Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

Army Approves Hormone Therapy Treatment for Wikileaker Chelsea Manning

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The U.S. Army has approved hormone therapy for Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of leaking national security secrets to Wikileaks, defense officials told NBC News late Thursday.

Private Manning revealed her gender identity as a transgender female after being convicted and sentenced to 35 years in the military prison at Leavenworth in July 2013.

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According to the officials, since Manning has been clinically diagnosed as a transgender and is confined to the military prison, the Army is obligated to provide and pay for her hormone treatments — just as if she was confined to a civilian federal prison.

The hormone therapy development was first reported by USA TODAY.

Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, became the first military inmate to ask for treatment for gender dysphoria. She asked for a treatment plan that would consider three measures: dressing and living as a woman, hormone therapy and possible surgery.

In July 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel approved an Army recommendation to begin the early stages of gender reassignment, including counseling and approval to dress as a woman, officials said.

IN-DEPTH

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

Army Approves Hormone Therapy Treatment for Wikileaker Chelsea Manning

collapse story

The U.S. Army has approved hormone therapy for Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of leaking national security secrets to Wikileaks, defense officials told NBC News late Thursday.

Private Manning revealed her gender identity as a transgender female after being convicted and sentenced to 35 years in the military prison at Leavenworth in July 2013.

advertisement

According to the officials, since Manning has been clinically diagnosed as a transgender and is confined to the military prison, the Army is obligated to provide and pay for her hormone treatments — just as if she was confined to a civilian federal prison.

The hormone therapy development was first reported by USA TODAY.

Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, became the first military inmate to ask for treatment for gender dysphoria. She asked for a treatment plan that would consider three measures: dressing and living as a woman, hormone therapy and possible surgery.

In July 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel approved an Army recommendation to begin the early stages of gender reassignment, including counseling and approval to dress as a woman, officials said.

IN-DEPTH

 

In Boston

Karl Marx On The American Civil War  

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*********
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862

The English Press and the Fall of New Orleans

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Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 199;
Written: on May 16, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, May 20, 1862.


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London, May 16
On the arrival of the first rumours of the fall of New Orleans, The Times, The Herald, The Standard, The Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, and other English “sympathisers” with the Southern “nigger-drivers” proved strategically, tactically, philologically, exegetically, politically, morally and fortificationally that the rumour was one of the “canards” which Reuter, Havas, Wolff and their understrappers so often let fly. The natural means of defence of New Orleans, it was said, had been augmented not only by newly constructed forts, but by submarine infernal machines of every sort and ironclad gunboats. Then there was the Spartan character of the citizens of New Orleans and their deadly hatred of Lincoln’s mercenaries. Finally, was it not at New Orleans that England suffered the defeat that brought her second war against the United States (1812 to 1814) to an ignominious end? Consequently, there was no reason to doubt that New Orleans would immortalise itself as a second Saragossa or a Moscow of the “South”. Besides, it harboured 15,000 bales of cotton, with which it could so easily have kindled an inextinguishable fire to destroy itself, quite apart from the fact that in 1814 the duly damped cotton bales proved more indestructible by cannon fire than the earthworks of Sevastopol. It was therefore as clear as daylight that the fall of New Orleans was a case of the familiar Yankee bragging.

When the first rumours were confirmed two days later by steamers arriving from New York, the bulk of the English Ispro-slavery press persisted in its scepticism. The Evening Standard, especially, was so positive in its unbelief that in the same number it published a first leader which proved the Crescent City’s impregnability in black and white, whilst its latest news” announced the impregnable city’s fall in large type. The Times, however, which has always held discretion for the better part of valour, veered round. It still doubted, but, at the same time, it made ready for every eventuality, since New Orleans was a city of “rowdies” and not of heroes. On this occasion, The Times was right. New Orleans is a settlement of the dregs of the French bohème, in the true sense of the word, a French convict colony -and never, with the changes of time, has it belied its origin. Only, The Times came Post festum to this pretty widespread realisation.

Finally, however, the fait accompli struck even the blindest Thomas. What was to be done? The English pro-slavery press now proves that the fall of New Orleans means a gain for the Confederates and a defeat for the Federals.

The fall of New Orleans allowed General Lovell to reinforce Beauregard’s army with his troops; Beauregard was all the more in need of reinforcements, since 160,000 men (surely an exaggeration!) were said to have been concentrated on his front by Halleck and, on the other hand, General Mitchel had cut Beauregard’s communications with the East by breaking the railway connection between Memphis and Chattanooga, that is, with Richmond, Charleston and Savannah. After his communications had been cut (which we indicated as a necessary strategical move long before the battle of Corinth), Beauregard had no longer any railway connections from Corinth, save those with Mobile and New Orleans. After New Orleans had fallen and he was only left with the single railway to Mobile to rely on, he naturally could no longer procure the necessary provisions for his troops. He therefore fell back on Tupelo and, in the estimation of the English p ro-slavery press, his provisioning capacity has, of course, been increased by the entry of Lovell’s troops!

On the other hand, the same oracles remark, the yellow fever will take a heavy toll of the Federals in New Orleans and, finally, if the city itself is no Moscow, is not its mayor a a Brutus? Only read (cf. New York”) his melodramatically valorous epistle to Commodore Farragut, “Brave words, Sir, brave words!” But hard words break no bones.

The press organs of the Southern slaveholders, however, do not construe the fall of New Orleans so optimistically as their English comforters. This will be seen from the following extracts:

The Richmond Dispatch says:

‘What has become of the ironclad gunboats, the Mississippi and the Louisiana, from which we expected the salvation of the Crescent City? In respect of their effect on the foe, these ships might just as well have been ships of glass. It is useless do deny that the fall of New Orleans is a heavy blow. The Confederate government is thereby cut off from West Louisiana, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas.”

The Norfolk Day Book observes:

“This is the most serious reverse since the beginning of the war. It augurs privations and want for all classes of society and, what is worse, it threatens our army supplies.”

The Atlantic Intelligencer laments:

“We expected that the outcome would be different. The approach of the enemy was no surprise attack; it has long been foreseen, and we had been promised that, should he even pass by Fort Jackson, fearful artillery, contrivances would force him to withdraw or ensure his annihilation. In all this, we have deceived ourselves, as on every occasion when the defences were supposed to guarantee the safety of a place or town. It appears that modern inventions have destroyed the defensive capacity of fortification. Ironclad gunboats destroy them or sail past then) unceremoniously. Memphis, we fear, will share the fate of New Orleans. Would it not be folly to deceive ourselves with hope?”

Finally, the Petersburg Express:

“The capture of New Orleans by the Federals is the most extraordinary and fateful event of the whole war.”

From The Archives Of  Women And Revolution

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time-With The Silhouettes’ Get A Job In Mind

 

An old man walked, walked haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off of it, maybe a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. A street near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he had graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered himself, properly headquartered himself as generations of schoolboy king hell kings had done previously, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old touches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he had to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.

Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town.

Under this condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified at least to me. Of course they never did, or Frankie never let on that they did, bother him enough to force the issue, and therefore never forced him on the road. But by then he was into being the corner boy king so that dream must have faded, like a lot of twelve- year old dreams.

In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation and so we will let him speak :

“Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates,” mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.

Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible), a friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s Carny had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh yah, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight-year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight- year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.

But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was neither the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See what really got me going was down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville, there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve.

But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to“ conquer” that scared thing. And countless win things (yah, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.

What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen- year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not at twelve, might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older, girls.

But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say I was not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.

The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl one time (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay), one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night because I gave her one from my “winnings,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin who hung around me from middle school on, already wrote that story once.

Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and according to Markin I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.

So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember hers. All I remember is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, a rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.

And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame La Rue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannabe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. We had lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.

Veterans for Peace sues City of Boston for St. Patrick's Peace Parade permit

Suit challenges City's eleven month delay in acting on permit application and charges favoritism for South Boston parade organizers who continue to exclude most LGBT groups.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  February 12, 2015

CONTACT:
Christopher Ott, communications director, 617-482-3170 x322, cott@aclum.org Patrick Scanlon, Veterans for Peace, 978-590-4248, Vets4PeaceChapter9@gmail.com

BOSTON -- The local Veterans for Peace Chapter 9, Smedley D. Butler Brigade (VFP) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court today against the City of Boston because the city has refused to act in a timely way on VFP's application for a permit to hold its annual St. Patrick's Peace Parade beginning at noon in Boston on March 15. The delay prevents VFP from being able to effectively organize for its parade and impedes its message.

Since 2011, VFP has organized its inclusive, non-discriminatory parade along the same route used by the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council (AWVC), a group that has refused for many years to allow gay rights groups and others, including VFP, to march with identifying signs. According to Patrick Scanlon, the coordinator of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of VFP, the AWVC parade has begun at 1:00 p.m. in the past, and the city has relegated the VFP's parade to commencing various distances behind the AWVC parade, forcing it to begin late in the afternoon.

Scanlon said that despite a recent deal touted by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, in which the AWVC will allow one gay group, "OutVets," to march in the next AWVC parade, the AWVC continues to bar most gay rights, peace and environmental groups. It is not an inclusive parade like VFP's.

"Veterans for Peace applied on March 25, 2014 for a permit to march at noon this coming March 15 to celebrate St. Patrick's Day," said Scanlon,. "We asked the City three times, in June, September and October what was happening with our application, and no one from the City ever responded." The City's refusal to act on the VFP parade application makes it very difficult for VFP to do all the organizing needed to hold a parade, he said.

"Unbelievably, the AWVC has told us in the past that they did not want us in their parade because they did not want the word 'peace' associated with the word 'veteran,'" Scanlon said. "St. Patrick was a man of peace, so the celebration of St. Patrick—the patron saint of Ireland—should be a day to reflect on and celebrate this great saint's deeds and words. Veterans for Peace celebrates the life of Saint Patrick and the proud Irish traditions without militarism. Our Peace Parade celebrating St. Patrick's Day is inclusive and open to anyone who would like to walk for peace. As far as we know, this is the only annual peace

ACLU of Massachusetts :: 211 Congress St. Boston MA 02110 :: 617.482.3170 :: 617.451.0009 (f) :: www.aclum.org

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parade anywhere in the entire country." VFP uses the phrase "The People's Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Environmental Stewardship, Social and Economic Justice" to describe the event.

John Reinstein, a cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, which is bringing the case, explained that the City has violated VFP's First Amendment rights by refusing to act in a timely way on the early VFP request for a permit and by favoring later applications from the AWVC and a road race group, even though those events do not conflict with the VFP parade. He noted that the parade route is already set up and ready by noon when VFP wishes to begin its parade.

"The City acts as if it can just ignore permit applications or hand out or deny permits willy-nilly," said Reinstein. "It doesn't use any clear standards and hasn't even followed its own regulation on parade permits. These permit systems are supposed to be neutrally and fairly enforced. This was anything but that." Attorneys on the case will be asking the federal court to issue an injunction ordering the City to grant a parade permit to VFP for March 15, starting at noon.

Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, acknowledged that the Supreme Court has held that the Allied War Veterans Council of South Boston had its own First Amendment right to exclude groups from its privately run parade. "But," she explained, "the Supreme Court ruling doesn't mean the City can ignore the application by Vets for Peace to parade earlier in the day or can force them to parade after the AWVC parade."

VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade is a chapter of the national VFP. Founded in 1985, Veterans for Peace is a national organization of men and women of all eras and duty stations, including from World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, as well as other conflicts. Veterans for Peace works to expose the true costs of war and to support veterans and civilian victims. For more information, go to www.smedleyvfp.org

For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts, go to:

http://www.aclum.org

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ACLU of Massachusetts :: 211 Congress St. Boston MA 02110 :: 617.482.3170 :: 617.451.0009 (f) :: ACLU of Massachusetts 

				ACLU of Massachusetts Because of the weather, the February 3 Amicus Luncheon with Tufts University's Peniel Joseph has been canceled. Please email Meaghan Giangregorio at mgiangreg...
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As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

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, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around  since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….    

 August 1914 (The Red Wheel #1)

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, H.T. Willetts (Translator)

August 1914 3.88 of 5 stars 3.88  ·  rating details  ·  1,250 ratings  ·  79 reviews

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each of the subsequent volumes will concentrate on another critical moment or "knot," in the history of the Revolution. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

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A View From The Left-Selma: The Movie and the Real Story Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

The Bankruptcy of Pressuring the Democrats

Selma: The Movie and the Real Story

 

By Brian Manning and John Perry

 

Director Ava DuVernay’s film Selma, based on three months of tumultuous black voting rights protests in 1965, graphically portrays the courage and tenacity of civil rights activists in the face of racial oppression and KKK and state terror in the Jim Crow South. From the Birmingham church bombing and the savage attack on marchers at Selma’s Pettus Bridge to the beatings and murders of black and white protesters, Selma paints a picture of the horrific racist violence.

But fundamentally the movie is a glorification of Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberal program of nonviolent protest and reliance on the federal government and the Democratic Party. The moral of the film is that Selma—the last major battle of the Southern civil rights movement—was a watershed because voting rights for black people paved the way for black elected officials. As longtime Congressman John Lewis said in 2009 right before President Obama’s inauguration: “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”

The mass mobilization of black people against the Jim Crow system of legal segregation disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. But from the outset, the civil rights struggles were dominated by a black middle-class leadership wedded to Democratic Party liberalism, with King as its most effective exponent. The movement achieved important, though partial, gains for black people largely in the realm of formal democratic rights, whose main beneficiaries make up a thin layer of the black petty bourgeoisie. To this day, the blood shed to win the right to vote is invoked to herd black people to the ballot box to elect “lesser evil” Democrats.

The civil rights movement met its defeat in the mid 1960s when it swept into the North, where the Jim Crow segregation codes did not exist. Activists ran headlong into the raw reality of black oppression that is woven into the fabric of American capitalism: rat-infested slums, crumbling schools, mass unemployment and rampant cop terror. Fifty years later, and six years after the election of a black president, the hellish conditions of the urban ghetto masses have only gotten worse. While today possessing formal equality under the law, black people remain a race-color caste, integrated into the U.S. economy but in the main forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.

Barack Obama proclaimed that the civil rights movement took black people “90 percent of the way” to full equality. But the yawning gulf between white and black America persists by every measure—employment, income, housing, education, incarceration rates. Black people are still blown away on the streets of America with impunity by the cops simply because of the color of their skin. The massive military mobilizations by the racist capitalist state against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, last year could have been Birmingham or Selma in the 1960s. Those gains that were won in the civil rights struggles almost immediately came under attack. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which Selma presents as a crowning achievement, has been gutted over the years, with the Supreme Court dealing it a major blow two years ago.

From the days of chattel slavery, American capitalism has rested on a bedrock of black oppression. Achieving genuine equality will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of the capitalist profit system by the multiracial working class, whose central role in production gives it the social power and objective class interest to put an end to capitalist rule. This country’s rulers ably wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the working class. In the course of class struggle against the common enemy—the owners of the banks and industry—white workers will be compelled to forego race prejudice. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons the cause of black freedom on its banner: Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

The 1965 Selma Protests

In early 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been organizing a voter registration effort in Selma, combating an entrenched system that denied the right to vote through a combination of racist terror, poll taxes and “literacy” tests. In the film, a white registrar challenges an older black woman to name every county judge in the state, and when she cannot, sneeringly stamps “denied” on her application. King announced that his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would make the town the center of its own voter registration campaign.

As we wrote at the time in “Conspiracy and Treachery in Alabama” (Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965, reprinted in WV No. 1051, 5 September 2014):

“From the beginning the black voter registration campaign in the South was an assertion of potential independence—directed against the underlying social system as well as the segregationist political apparatus which helps maintain it. Revolutionary in implication because it involved organizing masses of black workers and share-croppers in struggle, the mass character of the movement poses a dangerous threat to the American ruling class and its politicians. Hence they use every means at their disposal to derail the movement—including sending in such kept leaders as Martin Luther King—to head it off and deliver it to the Democratic Party where the job of beheading and neutralizing it can be finished off.”

While lionizing King, Selma makes clear that MLK aimed to use the blood of black civil rights foot soldiers to pressure the capitalist ruling class to grant those demands its liberal wing was willing to concede. Selma portrays King lecturing SNCC militants: “What we do is negotiate, demonstrate, resist. And a big part of that is raising white consciousness, and in particular the consciousness of whichever white man happens to be sitting in the Oval Office.” King’s strategy of nonviolent resistance was in fact a pledge of allegiance to the white power structure.

When King was jailed in early February, Selma exploded with protest marches, and over a thousand protesters were arrested. After the murder of 26-year-old protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by a trooper, the SCLC called for a protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. On March 7, a day subsequently known as “Bloody Sunday,” 2,000 marchers were stopped on the Pettus Bridge by a phalanx of state troopers and deputies, who attacked them with clubs, bullwhips and tear gas, driving them back through the city streets.

The film’s crisis point comes with the second attempt at the march to Montgomery three days later. At the bridge, again faced with a horde of state troopers, King gets everyone on their knees to pray, and then suddenly stands and turns the marchers back. In the movie, King’s decision to turn around is shown as a response to a directive from God. In reality, the directive had come from the federal government. As recounted in Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle (1981), the Feds worked out a secret deal with MLK that if he turned back the marchers, the state troopers would not attack them. The film shows that SNCC members were bitter at King’s reversal. Indeed, SNCC activists began openly talking of King as a coward and sellout. Instead of “We Shall Overcome,” the young militants sang “We Shall Overrun.”

Selma’s portrayal of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson as a recalcitrant racist who orchestrated FBI wiretapping of King has elicited a howl from liberal commentators. Former Johnson aides and historians point out that Johnson and King actually collaborated closely. In fact, the film captures LBJ’s attitude toward MLK when the president is depicted telling FBI director J. Edgar Hoover: “If he’s a degenerate, what I do know is he’s a nonviolent degenerate and I want him to go on leading the civil rights movement, not one of these bloodthirsty militants.” The Texas Dixiecrat Johnson’s catering to racists (which he did) and his administration’s spying on King (which it did) did not preclude the White House from collaborating with MLK.

As CEO of U.S. imperialism, Johnson was carrying out the will of a section of the American capitalist ruling class, which had its own reasons for acquiescing to the dismantlement of Jim Crow. With the mechanization of agriculture, which largely displaced sharecropping, and the increased urbanization of the black population, the system of legal segregation that had been consolidated to enforce the powerlessness of the black rural poor was rendered obsolete. Jim Crow also exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S. imperialists, who were extolling the supposed virtues of American democracy as part of their Cold War drive against the Soviet Union.

The tempo of the Selma events made it necessary for LBJ to offer some kind of voting rights law. The culmination of the film is the third, final march to Montgomery, portrayed as a brilliant success. We wrote at the time, “The march acquired the character of an ‘official’ parade directly launched from Washington, with a corps of food and latrine trucks, doctors and nurses, swarms of politicians, etc., and Federal troops standing guard along the route.” As the film shows, the march was a sea of American flags waved by an integrated crowd. It amounted to a support rally for LBJ and the Democrats.

SNCC: Breaking with Nonviolence and the Democrats

What Selma disappears is that by 1965 a whole layer of SNCC militants were rejecting King’s liberal pacifist, pro-Democratic Party pressure politics. Far from being a transcendent leader of a unified movement, as Selma portrays, King was one of the political poles against which the left wing of the civil rights movement was defined.

Outrageously, the film slanders SNCC activists, particularly James Forman, as arrogant, petulant opponents of the Selma protests whose main interest was defending their own turf against the SCLC; and King wins every argument with them. In reality, the differences between King and the SNCC activists were over burning political issues, such as reliance on the Democrats and the federal government, along with the question of armed self-defense. (See “SNCC: ‘Black Power’ and the Democrats,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2, 1985.)

When SNCC was formed in 1960, it was a constituent part of the Southern black liberal establishment, the youth group of what W.E.B. Du Bois had termed the “talented tenth.” But through bitter experience, SNCC had been radicalized by its grassroots organizing of poor black sharecroppers, which repeatedly brought it into direct conflict not just with the Dixiecrats, but the whole racist, capitalist state.

The film alludes to the 1961-62 protests in Albany, Georgia, where SNCC activists were already becoming disenchanted with King. When civil rights protesters were getting arrested by the hundreds in late 1961, King intoned: “Don’t get weary, children. We will wear them down by our capacity to suffer.” The next summer, black youth fought back with bricks and bottles when cops attacked a rally outside a black church. King declared a “day of penance” for the “violence.” SNCC, though, refused to condemn the protesters. In Albany, many SNCC members began to refer to MLK privately and derisively as “De Lawd.” This epithet is slipped into the movie so fleetingly that those unfamiliar with the history would not even notice it.

Selma was bracketed by the uprisings in Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965, which had a profound impact on SNCC militants. It was now clear that the “turn the other cheek” pacifist ethos was losing its resonance for increasing numbers of the embittered urban black masses. In response to Watts, King declared, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them [the ghetto masses].” King’s defense of cop terror to smash the ghetto explosions was the ultimate proof of what his one-sided “nonviolence” was about.

Up to that point, the young SNCC militants broadly accepted nonviolence. Now many asked themselves how nonviolence and voter registration could answer the oppression of Northern ghetto blacks. After “Watts had exploded in August, 1965,” Forman later wrote, “could we still call ourselves ‘nonviolent’ and remain in the vanguard of black militancy? If we were revolutionaries, what was it that we sought to overthrow?” (The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 1972).

It was SNCC activists who invited Malcolm X to Selma to speak after King’s arrest. In keeping with today’s liberal myth that King and Malcolm X were moving toward a meeting of the minds, the movie falsely portrays Malcolm X apologizing to Coretta Scott King for his criticisms of her husband. That apology never happened (nor was Malcolm ever the mealy-mouthed wimp shown on screen). In fact, Malcolm bitterly opposed King’s kowtowing, and that never changed. Around the same time, after a fascist punched King in a Selma hotel lobby, Malcolm fired off a telegram to Nazi führer 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.”

After the Selma protests, in April 1965 Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC activists stayed on to work in neighboring Lowndes County. There they organized an independent political party, taking a snarling black panther as its symbol, which soon came to be called the Black Panther Party. Although narrowly based on a single impoverished rural county, the Panthers were important because they were organized in opposition to the Democratic Party. As Carmichael said, it was “as ludicrous for Negroes to join [the Democratic Party] as it would have been for Jews to join the Nazi party in the 1930s.” Local residents agreed. One recalled, “SNCC mentioned about the third party and we decided we would do it, because it didn’t make sense for us to go join the Democratic party when they were the people who had done the killing in the county and had beat our heads.” Although Selma deals with numerous capitalist politicians, it doesn’t mention what party they were in. Why? They were all Democrats: from LBJ to Governor George Wallace to the local Alabama segregationists—to MLK!

The Lowndes County Black Panther Party was also important for its open advocacy of armed self-defense, which was a burning necessity for the black movement in the South. In Monroe, North Carolina, beginning in 1959 local NAACP head Robert Williams’ courageous battle against KKK terror (described in his 1962 book Negroes with Guns) became a beacon to black militants throughout the South. Indeed, Forman had visited Williams in 1961 just before the FBI hounded Williams into exile in Cuba. In Lowndes County, the SNCC activists were influenced by and defended the local black sharecroppers who owned guns and were willing to use them against racist attack. By 1965, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice had spread to Alabama. Civil rights rallies in Lowndes County were often defended by these armed self-defense squads.

Class Power and Black Rights

Nonviolence versus armed self-defense was the way in which the question of reform versus revolution was posed in the civil rights movement. The emergence of a layer of radical black youth groping for an alternative to liberalism cried out for the intervention of Marxists to win them to a proletarian revolutionary perspective. In the early 1960s, the predecessor of the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the ostensibly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), advanced a program of revolutionary integrationism—the fight for the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This perspective, which was developed by veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser, recognized that there can be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by a multiracial vanguard party, and there is nothing other than a workers revolution that can open the road to black freedom.

The RT fought for an active intervention into SNCC and other forces in the left wing of the civil rights movement, as a crucial opportunity for the crystallization of a black Trotskyist cadre. But the SWP majority refused to do so, covering its abstention with an opportunist “dual vanguardist” outlook that implicitly defined the SWP as a “white party” whose only contribution to the black struggle was to enthuse over “whatever the black people want.” The RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963-64.

At the time, the main body of the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy was headed by open Cold War crusaders, who had been installed in the red purges of the late 1940s and ’50s. Another section of the union tops, epitomized by United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther, gave a labor gloss to MLK’s pressure politics. Both these wings of the labor bureaucracy were anti-Communist and openly hostile to labor and black militancy. The petty-bourgeois SNCC radicals, who were isolated from the mass of the black working class, equated the rotten politics of the labor bureaucrats with the union ranks. Without the intervention of Marxists, they had no concept at all of the power of the working class, much less the need to oust the bureaucrats to unleash that power.

In 1966, after his election as SNCC chairman, Carmichael raised the call for “black power” in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi. Young black radicals picked up “black power” as the rallying cry against the preachers’ sermonizing and the liberals’ begging. It was a rejection of “faith in the system,” a vow to take matters into their own hands.

In intersecting these militants, the SL, which had been founded in 1966, explained that the “black power” slogan was contradictory. It raised questions whose answers lay outside the framework set up by the capitalist class, but was not consciously anti-capitalist. The “black power” movement was premised on the view that black militants should organize black people and forget about whites. We warned in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967): “The slogan ‘black power’ must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the ‘black power’ movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South.”

We called for a “Freedom-Labor Party” as the axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. That call was coupled with a series of other transitional demands: a Southern organizing drive backed by organized labor; workers united fronts against federal intervention; organized, armed self-defense. But the SL was too small to reach and influence more than a very small number of radicalized black activists.

The hardening of the black/white line in the New Left radical movement sealed us off from subjectively revolutionary black militants of the period. SNCC had expelled all its white members by the end of 1966. Absent a Marxist working-class perspective, many of the best of the “black power” militants turned toward one or another form of black nationalism, a petty-bourgeois ideology that has always been unable to generate a program for struggle in this country. It is based on fiction, as American blacks are not a nation and have not aspired to separation except when prospects for united struggle seemed foreclosed.

The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland in 1966, crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But despite their militancy and personal courage, the Panthers’ nationalist program was disdainful of the multiracial working class. Instead, the Panthers looked to the lumpen ghetto masses. Their isolation from the proletariat left them especially vulnerable to government repression. The FBI’s brutal COINTELPRO vendetta killed 38 BPP members and jailed hundreds more on frame-up charges. Within a few years, many leading Panthers would join moderate SNCC members back in the fold of the Democratic Party.

From Selma to Ferguson

The killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York have galvanized young anti-racist activists bitterly aware that six years after Obama’s election the conditions of black America are as hellish as ever. When seven of them met with Obama on December 1, he issued the same advice the racist LBJ gave King: go slow. Some protesters have organized “die-ins” at showings of Selma to draw attention to their demands, and a series of “Reclaim MLK” events were held around MLK Day. The die-in demands, typical of other protests, are straight from the liberal playbook of appeals to the federal government: from “repurposing” law enforcement funding to demanding that the “Obama Administration develops, legislates and enacts a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice.”

A host of reformist socialist groups today are pushing King’s program of pressure politics. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) published a review (socialistworker.org, 15 January) hailing Selma as “magnificent” and crowing that the film shows “what he believed was needed to win: determination, courage, sacrifice.” Like the movie, the ISO disappears the split that led black youth to reject King in favor of “black power,” instead reducing these debates over fundamental questions to “how they together developed and honed their strategy and tactics”!

The reformists like to tout the “transformative” last year of King’s life, when he supposedly was moving toward an “anti-capitalist” and “democratic socialist” perspective. His belated opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967 (at a time when a wing of the American bourgeoisie was also seeking to cut its losses) is cited as Exhibit A. In reality, King was explicit that with angry black youth and workers looking for a revolutionary solution to their own oppression, he was compelled to oppose that war to retain credibility. Far from reflecting a move toward anti-capitalism, King proclaimed that “the pursuit of peace” was “our greatest defense against Communism,” and that poverty should be combated because it was “the fertile soil in which the seed of Communism grows and develops.”

As we wrote ten years after King’s assassination in “Bourgeoisie Celebrates King’s Liberal Pacifism,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2):

“We must break through the myths of ‘passive resistance,’ crack the mask of ‘King the Peaceful Warrior,’ and present a revolutionary analysis of the failure of the civil rights movement to provide a program for fighting the social and economic oppression of blacks under American capitalism.... While the reformists cover for King to camouflage their own treacherous tracks, the task of creating a black communist cadre requires destroying politically the exalted symbols of passive defeatism and reliance on the bourgeois state which led to the death of the civil rights movement.”