This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Monday, February 16, 2015
REFUSING TO
KILL
CAMPAIGNING
WITH MILITARY REFUSERS, WHISTLEBLOWERS & PRISONERS
JANUARY/FEBRUARY
2015
Follow
the links and visit our website refusingtokill.net
for more information. Do write to refusers,
whistleblowers and prisoners - your letters will help keep them going!
Send
us your news and circulate this newsletter to help build a stronger
international network of refusal.
EVENTS
US,
9-15
FebruaryRasmeaOdeh,
67, Palestinian American community leader, tortured by the Israeli government in
1969, is facing sentencing for a trumped-up immigration charge on 12 March.
Write to
the Judge
and join theNational
Week of Action 9-15
Feb.
Shandre
Delaney, mother of one of the six, is leading the campaign.
PITTSBURGH
13 FebruaryPHILADELPHIA 14 February –
Benefits
for the Dallas 6, six
African-American prisoners in solitary confinement in a Pennsylvania prison who
blew the whistle on and peacefully protested against torture and violence by
prison guards.Four of them face trial
on 17 Feb.
UK,
16 February, Protest
for KevanThakrar
who was convicted of murders and other offences under the “Joint Enterprise” law
despite not being present when the murders took place. A petition
will soon be issued to demand his release from solitary confinement and for a
fair trial.
US,
Benton Harbor, 24 February-
New hearing for Reverend
Edward Pinkney,
convicted and sentenced to 30 months for "election law violation" .Judge Schrock admitted there was no evidence
against him and he wanted to set an example.Attend the hearing and writeto
him.
LONDONongoing - Support Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder.
Join the vigil at the Ecuadorean
embassy in London: Tue, Wed, Thu 4 -6pm and Sat 5.30 – 6.30pm.
CAMPAIGNING
NEWS
US,
Philadelphia
– Celebration
of the life of Phil Africa who died in prison on 12 January.He was one of the Move 9, falsely convicted
in 1978 for murder and still protesting their conviction.Support
the Move 9 who have been denied parole since
2008.
US
–
International
whistleblower Chelsea Manning, jailed for 35 years, is now preparing her appeal.
Supporters are also demanding clemency from President Obama. Write to Dept
of Defense
officials and to Chelsea
to help keep her morale up!
US,
Texas–
People rightly complain about journalists arrested by the Egyptian
government.Is Texas an example for
Egypt? Activist-journalist Barrett
Brown
has been sentenced to 5 years in jail and ordered to pay $890,250 in restitution
to companies he investigated, including defence
contractor Stratfor. Write
to him and donate
to his defense fund.
UK
– Sign
the petition
in favour of "Edna's law" making it a criminal offence to fail to act on
whistleblowers' evidence and concerns. Edna was an elderly woman who died after
abuse and neglect in a BUPA care home despite management having been
informed.
NIGERIA,
Lagos –
54
soldiers were sentenced to the death penalty for embarrassing Nigeria's military
by demanding weapons to confront BokoHaram, thus refusing what would have been a suicidal
mission.Check for updates on our
website.
US
– There is only one US government employee who has gone to jail in connection
with the widespread CIA torture program: the man who exposed it seven years ago.
Support ex-CIA employee John
Kiriakou,
still serving 30 months for "espionage".
New European Initiatives for Palestine Tuesday, February 24, 2015, 7:00 pm Community Church of Boston • 565 Boylston St • Copley T • Boston The Palestine/Israel Working Group of Massachusetts Peace Action
invites you to hear Dr. Phyllis Starkey, former British M.P.
Earlier this month, Dr. Starkey spoke at Oxford University on “How European Governments subcontract policy on Israel/Palestine to parliamentarians, civil society, and businesses.”
“Israel’s continued deepening of the occupation, failure to make any positive moves in political negotiations, and growing threats to formally annex Area C of the West Bank demonstrate that Europe must use its leverage as Israel’s biggest trading partner and take more robust action.” — May 2014
“Europe needs to use its economic levers to hold Israel to account. Firstly it must suspend all arms sales to Israel today – not when the next conflict begins. Secondly the EU should propose a strict timetable for easing the blockade (coupled with an offer to meet Israel’s genuine security concerns) and for wider negotiations to end the entire occupation.” — September 2014
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC • DONATIONS WELCOME
Contact: info@masspeaceaction.org • 617-354-2169 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1547580658836295/
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.
21st Century Warfare: Pentagon Strategy and Activist Response
When: Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 7:00 pm
Where: Cambridge Friends Meeting • 5
Longfellow Park (off Brattle St) • Harvard T • Cambridge
Subrata Ghoshroy, research affiliate at MIT Judy Bello, NY State Coalition to Ground the Drones
The Pentagon has a new strategy for 21st century warfare: overwhelm the enemy
with high tech, "intelligent" forces. Full Spectrum Dominance will utilize
drones, space weapons and cyber attacks. Covert operations are favored,
invading with large armies is a thing of the past. The antiwar movement needs a
new response, activists opposing killer-drones have led the way.
Subrata Ghoshroy will speak on "High Tech Wars in the 21st Century." Subrata
is research affiliate at MIT, and was a defense analyst and whistleblower at the
US Government Accountability Office (GAO), and also worked as a staff member for
the House Armed Services Committee.
Judy Bello will address, "Expanding Drone Wars, In and Out of the Media
Spotlight. She is active with the NY Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and
End the Wars, has been jailed for resistance at Hancock Air National Guard Base
in New York and visited Pakistan with Code Pink where she interviewed victims of
Drone Strikes.
Discussion will follow on peace/antiwar movement response.
Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace For more information, call 617 383 4857 or write info@justicewithpeace.org
On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The
Twist In Mind
Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Take me by my little hand
And go like this
Ee-yah
twist
Baby, baby twist
Ooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist
My
daddy is sleepin'
And mama ain't around
Yeah, daddy just sleepin'
And mama ain't around
We're gonna twisty twisty twisty
Till we tear the house down
Come
on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on miss and do the twist
Ee-yah
Yeah,
you should see my little sis
You should see my my litlle Sis
She really knows how to rock
She knows how to twist
Come
on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist
Yeah,
rock on now
Yeah, twist on down
Twist
('Round and 'round and 'round)
A few years ago, maybe four or five
now, around the time that Frank Jackman (always Frank and not Francis since
that was too much like that St Francis who was good to animals and stuff and no
self-respecting corner boy wanted that tagged to his name besides the formal
name sounded kind of faggy, hey that’s what we called guys before we knew better
who were kind of girlish although I used queer more, when the guys talked about
names one night, also not Frankie since that name was taken up in his crowd)
and Frankie Riley (always Frankie and not Francis for the same reason as Frank
but also Frankie because he had always been called Frankie since time
immemorial to distinguish him from his father Frank, Sr.) his Jack Slack’s
bowling alleys corner boy chieftain all through high school in North Adamsville
had been commemorating, maybe better to say comparing notes, on their fiftieth
anniversary of entry into that school in the ninth grade. Frank had written a
remembrance of the first day of school freshman year. He had written it at the
behest of a female fellow classmate, Dora, for a class website where she was
the webmaster which she and a few others had established so that those from the
Class of 1964 who wished to, those who were able to, could communicate with
each other in the new dispensation of cyberspace.
That remembrance, one of a series of
sketches that he eventually did, and on recent inquiry from Jimmy Jenkins
another classmate and ex-corner boy comrade, Frank has stated that he stood by
that “sketch” characterization, centered on the anxieties that he had on that
first day about making a brand new impression on the freshman class, about
changing his junior high school quasi-“beatnik” style, his two thousand fact
barrage that he would lay on anybody who would listen. A style change that lots
of guys and gals have gone through when faced with a new situation, although
the people he was trying to impress had already been his classmates in that
junior high school and were painfully aware of the previous way that he had
presented himself, presented himselfunder Frankie’s direction, to the world.
When Frankie at the time read what
Frank had written, a thing filled with new found sobbing, weeping, and pious
innocence he sent him an e-mail which brought Frank up short. Frankie
threatened in no uncertain terms to write his own “sketch” refuting all the
sobbing, weeping, piously innocent noise that Frank had been trying to
bamboozle their fellow classmates with. The key point that Frankie threatened
to bring down on a candid world, the candid world in this instance being the
very curious Dora for one, and her coterie of friends who had stayed in contact
with each other since high school since they all still lived in the area (except
in winter, now retired winter, and most headed to Florida, mainly around Naples),
to be clear about was the case of Frank Jackman and one Lydia Stevenson. Or
rather the case, the love-bug case he had for her. That, and not some
mumble-jumble about changing his act which he never really did since you could
always depend on Frank going on and on with one of his two thousand arcane
facts that he tried to impress every girl he ran across in high school with and
to dress like he had just come walking in from post-beat Harvard Square, was
the very real point of what was aggravating him on that long ago hot endless
first Wednesday after Labor Day morning.
See Frank had gotten absolutely nowhere
with Lydia, nowhere beyond the endless talking stage, and thus nowhere, in
junior high but he was still carrying the torch come freshman year and fifty
years later he still felt that fresh-scented breathe and that subtle perfume,
or bath soap, or whatever it was she wore, breezing over him (maybe it was
perfume stolen from Ma’s dresser top, he these days liked to think she had made
that thief to drive him crazy, crazy with her girlish wiles). Or maybe her
curse, a North Adamsville curse that he claimed at one point that Lydia cast on
him since he never had then a girlfriend from school, or from North Adamsville
for that matter, always from some other town. Not in high school anyway.
The currency of that fresh breeze that
occupied his mind may have been pushed forward by his getting back in touch
with classmates. And as fate would have it, the thrice-married Frank, never one
to say never to love had as a result of getting back in touch with classmates
on the website had a short fruitless affair with another classmate, Laura, who
had been a close friend of Lydia’s in junior high school and told him a couple
of things about what Lydia had thought about Frank. Laura confirmed that Lydia
had expected Frank to ask her out in junior high school but also after the
affair had run its course unconsciously confirmed by that failed affair that
Lydia’s curse was still at work fifty years later. And it is that missed
opportunity to fall under the sway of that Lydia scent that will drive this
short sketch, hell, forget Frank and his sketch business, this short piece.
This is the way Frank described to me
what happened after Frankie sent that fatal e-mail that might expose his long
hidden thoughts:
“Frankie, for once listened patiently
as I finished my story, the one that he say was filled to the brim with
sobbing, weeping, whining bull about starting anew and being anxious about what
would happen, and which he threatened to go viral on, immediately after I was
finished let out with a “Who are you kidding Jackman that is not the way you
told me the story back then.” Then he went on. “I remember very well what you
were nervous about. What that cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn
teen angst, boy version, had been about and it wasn’t first day of school
jitters. It was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she"
that you had kind of sneaked around mentioning as you had been talking, talking
your his head off about filling out forms, getting books, and other weird
noises, just to keep the jitters down. The way you told it then, and I think
you called me up right after school was out to discuss the matter, was that
while on those pre-school steps you had just seen her, seen her with the other
North Adamsville junior high girls on the other side of the steps, and got all
panicky, got kind of red-faced about it, and so you are going to have to say a
little something about that. And if you don’t I will.”
Frankie continued along this line,
stuff which seemed to be true but which made me wonder how a guy who when we
met at the Sunnyville Grille over in Boston for a few drinks to discuss this
and that, not the Lydia thing but our corner boy exploits, couldn’t remember
where he left his car keys and we had to call AAA to come out and find them on
his driver’s side seat. Jesus.Here’s
what he was getting at.
“See, I know the previous school year,
late in the eighth grade at North Adamsville Junior High, toward the end of the
school year you had started talking to that Lydia Stevenson in art class. Yes,
that Lydia who on her mother’s side from was from some branch of the Adams
family who had run the jagged old ship-building town there in North Adamsville
for eons and who had employed my father and a million other fathers, and I
think yours’ too if I am not mistaken, for a while anyway, around there and
then just headed south, or to Greece or someplace like that, for the cheaper
labor I heard later. She was one of the granddaughters or some such relation I
never did get it all down. And that part was not all that important anyway
because what mattered, what mattered to you, was that faint scent, that just
barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when you sat
next to her in art class and you two talked, talked your heads off.
“But you never did anything about it,
not then anyway although you said when we talked later about it you had this
feeling, maybe just a feeling because you wanted things to be that way but a
feeling anyway, that she had expected you to ask her out. Asking out for junior
high school students then, and for freshmen in high school too because we
didn’t have licenses to drive cars, being the obligatory "first date"
at Jimmy Jack's Shack (no, not the one off Adamsville Boulevard, that's for the
tourists and old people, the one on Hancock up toward the Square is the one I
am talking about). You said you were just too shy and uncertain to do it.
“Why? Well you said it was because you
came from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the old town, over by the old
abandoned Old Colony tracks and she, well like I said came from a branch of the
Adams family that lived over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the
swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when you
figured that if you studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff that you liked to
study anyway, then come freshman year you just might be able to get up the
nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen
to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry did
then.
“.... So don’t tell me suddenly, a bell
rang, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, were on the move,
especially those junior high kids that you had nodded to before as you took
those steps, two at a time. And don’t tell me it was too late then to worry
about style, or anything else. Or make your place in the sun as you went along,
on the fly. No, it was about who kind of brushed against you as you rushed up
the stairs and who gave you one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as you
both raced up those funky granite steps. Yeah, a place in the sun, sure.”
And so there you had Frank satisfying
Frankie enough with his agreement to make public on the class website the gist
of his stubborn e-mail. Funny though as much time as they spent talking about
it back in the day and then when they resurrected it a few years ago Frank
never did get to first base Lydia in high school, although she sent him a few
more of those big faintly-scented smiles which Frank didn’t figure out until
too late. Within a couple of weeks of the school opening Lydia was seen hand in
hand with Paul Jones, a sophomore then, the guy who would lead North Adamsville
to two consecutive division football championships and who stayed hand in hand
with him until she graduated. Frank had had a few girlfriends in high school,
Harvard Square refugees like himself who went crazy for his two thousand facts
but they were not from the town. The few times Frank did try to get dates in
school or in town, get to first base, he was shot down for all kinds of
reasons, a couple of times because he did not have a car and the girls had not
the slightest interest in walking around on a date, a couple of times he was
just flat stood up when the girls he was to date took the next best thing
instead. Yeah, the Lydia hex sure did him in. And after that Laura disaster
don’t say he wasn’t jinxed, just don’t say it around him.
In Boston
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale
A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.
Markin comment:
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow. ****** Markin comment on this issue: Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015
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 andSurrealists 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….
Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has inflicted on itself. For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of aBased on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has inflicted on itself. For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published in French as La Feu) vividly evokes life in the trenches: the mud, stench, and monotony of waiting while constantly fearing for one's life in an infernal and seemingly eternal battlefield. ...more
The Black Liberation Struggle -Post-Ferguson- A View From The Left
In New York City-Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That
Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues
A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new
movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority
youth, mainly black and Latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to
be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and
frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we
the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six
months have given us that. There is bound to be more to come. Check out what this organization's take on the struggle if you are around New York City that day.
Subrata Ghoshroy, research affiliate at MIT
