WHO WANTS A (COLD?) WAR WITH RUSSIA?

Investigative reporter Robert Parry has written a series of articles noting the relentless “Group-Think” (here and here) among Washington policy elites toward a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.  Among other things, the conventional wisdom erases completely the events following the (first) Cold War which laid the groundwork for the present crisis.

 

In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev called on European leaders to ‘learn how to make peace together’ with a cooperative approach to European security that would lay the foundations of a ‘common European home.’  It was not just rhetoric.  Gorbachev unilaterally withdrew Soviet troops from East Germany and Eastern Europe, allowing the former Warsaw Pact to dissolve. Perhaps he naively expected NATO, founded in 1949 ostensibly to deter Soviet aggression, to reciprocally disband (the Warsaw Pact was created later, in 1954, as a response to German rearmament). He was very much mistaken.  Instead, NATO began a relentless expansion eastward, to the borders of a much reduced Russia, violating the explicit understanding that had been put in place to allow peaceful German reunification; NATO would later intervene unilaterally to dismember Yugoslavia and later the rump Serbian Republic; then it participated in the US the wars against Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan and the bombing of Libya – all without prior UN sanction and in violation of international law.

 

Jack Matlock, US ambassador to Russia under Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush from 1987–91,

was present at some of the most pivotal discussions between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev during the Cold War’s denouement, the taproot of the current crisis is NATO expansion. Beginning with NATO’s Madrid Summit (1994) at which NATO announced it would begin the process of bringing in new member states, through NATO’s Bucharest Summit (2008), at which the alliance declared that “Georgia and Ukraine shall become members of NATO,” the United States has reneged on the promise President George H.W. Bush made to Gorbachev at the Malta Summit (1989) not to expand NATO eastward.  Bush’s promise not to expand the alliance eastward in exchange for the peaceful and orderly withdrawal of Soviet occupying troops in Eastern Europe was, according to Matlock, repeated by nearly all of the alliance members at the time. According to the ambassador, what today’s Western leaders seem not to understand is that a Europe that is “whole and free” will not and cannot exist unless “Russia is part of the system.” And yet, the United States has pursued policies toward Russia over the past two decades that can only be seen as exclusionary.  More

 

NATO expansion did not happen in a vacuum, but was promoted by very powerful interests, especially ones connected to the US armaments industry.

 

Meet The People Who Pushed Towards A New Cold War

Following the end of the Cold War, defense cuts had presented bottom-line problems for American businesses that relied exclusively on Pentagon contracts…  [Lockheed CEO Norm Augustine, a former undersecretary of the Army] was already thinking of future export markets for his company’s goods. In his capacity as the chairman of a Pentagon advisory council on arms-export policy, he was able to secure yet more subsidy guarantees for weapons sales to former Warsaw Pact countries. But in order to buy the types of expensive weapons that would stabilize the industry’s books, those countries had to enter into an alliance with the U.S… Enter the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO...  Its founder and chairman, Bruce Jackson, was so principled in his desire to see freedom in Central and Eastern Europe that he didn’t even take a salary. He didn’t have to. Jackson was a vice president at Lockheed Martin… Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were all in NATO come 1999. The Baltic States would soon follow. By 2003, those initial inductees had arranged deals to buy just short of $5 billion in fighter jets from Lockheed… As for freedom-purveyor Bruce Jackson, he began running a new outfit in 2002. It was called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.  More

 

Economic interests are still important drivers of US policy toward Ukraine and Russia. On the same day last January when a reported 50,000 “pro-Western” Ukrainians descended upon Kiev’s Independence Square to protest against the government of President Viktor Yanukovych the Financial Times reported a major deal for U.S. agribusiness titan Cargill.

 

Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch

Mr. Yuetter [Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Cargill] serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council… it’s a veritable who’s who of Big Ag. Among the luminaries working tirelessly and no doubt selflessly for a better, freer Ukraine are:  Melissa Agustin, Director, International Government Affairs & Trade for Monsanto; Brigitte Dias Ferreira, Counsel, International Affairs for John Deere; Steven Nadherny, Director, Institutional Relations for agriculture equipment-maker CNH Industrial; Jeff Rowe, Regional Director for DuPont Pioneer; John F. Steele, Director, International Affairs for Eli Lilly & Company…  Nuland also told the group that the United States had invested more than $5 billion in support of Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” meaning pulling Ukraine away from Russia. She made her remarks on a dais featuring a backdrop emblazoned with a Chevron logo. Also, her colleague and phone call buddy U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt helped Chevron cook up their 50-year shale gas deal.  More

 

Not surprisingly, the near unanimous outcry among our Washington elites for a more belligerent policy toward Russia is having an effect on US public opinion.

 

Americans Increasingly See Russia as Threat, Top U.S. Enemy

Russia now edges out North Korea as the country Americans consider the United States' greatest enemy. Two years ago, only 2% of Americans named Russia, but that increased to 9% in 2014 as tensions between Russia and the U.S. increased, and now sits at 18%.... Americans have also become significantly more likely to view Russia's military power as a critical threat to the U.S. -- 49% now hold this view, compared with 32% a year ago.   More

 

WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE? (cont’d)

 

Anne Applebaum is among the prominent opinion-leaders pressing for more confrontation with Russia. She has made a career in rehashing and reviving the Cold War, also writing a regular column for the increasingly Neo-Con Washington Post and contributing to the otherwise Liberal New York Review of Books.  Last week Applebaum wrote that “It will take much more than weapons to save Ukraine—and keep Russia at bay” and suggested we should “build a Berlin Wall around Donetsk in the form of a demilitarized zone and treat the rest of Ukraine like West Germany.”  Last summer she suggested people should drop everything and prepare “for total war.”

 

Readers might be interested to know that Applebaum (now a Polish citizen) is married to former Polish Foreign Minister and Minister of Defense Radosław Sikorski, who was once chief foreign correspondent for the rightwing US National Review and a fellow of the rightwing American Enterprise Institute (as was Applebaum); Sikorsky was closely aligned with the Maidan protests.

 

Nicholas Burns is closer to home. His regular Boston Globe column this week argued that  “The United States is locked into another generational struggle with Russia for power in Europe.”  Burns suggested that “Obama should also up the ante by delivering powerful defensive weapons to the embattled Ukrainian government. That will drive up the costs to Putin, who respects power above all else.”

 

The Globe identifies Burns is a “professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.” His faculty profile notes that the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations has some interesting outside connections. Burns is Director of the Aspen Strategy Group, whose members include a who’s who of neocons and liberal interventionists; he is a “Senior Counselor” at the Cohen Group (whose founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense (1997-2001),  providing  “global business consulting services and advice on tactical and strategic opportunities in virtually every market” and has a strong strategic partnership with DLA Piper, an international law firm which offers “client-driven legal services to leading local, international and multinational companies operating in Ukraine. We are well-positioned to guide clients through this risky yet highly prospective market;” and Burns  serves on the Board of Directors of Entegris, Inc., a diversified transnational corporation with substantial assets in military-related industries.

 

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.  

 

   

One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

 

I have spilled plenty of cyber-ink in this space going back to the now classic age of rock and roll (Elvis, Bo, Chuck, Bo, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Wanda, et. al for shorthand) that formed my musical tastes back in the 1950s when I came of age, musical age anyway. Came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation. Lately though I have going back to various commercially-produced  compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies to cull out the better songs, some which I have had on the tip of my tongue almost continuously since then (the Dubs Could This Be Magic and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love are two examples that quickly come to mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee I needed some coaxing by the compilations to remember.

But I have now found a sure-fire method to aid in that coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even there I am cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When you look at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations you will find excellent artwork that highlights various institutions back then. You know the infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when we gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sods, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene is always associated in my mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.

So that is how the game is played. Two (or more) can play so I will just set the scenes and you can fill in your own musical selection. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours or father borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one  all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when younger and at night when older. Okay, I have given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.                      

Victory To The West Coast Dockworkers (ILWU)- All Labor Must Stand In Solidarity Now!

 

 

 

 

Peter Paul Markin comment:

 

As the author below notes, a long-time longshoreman himself, this West Coast fight by a last remaining union bastion from heroic struggles to form unions in this country back in the 1930s is a last ditch test to try to revitalize the organized labor movement or essentially crush militant unionism for a long time. The ILWU itself only became a powerful labor union after it won the union hiring hall in the famous San Francisco General Strike of 1934. Plenty has been written of late about how the working class (and apparently a good section  of middle class too) has fallen behind in the great gap that has been created by the rich to keep working people in their place. No small part of that gap has been as a result of the demise of the organized labor movement which used to set the standard for all labor, organized and unorganized. Now is the time for all labor, organized and unorganized, to stand in solidarity with the West Coast dockers. Then the rest of us should do like the old labor organizer Joe Hill said- organize, organize like hell. We made the wealth let's take it back.            

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Open Forum

Dock workers, shippers face off at the Port of Oakland

By Jack Heyman

February 18, 2015 Updated: February 18, 2015 9:32am

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West Coast ports are badly congested. Ships are backed up, unable to find a berth to unload their cargo. Longshore contract negotiations are deadlocked between the shipowners and terminal operators of the Pacific Maritime Association and dockworkers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. With big retailers and agribusiness screaming, President Obama has sent in Labor Secretary Tom Perez.

The PMA’s tough negotiating ploy has intentionally created a port crisis. The PMA, echoed by the business press, claims greedy workers engaging in work slowdowns are to blame. Yet the employers, after dragging out negotiations for nine months, have closed ports this past holiday weekend. They previously had ended night work to stop paying overtime and shift premiums, thus employers have slashed available work time in one week by 75 percent. In 2002, when PMA locked out longshore workers and shut down West Coast ports, the media conflated it with a workers’ strike. Is this a bad media rerun?

What’s really brewing here is an assault on one of the last bastions of union power left in the United States, the ILWU. In the last five years, the ILWU has faced union-busting attacks by mining titan Rio Tinto and the ABCD grain monopolies (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge Limited, Cargill Inc. and Louis Dreyfus Commodities), which control 90 percent of the world’s grain distribution. In both cases, the union conceded key contract provisions, and now maritime monopolies are smelling blood.

Two of the biggest global port employers, Ports America Inc. and Stevedoring Services of America were until recently owned in large part by the insurance monolith AIG and Goldman Sachs, respectively. This is “Wall Street on the waterfront,” and they’re out to gut the power of the ILWU, the union hiring hall, and curtail union action by using arbitrators.

Yet when longshore workers stop work, it’s often because of safety issues in a dangerous industry whose rate of work-related fatalities exceeds that of firefighters.

When Bay Area longshore workers shut down ports to protest Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting activities, that state’s AFL-CIO called the ILWU “the moral compass of the labor movement.” And when Oakland police nearly killed Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen during an Occupy movement protest, 30,000 outraged demonstrators marched into the port, closing it in protest and in solidarity with longshore workers battling the nonunion Export Grain Terminal in Longview, Wash. Shades of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike frightened West Coast port employers.

ILWU longshore jobs pay decent wages and benefits, but far less than employers claim. If a rising tide can lift all boats, then these jobs and benefits will continue to set standards for other workers. But, if Wall Street on the waterfront breaks the ILWU, wages and living standards will be driven down for all.

Don’t forget the lesson of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union destroyed by Ronald Reagan, while other unions sat idly by. The consequences devastated the entire labor movement. And, in 2012, President Obama sent Coast Guard vessels against the ILWU protesting a scab ship at the Export Grain Terminal. Longshore workers need to use their power to stop concessionary contracts, and all working people should have their back.

Jack Heyman, a retired ILWU member, has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area as a longshoreman and boatman for over 30 years. He chairs the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee. (www.transportworkers.org)

 

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program -Five - A History Of One's Own

What James “Big Daddy” Dixon did not know about history would fill a book said his boyhood friend Anthony Hilton. What Anthony meant by that, or what James thought he meant by that was the saga of the American experience was a book sealed with seven seals for him. James, not usually one to suffer a slight with a shrug of the shoulders, and he took the remark as a slight, a kidding slight, not to be avenged but a slight nevertheless, wanted to know more about what was on Anthony’s mind that cold February 1964 morning. Normally, James would not give a rat’s ass (a popular expression picked up by the kids, James and Anthony included, in the rat-filled tenement house on the corner of Washington Street in the high Roxbury ghetto where James and Anthony had grown up, and had come of age together before they parted company to go their separate ways in in this wicked old world) about what Mister George Washington did, or did not do, at Valley Forge. Or what madness Mister Andrew Jackson brought down on the English in front of New Orleans or whether Mister Davey Crockett was ill-advised to make that terrible, fateful last stand down in the Podunk Alamo or whether Mister Abraham Lincoln (Father Abraham in his grandmother’s home, a place where he was dumped more often than not when his late mother had her wanting habits on, wanting men habits on) meant to free the slaves or whether Mister Woodrow Wilson sincerely, hah,  wanted to “make the world safe for democracy” when he send American boys (including a grand uncle) over to Europe to do some hellish fighting in a war that lasted forever some years back or whether Mister Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, or did not, sell out to Mister Joseph Stalin at Yalta in the last big war or wherever it was that he was supposed to have done the deed.

James relationship to history was more up to date, more existential if he had known the word, or had asked Anthony what it meant (and if he had known the word then six-two-and even that Anthony would have known what it meant, Anthony always knew what the words meant, always). His world history was based on how much liquor had been served at his High Hat Club the night before (and how much he had been clipped for by those thieving negro brothers he had running the place), how his numbers runners were doing and whether the latest shipment from Mexico with that grade A reefer, that Acapulco Gold, would get here this month. And he expressed those world historic concerns to Mister Anthony Hilton (as he had done on other occasions) in no uncertain terms. What concerned him just that moment was whether Mister Honky (and he used that name freely in front of, and behind the backs of, his white associates) was going to continue to protect his operations in the neighborhood or not. And as he began to explain to Anthony (as he had also done many times before) the historical facts of his place in the sun in the Roxbury world Anthony stopped him short with this.       

“James, doesn’t it matter to you that you could be descended from kings, from great warrior -kings back in Mother Africa, back before bondage times and that our people could erect great works before the bloody honkys could figure out how to use a spoon to eat with(Anthony too , although college educated and ready to become a professor within a few years if things worked out right, maybe at Howard,  could speak the language of private black rage when he was among kindred, and James was kindred), doesn’t it matter that our history has been denied us. Not only that we were warrior- kings, but that we more than paid our dues when we came to this land all shackled up and bedraggled, that we built this country as sure as hell. That we fought our share, our freedom share with old Nat Turner, and a thousand other slave revolts, that our brothers stood with that old prophet angel John Brown at Harpers Ferry fight to make Mister Whitey red with rage, that our proud forbears right in this city formed a regiment, the Massachusetts 54^th, to avenge our shackles in Civil War fight, and that we have put our brand on American culture from ….”                           

With that James, who also knew, knew from deep in his brethren soul, that Anthony was prepared to give him the whole entire panorama of the black experience on these damn shores if he didn’t stop him right then and there did so. Did it as he always did with his right arm extended out hand palm up- stop. And Anthony knowing the sign, ever since that one time fight to determine who was the king hell king of the tenement night, knew to stop. As he prepared to go James stopped him, handed him ten one hundred dollar bills from inside his suit pocket and said, “Use that for that damn Negro History project you are working on over a Boston University.” 

After their good-byes and had Anthony left, and after James had figured up the previous night’s receipts and determined that those thieving negro brothers had only nicked him a little, he, in the quiet of his office, thought about what Anthony had said, about the warrior- king part of it, for in truth that was the only part he remembered. And the next time Anthony came by he was going to ask him more about that, a lot more and for just that minute James “Big Daddy” Dixon wished he had a known history, a history of  his own… 

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]

 

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

 

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

 

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

 

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

 

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

 

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

 

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

 

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

 

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

 

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

 

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

 

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

 

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

 

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 

We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

In Boston-Free All Class-War Prisoners 

 

Free Angela and All Political Prisoner ***** Rescheduled to March 1 *******

When: Thursday, March 1, 2015, 6:45 pm to 9:00 pm

Where: Central Square Cambridge Library • 45 Pearl Street • In Honor of Black History Month • Cambridge

An Inspiring docudrama that takes a gripping look at the historical incidents that created an International movement to free activist Angela Davis.
“For more than four decades the world renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon of the 1970’s black liberation movement, Davis’ work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations.”      From Democracy Now, March 6, 2014
Parking nearby Municipal garage on Green Street
Sponsored by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Light refreshments will be served 

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

Upcoming Events: 

Where Is Malcolm X-Truth-Teller When We Need Him-On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Assassination Of Malcolm X  

Markin comment:

Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "De Lawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America

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

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

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

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa
"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964

MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •

Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

February Is Black History Month- Hats Off To Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

 

 

 

DVD Review

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes, film documentary, Image Entertainment, 2005

 

[This documentary was produced and reviewed well prior to the rightly well-received Martin Luther King biopic, Selma, but still holds up well to acknowledge the man other who made the struggle down South the defining event of those times-Frank Jackman-2015

 

Every major (and most minor) progressive social struggle in America from the struggle for independence from Great Britain through to the struggle for slavery’s abolition up to the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality today has had more than its share of heroes and martyrs. The purpose of the documentary under review, Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes, rightly, highlights some of those lesser known heroes and martyrs from the struggle for black civil rights that came to national prominence in the1950s and 1960s (although arguably that conscious struggle goes back to the 1930s and before).

Although, in the end the question of black equality had to be addressed (and still has to be addressed) nationally the thrust of the black civil rights movement that is featured in this film is the struggle for something like a democratic revolution by blacks and their supporters in the police state-like American South. That barbaric de jure and de facto Jim Crow system officially, as a matter state and social policy, held blacks in second class citizenship (or lower). The struggle to overcome that ingrained (and profitable, profitable for whites of almost all social strata) was almost, of necessity, going to create more than its share of heroes and martyrs.

The case of fourteen- year old Chicago resident Emmett Till and his horrible murder at the hands of white marauders in Mississippi in 1955, the first of the three separate segments that make up the film graphically highlights the problem. For the mere allegation of “whistling at a white woman while black” (if that allegation had any substance) young Emmett was brutally mangled and thrown into the local river. When his mother, righteously, made a cause out of this bestial murder all hell broke loose, at least on the surface. And the case galvanized blacks and whites nationally, alerting many for the first time to the hard fact that something was desperately wrong down in Mississippi (and not just there). But justice, Mississippi justice, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, is justice deferred. As detailed in almost all the cases highlighted in the film those directly responsible for the actions against the civil rights workers were either never brought to justice or only after something like a long drawn out legal civil war. No one should forget that aspect of the struggle either.

The other cases highlighted from the assassinated Medgar Evers to the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church when it was bombed to the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi that drew nation-wide attention to slain white civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb, murdered for “being white while working for black civil rights” exhibit those same kinds of sickening results. Let me put it this way after viewing the film footage here, especially Bull Connor’s attack dogs being let loose on civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama that was one of the first visual images that drove me into the civil rights struggle, I still wanted to throw something at the screen. And you wonder why fifty or so years later I still say Mississippi (or fill in your preferred state) goddam. Kudos here.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music OF The Carter Family (First Generation)

You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes. As a kid I could not abide it but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high and school after when I hung around Harvard Square I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.           

Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early day. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.         

The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player. But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.            

In Boston, Saturday February 21, 2015- 50 Years After The Assassination Of Malcolm X

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In Boston, Saturday February 21, 2015-No 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. Read on       

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