The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2015 Anti-War Season

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2015 Anti-War Season-All U.S. Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!-Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombing Raids-Hands Off Ukraine! Hands Off The World!

 

Click below to link to the Veterans For Peace Facebook page for the latest news on what anti-war front the organization is working on.

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Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19^th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).        

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

At the beginning some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after  Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

And a lot of that good old cause for Ralph since about 2010 had been through working with a later manifestation of VVAW – Veterans for Peace (VFP) which as Ralph will describe below is what has enhanced his political profile. Sam had also joined the group after Ralph beat him down about it. (VFP has a category of supporters called associates who have all the rights of membership except a decisive vote on the issues before the body when their votes would determine the outcome. Here is how Ralph “connected” with VFP in Boston of all places on one of his trips to see Sam:   


Back on Veterans Day 2010 I happened to be at the Boston Common heading toward Jack Higgin’s Grille, the one on Charles Street not the one near Quincy Market, to meet Sam in a location just off the downtown section when I came across some white flags, maybe twenty, waving in the distance over near when Charles Street intersects Beacon Street (the main street of the famous Beacon Hill section of Boston). Since I was heading that way I decided to check out what those flags were all about. Upon investigation I found that the white flags also contained in black outline a peace dove symbol and the words Veterans for Peace. Yah, sign me up, my kind of guys and gals. So, to make a long story short,  I marched with the contingent that year in their spot behind, and not part of, the official parade sponsored by the city (the reason for that separation will be described in more detail below) and have marched each year since, including this year. [2014] Previously in promoting and commemorating this peace event I have recycled my sketch from 2010 out of laziness, hubris, or the basic sameness of the yearly event. I have updated that sketch a bit here to reflect on this year’s event.   
 **********

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, and socialist causes in my long political life. Some large, many small but both necessary. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have, like I have, “switched” over to the other side, have gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace and what to do about it, have exposed the better angels of their nature after the long hard thrust of war and preparations for war have lost their allure, and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system in America has embarked upon.

From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days (the days when even guys like the present Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry had to march in the streets to allay their angers and hurts) I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them out of the barracks, off the bases, and into the streets as happened a little as the Vietnam War moved relentlessly onward) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, don’t do a bookish analysis, complete with footnotes, of the imperial system and their cog part in it, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (the infamous “battle of the barstool,” no, battles) and donning the old overstuffed moth-eaten uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened in 2010 (and this year) as well. What also happened in Boston this year as in 2010 (and other years but I had not been involved in prior marches) was that the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their Armistice Day (“Veterans Day”) program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one, one o’clock in the afternoon in downtown Boston near the Common.

Prior to 2010 there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events so all I know is that there were some heated disputes) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others), maybe before, who have differed from the bourgeois parties’ pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set in 2010 and this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated that year, if you can believe this, from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. This year by a phalanx of Boston Police motorcycle cops. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one on every occasion.

In the event this year’s march went off as usual for both parties, as we waited behind the motorcycle cordon for the “officials” to pass by. While waiting I noticed that while the anti-war contingent was about the same size as it has been for the past few years that I have participated, filled out with other peace activists from Quakers and shakers to ranters and chanters and ant-drone folk (strolling along with a mobile replica of a drone to make their point nicely), all angelic, or at least all also on the right side of the angels, the VFP component looked a little smaller. This reflecting the inevitable aging, can’t make the walk, reality that VFP like myriad peace and social justice-oriented organizations are now peopled, alarmingly so, mainly by older activists who cut their teeth in the struggles of the 1960s (or earlier).

Equally as alarming was the sight of more of my Vietnam era veterans using canes, walkers and other aids to either walk the parade or to get around and listen to the program at the end of the march at the Samuel Adams Park at Fanuiel Hall. The hopeful sign though was an increased number of Iraq (Iraq II, 2003) and Afghanistan veterans who have had enough time to reflect on their war experiences and made a decision to come over to the side of the angels.
One such veteran spoke from platform, as did veterans from World War II,  the Korean and Vietnam War eras, as well as a speakers, young speakers and proud from the Iraq and Afghan war zones, who sang, read their poets, or read their prose pieces to flush out the event. And to say that a new generation of anti-war soldiers will take the torch, take it and go forward as the older generations fades away.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicked old world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers in 2010 and this year well, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we again this year formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited for us after the official paraders had marched by and waved, clapped, and flashed the ubiquitous peace sign at our procession from the sidelines. Be still my heart.

That response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these fellow vets would go beyond then “bring the troops home” and pacific vigil tactics and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from everywhere, embrace a more studied response to the nature of war policy “in the belly of the beast” then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today, like at that first white flag sighting in 2010 I was very glad to be fighting for our peaceful more social future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

Join The 2015 Maine Walk For Peace-In The Desperate Search For Peace

Join The 2015 Maine Walk For Peace-In The Desperate Search For Peace- The Maine March For Peace and Protection Of The Planet From Rangeley To North Berwick -October 2014

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

[This sketch is written as a warm-up to get people to commit to this year’s annual Maine VFP-led Peace Walk which will concentrate on the Militarization of the Seas and take a route from Ellsworth, Maine (near Bar Harbor) to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from October 9 to October 24.  For more information contact Maine Veterans For Peace www.vfpmaine.org

207-443-9502 globalnet@mindspring.com 207-422-8273  Join us.]  

“You know I never stepped up and opposed that damn war in Vietnam that I was part of, a big part of gathering intelligence to direct those monster B-52s to their targets. Never thought about much except to try and get my ass out of there alive. Didn’t get “religion” on the issues of war and peace until sometime after I got out when I ran into a few Vietnam veterans who were organizing a demonstration with the famous Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) down in Washington and they told me what was what. So since then, you know, even if we never get peace, and at times that seems like some kind of naïve fantasy I have to be part of actions like today to let people know, to let myself know, that when the deal went down I was where the action was, ’’ said Jack Scully to his fellow Vietnam veteran Pete Markin.

Peter was sitting in the passenger seat of the car Jack was driving (Mike Kelly, a younger veterans from the Iraq wars sat in back silently drinking in what these grizzled old activists were discussing) as they were travelling back to Jack’s place in York after they had just finished participating in the last leg of the Maine Veterans for Peace-sponsored walk for peace and preservation of the planet from Rangeley to North Berwick, a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles over a ten day period in the October breezes. The organizers of the march had a method to their madness since Rangeley was projected to be a missile site, and the stopping points in between were related to the war industries or to some environmental protection issue ending in North Berwick where the giant defense contractor Pratt-Whitney has three shifts running building F-35 missiles and parts for fighter jets. The three veterans who had come up from Boston to participate in the action had walked the last leg from Saco (pronounced “socko” as a Mainiac pointed out to Peter when he said “sacko”) to the Pratt-Whitney plant in North Berwick, some fifteen miles or so along U.S. Route One and Maine Route Nine.   

After Peter thought about what Jack had said about his commitment to such actions he made this reply, “You know I didn’t step up and oppose the Vietnam War very seriously until pretty late, after I got out of the Army and was working with some Quaker-types in a GI bookstore near Fort Dix down in New Jersey (both of the other men gave signs of recognition of that place, a place where they had taken their respective basis trainings) and that is where I got, what did you call it Jack, “religion” on the war issue. You know I have done quite a few things in my life, some good, some bad but of the good that people have always praised me for that social work I did, and later teaching I always tell them this- there are a million social workers, there are a million teachers, but these days, and for long time now, there have been very few peace activists on the ground so if you want to praise me, want to remember me for anything then let it be for this kind of work, things like this march today when our forces were few and the tasks enormous.”             

With that the three men, as the sun started setting, headed back to the last stretch to York in silence all thinking about what they had accomplished that day.  

******
It had been a long day starting early for Peter since, due to other commitments, he had had to drive up to York before dawn that morning. Jack and Mike already in York too had gotten up early to make sure all the Veterans for Peace and personal gear for the march was in order. They were expected in Saco (you know how to say it now even if you are not from Maine, or even been there) for an 8:30 start to the walk and so left York for the twenty-five mile trip up to that town about 7:30. They arrived at the inevitable Universalist-Unitarian Church (U-U) about 8:15 and prepared the Veterans for Peace flags that the twelve VFPers from the Smedley Butler Brigade who came up from Boston for the last leg would carry.

That inevitable U-U remark by the way needs some explanation, or rather a kudo. Of all the churches with the honorable exception of the Quakers the U-Us have been the one consistent church which has provided a haven for peace activists and their projects, various social support groups and 12- step programs and, of course, the thing that Peter knew them for was as the last gasp effort to preserve the folk minute of the early 1960s by opening their doors on a monthly basis and turn their basements or auditoria into throw-back coffeehouses with the remnant folk performers from that milieu playing, young and old.                  

And so a little after 8:30 they were off, a motley collection of about forty to fifty people, some VFPers from the sponsoring Maine chapter, the Smedleys, some church peace activist types, a few young environmental activists, and a cohort of Buddhists in full yellow robe regalia leading the procession with their chanting and pacing drum beating. Those Buddhists, or some of them, had been on the whole journey from Rangeley unlike most participants who came on one or a few legs and then left. The group started appropriately up Main Street although if you know about coastal Maine that is really U.S. Route One which would be the main road of the march until Wells where they would pick up Maine Route Nine into North Berwick and the Pratt-Whitney plant.

Peter had a flash-back thought early on the walk through downtown Saco as he noticed that the area was filled with old red brick buildings that had once been part of the thriving textile industry which ignited the Industrial Revolution here in America. Yes, Peter “knew” this town much like his own North Adamsville, another red brick building town, and like old Jack Kerouac’s Lowell which he had been in the previous week to help celebrate the annual Kerouac festival. All those towns had seen better days, had also made certain come-backs of late, but walking pass the small store blocks in Saco there were plenty of empty spaces and a look of quiet desperation on those that were still operating just like he had recently observed in those other towns.    

That sociological observation was about the only one that Peter (or anybody) on the march could make since once outside the downtown area heading to Biddeford and Kennebunk the views in passing were mainly houses, small strip malls, an occasional gas station and many trees. As the Buddhists warmed up to their task the first leg was uneventful except for the odd car or truck honking support from the roadway. (Peter and every other peace activist always counted honks as support whether they were or not, whether it was more a matter of road rage or not in the area of an action, stand-out or march). And so the three legs of the morning went. A longer stop for lunch followed and then back on the road for the final stages trying to reach the Pratt-Whitney plant for a planned vigil as the shifts were changing about three o’clock.   

[A word on logistics since this was a straight line march with no circling back. The organizers had been given an old small green bus for their transportation needs. That green bus was festooned with painted graffiti drawings which reminded Peter of the old time 1960s Ken Kesey Merry Prankster bus and a million replicas that one could see coming about every other minute out of the Pacific Coast Highway hitchhike minute back then. The green bus served as the storage area for personal belongings and snack and, importantly, as the vehicle which   would periodically pick up the drivers in the group and leaf-frog their cars toward North Berwick. Also provided rest for those too tired or injured to walk any farther. And was the lead vehicle for the short portion of the walk where everybody rode during one leg before the final walk to the plant gate.]       

So just before three o’clock they arrived at the plant and spread out to the areas in front of the three parking lots holding signs and waving to on-coming traffic. That was done for about an hour and then they formed a circle, sang a couple of songs, took some group photographs before the Pratt-Whitney sign and then headed for the cars to be carried a few miles up the road to friendly farmhouse for a simple meal before dispersing to their various homes. In all an uneventful day as far as logistics went. Of course no vigil, no march, no rally or anything else in the front of some huge corporate enterprise, some war industries target, or some high finance or technological site would be complete without the cops, public or private, thinking they were confronting the Russian Revolution of 1917 on their property and that was the case this day as well. 

 

Peter did not know whether the organizers had contacted Pratt-Whitney, probably not nor he thought should they have, or security had intelligence that the march was heading their way but a surly security type made it plain that the marchers were not to go on that P-W property, or else. As if a rag-tag group of fifty mostly older pacifists, lukewarm socialists, non-violent veterans and assorted church people were going to shut the damn place done, or try to, that day.         

Nothing came of the security agent’s threats as there was no need for that but as Peter got out of Jack’s car he expressed the hope that someday they would be leading a big crowd to shut that plant down. No questions asked. In the meantime they had set the fragile groundwork. Yes, it had been a good day and they had all been at the right place. 

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date (basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player. Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October.

Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could so a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country just then, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

 

Important  Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Commentary

The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.

The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.

*****
Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):

Mumia Is an Innocent Man Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty   Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 24 years, falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and mountains of evidence show this, including the confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, to the murder. All the elements of the capitalist “justice” system colluded in framing up this former Black Panther and MOVE supporter because he is an eloquent and defiant spokesman for the oppressed. The fight to free Mumia has now reached a critical juncture. Last December, the federal appeals court put Mumia’s case on a “fast track” for decision, marking the last stages of the legal proceedings. Both Mumia and prosecutors are appealing decisions made in 2001 by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned the death sentence but upheld every aspect of Mumia’s frame-up conviction. The state is as determined as ever to execute Mumia and has appealed. He has been barred by the courts from presenting evidence that he is innocent. But the district attorney filed legal papers in the federal appeals court in April, opening its case with a venomous, lying statement to portray Mumia as a cop-killer who must be executed. In a short time, even as soon as six months, the court could decide what is next for Mumia: death, life in prison or more legal proceedings. Mumia was locked up on death row in 1982 based on lying testimony extorted by the cops without a shred of physical evidence. The judge at his trial, Albert Sabo—known as the “King of Death Row”—was overheard by a court stenographer saying, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” Rigging the jury to exclude black people, the prosecution incited jurors with the grotesque lie that Mumia’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was committed to kill a cop “all the way back then.” The 1982 conviction was secured with arguments that the jury could disregard any doubts about Mumia’s guilt because he would have “appeal after appeal.” In nearly two decades of appeals, each and every court has rejected the reams of documented evidence of the blatant frame-up of Mumia. For over four years, Pennsylvania state as well as federal courts have refused to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December casts an ominous shadow. The legal lynching of Williams, which provoked an outcry nationally and internationally, signaled the determination of the U.S. capitalist rulers to fortify their machinery of death in the face of growing reticence in the population over how the death penalty is applied. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, is the executioners’ number one target. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this clear when, in denying clemency for Williams, he cited the fact that Williams’ 1998 book, Life in Prison, was dedicated to—among others—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s case demonstrates what the racist death penalty is all about. It is the lynch rope made legal, the ultimate weapon in the government’s arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. A legacy of chattel slavery, the death penalty is maintained in a society where the segregation of the majority of the black population is used as a wedge to divide the laboring masses and perpetuate the rapacious rule of capital. The murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system was displayed for all to see when thousands of people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mumia’s appeal takes place in the context of the government’s assertion of its “right” to disappear, torture or even assassinate its perceived opponents, and to wiretap and spy on anyone and everyone. In the name of the “war on terror,” rights won through tumultuous class and social battles are being put through the shredder by the Bush administration with the support of the Democratic Party. The purpose is to terrorize and silence any who would stand in the way of the capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits and their imperialist adventures, like the colonial occupation of Iraq. As Mumia’s case moves through the final stages of legal proceedings, the fight for his freedom is urgently posed. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—stands for pursuing every legal avenue in Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Through publicity and action, we have struggled to mobilize the broadest social forces, centered on the labor movement, to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty. As Mumia faced execution in August 1995, a mass outpouring of protest nationally and internationally—from civil liberties organizations and such heads of state as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to trade unions representing millions of workers—succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand. Today we face greater odds. But if undertaken through a mobilization based on the social power of the working class, the fight for Mumia’s freedom would be a giant step forward in the defense of all of us against the increasingly depraved and vicious rulers of this country.   Anatomy of a Frame-Up In the eyes of the capitalist state, from the time Mumia was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 1969, he was a dead man on leave. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pronounced: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This policy was carried out under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and the Republican Nixon administration. Under the FBI’s “counter-intelligence” program known as COINTELPRO, 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds of others framed up and railroaded to prison. The 900 pages of FBI files the PDC was able to obtain on Mumia’s behalf, even though highly expurgated, make clear that the FBI and cops used any “dirty trick” in their mission to get him. His every move was tracked and his name put on the FBI’s Security Index, the 1960s version of a “terrorist” hit list. Even with the demise of the Panthers, the state did not call off its vendetta against Mumia. As a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia’s impassioned defense of black rights continued to enrage them. The Philly cops particularly seethed over his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, which was subjected to an onslaught of state terror. Mumia was targeted for death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said. And in the early morning hours of 9 December 1981 at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, the cops finally saw their chance. Mumia was driving a cab through the area that night. He heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother and got out of his cab to help him. Moments later, Mumia was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest. Nearby lay a wounded police officer, Daniel Faulkner. The cops found their long-awaited opportunity and seized on it to frame up Mumia as a “cop killer.” The prosecution’s case rested on three legs, all based on lies: the testimony of “eyewitnesses” coerced through favors and terror; a “confession” purportedly made by Mumia the night of the shooting that was such a blatant hoax that it didn’t surface until months later; and nonexistent ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, this frame-up was completely blown to pieces with Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was the man who shot Faulkner. In a sworn affidavit printed in the PDC pamphlet Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!, Beverly stated:   “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.   “Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting.” Beverly stated that the second shooter also fled the scene. This is supported by a sworn affidavit by Mumia’s brother, Billy Cook, who testified that his friend Kenneth Freeman was a passenger in Cook’s VW at 13th and Locust that night. Freeman later admitted to Cook that he was part of the plan to kill Faulkner and had participated in the shooting and then fled the scene. This is further corroborated by the testimony of a witness at the scene, William Singletary, who said he saw a passenger get out of Cook’s VW, shoot Faulkner and then flee the scene. At least half a dozen witnesses who were on the scene the night of the shooting saw, from several different vantage points, one or more black men flee. Police radio “flashes” right after the shooting reported that the shooters had fled the scene with Faulkner’s gun. Five witnesses, including two cops, describe someone at the scene wearing a green army jacket, which both Beverly and Freeman were wearing that night. Neither Mumia nor Cook wore a green army jacket: Mumia wore a red ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes and Cook had a blue jacket with brass buttons. Beverly said that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. This is confirmed by no less an authority than the state Medical Examiner’s office, whose record written the same morning as the shooting quotes a homicide officer saying that Mumia was shot by “arriving police reinforcements,” not by Faulkner. Other witnesses have corroborated Beverly’s testimony that undercover and uniformed police were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, which Beverly assumed meant that they were in on the plan to kill Faulkner. One witness, Marcus Cannon, saw two undercover cops on the street across from the shooting. William Singletary also saw “white shirts” (police supervisors) at the scene right after the shots were fired. The prosecution dismisses the idea that the cops would kill one of their own as an outlandish invention. Leaving aside that Beverly passed two lie detector tests, his account fits with the fact that at the time of Faulkner’s killing in 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal investigations into police corruption in Philadelphia, including police connections with the mob. Police working as FBI informants were victims of hits in the early 1980s. A former federal prosecutor acknowledged that the Feds had a police informant whose brother was a cop, just as Faulkner had a brother who was a cop. A sworn affidavit by Donald Hersing, a former informant in an FBI investigation into police corruption, confirms that at the time of Faulkner’s shooting the word was out that the Feds had an informant in the police force. The commanding officer of the Central Police Division, where the murder of Faulkner took place, the chief of the police Homicide Division and the ranking officer at the scene of Faulkner’s killing, Alfonzo Giordano, were all under investigation at the time on federal corruption charges. These cops were literally the chain of command in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Giordano had been the right-hand man for Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police chief and later mayor, Frank Rizzo. From 1966 to 1970, Giordano was in charge of the cop “Stakeout” squad, which led the police raid on the Black Panthers’ headquarters in 1970. He was also the supervisor of the 15-month police siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village house in 1977-78, which resulted in nine MOVE members being sent to prison on frame-up charges of killing a cop. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was. The senior officer on the scene, he had both motive and opportunity to frame up Mumia for the killing of Faulkner. Giordano originated the claim that Mumia’s gun—the putative murder weapon—was lying beside him on the street. But according to police radio records, the cops were still looking for the gun some 14 minutes after hordes of police had arrived on the scene. Giordano arranged the identification of Mumia by cab driver Robert Chobert, who became a witness for the prosecution. Giordano was the central witness for the prosecution at Mumia’s pretrial hearing. But he was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. Shortly before the trial, he was assigned to a desk job. One working day after Mumia was convicted, Giordano resigned from the force. In 1986, Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on his receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs from 1979 to 1980. He didn’t spend a day in jail.   Prosecution’s Web of Lies The prosecution’s story is that two people were on the corner of 13th and Locust where Faulkner was shot: Mumia’s brother Billy Cook and Faulkner. They claim that Mumia ran across the street when he saw his brother being beaten by Faulkner. According to police and prosecutors, Mumia shot the cop in the back, the cop shot back at Mumia and then Mumia stood over the fallen cop and shot him “execution style” several times in the head. Even a close examination of the cops’ and prosecution’s own evidence gives the lie to this scenario. A look at the “three legs” of the prosecution’s case provides not only stark confirmation of Mumia’s innocence but clear corroboration of Beverly’s testimony. The Prosecution’s Witnesses: Even with police and prosecution threats and favors at the time of the 1982 trial, no witness testified to seeing Mumia actually shoot Faulkner. Only one, Cynthia White, the prosecution’s star witness, testified that she thought she saw a gun in Mumia’s hand when he crossed the street. A prostitute working in the area, White claimed to have witnessed the events from the southeast corner of 13th and Locust. Yet the other two prosecution witnesses, as well as two defense witnesses who knew White, all denied she was at the scene during the shooting! Other prostitutes testified in subsequent court hearings that White alternately got police favors or was threatened by police in order to extract her testimony. As for Robert Chobert, at first he told police that the shooter “ran away.” After further interrogation, he changed his story, claiming that Mumia stood over Faulkner while the shots were fired and that no one ran away. A cab driver using a suspended license while on probation for felony arson, Chobert was given favors by the prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He later admitted that he never saw the shooting. The third state witness was Michael Scanlan. He initially identified Mumia as the VW driver but then claimed that the shooter ran across Locust Street, which Beverly admits that he did. He also admitted that he did not know if Mumia was the man he saw. Ballistics and Forensics: The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence was “consistent” with Mumia’s gun being the murder weapon even while admitting that the “consistency” applied to millions of handguns. There is no evidence that Mumia’s gun was even fired that night. There was every opportunity to test Mumia’s hands, or the gun, for evidence that it had been recently fired. But according to police no such tests, which are standard operating procedure, were ever done! The Stakeout officer who claimed he picked up Mumia’s gun did not turn it over for more than two hours, providing more than ample time to have it tampered with. The Medical Examiner’s report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet, yet Mumia’s gun was a .38 calibre. Although the crime lab claimed that the main bullet fragment removed from Faulkner’s head was too damaged to test, the defense team’s ballistics expert denied this. A second bullet fragment removed from the head wound simply disappeared without a trace. Evidence at the scene—bullet fragments, blood stains, the absence of divots in the sidewalk—refutes the prosecution claim that Faulkner was shot repeatedly while lying on the ground. The bullet patterns are far more consistent with multiple shooters, as Beverly testifies. A copper bullet jacket found at the scene was inconsistent with either Faulkner’s or Mumia’s guns, suggesting that a different gun was fired. Similarly, type O blood was found at the scene, but Faulkner, Mumia and Cook were all type A, suggesting that another person was present and injured. The angle of Mumia’s own wounds is impossible if he was shot while standing over Faulkner as the prosecution claimed. However, Mumia’s wounds are consistent with Beverly’s testimony that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. The “Confession”: The frame-up’s final leg was the claim that Mumia, lying in a pool of blood at the hospital where he was taken for treatment, shouted out that he had shot the cop. Yet the police officer assigned to guard Mumia there reported that same day that Mumia “made no comments.” In reality, he was so badly wounded, with a bullet hole through one lung, and had been so badly beaten by police on the street and at the hospital, that he could not have “shouted” anything. The “confession” was manufactured by the prosecution at a roundtable meeting with cops two months after the shooting. Priscilla Durham, a security guard, was the only hospital employee who backed up the cops’ “confession” lie. In 2003 Durham’s stepbrother Kenneth Pate swore that Durham said she was pressured by the cops to say Mumia confessed. Pate also said Durham heard Mumia say, “Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me.” Mumia Abu-Jamal has always categorically maintained his innocence. As he declared in a 2001 affidavit: “I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent…. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to.” Mobilize Now to Free Mumia! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state. Its justice system is class- and race-biased to the core. The cops and courts who framed up this innocent man, the living tomb of the prison system in which he is jailed, the executioner who stands ready to kill—all are instruments of organized violence used to preserve the rule of the capitalist class through the forcible suppression of the working class and oppressed. Smashing this racist frame-up machine will require a socialist revolution that overturns the capitalist system. Demands for a “new trial” which have been raised by liberals, self-proclaimed socialist organizations, black nationalists and others have fed illusions that there can be justice in the capitalist courts. Those illusions demobilized a movement of millions around the world in Mumia’s defense. The time is now to rekindle mass protest—nationally and internationally—on behalf of Mumia. Mumia’s freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged “justice” system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. The power that can turn the tide is the power of millions—working people, anti-racist youth, death penalty abolitionists—united in struggle to demand the freedom of this innocent man. Crucial to this perspective is the mobilization of the labor movement, whose social power derives from its ability to shut down production. As we have stated since we first took up Mumia’s defense in the mid 1980s, what’s necessary are labor-centered united-front actions, generating effective protest across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring all the right to have their own say. The time is now to make Mumia’s case a rallying cry against the racist death penalty, against black oppression, against government repression. Raise your voice and organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! —Partisan Defense Committee, 27 May 2006

An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)


The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.

Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.

Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.

Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.

I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.

Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.
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June Is Class-War Prisoner Month-Free All The Class War Prisoners!

Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied  Bombings In Syria And Iraq- Stop The Damn American Killer Drone Attacks Everywhere- Stop The Saudi Bombing Decimation Of Yemen-Stop The American Military Aid To Israel- Hell, Just Stop The Madness In The Middle East  

 

If you look closely, hell, if you just look at the visual, an old “stick-on” button-Stop The Wars meaning this day Stop The F-----g Wars that I have been wearing for years, that accompanies this sketch you will notice that it is ragged with wear, has been through a lot of hard times over the past decade or so but the message still rings true, still needs to be proclaimed like never before. Today in April 2015 I add the now month long American-supported Saudi aerial decimation of Yemen as the latest installment on the war front, no war fronts, that I had initially written about in February 2015 when I argued against the very real likelihood that Obama (okay, okay I will be civil today since he and his ilk hold all the cards, ah, hold all the weapons, and call him President Obama but I do so holding my nose) would get a resolution through Congress to go full-bore on the ISIS front. He, the President, said at the time not including ground troops, or really no additional ground troops since he has snuck a couple of thousand in as “advisers” in Iraq and Syria who are holding his Iraqi and Syrian agents by the hand as they go into battle already but we should be very wary on that sneaky front since it looks like additional ground forces will be necessary as everybody now has a timetable of a decade of so more of off-hand fighting. AND included at the time some kind of stepped-up military engagement in Ukraine which is looking very much more likely than when I posited the idea in February.

As I said then as well this from a “peace” President (an oxymoron in the United States and a few other countries) who has actually won the Nobel Peace Prize if you can believe that by this unconventionally bellicose man. So you can image what the other guys, the Republicans are up to, are ready to go hammer and tong on (beside their bugaboo Obamacare obsession which really is played out).

So, yes, I am a non-partisan, I willingly go after both parties, on the issues of war and peace and have been doing so since I got “religion” after my own service during the Vietnam War, another war that proved nothing, that we were consciously lied to about, and one that almost tore the United States apart including a near mutiny in the Army by about 1969. Prior to that “religious” conversion, I had had harbored the same kind of bellicose thoughts about America’s enemies in the world, including the benighted Vietnamese as the next guy, excepting a quirky thing about abolishing nuclear weapon learned at the knew of my Catholic Worker-influenced grandmother. So I know both sides and know too the vehemence of my anti-war commitment, the kind of vehemence that is the special Provence of the converted.      

Make no mistake I hold, and those I know who I have worked with lately in Veterans For Peace and the umbrella nation organization United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC), an organization that long ago provided the stick-on button which has seen much wear, hold no truck with ISIS, none for those savages. Hold no truck with all the emerging swarms of religious fanatics from Christian fundamentalist climate nay-sayers to Islamist fundamentalists ready to carry one and all back to the 8^th century (including those advanced jet fighter Saudis who actually think they are running an 8^th century society otherwise) to Zionist irredentists going back to Biblical times for their authority. And you wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

But that, my friends, is a long way from assuming that the United States, which one way or another has “created” ISIS (and on the other “front” aided the fascist-supported coup in Ukraine which has exploded in its face), should be bombing and threatening ground troops in situations where who knows what the hell is going on. Off the recent track record in the failed state of Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the failed state of Yemen (if it ever really was a state but since everybody of late, every bourgeois academic from Henry Kissinger on down has been yakking about the inviolability of the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 I will let that argument pass) the nearly failed state in Syria (I am still looking for those “moderate” anti-ISIS forces that the United States is trying to supply in Syria) and the also nearly failed state in Ukraine all of which have the fingerprints of American involvement over them the beginning of wisdom is to oppose further military involvement. Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings and Drone Attacks! No Military Aid To Israel! No Military Aid to Ukraine….and that is just for starters.