When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

 

 

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby

Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh
Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Frank Jackman

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly (although there is some question even in my own mind and I went through the whole thing from folk boy to  patriotic soldier to flower child about whether the movement for all its high gloss publicity and whirlwind effect dominated as much as we though). That decade or so from about 1964 to about 1974   is nevertheless beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers (the ones born immediately after the war as the troops came home, came off the transports, and guys and gals were all hopped up to start families, figure out how to finance that first white picket fence house and use the GI bill to get a little bit ahead in the world, at least get ahead of their parents’ dead-end great depression woes) who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since we of the so-called generation of ’68, so called by some wag who decided that the bookends of the rage of the American Democratic Convention in Chicago that year and the defeat of the revolutionary possibilities in France in May of that year signaled the beginning of the ebb tide for the whole, who are still up for a fight against the military monster who is still with us are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive.

Thinking back a bit to that time a thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, something new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of our childhoods (that time always absurdly symbolically topped off by the sight of elementary school kids, us, crouched under some rickety old desk arms over our head some air-raid drill practice time as if, as the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can attest to, that would do the slightest bit of good if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs hit. Yeah, the Cold War time too when what did we know except to keep our obedient heads down under our desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if we were ready to face the bleak future if we survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally I remember telling somebody then that I would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take my chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do us.)

 

For a while anyway we were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with our world, our world even if we had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of us who were caught up in the whirl thought it would be for only a while or at least thought it would fade so fast just as we thought, young and healthy as we were, that we would live forever. But if you took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where I like to start dating my own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then I would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South in the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence I have found that these are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star  James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando in The Wild One and a brooding Montgomery Cliff in almost anything to the mix of what we could relate to as icons of alienation and angst .)   

 

An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys (and very few gals since that Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-William Burroughs-Allen Ginsberg mix was strictly a male bonding thing) who listened to the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz and wrote up a storm based on that sound, declared a new sound, that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang.

Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what we, or some of us, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed our parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.” Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for our parents we wanted guys who set the buzz going, let us think about getting some kicks out of life, that maybe with some thought we would survive, and if we didn’t at least we had the kicks.

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of our generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought as I get older and hear more stories about the guys who didn’t make it back to the “real” world after “Nam, those guys you see downtown in front of the VA hospitals, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.

 

There were more things, things like the “Pill” (and if you need to know what pill and its purpose where have you been) that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, sex, sex beyond the missionary position of timeless legends, something very different if the dramatic increase in sales of the Kama Sutra meant anything, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward.

Cultural things like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters (stuff that we only knew negatively about, about staying away from, thru reefer madness propaganda, thru the banning of some drugs that were previously legal like sweet sister cocaine and taunt Nelson Algren hard life down at the base of society in films like The Man With The Golden Arm), the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name (my moniker at one time was Be-Bop Benny draw what you will out of that the idea being like among some hipster blacks, although with less reason, we wanted to get rid of our slave names)  fashion (the old college plaid look fading in the face of World War II army surplus, feverish colors, and consciously mismatched outfits and affectation (“cool, man, cool” and “right on’ said it all). More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission when on the road, or later on the bum). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of us in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of us have our specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that we still live with for not taking the omens more seriously. (My ebb tide, as I have described elsewhere, was the events around May Day 1971 when we seriously tried, or thought we were seriously trying, to shut down the government in D.C. if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for our efforts. After those days I, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than we were about creating the new and that we had better rethink how to slay the monster we were up against and act accordingly.)

Then we have the photograph (see above) that graces this short screed, and which pictorially encapsulates a lot of what went then, a lot about which side were you on when the deal went down. This photograph is almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-“newer world” mix stirred up in the 1960s. Three self-assured women (the “girls” of photograph a telltale sign of what society, even hip, progressive society thought about women in those slightly pre-women’s liberation time but they, we, would learn the difference) comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt (and mother dread thoughts about whether daughter knew about the pill, and heaven forbid if she was sexually active, a subject not for polite society, not for mother-daughter conversation, then she damn better well know, or else).

They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no, outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured here. I wonder how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. I did not refuse induction for a whole bunch of reasons but then I did not have any girlfriends who made that demand, mine early on anyway were as likely to want me to come back on a shield as those warrior-proud ancient Greek women. Too bad. But I like to think that today we could expect more women to be like the sisters above. Yeah, more, many  more of the latter, please as we continue in the nightmare world of endless war.       

DO MORE OF-Let 's Win The Fight For $15-And More

Let 's Win The Fight For $15-And More

Sam Lowell comment:

When even run-of-the-mill politicians like Governor Cuomo of New York are jumping on the fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage band wagon you know the idea's time has come (as the politicians are as usual way behind the grassroots on issues like this, bedrock pocketbook issues which have not bothered them since they were kids).  Still if you do the math for a full workweek (not usual these days when a full-workweek means health benefits kick in under Obamacare) 40 X 15 =600 x 52 weeks =$31,200. For a family of four, hell, for a childless couple, hell, for an independent single adult that's not enough. We can squeeze more out of these guys. Lots more until we get to an adequate living wage-if we fight. Yes, "if we fight for it" are the operative words.    

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East! –Stop The
U.S. Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

I have already mentioned the night not long ago when my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern Massachusetts, Sam Lowell, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure while having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also mentioned which is germane here in discussing the broader category of the seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at the close of our lives so that we never again utter the word “peace” with anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the last couple of generations of America’s wars has for over a quarter of a decade been determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first instrument, of American policy in what it sees as a hostile world (a view that it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of devastation brought forth has changed).  

I also noted Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective on the killer/spy drones. I thought his argument perhaps reflected an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. More importantly that Sam, who marched in any number of anti-Vietnam War parades with me after my service was over and I gave him the “skinny” on what was really going on in that war had in the post-9/11 period like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions. Something in that savage criminal attack in New York City against harmless civilians got the war lusts, yes, the war lusts up of people, good, simple people like Sam and lots of “peaceniks” from our generation to kill everything that got in our way. LBJ and Richard Nixon would have in their graves rather ironic smiles over that change of heart.   

And those many who changed positions, who sulkily went along with whatever was “necessary,” including I remember one time a woman who identified herself as a Quaker who, I swear, asked plaintively on some radio talk show I was listening to whether we (meaning the American government and not her individually I assume but who knows) could not surgically nuclear bomb Al Qaeda from all memory. Sam got caught up in this war lust wave and has since, starting with his initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, wound up in the end left with egg all over his face.

But Sam is nothing if not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and the with it whatever rationale made the American government built a thing from which it had to run.

As is also usual these days like with the question of killer/spy drones we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I again got to thinking about the issue of the debacle of American policy and while not intending to directly counter Sam arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:

 

“Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least more vociferously so) as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred at last count (but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti), to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to,  quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).

Of course the existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless American blunders from the get go has helped create.

All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes puts paid to that thought).

And during all this deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?

Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!     

***

Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent (small) anti-war rally:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]  

A View From The Marxist Left- Movie Review: The Black Panthers-By M.J. Clancy

Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)   http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed   Workers Vanguard No. 1076	16 October 2015

Movie Review: The Black Panthers-By M.J. Clancy

 

With its powerful archival footage and interviews with former Black Panther Party members, Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution reopens a chapter of black history that has long been distorted, hated and feared by the racist rulers of America. While the capitalist ruling class has embraced Martin Luther King as the prophet of “nonviolence” and “patient moderation,” the Panthers have long been demonized as little more than thugs. Even amidst the outpouring of protests against racist cop terror, there has been little reference to the Panthers who courageously championed the defense of the ghetto masses against police brutality. Instead, the call has been to “reclaim MLK” as some kind of radical opponent of American capitalism.

To some extent, such mythology is also shared by Nelson. His documentary gives the impression that the Panthers were a kind of Northern offshoot of the civil rights movement and that it was only following King’s assassination in 1968 that they came to despair of his “turn the other cheek” liberal pacifism. On the contrary, the Black Panther Party was founded as a direct response to the failure of the civil rights movement, embodied in MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to make any serious dent into the bedrock of black oppression when it moved North in the mid 1960s.

Here, the political premises of the King leadership—which looked to the federal government and the Democratic Party for legislative redress—collided with economic and social reality. Black people in the Northern ghettos had lived with “equality under the law” for years while being segregated in the rotting tenements of the inner cities, relegated to the worst, lowest-paying jobs and daily humiliated and brutalized by the police. It became abundantly clear that King had no program to fight the causes of racial oppression, which is rooted in the economic and social structure of capitalist America.

A movement that had raised great hopes and activated tens of thousands in often-heroic battles collapsed amidst the ghetto uprisings that began in Harlem in 1964 and continued with undiminished intensity through Watts in 1965 and Newark, Cleveland and Detroit in 1967. In the middle of these upheavals, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. They sought to strip away the deeply felt sense of powerlessness of the black inner city residents, particularly in relation to racist cops gunning down blacks on the streets.

Images of Malcolm X and his call for the right of self-defense “by any means necessary,” fill the screen at the beginning of the documentary. But it gives little idea of the impact of his uncompromising opposition to the capitalist rulers of America, Democrats as well as Republicans. Malcolm sparked hatred and fear in those rulers and inspired black militants. The Panthers were established just two years after The Autobiography of Malcolm X was first published. In his book This Side of Glory (1993), former Panther leader David Hilliard recalled a conversation in which Newton announced that he was about to found a new organization that will be “the personification of Malcolm X’s dreams.”

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution shows footage of BPP patrols in Oakland, armed with guns and law books, surrounding a gang of white cops terrorizing a black “suspect.” For boldly asserting their constitutional right to bear arms and challenging racist cop terror, the Panthers gained the respect of the ghetto masses and began drawing many black youth into their ranks, first in Oakland and then nationwide. At its height, the BPP had 4,000 members and 35 chapters. As one former Panther says in the documentary: “We were not after the church folks; we were not after the Muslim folks. We wanted the brother on the corner, the brother who is getting his head banged in every weekend by the police.”

Other former Panthers recall the problems of trying to assemble a “vanguard of the revolution” from unemployed black youth. The BPP made its stand on purging the ghetto of police brutality. This was equivalent to calling to overthrow the armed might of the capitalist state, a perspective that could and can only be realized by the mobilization of the multiracial working class under the leadership of a genuine vanguard party. Despite the radicalism and personal courage of its militants, the BPP shared the predominantly white, student-centered New Left’s rejection of the centrality and strategic social power of the working class in the struggle against racial oppression and class exploitation.

As we wrote in 1972:

“To avoid the Marxist contention that the organized working class is the key revolutionary element, the Panthers came up with the theory that black lumpens are the revolutionary vanguard, and that all employed workers, black and white, have been bought off by the ruling class. The Panthers’ ‘theory’ of lumpenism is a mixture of self-aggrandizement and impressionism....

“A political movement which isolates itself in a social milieu hostile to normal work-a-day society must become irresponsible, individualistic and ultimately cynical and contemptuous of the mass of working people. It is precisely that task of revolutionaries to penetrate the mainstream of social and economic life and explode ‘normal work-a-day’ society on the basis of its terrible oppressiveness—the very oppressiveness which drove individuals to become revolutionaries in the first place.”

— “End of the Black Power Era,” reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)

The Panthers had members working in factories near Oakland and even put out a few issues of a plant newspaper at the Fremont GM plant. Unionized white workers on strike at an oil refinery in Richmond, California, took up the BPP’s cry of “pig” against strikebreaking cops who were attacking their picket lines. Thus, the idea of linking the anger of the ghetto masses to the power of labor was not some kind of utopian pipedream. The Spartacist League sought to win young black militants around the Panthers to a Marxist perspective and to the struggle to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Fighting in the unions as well as among radicalizing youth, such militants could have been instrumental in breaking the brittle stranglehold of the racist, anti-Communist AFL-CIO misleaders over the integrated labor movement, in defeating the black Uncle Toms in the inner cities and their capitalist patrons in the Democratic Party.

But the BPP turned its back on the multiracial working class. Instead, the Panthers substituted their own militants for the organized power of the working class. However heroic, they were no match for the armed might of the capitalist state.

The Panthers Pick Up the Gun and Are Defeated

Taking advantage of California’s then-permissive gun laws, the Panthers applied their “pick up the gun” theory. At first this tactic seemed successful as Newton’s armed patrols in Oakland went unmolested. The Panthers also held a rally protesting the police murder of a young black man, Denzil Dowell, in Richmond, California, which the cops ran like a Southern town. Again, they succeeded in facing down the cops. The documentary shows footage of the most spectacular action of the BPP, the one that put them on the map nationwide. That was the armed Panther march, led by Bobby Seale, into the state Capitol in Sacramento, to protest the Mulford Bill. This bill (named after a white politician from a wealthy Oakland enclave) was drafted specifically to disarm the Panthers.

The scenes from Sacramento in the documentary, with then California governor Ronald Reagan and state legislators cowering, capture the spirit that inspired the rapid growth of the Panthers. They are also a powerful indictment of gun control laws, at the time pushed by right-wing Republicans and today by liberals. What is abundantly clear is that the purpose of such laws is to disarm black and working people, ensuring that the cops maintain their monopoly on the means of violence together with their fascist and criminal counterparts.

Taken aback by the Panthers’ flamboyance and uncertain how much support they had in the ghettos, the state’s authorities at first proceeded with some caution. But beginning with the wounding and jailing of Huey Newton on frame-up charges of killing a cop in October 1967, and gaining steam with the Oakland police killing of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton and the arrest of Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in April 1968, a coordinated national campaign to wipe out the Panthers was launched by the FBI under the Democratic president Lyndon Johnson and carried out by local police forces. In many cases they had the active collaboration of cultural nationalist groups like Ron Karenga’s United Slaves organization, whose members killed L.A. Panther leaders Bunchy Carter and John Huggins on the UCLA campus in 1969.

While Nelson’s documentary doesn’t mention the role of these black cultural nationalists, who glorified the heritage of African kings and queens, it very powerfully depicts the murderous vendetta launched by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Raving that the Panthers were the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” Hoover revived COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that had originally been set up in 1956 with its main target being the Communist Party. In a memo distributed to all FBI offices in the country, Hoover declared: “The purpose of this new counter-intelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” What Hoover meant by “neutralize” was spelled out in 1968, “the Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

COINTELPRO unleashed the most savage and systematic campaign of racist murder in modern American history. Much of this is vividly portrayed in archival footage in the documentary: from images of Panthers in Philadelphia stripped to their underwear and lined up against the wall outside their headquarters, to Oakland Panthers piling up sand bags in anticipation of a police assault on their office. There are depictions of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged like a latter-day slave on orders from the judge in the Chicago Seven trial. Footage of a rally outside the courthouse shows the powerful eloquence of the 20-year-old Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the BPP’s Illinois branch.

There is also footage of the bloody aftermath of the 4 December 1969 pre-dawn raid by the Chicago police on Hampton’s apartment. Orchestrated by the FBI, the cops unleashed an onslaught of bullets killing Hampton and 17-year-old Mark Clark in their beds as they slept. Among those interviewed in the movie is William O’Neill, the police informant who was Hampton’s bodyguard and provided the floor plans to the apartment.

Four days after the assassination of Hampton and Clark, an L.A. SWAT team laid siege to the Panther office in L.A., firing thousands of rounds of ammunition. Although unmentioned in the documentary, a particular target of the LAPD was L.A. BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Vietnam War vet whose military knowledge was crucial to saving his life and those of his comrades. Geronimo was subsequently framed up for a 1968 murder and spent 27 years in prison (eight of them in solitary) before his conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1997; he died in 2011.

Virtually the entire leadership of the New York Black Panthers was arrested on trumped-up and completely ludicrous “conspiracy” charges, including that they were plotting to blow up the Bronx botanical gardens and other targets. Known as the Panther 21, they were held in jail for nearly two years. After a 13-month trial, the longest criminal proceeding in New York state history at the time, it took the jury only three hours to find all of the Panther 21 not guilty on all charges.

Thirty-eight Panthers were murdered under the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign. Hundreds of others were rounded up and thrown in jail. Today, 20 former Panthers, including America’s foremost class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal who had been sentenced to death on frame-up charges of killing a Philadelphia cop, continue to languish in America’s prison dungeons. While the number of former BPP members in jail is mentioned in the movie, nothing is said of their cases or the cause of fighting for their freedom. Among the former Black Panther supporters still incarcerated are Ed Poindexter, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa and Albert Woodfox, all of whom, like Mumia, receive monthly stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League.

The Panthers Defend Themselves and Move Right

From May 1967 to December 1969 alone, the BPP was hit with 768 arrests and almost $5 million in bail bonds. Isolated, with state repression relentlessly bearing down on them, the Panthers shifted their focus to legal defense work. The Panthers’ alliance with various white radical and liberal groups, like the Peace and Freedom Party, was not motivated by any realization that American society could only be revolutionized by an integrated working-class movement. Rather they were driven by the need to gain the broadest material and other support for their legal defense.

The documentary shows footage of Panthers at Jane Fonda’s apartment, with former BPP members recalling the titillation of the white glitterati at the sight of them lining the walls in their black leather jackets and berets posturing as if they were about to shoot someone. The cultural wing of the liberal bourgeoisie paid handsomely for the experience of exposing their bourgeois sensibilities to the “black revolution” in safety, an expensive delight somewhat recalling the Roman arena.

What is left unsaid is the role played by the reformists of the Communist Party (CP), although one is left to wonder where all the white lawyers who defended the Panthers came from. Guided by the legal apparatus of the CP, the Panther leadership was influenced to launch a “united front against fascism” in 1969. Its purpose was to forge a political alliance with the liberal Democratic Party establishment against the Republican right on an essentially civil libertarian basis. The central demand of this abortive “united front” was community control of the cops. This demand combined liberal illusions about the nature of the capitalist state with black nationalist illusions that the oppression of black people could be ended through their control of ghetto institutions. Today, the call for community control of the police is again prominent in the Black Lives Matter protests against racist cop terror. Behind it is the deadly reformist illusion that the capitalist rulers can be pressured into dismantling their repressive state apparatus.

Along with their turn toward the liberals, the Panthers launched a series of ghetto social work programs, exemplified by their “breakfast for children” program. As the documentary portrays, these new activities were designed to gain support from black people in the inner cities who had not rallied behind the BPP’s adventurist confrontations with the cops because they recognized that the balance of forces was decidedly not in their favor. In addition, the aim was to give the Panthers a more humanitarian image when facing middle-class white juries. To this day, the image of the Panthers feeding hungry black children is the one preferred by the reformist left and black petty-bourgeois radicals.

With the rulers of this country now snatching school lunches even out of the mouths of white kids, the idea of providing breakfast to hungry children must look pretty good to black youth and others. But the Panthers’ “serve the people” programs were no competition for the money the U.S. government was throwing at poverty programs in the 1960s. This was hardly out of the “goodness of their hearts.” Rather the aim was to pacify the inner cities following the ghetto uprisings. The bourgeoisie needed black youth as cannon fodder for their dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants and didn’t want to fight a war on two fronts, at home and abroad.

But the problem with the Panthers’ food, health and other programs was not that they didn’t work but that they strengthened the BPP’s paternalistic self-image: the Panthers as avenging angels of the black masses who in turn were seen as grateful clients, not as potential conscious revolutionists in their own right. Meanwhile, the main beneficiaries of the government’s “war on poverty” were a thin layer of the black population, many of whom went on to be overseers of the ghettos as big city mayors, police chiefs and in other government offices.

By every index of misery the conditions of life for the black working class and poor are as bad as they were in the 1960s. The reality today is that much of the black population is written off as little more than a “surplus population” by the racist rulers, not worth even providing with subsistence-level welfare and other programs. And of course there are the huge numbers locked up in prisons. This serves to underline, again, that the only road to black freedom lies through shattering the entire system of racist American capitalism. What is necessary is a struggle for power, a socialist revolution, by the integrated working class—the wage slaves without whose labor the capitalist owners cannot reap their golden riches—that will overthrow the U.S. imperialist order.

The Fall of the Black Panther Party

Facing a dead end politically, their early victories against cop brutality long behind them, the popular-front alliance with the reformists and liberals going nowhere, the Panthers were broken by bloody state repression and COINTELPRO provocations. These in turn fed into murderous internal factionalism. In 1971 there was a violent and spectacular split centered on the personalities of BPP leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. As seen in the documentary, Cleaver and much of his group were in exile in Algeria where he fled following his 1968 arrest. This wing continued to talk of “urban guerilla warfare,” although given the massive state repression against the Panthers this was little more than posturing. The Newton wing moved to Democratic Party liberalism as seen in the footage in The Black Panthers of Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown campaigning as Democrats in the 1973 Oakland municipal elections.

Despite the idealism and heroism of the early Panthers, the split reflected the problems of trying to build a “revolutionary vanguard” based on the glorification of impoverished black youth in the ghettos, seeing the “most oppressed” as the “most revolutionary.” Although often courageous, these adventurous youth were not recruited on the basis of a revolutionary political program. As a reflection, discipline in the Panthers was imposed by street-gang methods. In the absence of a membership politically armed through education, discussion, debate and commitment, leadership in the Panthers became a form of “hero worship.” The disastrous effect can be seen in the documentary with Huey Newton bathing in adulation following his release from jail. The inherent corruption of the “warrior-hero” leader is captured in scenes of Newton’s lavish penthouse apartment, paid for out of party funds raised for Panther defense cases.

The Panthers’ glorification of lumpenism was also seen in their treatment of women members, who by the 1970s made up over half the party’s membership. While many of these women were leaders of Panthers’ political education classes and some were party leaders, phrases like “pussy power” were thrown around, reflecting the sexual degradation of women in the BPP. This was not simply vulgar talk but came out of the Panthers’ lumpenproletarian base and macho quasi-militarism, which made for a brutal internal life, particularly for women.

Nonetheless, from the late 1960s through to the Cleaver-Newton split, the Panthers were so sacrosanct in radical circles and nearly all self-proclaimed Marxist organizations that any criticism of them was met with shrill accusations of racism. In the face of the widespread hero worship of Newton, Cleaver and other Panther leaders, the Spartacist League polemicized against the BPP’s notion of lumpen vanguardism and argued that black nationalism, even in its most radical form, was a utopian dead end. We also denounced their physical assaults against other leftists and challenged their rightward plunge into the Democratic Party. At the same time, we fought to defend Panther militants against state repression, and we continue to do so.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

In the end, the Panthers were not defeated politically through the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party, but rather physically and organizationally destroyed by the capitalist state. Thus, many of the lessons of the demise of an organization that represented the high-water mark of black radicalism in the last 50 years of American history have been lost. Our purpose is to arm a new generation of young militants and workers with these lessons, to win them to the program of revolutionary integrationism. That is the understanding that the only road to black freedom lies in the struggle to smash racist, imperialist America through a proletarian socialist revolution, in which black workers, the most combative element in the working class, will play a leading role.

As we concluded our article “End of the Black Power Era,” which was written after the Cleaver-Newton split:

“The Panthers could not defeat the cops because the cops are an essential part of the capitalist state and the Panthers could not defeat that state. Given that fact, the Panthers could only alternate between the bitter consequences of heroic adventurism or appealing to the liberal establishment.

“The oppression of the black people cannot be ended by black activists alone, but only by the working class as a whole. The breakup of the Panthers’ organization and authority creates greater opportunity—but only opportunity—for the struggle for an integrated proletarian socialist vanguard party. The process is in no sense inevitable; there will always be plenty of hustlers and romantic rebels to attempt endless repetition of the old mistakes and betrayals. But the intervention of Leninists among radical blacks can stimulate the understanding that the liberation of black people will be both a great driving force of the American proletarian revolution, and a great achievement of the revolution in power. That revolution will be made, not in the name of black power, but of working-class power—communism.”

 

Out In The Midnight Hour-With Robert Mitchum’s The Racket (1951) In Mind

Out In The Midnight Hour-With Robert Mitchum’s The Racket (1951) In Mind

 

 

Nick Scanlon had all the angles, had all the angles covered, maybe thought he had all the angels covered too but it would not have been wise to test him on that condition not when he still felt that mortal blows from Sister Mary Eddie and her treacherous ruler even when he became the primo outlaw crime boss in Big Town, ran everything from numbers to women to drugs and back. Had done so, had those angles figured since he was a young man, a kid really only about twenty but everybody could see he was a comer once he knocked a few heads around, cleaned out the competition for his lordship, Boyo, Boyo McNamara a name to be reckoned with before the war, before World War II. Yeah Nick was Boyo McNamara’s top up and coming “aide” when the old school ruled the action in Big Town (and lots of other places too) by fear, intimidation and leaving no witnesses and no squeakers alive to tell anybody, any law enforcement agencies anything. Zip.

 

Then Boyo, as guys who like to play the angles too smart, too sharp, or think they do once they get out of that comfort zone that got them where they were had tried to set Nick up for the fall, tried make him take the big step off for a killing Boyo had one of his boys commit over some illegal liquor haul back in Prohibition days when Boyo though Nick was getting too big for his britches (and Boyo may have been wrong on lots of thing but Nick had the fire in the belly to be Mr. Big, run the whole show himself  and so not on that suspicion). Nick had not even been in town so slipping Johnny Blaze, the guy who actually did the deed and had been Boyo’s main torpedo,  rather than take the fall he cornered Boyo one night outside the back alley of the Club Lucky, Boyos hang-out,  and put two right on the head. Since it was just a falling out among the boys, the Irish boys from Irishtown in Big Town (New York City really but Big Town is as good a name as any since every town in those days had an Irishtown filled with Nicks and Boyos) no coppers put too much effort into solving that crime, no time whatsoever. That was the last time Nick Scanlon had to kill a man but it also greased the skids for Nick to take over Boyo’s operations without a murmur, not even from Johnny Blaze who transferred his allegiance just as quickly as changing his socks.

 

No question Nick, (everybody called him Nick and it stuck except his mother and the good nuns at Saint Theresa’s Parochial School over on Vine Street until he, they had a falling out and he quite the school in eight grade to head to greener pastures, Boyo’s greener pastures and as we now know his, was a tough boy as far back as sixth grade when he and his corner boys around Higgin’s Grocery Store on West Main were beginning their careers of up to no good. Yeah, they did the usual kids starting out stuff, the extortions of milk money from fellow students for openings, the “clip” of everything in every department and jewelry store that was not nailed down and as they got older the midnight creeps over in the Tappan section of town where the Mayfair swells lived. Of course when they came of age no decent car was safe from their joy-riding pleasures.

 

Nick’s corner boys, if you know anything about Irish corner boy life, were the usual mix you expected in Irishtown then, maybe now too, guys who would wind up doing consecutive terms in stir for armed robberies like Goose Kiley and Moon Regan, a couple of guys like Slugger O’Toole and Johnny Callahan who got “connected” and took the graft with city jobs (and helped Nick along the way easing his wanting habits with easy access to hands-out city “pols” and contractors), Pat Meara who turned himself around after Father Murphy got through with him and what God wanted of him and became a priest. And of course Tommy Kelly, Tommy the copper. Tommy the copper who was as honest as any cop you could find, maybe take up an offer of coffee and crullers but every cop expected that why else become a cop. Early on Tommy had been Nick’s bright boy, the guy in sixth grade who worked out the “clips” (who was to be the look-out, who the grabber, who to watch out for, when to do the deeds stuff like that, good too since nobody ever took the fall for anything while Tommy planned stuff).

 

But Tommy could see that where Nick was heading was not where he wanted to head. Not if he wanted to get in Delores Malloy’s pants. And Tommy wanted that more than anything. So he moved away from Nick, made his peace with normal society and when he got old enough took the Big Town police exam and became a cop, and honest one (not withstanding that coffee and crullers business and a few free tickets to Yankee games from grateful citizens).

      

And that was the way things went for a while, Nick building up his operations with a big boost from prostitution when the war started and Big Town was filled with soldiers and sailors who needed sexual release and Nick could hardly get enough young women with novenas and rosary beads to fill the demand until he seduced Nora Riley, the ice queen and the rest followed. Got a big boost too from deals he made with the Italians to run the dope, everything from reefer to horse, in his sections of town. Was king of the hill and if anybody, citizens, pols, priests, whoever didn’t like they could keep silent or be found along the drag of the East River some moonless night. Made more guys take falls that you could shake a stick at.

 

The war had changed things, changed the way the really big guys saw things internationally, changed the way dope was run, women trafficked, numbers worked, and how the money got funneled. Guys, little big guys like Nick whose idea of finesse was to rub out half the city to impress the other half to stay quiet and keep him in clover were being turned out to pasture, went back to the old country. Or younger guys like Nick became “employees” of the mysterious Mister Big who now called the shots but on the low, no more bodies along any goddam rivers. And so Nick sat there in Big Town with his big angles and nowhere to go.

 

Another thing that the war changed was that some guys, war veterans, a few of them war heroes, got tired of the old graft, got tired of witless corner boys and drop-outs running stuff through their towns. Didn’t see their fight against guys like Hitler as giving guys like Nick the red light to keep doing whatever the fuck they wanted (Tommy Kelly’s term). So they took dead aim at Big Town figuring if you could clean that town up, or part of it lesser Big Towns like Chicago and more recently LA would come around. The number one boy for the job, the day to day operations, Tommy Kelly. Tommy who had a glean in his eye at the idea of putting his old corner boy Nick down, down for the count and after him, who knows, maybe the real Mister Big, but Nick first, yeah, Nick had to fall.   

        

Nick blew his top when he heard old nemesis Tommy was busting up his operations, arresting his numbers runners before they could collect (and before they could pay off the customers either) whom he paid City Hall very good money to protect. Busted up some hophead tea houses throughout the city where even Mayfair swells, including some in Mister Big’s circle if the eternal rumors about who Mister Big was held water, with wicked dope habits and deep needs for privacy could be found (also had made those pays off to City Hall for that very purpose. Busted up his cat houses where the girls gave Tommy and his men in blue, some regular customers called by first names and married too as the girls grabbed the door of the paddy wagon, more battle than any of the others.  (Tommy did privately weep when he collared Nora Riley, Nick’s queen of the madames now although she still looked good enough to turn a few tricks, for he had been sweet on her back in Saint Theresa days when she carried that novena book and rosary beads with a certain style and he watched his ass from a couple of rows behind her Sunday morning 8 o’clock Mass time.

 

So Nick did what the Nicks of the world do when they are cornered. Called Tommy in and gave him the what for. Tried to piece him off with a big chunk of change (what Nick didn’t know was that if he had upped the dough about twice, a bargain really after the fact he could have had Tommy as his man since Delores needed a big operation and he was light on insurance in those days when cops took what they got from the city and liked it). So Tommy, honest Tommy again, keep up the attacks, made numbers runners, madames, street whores, hipsters and dope fiends cry uncle. Naturally old school Nick once he could not grease the skids started a civil war. Started it tooth and nail right at Tommy’s house practically blowing the place to kingdom come with Delores in it. Yeah it was getting personal, very personal. Then he upped the ante, went for more than some symbolic gesture like blowing a guy’s house, lured Jeff Hannigan, Tommy’s best cop down to the East River one night for a parlay. Except he didn’t show but two boys did, a couple of out of towners who riddled Jeff with a spray of bullets and then dumped him naked in the East River. Yeah, Nick liked a nice touch like that to puncture what he had to say.  

 

That did it. Put Nick’s head in a noose for real. Not so much by Tommy although he personally would have liked to settle the scores in some back alleys alone but with Mister Big, the real Mister Big. Once Nick made the front pages of all the daily newspapers scream he had to be taken down, made to take the big step off, made to go to sleep. So through Mister Big’s stoolies set up to give Tommy what he wanted he found out where Nick was hiding after the cop murder that had the whole town buzzing (and a few cops and crooks squeamish since who knew where the whole thing would lead). Called him out of his hiding spot down by that East River with a platoon of back-up in patrol cars and snipers on roofs. Nick said go to hell and started blasting away with a semi-automatic which nipped a few coppers although none fatally. From the side almost in back of Nick Patrolman John Callahan gunned Nick down like a dog. And so Nick fell with two slugs in his heart.

 

What Tommy didn’t know, Nick either if it would have helped him at that point, was that Callahan was Mister Big’s guy in the police department sent to make sure Nick took the big step-off, took the fall. Had been on the payroll for years and had drinks with Nick in the old days when he looked the other way when the dope was brought in down at the Battery. Johnny Blaze took over the operation and things got very quiet again except around the variety stores and restaurants of the city when the late edition with the number came out, except at the Club Nana where the hophead Mayfair swells did their nasty dope almost in public, and around the cat houses where every one of them now had a band in the front room playing be-bop jazz and every once in a while you would see Nora Riley still looking good come out to greet the customers. Yeah, Nick knew all the angles, all the angles except that one. All the angels now too.