*****Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Chelsea Manning And Other Military Resisters

*****Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning 

Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

During the early stages of the Vietnam War, say 1965, 1966, frankly, I was annoyed at, dismayed by, appalled by and perplexed by guys my age, who were refusing to be drafted, refusing in some cases to even sign up for the draft (although I admit I was “late” signing up myself not for political or moral reasons but because I was not living at home having left on the first of about six estrangements from my family and did not receive the letter about the legal requirement to register until much later). Refusing and making a big public deal out of it. And this draft resistance movement was not some faraway situation heard on the news out in the suburbs about actions in the big cities or on some ivy-covered Ivy League elitist campuses but because while I was going to school I supported myself by getting up very early and servicing coffee- making machines in various locales in downtown Boston, including near the landmark draft resistance center, the Arlington Street Church (now U/U –Universalist-Unitarian but then I believe home to only one of the two having subsequently united but I am not sure which denomination ruled the roost at that location then although I believe it was the blessed Unitarians, now blessed for their generous help in the struggles against war and lesser known place of refuge for vagrant monthly folk-music friendly coffeehouses.)

 

The Arlington Street Church moreover held itself out as a main sanctuary protecting under long time religious principles draft-resisters who had taken shelter there in order to avoid being arrested by federal law enforcement agents. So many mornings there would be a bee-hive of activity outside and around the church in support of the resisters. The sight of straggly guys and their supporters protesting would get my blood pressure rising.   

Now it was not that I was particularly pro-war even then, probably had not been in favor of escalation of that war and support to the South Vietnamese government since about the time of the Diem regime, the time before Jack Kennedy was murdered in 1963. Somehow I sensed that with each tragic turn there the noose of the draft would tighten around my own neck. But in those days, whatever else I held politically sacred, I, a working class guy from North Adamsville, held all of the usual patriotic sentiments about country, about service and about military duty of my neighborhood and upbringing.

As my grandfather, a veteran of World War I, said of his own experience of volunteering when President Wilson pulled the hammer down looking for recruits back then, never volunteer but if called you go, say you went willingly if anybody asked. So the thought of anybody “shirking” their duty if called really rankled me and while later I did a complete turn-around about the draft resisters, especially the ones who chose jail rather military service then I was disgusted. Disgusted as well by what I perceived vaguely as a class-bias about who was refusing to go and who had to go if those who would normally be called refused to go-working class and minority guys. Don’t hold me to some kind of prescience on that because that was just a vague underpinning for my general reasons of patriotic duty but in the case when I did my own military service, my infantryman grunt service guess who the other guys in the barracks and tents were-yeah, working class and minority guys.

I, on the other hand, have always admired military resisters since my knowledge of them and their actions came later after I had begun my sea-change of views. Knowing too by personal experience that “bucking” the Army system and winding up in the stockade, or worse the dreaded Fort Leavenworth every drill sergeant made a point of telling us about if we screwed up. But I was no resister having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out and began to see things without “the fog of war” and its infernal “do it for your buddies” which is what a lot of things came down to in the end blinding me and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources.

At first I began working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army, for one reason or another whether the craziness of pursuing the war, racism, or just guys being fed-up with being cannon-fodder for Mister’s war, was half in mutiny and the other half disaffected toward the end of American involvement in that war. The Quakers front and center on the military resisters just as they had been with the draft resisters at a time when there was a serious need as guys, guys who got their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted and why I hadn’t expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work was most satisfying and rewarding as I actually worked with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire although that experience was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business (another futile attempt to rekindle the family ties) I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades here in America for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown  up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go and did his time in the military that way.           

[In an earlier version of this sketch I mentioned that I would fill in more about Sean’s anti-war military resister story when I got a chance to talk to him about some of the details of that story that I had forgotten. We recently got together as part of a contingent from Boston Veterans for Peace that went up to Maine to walk part of the way in the Maine VFP-led sixteen day walk from Ellsworth up near Bar Harbor along U.S. Route One to the Portsmouth Naval Base in New Hampshire calling for the demilitarization of the seas. As fate would have it a Quaker woman, Sally Rich, who had helped to publicize Sean’s case had joined the walk in Freeport where she now lives. This surprise encounter led to the two of them talking one evening during a pot luck supper in Portland about Sean’s case. Other younger walkers were very interested in hearing the story and so Sean told it and these are my recollections of what he said that night. I checked with him to make sure I had it right so this is pretty close to what happened back then.]     

 

 “You know I haven’t told this story in years, haven’t had to since the draft went down in flames back in the 1970s and except for people like most of you, people who won their spurs in the peace movement way back in the 1960s, maybe before, there had been not need to tell it. It really is the story of why almost fifty years later I am pounding the bloody pavements of Maine something I would probably not be doing if the fates had worked otherwise. Certainly I would not use the story, most of it anyway, if we were out counter-recruiting in the high schools because with the volunteer military it would go over their heads. But you can relate to this story because you, somebody you know, or knew, some guy anyway back then had to face the draft and what to do, or not do about it.

Now I was a college student back in Boston in the mid-1960s as the crescendo of anti-Vietnam War activity came through the campuses and so I was vaguely anti-war, probably as much as any Boston college student but not actively. Strangely on that issue I was kind of behind the curb since on social issues; the war on poverty, civil rights in the South which meant black civil rights, abolition of capital punishment, and nuclear disarmament I was well left of center, left of Bobby Kennedy my political hero then whom I worked for that fateful spring of 1968 until he was assassinated. I wasn’t into draft resistance, street protests, that kind of thing although I wasn’t hostile to any such efforts. Mostly though I was interested in my girlfriend, having sex, doing a little drugs, not much by the standards of the day but enough, going to rock concerts and letting tomorrow take care of itself, stuff like that and working for candidates like Bobby who were in the system since I wanted my own Democratic Party career, something like that.        

After graduation I had planned to go to law school as a way to put off the draft question that as the escalations in Vietnam continued and as the American body count got larger I started to focus on a bit more. Especially since by 1968 the need for ground troops was growing faster than guys were volunteering or being dragooned by their National Guard units into active service and they were no longer exempting law school students from the draft. Then in the fall of 1968 I got my notice to appear for a physical and subsequently after successfully completing that physical I got my notice to report to the Boston Army Base for induction.

Here’s where everything gets tricky though, or really my whole past, who I was, where I came from got me caught in a web. My girlfriend’s brother was in Vietnam, I had come from a family, a working class family where military service was expected, my father was a Marine in World War II and one of my uncles a lifer who would eventually become Sergeant-Major of the Army, the highest enlisted man, a couple of guys on my small street had been killed in Vietnam already so there was no social support for doing anything but take the induction. I wasn’t a CO, I didn’t even consider jail or Canada they were really not even on the radar and so although I had my qualms, maybe fears of getting killed mixed in too, I was inducted in early 1969 and sent to Fort Gordon down in Georgia, Augusta where they play the Masters golf tournament every year.

About three days, maybe four days, in I realized that I had made a very serious mistake, had not thought how contrary to my self-identity that whole basic training scene was. I was getting “religion” on the questions of war and peace very quickly. As the weeks in basic went by I got stronger in my resolve to not go to Vietnam but kept quiet about it since I was in the middle of nowhere with no resources to do anything except eat that rich red Georgia clay we grabbed every day in training. After basic I was assigned to Advanced Infantry Training, AIT, at Fort McClellan in goddam Alabama the die was cast, the noose was getting tighter since the only place for infantry men, grunts, 11 Bravos, cannon fodder was in Vietnam. The only thing I knew was when I got home I was getting some help, some outside help in order to resist orders to Vietnam that were inexorably coming at the end of that training.

After I got my orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to Vietnam I got to go home for thirty days on leave before reporting, the standard procedure then but a mistake by the Army in my case. After checking in with my girlfriend who was not sympathetic with my situation and whom I decided to forsake (okay dump) I went to AFSC in Cambridge since although I did not know that much about Quakers I did know that they were historically against war and knew something about CO status. I was counselled there by a guy, I forget his name, do you remember him, Sally, a tall guy with a long ponytail [Sally: no] who laid out some options without telling me what to do but with a wink. What I did was go AWOL for thirty-three days since once you have passed thirty days you are automatically dropped from the rolls of the place you were assigned to they called it. Which meant that those orders to Fort Lewis were no longer in effect since I didn’t belong there at that point. I turned myself in up at Fort Devens, the closest Army post in the area and was put in what they called a Special Detachment Unit (SPD), a unit for AWOLs and other problem children after I told them I wanted to put in for CO status.     

Now in those days except for Quakers, religious people with long histories of pacifism, it was hard to get CO status from civilian draft boards much less from the Army although federal court cases were coming through that would help both classes of cases, would help me eventually. So I put in my application, went through the procedure which I won’t go through since while I was termed “sincere” which would also help me later I was turned down. Turned down in the Army meant to get those orders to Vietnam again.

I was not going, no way not after that trial by fire in my head and that is when after a ton of thought I decided that I was going to refuse to wear the uniform at the weekly Monday morning head count, the morning report they called it to see who was in and who was missing, AWOL. I did so also carrying a sign when said “Bring The Troops Home.” Needless to say I was in trouble, deep trouble, deep trouble in the immediate sense because two burly lifer-sergeants tackled me to the ground, handcuffed me and escorted me to the stockade where they put me in solitary for a while I guess to see what kind of monster they had on their hands. I was given what they called a special court martial which was not bad since it meant the maximum they could give me was six months which they did and which I served in full at the Devens stockade. When I was released from the stockade though because of some legal action my civilian attorney provided by AFSC who had gotten before a judge to keep me at Devens I had to go through the whole refusal thing again and again received a six month sentence. Most of which I served.         

I have to laugh when I think about it now but I could have endlessly been given six months sentences for refusing to wear the uniform and still been in the stockade or some such place today. That is where the extra civilian legal help came in to save my ass. The key point was that all the Army paperwork said I was sincere so my civilian lawyer, Steve Larkin, who worked out of an office in Central Square in Cambridge and had done a bit of military resistance work previously submitted a writ of habeas corpus to the Federal District Court in Boston stating that I had been “arbitrarily and capriciously,” those words have legal significance, denied my CO status by the Army. Of course as you know the courts take a while to make decisions on anything so I waited in jail for the decision. Steve had said to expect the worse though since the judge in the case was not known for being sympathetic to such cases. What helped was the “sincere” part and the fact that the United States Supreme Court had loosened up the standards for CO status so the judge granted the writ and after few minor delays I was honorably discharged from the Army and told never to return to a military base in this lifetime.

I, a short time later, joined in the anti-war GI resistance work at a coffeehouse outside Fort Devens and later at Fort Dix down in New Jersey. Where Sally and others had come in on my case was to organize rallies at the front gate of the fort against the war and calling for my release. As every political prisoner knows, people like Chelsea Manning today, a case that I have been involved in supporting, that outside public help went a long way toward keeping my spirits up especially after that second court-martial. So again kudos to Sally and the others who came out in support.”      

In New York City-January 30th-Fundraiser-Partisan Defense Committee-Free All Class- War Prisoners-Free Mumia-Abu-Jamal

In New York City-January 30th-Fundraiser-Partisan Defense Committee-Free All Class- War Prisoners-Free Mumia-Abu-Jamal   

*A Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby” World

Click on the headline to link to a " YouTube" film clip of "American Grafitti" to set the mood for the piece below.

Markin comment:

This is a little break from the overtly political wars, for a minute.


A Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of Tom Wolfe's “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby.”

There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the hoary Cold War the- atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-and-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that around. Some people, mostly older, whom I knew along the way in my life, while I was doing one thing or another, got caught up in that dragnet, that “red scare” dragnet, and took a beating over it, sometimes a physically beating but definitely a beating of their psyche, with or without the physical part. All for the simple proposition, when you think about it, that working people, and the people I am talking about to a person were working people not the high-flown intellectuals who abandoned ship when things got too hot, that those who make the goods of this sad old world, I mean really make the stuff, should make the rules. I’ll tell you more on that some other time but today I want to about cars, just about cars, about guys crazy about them and the girls crazy about the guys crazy about them, and about what they meant, no, what they really meant back then.

Like I say there was a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more aerodynamically-refined, more powerfully-engined, especially the powerfully-engined part but also with a classy chassis, the better. Some people who ought to know, like wannabe “gonzo” journalist Tom Wolfe who got me started on this screed from an old article that I have used as part of the title here that he wrote in “Esquire” magazine in 1963 or a real “gonzo” journalist like Hunter Thompson, except it was motorcycles too, or maybe James Dean himself who knows, say the madness started even before then, the fifties that is, back at the tail end of the Second World War. Their idea is that there was so much money around, war boom production government dough, especially so much dough around for Depression-raised “no dough” kids that the kids, if you can believe this, started going after cars and, as kids will, taking the old-fashioned ones like Hudsons, Studebakers and old time Fords and “souping” them up. That is once cars started being produced again, instead of tanks, lots of tanks, in Detroit.

Not only that, according to the stories, the kids started to get a little whacky about it. Like spending all their time hammering down heavy chrome fender and bopping to get it just right, eternally , oil-drenched, grease-monkeyed engine-tweaking, forever high-end rear axle-lifting, and, don’t forget, applying rainbow color-coded flash-painting (and, maybe, decaling). And trying to look cool while doing it and…well, and trying to impress the be-bop, short shorts wearing, slinky, saucy, sultry (did I leave anything out) tweeny-teeny girls who just happened to be walking by.

And once you start trying to impress girls, or once you actually did impress them, then the only thing left was how you were going to feed them. I mean the girls not the cars, although come to think of it maybe I am thinking of the cars. Nah. Well, sure what else is a guy to do but run down to the ubiquitous now slice-of-nostalgic- Americana, save it for “American Graffiti” drive-in food shack, complete with short-skirted bunny hoppers waiting on you and your cravings natch. And then you were up against how you were going to excite them with all that power, car power that is, natch again, on those barely asphalt ,one lane, lonesome road Saturday night “chicken” runs out on the edge of the universe, at least it seemed like that on star-studded nights. So, the long and short of it is that a little cult kind of thing got going, or maybe it was just teenagers being teenagers. I don’t know but it sounds real good, doesn’t it.

Still I don’t really know about that story, good as it sounds, because it was suppose to be kind of a West Coast kid thing. Figures, right? You know, all those guys who couldn’t get close enough, or want to get close enough, to the water to be surfer guys, or just didn’t know what the heck “hanging ten” was all about, or didn’t care. Or, maybe, from another angle, because I have heard these kinds of stories too, just Southern good old boys running white liquor through the hollows and back roads of some woe begotten mountain valley beating hell out of the revenue agents. The easy part is beating those revenue guys but you need serious wheels to beat through muddy-encrusted back roads and hollows down Appalachia way and you had better have that big old V-8 “souped-up”, I don’t think a Super 6 would do it, to beat the band if you did not want to spent your sweet roll, high-kicking young life in some old jail, state or federal, take your pick. I am closer to the nut on that story seeing as my father came from there, down in those hollows and those winding roads and those mountain mists and breezes, but still it just ain’t my madness story.


Really, I want to tell you about what I know about the madness and so I have to go from the 1950s. Like I say I don’t know, first hand anyway, about those other locales, their ethos, their humors or their quirks. I just don’t. See I think, for one thing, that those guys telling those earlier stories are just piecing us off by making it a cult thing or a small sub-set of a subset of a cult, or maybe just trying to tell colorful stories to make up for that “red scare” stuff that doesn’t sound right about America. You know democracy and all that stuff while you are running people out of town on a rail for just talking “red talk”, or trying to.

Besides, this story wasn’t just about, deafeningly mad as they were, those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not types bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, no sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run. No way, it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t even just those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys either. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be) because this guy is “cute”. Go figure, right? , Aw, maybe I don’t like her all that much anyway, and we all have to fend for ourselves when the deal goes down. Jesus, a monosyllabic (uh) soda jerk. Come on, sis.


No, and, by the way, forget all those stereotypes that they, the writers and film guys, like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color”, or tap into “baby-boomer” nostalgia, to the desperately color-craving 1950s. With their monotonous line-up of blond, slick-haired, California sun-drenched, devil may care, second generation “Okie” car jockeys. This car madness really was driven, driven hard, driven white-knuckled hard right to the edge, by East Coast non-blond, non-slick, non-“Okie” guys like Stu who lived down the end of my growing up street. Down the car-wreck-filled, oil-slick splashed, gas-fume-smelling dead-end of my run down old working class, edge of the working class getting poorer not richer, neighborhood ready for the bulldozer anytime street.

And Stu was the “king” there. If such a place could have a king he was it, no question, and nobody, not us kids anyway, questioned his lordship. Stu, kind of non-descript, pimply-faced, deceptively Saturday afternoon television wrestler overweight although we swore, or we would swear, that he was just big. Hands so permanently oil-stained, so deeply gritted, that no Borax could ever penetrate. Wearing some kind of grease-ladened denims to accompany those hands too, when denim meant Farmer Brown more than fashionista. Mussed–up hair unfurled at odd angles like maybe he had just enough time for a “bowl cut” from some younger brother or maybe his mother before he got back under the hood or under the body where he “breathed’ the rarefied air that kept him going. And always, always a “what the hell” smirk like he knew, and knew for certain, about the nature of the universe, as the smoke from his ever-present cigarette wrapped around in rings his (and your) head, and seemed to tell of new techniques learned and just a little more power gotten out of that old ’57 Chevy primo boss wagon that had all us neighborhood kids on the prowl for a ride (that we never ever got, but that’s a different story and you can figure out why after what I tell you next).

Ya, but that is not all, no, not by a long shot. Here is where you got to figure something is awry in the universe, or at least you’ve got to think of that possibility. “Stew-ball” Stu (that’s what we called him, although not to his face, for there was always the faint smell, and sometimes not so faint, of liquor, hard liquor like whiskey or scotch or who knows, maybe, Southern Comfort, it was cheap enough then, coming out of that tobacco-infested mouth of his) always had “babes” around. Hell, there were always a ton of them fussing over him and I swear I am not exaggerating because I would have been happy, very happy, to have one of his cast-offs, if I had been just a little older, and a lot wiser. And these were not just some old mirror-image Stu babes. These girls were “hot”, 1950s “hot”, ya, but still hot. A more mysterious, secretive, selective, “I wonder what she really looks like underneath” hot than today when you know, and know for certain, who is hot without having to ask that question.

I can still picture those oceans of flowing hair, that sea of tight jeans and stretch pants and those cashmere sweaters and who knows what else underneath, and what do I know what else, or care, because all I know is that to a supposedly oblivious young buck that I still was back then they smelled nice and a boy/man can dream, can’t he? And high school dropout, couldn’t care if school kept or not, getting grease all over him, and maybe all over them Stu just kind of ignoring them. Ignoring them! Can you beat that?

Ya, but see here is what I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the late night beach Stu. The Stu watching the “submarine” races down by the now tepid ocean shore, with the waves apologizing to the beach sand for splashing it, with some quick choice girl. And they, the girls that is, were standing to line, just to get in line. And who is to say, and at least who am I too say, that they were wrong. It was a ’57 Chevy, after all. Did you hear me? I said it was a ’57 Chevy that had all the girls trembling like Stu was Elvis or something. But here is what burns me up even today. Those girls weren’t interested, weren’t interested in the least, in what old Stu had read lately, or whether he even read anything at all, like I tried to use as my calling card back then to wow the girls, unsuccessfully. Hell, and you wonder why I speak of madness. Let me out of this place.

Once Again….Then-With The Carver High School Class of 1962 In Mind

Once Again….Then-With The Carver High School Class of 1962 In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Jack Dawson as he prepared to get ready for his 50^th class reunion of the Carver High Class of 1962 (or rather prepared to think about going to the event since as the reader will discover Jack’s thinking about attending this particular event was no better than six, two and even given his past traumatic experiences growing up in that town) in the early days of January, 2012 wondered out loud about certain concerns of prior generations come 50^th anniversary time. Wondered whether the parents or grandparents of his generation had in their 50^th anniversary times wondered, wondered out loud about all the changes, social and technological changes that had taken place in their lifetimes. That 50^th anniversary, given the social conditions of those previous generations, not necessarily graduation from high school since many did not graduate (his own father and grandfather, “boggers” both, in the cranberry bogs that had made Carver famous back then since, as his grandfather had sternly said when asked how far he had gotten in school, “what does a bogger need schooling for”). Could thus have been 50 years of marriage, 50 years on the same job, no unheard of then, as his own grandfather’s life history testified to with 55 years in the bogs, that kind of stuff. Those changes Jack was wondering about were things like the transition from telephones to cellphones, radio to television, newspapers to Internet for information, going into space and the moon and surviving, it being okay, if not universally okay, to be gay, it being okay, if not universally okay, to have a live-in companion out of wedlock, it being okay to change jobs at the drop of a hat, stuff like that.    

Jack had directed his out loud thoughts to his old friend Josh Breslin, a journalist whose name you might recognize if you read certain small publications and journals on a variety of subjects for he, as he himself would be the first to tell you, had written for them all in his time and knew, which he also would tell you, “where all the bodies were buried.” Josh was a guy Jack knew not from Carver boyhood but as a guy from Olde Saco up in Maine whom he had met out in the California great blue-pink American West night back in the mid-1960s after he had graduated from high school. He, then footloose and fancy free, went out there with a couple of corner boys, Frank Jackman and Bart Webber whom he did know from those Carver days, to search for, well, to search for “something” which was a mantra for segments of his generation and wound spending a couple of years “on the bus” as they called it then. The “bus” being a converted yellow brick road school bus such as Jack and Josh had ridden in as young schoolboys but which had then been turned in a day-glo, psychedelic, sound system-equipped communal travelling “home “ for an assortment of the lost, the wayward and the merely curious who got “on” and “off” the bus at various points. The whole enterprise “sponsored” by Captain Crunch (real name Saul Stein, Yale Class of 1957 if you need his bone fides) who had been rumored to have “bartered” for the bus in some exotic earlier drug deal. Those were the days when young men and young women, people like Josh, Jack, Frank, and Bart lived and died by the slogan of their generation (or part of it since as always some could not, would not, take the ticket, take the ride)-“drugs, sex, and rock and roll.”

They would throughout the following forty some years keep in contact with each other, sometimes in close contact and at other times some years would go by before they spoke to each other. Once the millennium hit though and as thoughts of intimations of mortality clouded their respective views they had been in much closer contact meeting at least monthly at The High Hat in Cambridge where Josh lived before he retired back up to Olde Saco (something he swore he would not do back in the 1960s when he, like Jack and his boys, just wanted to get the dust of the town off his shoes but things change over a lifetime and so back to Olde Saco). Or lately at the Crow’s Nest up in York where Jack (and Minnie, his long-time companion, companion rather than wife a long story but three divorces should give the reader an idea of the “why” of that arrangement) had a small “get-away” condo, get away from their collective broods of kids and grandkids as much as they adored the whole crew).           

Since for both men that “wonder” was a moot question as both sets of parents and grandparents had long gone to earth they could only speculate. (And moreover it was possible given that earlier ethos that drove Carver and Olde Saco life that those forebears would not be forthcoming with their answers since they were generations that “kept their own counsel,” like when Jack and Josh asked their respective fathers and grandfathers about their military service in World War or World War II they would be met with stony silence.) Josh thought that his own Irish-French-Canadian (mother nee LeBlanc) parents and before them his F-C grandparents (he had never met his paternal grandparents since his father had been born and raised in Kentucky and when World War II came he enlisted in the Marines, got stationed at Portsmouth Naval Base before being discharged, met his mother and stayed in Olde Saco never going back down South thereafter as a far as he knew and only hearing about their deaths later when he asked when he grew older) pretty much acted like social change was a social disease and kept to the various old country ways like keeping with one’s own, keeping the old religion, language, holiday, alive (and old America ways too like self-reliance, keeping your own counsel, keeping your nose to the grindstone, don’t air your dirty linen in public).

Maybe, Josh thought, it had to do with the isolated existences in mill-towns, both Olde Saco and Carver being such worn-out towns, working hard and keeping their own counsel (no “airing dirty linen in public” the order of the day as he remembered his mother always saying like she was some old “shawlie,” like some of the Irish women in the town who gossiped endlessly about the misfortunes of other and were mum on their own sorrows on their grapevine which would make the CIA and NSA blush with envy). Mixed in with that particular Catholic fatalism which they were both exposed to as kids, the sense that in this “veil of tears,” Jack’s grandmother’s eternal expression there was nothing to done about the fates but in the next life, well, milk and honey-he hoped she got her fair share since she never got it on this good green earth. That pray hard, say the rosary endlessly, pray hard some more, repent ye sinner that attached to everything and drove both men crazy when they were trying to jail-break out of the old time mold. (All forebears “freaked out” to use an expression from the 1960s at the thought of Jack or Josh spending a couple of years “on the bus,” which all forebears never let either man forget about.)         

One night over high-shelf scotches, gone were the days of heavy drug use which got them acquainted back in the day and prior to that cheap low-shelf whiskies and lower shelf rotgut wines, in the Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Olde Saco across from the famous Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street when Jack and Minnie went up to visit Josh at his home they decided to play a game about the changes they could recall from back in the 1960s. First off was the change in attitude toward drugs which back then were seen as the province of dead-beat junkies and odd-ball New York hipsters (read jazz musicians, read black people). They had to laugh when Jack said they probably ingested more drugs that all the “beats” combined. Another was the change from fag-baiting guys who seemed girlish (“light on their feet,” or “different” in polite society but fag the more common expression on the street corners) and dyke-baiting once they had understood the idea of different strokes for different (none of their forebears would have understood the whole gay marriage phenomenon).

Josh mentioned attitudes toward cigarettes, especially since that was “cool” in searching for girls and both having been long-time heavy smokers who had only quit after many tries shook their heads at that idea. Of course the whole thing with women (then girls) had gone topsy-turvy with woman now in professions like the law and medicine that were unheard of then and while both their mothers had worked (in their respective town mills, Olde Saco textiles and Carver shoes the other industry that kept the town afloat then) and so had been working Moms that was a necessity then to keep the families afloat and had been the cause of many caustic comments by guys whose mothers did not work, did not need to work.

Jack and Josh went on that way for a while until they ran out of broad-based big ticket social subjects to think about, ran out of  booze too as the hour got late and Jimmy the bartender wanted to close up. So as they walked up the street to Josh’s house about ten blocks away they started on the silly stuff. Stuff in high school like why did the boys and girls have separate gym classes, why were there separate sex bowling teams for Christ sake. Why girls could not run on the track team like both of them had done who were believed even by gym teachers who should have known better to be incapable of running more than about ten yards without faltering (that track team business before that “cool” smoking stuff shifted their priorities). Why girls could only play half-court basketball like going full court would break their feminine wiles wide open (both laughed when Jack mentioned that today’s taller more athletic women could run any guys from back then ragged in a pick-up basketball game, giving plenty of points too.

Big question, big : why even on a friendly date was the guy, them, poor as church mice guys, supposed to pay for everything and “Dutch treat” was considered bad form, very bad form even when the girls had plenty of dough. It went on like that until they got to Josh’s house and then they having exhausted the subject started talking about whether Jack was going to his class reunion. Yeah, there was plenty of wondering going on that night, wondering too about whether when their kids were getting ready for their 50^th anniversary high school class reunions they would be wondering about what their respective fathers made of their times.

[In the event Jack Dawson decided for a host of good reasons not to go to his class reunion which really is a story for another day. Josh, Class of 1966, is still up in the air about the question from last report.]

Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers-The Struggle Against Nuclear War

***Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers-The Struggle Against Nuclear War

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Peace Action (successor organization to the SANE organization mentioned below).

 

 

He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie DeAngelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie depth psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it used to it but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness (yes, girls scared him, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off to no avail) on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.

 

See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.

 

What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as a good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.

 

Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.

 

Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-today.

 

But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Yah, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.

 

Heady stuff, yah, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.

Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working- class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.

 

But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against bad man Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.

 

On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap,” and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and to go.

 

That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got even more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.

 

Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime anyway) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused their unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that drew Peter Paul’s attention this day. After running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally is to take place he is amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.

 

Arriving at the bandstand he sees about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spotted a clot of people who are wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and is starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He goes over to the clot and introduces himself and tells them how he came to be here. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.

 

Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.

 

Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.

 

But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh yah, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.


*******

In line with his belief in nonviolence, Martin Luther King worked closely with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), often sponsoring the organization’s statements. He told a journalist in 1961, ‘‘I am a strong believer in disarmament and suspension of nuclear tests’’ (King, 29 October 1961). SANE grew out of a meeting of pacifists and anti-nuclear activists in April 1957. Initially conceived as a liberal ad hoc committee to stimulate debate on the hazards of nuclear testing, SANE soon became a leader in the struggle for disarmament. On 15 November 1957, SANE ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times warning Americans: ‘‘We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed.’’ Inspired by the enthusiastic response to its Times advertisement, SANE redefined itself as a mass membership organization, gaining 130 chapters and 25,000 members by the following summer. King became involved with SANE in March 1958, when he joined several other notables in sponsoring the organization’s second public advertisement. Over the following years, he sponsored and signed dozens of letters, petitions, brochures, and advertisements for the organization. In 1961 King said, ‘‘I don’t think the choice is any longer between violence and nonviolence in a day when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere. I think now it is a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence’’ (King, 29 October 1961). As the war in Vietnam escalated, SANE became more active in the anti-war movement. In 1965, before King’s first major speech on Vietnam, Coretta Scott King joined with SANE spokesman Benjamin Spock to rally against the war in New York and Washington, D.C. Two years later, King, Jr., and Spock co-chaired the spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Many in SANE’s liberal leadership were hesitant to align with the more radical anti-war organizations, however, others like Spock, thought it was essential to collaborate effectively with other peace organizations. Although the organization faltered in late 1967, it reinvented itself while campaigning for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential race. After King’s death, Coretta Scott King continued to work on behalf of SANE. SANE membership peaked during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and Coretta Scott King was invited to sit on the organization’s advisory council. In 1983, commemorating the organization’s historic link with the civil rights movement, SANE held a reception for Mrs. King on the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1987 SANE merged with the grassroots-based Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and SANE/FREEZE changed its name to Peace Action in 1993. As the largest grassroots peace network in the U.S., Peace Action remains engaged in activism and policy advocacy today. References Katz, Ban the Bomb, 1986. King, Interview by John Freedom on ‘‘Face to Face,’’ 29 October 1961, MLKJP-GAMK. SANE, ‘‘We Are Facing a Danger Unlike Any Danger That Has Ever Existed,’’ New York Times, 15 November 1957.

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists In WWI-Karl Liebknecht

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists In WWI-Karl Liebknecht  

 

 

    

EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.

Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography

The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.

As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was imprisoned.

Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.

**************

Markin comment:

Karl Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior

This comment was originally  written in 2006 in the American Left History blog but the main points hold true today:

I recently (2006) have received a comment from someone whom I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s (and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was only the beginning of political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or her other politics were weak.  The commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what kind of politician would qualify for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians, Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht, the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts. Here is what I had to say in part about that revolutionary politician:   

"…I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had been a friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. That, my friends, is the kind of politician I can support. As for the rest-hold their feet to the fire.

"One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. (That photograph can be Googled.) That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now.

REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "THE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR." Wilhelm would have been proud.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Stepphenwolf's "The Monster"

Click On Title To Link To A "YouTube" Film Clip Of Stepphenwolf Performing "Monster". Ah, Those Were The Days.

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Markin comment:

Some of the entries in this series have seen life in other earlier blog entries. That is the case here as we amp up in our opposition to Obama's wars. The lyrics here still make a powerful point.

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope
Like good Christians, some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war over
They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice
And it's keepers seem generous and kind
It's leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--