*****The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

*****The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Jack Callahan thought he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road, definite in giving him and a goodly portion of his generation that last push to go, well, go search a new world, or at least get the dust of your old town growing up off of your shoes, that had much to do with his wanderings. Got him going in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe,” Peter Paul Markin called the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams I will do so here). Any way you cut it seeking that new world that gave Jack his fitful dream. That  “driving him crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings, that search had begun, and finished shortly thereafter, about fifty years before when he left the road after a few months for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life. Decided that like many others who went that same route he was not build for the long haul road after all.  

But maybe it is best to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day” get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block down Massachusetts Avenue from where Jimmy lives. We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, most recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking (drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys, and draino Southern Comfort, and that draino designation no lie, especially the first time before you acquired the taste for it).

The night I am talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think, mentioned that he had read in the Globe that up in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart as did thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 who went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul Markin.

Yeah, we still moan for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our youths come up. It might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies,” the hard-bitten Friday or Saturday night times when nothing to do and nothing to do it with he would hold forth, was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions).

We would change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss” car, like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past square one with girls, the girls we knew, or were attracted to, in those days).           

Markin was whistling in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading us heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart Webber, in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better once a couple of Cambridge girls asked me if I liked folk music one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several months.

But enough of me and my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota).

In a lot of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all, all in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”  Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.       

So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, and of the limits of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack Kerouac’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.              

Here the odd thing, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.           

But enough of the quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five kinds of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read about how his hero Benjamin Frankin had started in the business, get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after about seven million drum-fire assaults by Markin pressing him to read the thing.

So there he was by himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going  to hitchhike to save money and hell just to do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully started his trip on. There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French- Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of love was all about.

Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the 1940s.

Ti Jean whose did not look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown, kind of blew that off when Providence seemed too provincial to him, had fled to New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters and hustlers.

After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times than you would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book that was never published because there were too many squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.

Then Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.              

  

High Side-Low Side- Barbara Stanwyck’s East Side, West Side-A Film Review

High Side-Low Side- Barbara Stanwyck’s East Side, West Side-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

East Side, West Side, starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner, 1949

 

You can never predict what will sent a formerly flowering love relationship into a tail spin; indifference, longevity, boredom, philandering, and sometimes just plain murder. That is the premise, the ultimate premise of the film under review, Barbara Stanwyck’s East Side, West Side, a 1949 melodramatic murder mystery which takes place in high side West Side New York City and has its roots in low side East Side New Jack City as well. Purely by accident this will be the third film in a row that I have reviewed which has some relationship to that big, bad ass city and its eight million denizens. This one is as much about class structure, you know high and low class, in an urban environment as the others but has the added tingle of murder and mayhem among the upper crust to keep things moving at their normal slow pace among that set. (The other two films, both starring Gary Cooper, involved Great Depression light-hearted class struggle stuff and the usual romantic filler to expand the film time and bad ass upper crust characters by but 1949 the country was on the road to the golden age and the class struggle parts are muted to “back in the day” time).

Here is the way it played out, played out down and dirty, in this one. Former, or maybe not so former, playboy investment banker Brandon (played by a debonair James Mason) had been two-timing his West Side high society wife Jessie (played by Barbara Stanwyck) for years with a low-rent tramp Isabel, played by Ava Garner, a gold-digger from day one of her life probably, strictly from the East Side okay. He finally, or seemingly finally, decided that the staid and demur Jessie was for him and brushed Isabel off. Isabel healed her wounds in Paris for a while and then returned, returned to put her claws right back into Brandon. No prisoners taken this time. The replay of the past is what drives the first part of the story line. That and the introduction of Mark Dwyer, played by Van Heflin, an New York ex-cop now a very hush, hush governmental European agent (meaning CIA probably), who takes dead aim at the staid and demur Jessie.        

Of course while Mark and Jessie are “playing house,” the no sex 1940s version of playing house Brandon had been entrapped (yeah, right) by the scheming Isabel. The battle was joined as Jessie was ready to fight tooth and nail for her man. Except a little problem came up-Isabel wound up dead, very dead in her upscale high rent apartment (paid for by some sweet man sugar daddy she had been hanging around with). And who is the number one suspect. No, not Jessie because she had an alibi in Mark. Yeah, Brandon was all set to take the fall, take the big step off up in Ossining. Is rich lover- boy Brandon though going take the fall for something he didn’t do? No way because Mark, for a little breather from heavy duty CIA work, has this one solved before dinner with time for a nap. The sometimes gold-digger girlfriend of the sugar daddy who was paying Isabel’s bills got sore and put the bang-bang dead on old Isabel.

Here’s the funny thing, the funny cultural thing you pick up from old films, the dame was continually called an Amazon, like very tall and statuesque, which was a “crime,” a social crime in those days when women were shorter than today. She would barely make a high school girls’ basketball team today. Here’s the even funnier part after all the flap over Isabel and her fate it turned out Jessie left Brandon high and dry. Didn’t really love the shell of a man he she had married. Maybe she will become Mrs. CIA over in Europe. Hey, not Barbara Stanwyck’s greatest flix (probably Double Indemnity is) but what can you expect from a melodrama, even one set in New York City.  

*****Send The Following Message (Or Write Your Own) To The President In Support Of A Pardon For Private Manning

*****Send The Following Message (Or Write Your Own) To The President In Support Of A Pardon For Private Manning

To: President Barack Obama
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge, Colonel Lind, on August 21, 2013 to Private Manning (Chelsea formerly known as Bradley) has outraged many citizens including me. (A decision upheld by the Convening Officer of the First District, General Buchanan in early 2014. The defense team is now preparing a full-blown brief to be presented to Army Court Of Military Appeals when ready.)

Under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution the President of the United States had the authority to grant pardons to those who fall under federal jurisdiction.
Some of the reasons for my request include: 
*that Private Manning  was held for nearly a year in abusive solitary confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, which the UN rapporteur in his findings has called “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”

*that the media had been continually blocked from transcripts and documents related to the trial and that it has only been through the efforts of Private Manning’s supporters that any transcripts exist.

*that under the UCMJ a soldier has the right to a speedy trial and that it was unconscionable and unconstitutional to wait 3 years before starting the court martial.

*that absolutely no one was harmed by the release of documents that exposed war crimes, unnecessary secrecy and disturbing foreign policy.

*that Private Manning is a hero who did the right thing when she revealed truth about wars that had been based on lies.

I urge you to use your authority under the Constitution to right the wrongs done to Private Manning – Enough is enough!

Signature ___________________________________________________________

Print Name __________________________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________________________

City / Town/State/Zip Code_________________________________________

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

 

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

 

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

 

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (and will again this year on her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

Markin comments (Winter 2014):   

There is no question now that Chelsea Manning’s trial, if one can called what took place down in Fort Meade a trial in the summer of 2013 rather than a travesty, a year after her conviction on twenty plus counts and having received an outrageous thirty-five year sentence essentially for telling us the truth about American atrocities and nefarious actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the American government can stick its nose that her case has dropped from view. Although she occasionally gets an Op/Ed opportunity, including in the New York Times, a newspaper which while recoiling at the severity of the sentence in the immediate reaction did not question the justice of the conviction, and has several legal moves going from action to get the necessary hormonal treatments reflecting her real sexual identity (which the Army has stonewalled on and which even the New York Times has called for implementing) to now preparing the first appeal of her conviction to another military tribunal the popular uproar against her imprisonment has become a hush. While the appeals process may produce some results, perhaps a reduction in sentence, the short way home for her is a presidential pardon right now. I urge everybody to Google Amnesty International and sign on to the online petition to put the pressure on President Barack Obama for clemency.                   

I attended some of the sessions of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in the summer of 2013 and am often asked these days in speaking for her release about what she could expect from the various procedures going forward to try to “spring” her from the clutches of the American government, or as I say whenever I get the chance to “not leave our buddy behind” in the time-honored military parlance. I have usually answered depending on what stage her post-conviction case is in that her sentence was draconian by all standards for someone who did not, although they tried to pin this on her, “aid the enemy.” Certainly Judge Lind though she was being lenient with thirty-five years when the government wanted sixty (and originally much more before some of the counts were consolidated). The next step was to appeal, really now that I think about it, a pro forma appeal to the commanding general of the Washington, D.C. military district where the trial was held. There were plenty of grounds to reduce the sentence but General Buchanan backed up his trial judge in the winter of 2014. Leaving Chelsea supporters right now with only the prospect of a presidential pardon to fight for as the court appeals are put together which will take some time. This is how I put the matter at one meeting:

“No question since her trial, conviction, and draconian sentence of thirty-five years imposed by a vindictive American government heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning’s has fallen off the radar. The incessant news cycle which has a short life cycle covered her case sporadically, covered the verdict, covered the sentencing and with some snickers cover her announcement directly after the sentencing that she wanted to live as her true self, a woman. (A fact that her supporters were aware of prior to the announcement but agreed that the issue of her sexual identity should not get mixed up with her heroic actions during the pre-trial and trial periods.) Since then despite occasional public rallies and actions her case had tended, as most political prisoner cases do, to get caught up in the appeals process and that keeps it out of the limelight.”            

Over the past year or so Chelsea Manning has been honored and remembered by the Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade in Boston in such events as the VFP-led Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, the Memorial Day anti-war observance, the yearly Gay Pride Parade, the Rockport July 4^th parade, the VFP-led Veterans Day Peace Parade, and on December 17^th her birthday. We have marched with a banner calling for her freedom, distribute literature about her case and call on one and all to sign the pardon petitions. The banner has drawn applause and return shouts of “Free Chelsea.” The Smedley Butler Brigade continues to stand behind our sister. We will not leave her behind. We also urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition calling on President Obama to use his constitutional authority to pardon Chelsea Manning

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30  

Additional Markin comment on his reasons for supporting Chelsea Manning:

I got my start in working with anti-war GIs back in the early 1970s after my own military service was over. After my own service I had felt a compelling need to fight the monster from the outside after basically fruitless and difficult efforts inside once I got “religion” on the war issue first-hand. That work included helping create a couple of GI coffeehouses near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down at Fort Dix in New Jersey in order for GIs to have a “friendly” space in which to think through what they wanted to do in relationship to the military.

Some wanted help to apply for the then tough to get discharge for conscientious objection. Tough because once inside the military, at least this was the way things went then, the military argued against the depth of the applying soldier’s convictions and tended to dismiss such applications out of hand. Only after a few civil court cases opened up the application process later when the courts ruled that the military was acting arbitrarily and capriciously in rejecting such applications out of hand did things open up a little in that channel. Others wanted to know their rights against what they were told by their officers and NCOs. But most, the great majority, many who had already served in hell-hole Vietnam, wanted a place, a non-military place, a non-GI club, where they could get away from the smell, taste, and macho talk of war.

Although there are still a few places where the remnants of coffeehouses exist like the classic Oleo Strut down at Fort Hood in Texas the wars of the past decade or so has produced no great GI resistance like against the Vietnam War when half the Army in America and Vietnam seemed to be in mutiny against their officers, against their ugly tasks of killing every “gook” who crossed their path for no known reason except hubris, and against the stifling of their rights as citizens. At one point no anti-war march was worthy of the name if it did not have a contingent of soldiers in uniform leading the thing. There are many reasons for this difference in attitude, mainly the kind of volunteer the military accepts but probably a greater factor is that back then was the dominance of the citizen-soldier, the draftee, in stirring things up, stirring things up inside as a reflection of what was going on out on the streets and on the campuses. I still firmly believe that in the final analysis you have to get to the “cannon fodder,” the grunts, the private soldier if you want to stop the incessant war machine. Since we are commemorating, if that is the right word the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I check out what happened, for example, on the Russian front when the desperate soldiers left the trenches during 1917 after they got fed up with the Czar, with the trenches, with the landlords, and the whole senseless mess.

Everyone who has the least bit of sympathy for the anti-war struggles of the past decade should admire what Chelsea Manning has done by her actions releasing that treasure trove of information about American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere. She has certainly paid the price for her convictions with a draconian sentence. It is hard to judge how history will record any particular heroic action like hers but if the last real case with which her action can be compared with is a guide, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, she should find an honored spot. Moreover Chelsea took her actions while in the military which has its own peculiar justice system. Her action, unlike back in Vietnam War times, when the Army was half in mutiny was one of precious few this time out. Now that I think about she does not have to worry about her honored place in history. It is already assured. But just to be on the safe side let’s fight like hell for her freedom. We will not leave our sister Chelsea behind.              

 

A View From The Left- No Reliance on Democrats, Supreme Court-Fight for Free Abortion on Demand!

Workers Vanguard No. 1086	25 March 2016

No Reliance on Democrats, Supreme Court-Fight for Free Abortion on Demand!

On March 2, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the most critical abortion case in decades. Abortion providers in Texas, represented by Whole Woman’s Health, challenged the omnibus anti-abortion law known as HB2. Since 2013, the Texas law’s numerous roadblocks to obtaining a safe and timely abortion have forced the closure of at least 22 of 41 clinics. Draconian provisions mandate clinics to meet the costly and unnecessary standards of hospital-level surgery centers and require doctors to obtain admitting privileges from local hospitals. If the provisions are upheld, the number of clinics in Texas will be reduced to fewer than ten, making abortion even more inaccessible for hundreds of thousands of poor, rural, black and Latina women. What is at stake is the fate of abortion services in states across the country. In Louisiana, a similar admitting privileges law—temporarily blocked—threatens to shut down all but one clinic.

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationwide, a variety of reactionary forces, from the pulpit, the legislatures and the courtrooms, have relentlessly chipped away at it. The legal basis for the current assault on women’s rights was laid by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which upheld Roe but gave states the green light to impose restrictions on abortion. Anti-woman bigots have since pushed to curtail the definition of an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion. They have imposed ever-greater hurdles—from mandatory waiting periods to parental consent requirements and bans on late-term abortions. The latest round of legislation, called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, has the intended effect of forcing women back to the pre-Roe days of coat hangers and back-alley butchery. Since 2010, over 280 state restrictions on abortion have been imposed, nearly as many as during the entire 15-year period prior to that. In the last five years, at least 162 abortion providers have closed or stopped performing abortions, due mostly to cost-prohibitive codes and insurmountable doctor regulations—not to mention violence and terror at the hands of anti-abortion zealots.

The claim that TRAP laws serve to “protect” and “improve” women’s health is as ludicrous as it is sinister. Abortion is an extremely safe and effective procedure with fewer complications than a colonoscopy. Most, especially medication abortions, can be administered in any setting under medical supervision. A legal brief submitted by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association declared “there is no medically sound reason” for HB2’s provisions. The risks associated with pregnancy, including childbirth itself, are far greater than those of abortion.

The war on abortion rights is driven by the deep-seated anti-woman bigotry that pervades this class-divided society. Abortion is a politically explosive issue because it poses the question of women’s equality, providing women with some control over whether or not to have children. For this reason, it is seen as a threat to the institution of the family, which is a key prop of the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Along with organized religion, the family instills rigid sexual stereotypes and conservative morality that promotes fear, guilt and obedience to authority. Such ideological tools allow the rulers to socially regiment the population, and thus better contain any struggle against their system.

While wealthy women always find a way to get safe abortions, for the masses of working-class and poor women—who lack affordable health care, access to contraception and the means to adequately feed, house and educate their children—abortion is simultaneously a vital necessity and increasingly out of reach. Of the roughly one million abortions obtained each year in the U.S., women living below the federal poverty line account for around 40 percent and black and Latina women account for over half. Marcela Howell, the director of the black reproductive rights organization In Our Own Voice, recently noted that black women are disproportionately impacted by the legacy of abortion restrictions like the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds to cover the procedure and was signed into law by Democratic president Jimmy Carter in 1977. She also warned of the national implications if the Supreme Court upholds HB2: “We are looking at more than 12 million Black women if you look at the other states where these laws also exist.”

In order for safe and legal abortion to become available to all women, we call for free abortion on demand, as part of a fight for quality health care for all, free at the point of delivery. It is outrageous that the government—from state legislatures up to the inherently reactionary Supreme Court—has the ultimate power to interfere in people’s most intimate, private decisions. While the Republican bible-thumpers compete to openly overturn Roe, the “pro-choice” Democrats have allowed the reactionaries to gut access to abortion. Reliance on the capitalist rulers and their judges simply cedes ground to the forces of anti-abortion reaction and undermines the necessary struggle to defend and extend women’s rights.

Racist Anti-Abortion Offensive

The ongoing erosion of access to abortion through TRAP legislation is powerfully depicted in the new documentary Trapped directed by Dawn Porter. The film, which focuses on clinics in Texas and Alabama as well as the lone surviving one in Mississippi, documents the heroic clinic workers and abortion providers struggling to keep their doors open. Interviews and anecdotes capture the impact that the shuttering of clinics has on women in the South who are unable to afford or access the service. One clinic owner explains that most patients are already mothers who are either unemployed or work long hours for paltry wages and know they can’t provide for another child. With the nearest clinic hundreds of miles away, women face barriers including lack of transportation, childcare expenses and having to take time off work. One story recounts how one woman had to drive across Texas with her husband and kids and camp out in an RV in the clinic parking lot for days because of all the legal restrictions and the waiting period.

In a scene at an Alabama clinic where procedures are on hold because of inability to comply with new regulations, staff field nonstop phone calls from desperate women, but have to direct them elsewhere. The waiting lists at the few operating clinics are so long that some women fall outside the 20-week legal limit. A worker at a Texas clinic recounts how she was forced to turn away a pregnant 13-year-old rape victim because of the late stage of her pregnancy. To get an abortion, the girl would need to gather thousands of dollars for the procedure, travel to New Mexico and arrange for accommodation while there. Noting the unlikelihood of this happening, the staffer wells up with tears saying, “We sentenced her to motherhood.”

Faced with such obstacles, women will find a way to have an abortion, but it might well not be safe or legal. One abortion provider in the film recalls a patient asking, “What if I told you what I have in my kitchen cabinet and you tell me what I can do?” Up to 240,000 women in Texas alone are estimated to have tried to end their pregnancies themselves without medical assistance. “Do-it-yourself” abortions—using everything from herbs to bleach to catheters—are on the rise in states where there are the most restrictions. Many of those same states criminalize women for suspected self-induced miscarriages. A 31-year-old Tennessee woman, Anna Yocca, is facing a life sentence after being charged in December with attempted murder for using a coat hanger to terminate her 24-week pregnancy. Last summer, Kenlissa Jones, a black 23-year-old in Georgia, was charged with “malice murder” after taking abortion-inducing medication bought online. Though the murder charge was dropped, she still faces a misdemeanor charge for possession of the abortion pills without prescription.

Trapped shows the extraordinary courage and conviction of clinic workers and abortion providers, including Willie Parker, a black Christian doctor who gave up a prestigious career in obstetrics to provide abortions in Mississippi, the poorest of the states of the former Confederacy. While showing bible-thumping protesters preaching faith-based filth outside clinics, the film gives only a small taste of the daily violence and harassment faced by doctors and clinic workers. Among those protesters could be another terrorist like Robert Dear, responsible for murdering three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado last November. In one scene showing the pure racist venom of protesters, a white anti-abortion crusader shouts that Dr. Parker sickens her because he’s a black man who is “destroying black lives” and comes to “kill his own race.” The fact that black women experience the highest rates of unintended pregnancies—because of lack of contraception, poverty and lousy education—is what compels providers like Dr. Parker to dedicate their lives to providing abortion services.

Republicans, Democrats, Supreme Court: Enemies of Women’s Rights

In a recent interview on Jezebel.com, Trapped filmmaker Dawn Porter noted that the upcoming presidential elections should make abortion “a voting issue for people who care about it.” In the lead-up to Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, Democrats worked to co-opt a layer of mostly white, middle-class women voters alienated by religious bigots who openly reveled in the subordination of women as wives and baby-makers. Latching onto the Democrats as the supposed friends of women, liberals and feminists rallied behind Clinton’s presidential election campaign, not least because the next president would decide the balance of the Supreme Court. The end result was that over the next period, the number of abortion providers plunged as clinics closed across the country. Jump forward 24 years and the same pressures are being brought to bear.

In February, all-purpose reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia did the only good thing he could for humanity and dropped dead. His body wasn’t cold before the appointment of his successor became a political football between the two parties of the bourgeoisie. Now, liberals ponder the abortion stance of Obama’s new “centrist” appointee, Merrick Garland. In the Texas case, liberal hopes rest on the supposedly reasonable Justice Anthony Kennedy, particularly following his decisive vote in the legalization of same-sex marriage—an important gain albeit one that had more to do with affirming marriage as a legal contract than with sexual freedom. Kennedy co-wrote the vague “undue burden” clause of the 1992 Casey decision and has supported many anti-abortion measures since. In recent years, the Supreme Court of injustice has ruled against black voting rights, Medicaid expansion, affirmative action and just about anything that smacks of civil rights, integration or secularism.

It was not the political composition of the 1973 court—the majority of whom were Republican appointees—which led to the legalization of abortion. The historic Roe decision was a concession to explosive mass struggle. The women’s liberation movement arose as hundreds of thousands of radicalized youth took to the streets to fight for black rights and against the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam. But this period was short-lived. As long as the capitalist system remains in place, even the most minimal gains for working people, women and minorities—achieved in the first place as a result of social struggle and not through the ballot, lobbying Congress or the Supreme Court—can be rolled back, as the onslaught on abortion rights demonstrates.

Just as Bill Clinton was painted as a defender of women, today Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid is being touted by feminists and abortion-rights activists. NARAL endorses Hillary Clinton as “a champion with a demonstrated record of fighting for reproductive freedom and economic justice.” It is worth recalling that she supported the policies implemented during her husband’s presidency, which consigned millions of women and children to poverty through the racist drive to “end welfare as we know it” and set the stage for states to implement a host of anti-abortion measures.

Though the Democrats differ from the Republicans on tactics and rhetoric, the “lesser evil” party is just as committed to the preservation of the capitalist system, to the exploitation of the working class, to the institution of the family and to furthering U.S. imperialist interests abroad. The feminists’ strategy of relying on the Democratic Party has demobilized fighters for women’s rights and ceded terrain to reactionaries who are gunning to outlaw abortion. Hillary Clinton’s mantra that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” sounds like former Texas governor Rick Perry, who declared, referring to HB2, that abortion should be as “rare as possible.” Alongside her emphasis on faith and family values, Clinton expresses her “respect” for those opposing abortion rights.

A victory for the Texas abortion providers in the current Supreme Court case would provide immediate respite for thousands of women. However, it would have no effect on the numerous other restrictions on abortion: time limits, waiting periods, parental consent and bans on government funding, to name a few. Pushing faith in the courts deepens illusions that the bourgeois state, which upholds the sanctity of the family, will act in the interests of women.

Feminism is sometimes understood as a wish for equality between men and women, but it is in fact a political program based on seeing the main division in society as gender, rather than class. The feminist strategy of supporting the capitalist Democrats and relying on the capitalist state to protect women’s rights is in reality an obstacle in the fight for women’s liberation.

We fight for women’s liberation as part of a program for the working class to take power and overthrow the capitalist system. For this, the working class must come to the understanding of the need to combat all forms of oppression as part of the battle to free itself from wage slavery. The job of the revolutionary party, which we seek to build, is to bring this consciousness to the working class. Only overturning the profit system and establishing the rule of the working class can open the road to liberation for women and all humanity. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

On The 104th Anniversary- Labor's Untold Story In Song- Remember The Heroic IWW-led Lawrence (Ma) Textile Strike Of 1912-"Bread And Roses"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of a performance of "Bread and Roses" about the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912.

Poem and Song lyrics-"Bread And Roses"

Poem

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses! Song Lyrics

Song

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two      

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January  

Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

 

I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.  

 

I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.

 

This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the  struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.

 

Below is a second sketch written as part of a series posted over  several days before the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16^th (see archive) of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the very problems that Lenin had to get a handle on.

******

“Big Ivan” Smilga (called such for obvious reasons, well over six feet tall, well over two hundred pounds and thus big for a Ukrainian farm boy) had been out of work, steady work anyway, the best part of a year after he (along with his work crew) had been laid off by John Smyte and Son, the English textile firm working under license from Tsar in Moscow. He had been called “redundant” (and of course the crew as well) after the job he held as lead-man on a work crew that took the rolls of finished fabric off the bobbing machines for further processing and transport had been replaced by a machine which did the task automatically. Ivan and that crew in “Luddite” fashion had one Saturday night after a heavy day of drinking had smashed the machine in expectation that that action would get their jobs back. That course of action pursued, a Luddite caper, in which he and his crew snuck into the closed Smiley factory one Saturday night and wreaked the hauling machinery only to find that next Monday morning that it was replaced by an exact replica. Fortunately he and the crew were never discovered and nobody snitched to the Okhrana or he/they would be in Siberia just them. (Luddite being an English moniker well known to the Smythes as a moniker used for “anarchists” who went around smashing machines in England in the early part of the Industrial Revolution for the same reasons as Ivan and his crew and with the same results. Ivan had been befuddled by the term when it had appeared in the pro-Smythe Moscow Gazette until the term was explained to him and he responded with a big laugh saying something like there really wasn’t anything ne win the world.) He had sulked and drunk himself silly for a while (a man who before the trek to the city had been a very modest vodka drinker by Ukrainian standards) and then grabbed any work he could find as he was running out of funds. Grabbing whatever work he could find entailed moving down the working-class scale as his once substantial stash of cash was dwindling and as he came in contact with more nefarious types at the workingmen’s taverns that he then more frequently hung out at to kill time.

One night at the Golden Eagle Tavern (rough Russian translation and allegedly named in honor of the Tsar but maybe just named to curry favor with the police inspectors who were prowling around such working-class haunts ever since labor agitation not unlike in the rest of Europe had started in the Saint Petersburg factories) Ivan ran into some workmen whom he knew and a few who were not working men but students, maybe from Moscow University, who were talking in the back room, talking quietly although not attempting to cover their voices or the door which led into the back. One of the workmen, Vladimir Suslov, known to him from his time at Smythe and Son, motioned him to come join the group. This Suslov knew of Ivan’s ill-fated attempt to wreak the machinery at Smythe from one night when Ivan had been too talkative and he had overheard Ivan speaking of the attempts. What Vladimir, and one of the students, Nicolas Kamkov as he found out later, had to say was that things had become intolerable in Russia, that the sons and daughters of the land needed a reprieve, that the growing working- class needed relief and that the students (they called themselves the “intelligentsia” and maybe they were but around the peasantry, and those who had roots in the peasantry like Ivan, using that term was quickly squashed once they found out that the peasantry associated all intellectuals with the court and government) needed to be able to breath and say whatever they wanted. And this motley group of students and workmen had a plan to solve this problem.

Nicolas let Suslov tell the broad outline of the plan. The idea, like something out of the People’s Will movement of blessed if now distant memory, was rather than try to assassinate governmental officials like in the wild old days, instead to take them hostage, hostages to be returned for various grants of relief for peasants, workers and students. Suslov looked directly at Ivan when he asked who was in and who was out. Ivan nodded, or half-nodded, that he was in. (He later said he feared some Suslov indiscretion more, especially if he was caught, more than the very real doubts he initially expressed about the plot). Since everybody in the room expressed an interest they began to plan. The main idea for hostage number one, the Tsar’s finance minister who was in an entourage along with foreign investors and factory owners headed on a train into Moscow within the next few days according to some inside information the group had, was that Ivan was to do the strong-arm work one evening at the minister’s hotel disguised as a hotel employee. So the planning went on over the next few days. Then just as quickly it was over as a knock came on Ivan’s door one night and when he opened it there was Daniev, the local Okhrana official with Suslov in tow. Suslov had betrayed him (and the others), in order to get out from under his own hard time as a ring-leader. Ivan was thereafter banished to Siberia for two years, a hard two years, for even thinking about the idea of kidnapping the Tsar’s minister.