From the Archives of Marxism-“Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”-by V.I. Lenin

Frank Jackman comment: with not too much addition and taking into consideration the almost one hundred year  time difference these theses read like they could have been written today by Brother Lenin.

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-“Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”-by V.I. Lenin

We reprint below Theses by Lenin that counterpose the soviet system of workers democracy established by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the fraud of capitalist democracy. Lenin presented the Theses to the First Congress of the Third (Communist) International in March 1919, while Europe was being shaken by revolutionary working-class upheavals. In January of that year a workers uprising in Berlin was crushed and Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were assassinated.

The Communist International was founded in opposition to the Second (Socialist) International. Most of the parties of the Second International had betrayed the working class by supporting their own imperialist ruling classes in the slaughter of World War I. The Communist International won substantial numbers of workers from the old Socialist (Social Democratic) parties to revolutionary communism.

This translation of the Theses is taken from Lenin’s Collected Works. The Berne International Conference that Lenin references sought to re-establish the Second International, which had collapsed at the start of WWI.

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1. Faced with the growth of the revolutionary workers’ movement in every country, the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Condemnation of dictatorship and defence of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand strains by the capitalist press and at the Berne yellow International Conference in February 1919, are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.

2. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of “democracy in general” and “dictatorship in general,” without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism, namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognise in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilised capitalist country does “democracy in general” exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of “dictatorship in general,” but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.

3. History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters—a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the socialists who denounce “dictatorship in general” and extol “democracy in general,” won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration. In books, pamphlets, congress resolutions and propaganda speeches socialists everywhere have thousands and millions of times explained to the people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship. That is why the present defence of bourgeois democracy under cover of talk about “democracy in general” and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under cover of shouts about “dictatorship in general” are an outright betrayal of socialism. They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian, revolution, and defence of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.

4. In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists. There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism. But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people “pure democracy,” have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people. They assert that in a democratic republic there is not, and never has been, any such thing as a state machine for the oppression of labour by capital.

5. The Paris Commune [of 1871, when the Parisian working class briefly seized power]—to which all who parade as socialists pay lip service, for they know that the workers ardently and sincerely sympathise with the Commune—showed very clearly the historically conventional nature and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy—institutions which, though highly progressive compared with medieval times, inevitably require a radical alteration in the era of proletarian revolution. It was Marx who best appraised the historical significance of the Commune. In his analysis, he revealed the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system under which the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall “represent and suppress” (ver- und zertreten) the people in parliament. And it is now, when the Soviet movement is embracing the entire world and continuing the work of the Commune for all to see, that the traitors to socialism are forgetting the concrete experience and concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about “democracy in general.” The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.

6. The significance of the Commune, furthermore, lies in the fact that it endeavoured to crush, to smash to its very foundations, the bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucratic, judicial, military and police machine, and to replace it by a self-governing, mass workers’ organisation in which there was no division between legislative and executive power. All contemporary bourgeois-democratic republics, including the German republic, which the traitors to socialism, in mockery of the truth, describe as a proletarian republic, retain this state apparatus. We therefore again get quite clear confirmation of the point that shouting in defence of “democracy in general” is actually defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges as exploiters.

7. “Freedom of assembly” can be taken as a sample of the requisites of “pure democracy.” Every class-conscious worker who has not broken with his class will readily appreciate the absurdity of promising freedom of assembly to the exploiters at a time and in a situation when the exploiters are resisting the overthrow of their rule and are fighting to retain their privileges. When the bourgeoisie were revolutionary, they did not, either in England in 1649 or in France in 1793, grant “freedom of assembly” to the monarchists and nobles, who summoned foreign troops and “assembled” to organise attempts at restoration. If the present-day bourgeoisie, who have long since become reactionary, demand from the proletariat advance guarantees of “freedom of assembly” for the exploiters, whatever the resistance offered by the capitalists to being expropriated, the workers will only laugh at their hypocrisy.

The workers know perfectly well, too, that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and the small peasants—the overwhelming majority of the population—are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, “equality,” i.e., “pure democracy,” is a fraud. The first thing to do to win genuine equality and enable the working people to enjoy democracy in practice is to deprive the exploiters of all the public and sumptuous private buildings, to give the working people leisure and to see to it that their freedom of assembly is protected by armed workers, not by scions of the nobility or capitalist officers in command of downtrodden soldiers.

Only when that change is effected can we speak of freedom of assembly and of equality without mocking at the workers, at working people in general, at the poor. And this change can be effected only by the vanguard of the working people, the proletariat, which overthrows the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.

8. “Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy.” And here, too, the workers know—and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times—that this freedom is a deception while the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed. The capitalists have always used the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of “pure democracy” prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement. Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper.

9. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrated, even before the war, what this celebrated “pure democracy” really is under capitalism. Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the “purer” democracy is, the more naked, acute and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the “purer” the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship. The Dreyfus case [witchhunt against Jewish army officer in the 1890s] in republican France, the massacre of strikers by hired bands armed by the capitalists in the free and democratic American republic—these and thousands of similar facts illustrate the truth which the bourgeoisie are vainly seeking to conceal, namely, that actually terror and bourgeois dictatorship prevail in the most democratic of republics and are openly displayed every time the exploiters think the power of capital is being shaken.

10. The imperialist war of 1914-18 conclusively revealed even to backward workers the true nature of bourgeois democracy, even in the freest republics, as being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Tens of millions were killed for the sake of enriching the German or the British group of millionaires and multimillionaires, and bourgeois military dictatorships were established in the freest republics. This military dictatorship continues to exist in the Allied countries even after Germany’s defeat. It was mostly the war that opened the eyes of the working people, that stripped bourgeois democracy of its camouflage and showed the people the abyss of speculation and profiteering that existed during and because of the war. It was in the name of “freedom and equality” that the bourgeoisie waged the war, and in the name of “freedom and equality” that the munition manufacturers piled up fabulous fortunes. Nothing that the yellow Berne International does can conceal from the people the now thoroughly exposed exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, bourgeois equality and bourgeois democracy.

11. In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat, have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots [Social Democrats], then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point.

Throughout the civilised world we see Bolsheviks being exiled, persecuted and thrown into prison. This is the case, for example, in Switzerland, one of the freest bourgeois republics, and in America, where there have been anti-Bolshevik pogroms, etc. From the standpoint of “democracy in general,” or “pure democracy,” it is really ridiculous that advanced, civilised, and democratic countries, which are armed to the teeth, should fear the presence of a few score men from backward, famine-stricken and ruined Russia, which the bourgeois papers, in tens of millions of copies, describe as savage, criminal, etc. Clearly, the social situation that could produce this crying contradiction is in fact a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

12. In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars.

The main thing that socialists fail to understand and that constitutes their shortsightedness in matters of theory, their subservience to bourgeois prejudices and their political betrayal of the proletariat is that in capitalist society, whenever there is any serious aggravation of the class struggle intrinsic to that society, there can be no alternative but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of some third way are reactionary, petty-bourgeois lamentations. That is borne out by more than a century of development of bourgeois democracy and the working-class movement in all the advanced countries, and notably by the experience of the past five years. This is also borne out by the whole science of political economy, by the entire content of Marxism, which reveals the economic inevitability, wherever commodity economy prevails, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that can only be replaced by the class which the very growth of capitalism develops, multiplies, welds together and strengthens, that is, the proletarian class.

13. Another theoretical and political error of the socialists is their failure to understand that ever since the rudiments of democracy first appeared in antiquity, its forms inevitably changed over the centuries as one ruling class replaced another. Democracy assumed different forms and was applied in different degrees in the ancient republics of Greece, the medieval cities and the advanced capitalist countries. It would be sheer nonsense to think that the most profound revolution in human history, the first case in the world of power being transferred from the exploiting minority to the exploited majority, could take place within the time-worn framework of the old, bourgeois, parliamentary democracy, without drastic changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions that embody the new conditions for applying democracy, etc.

14. Proletarian dictatorship is similar to the dictatorship of other classes in that it arises out of the need, as every other dictatorship does, to forcibly suppress the resistance of the class that is losing its political sway. The fundamental distinction between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes—landlord dictatorship in the Middle Ages and bourgeois dictatorship in all the civilised capitalist countries—consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the landowners and bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance offered by the vast majority of the population, namely, the working people. In contrast, proletarian dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e., an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists.

It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism—the toiling classes.

And indeed, the form of proletarian dictatorship that has already taken shape, i.e., Soviet power in Russia, the Räte [council]-System in Germany, the Shop Stewards Committees in Britain and similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all this implies and presents to the toiling classes, i.e., the vast majority of the population, greater practical opportunities for enjoying democratic rights and liberties than ever existed before, even approximately, in the best and the most democratic bourgeois republics.

The substance of Soviet government is that the permanent and only foundation of state power, the entire machinery of state, is the mass-scale organisation of the classes oppressed by capitalism, i.e., the workers and the semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit the labour of others and regularly resort to the sale of at least a part of their own labour power). It is the people, who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, while possessing equal rights by law, have in fact been debarred by thousands of devices and subterfuges from participation in political life and enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties, that are now drawn into constant and unfailing, moreover, decisive, participation in the democratic administration of the state.

15. The equality of citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race, or nationality, which bourgeois democracy everywhere has always promised but never effected, and never could effect because of the domination of capital, is given immediate and full effect by the Soviet system, or dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact is that this can only be done by a government of the workers, who are not interested in the means of production being privately owned and in the fight for their division and redivision.

16. The old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organised that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from the machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organised as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organisation of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units—the factory.

17. The army was a machine of oppression not only under the monarchy. It remains as such in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic ones. Only the Soviets, the permanent organisations of government authority of the classes that were oppressed by capitalism, are in a position to destroy the army’s subordination to bourgeois commanders and really merge the proletariat with the army; only the Soviets can effectively arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie. Unless this is done, the victory of socialism is impossible.

18. The Soviet organisation of the state is suited to the leading role of the proletariat as a class most concentrated and enlightened by capitalism. The experience of all revolutions and all movements of the oppressed classes, the experience of the world socialist movement teaches us that only the proletariat is in a position to unite and lead the scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population.

19. Only the Soviet organisation of the state can really effect the immediate break-up and total destruction of the old, i.e., bourgeois, bureaucratic and judicial machinery, which has been, and has inevitably had to be, retained under capitalism even in the most democratic republics, and which is, in actual fact, the greatest obstacle to the practical implementation of democracy for the workers and working people generally. The Paris Commune took the first epoch-making step along this path. The Soviet system has taken the second.

20. Destruction of state power is the aim set by all socialists, including Marx above all. Genuine democracy, i.e., liberty and equality, is unrealisable unless this aim is achieved. But its practical achievement is possible only through Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, for by enlisting the mass organisations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state.

21. The complete bankruptcy of the socialists who assembled in Berne, their complete failure to understand the new, i.e., proletarian, democracy, is especially apparent from the following. On February 10, 1919, [Swedish Social-Democratic leader Hjalmar] Branting delivered the concluding speech at the international Conference of the yellow International in Berne. In Berlin, on February 11, 1919, Die Freiheit, the paper of the International’s affiliates, published an appeal from the Party of “Independence” to the proletariat. The appeal acknowledged the bourgeois character of the [German Social Democrat Philipp] Scheidemann government, rebuked it for wanting to abolish the Soviets, which it described as Träger und Schützer der Revolution—vehicles and guardians of the revolution—and proposed that the Soviets be legalised, invested with government authority and given the right to suspend the operation of National Assembly decisions pending a popular referendum.

That proposal indicates the complete ideological bankruptcy of the theorists who defended democracy and failed to see its bourgeois character. This ludicrous attempt to combine the Soviet system, i.e., proletarian dictatorship, with the National Assembly, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, utterly exposes the paucity of thought of the yellow socialists and Social-Democrats, their reactionary petty-bourgeois political outlook, and their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly growing strength of the new, proletarian democracy.

22. From the class standpoint, the Berne yellow International majority, which did not dare to adopt a formal resolution out of fear of the mass of workers, was right in condemning Bolshevism. This majority is in full agreement with the Russian Mensheviks [social democrats] and [peasant-based] Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Scheidemanns in Germany. In complaining of persecution by the Bolsheviks, the Russian Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries try to conceal the fact that they are persecuted for participating in the Civil War on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Similarly, the Scheidemanns and their party have already demonstrated in Germany that they, too, are participating in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the workers.

It is therefore quite natural that the Berne yellow International majority should be in favour of condemning the Bolsheviks. This was not an expression of the defence of “pure democracy,” but of the self-defence of people who know and feel that in the civil war they stand with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

That is why, from the class point of view, the decision of the yellow International majority must be considered correct. The proletariat must not fear the truth, it must face it squarely and draw all the necessary political conclusions.  

ICL Sections Say:Down With Imperialism—For Class Struggle at Home!- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to an article about what radicals and revolutionaries should be have been doing when the American war machine was being rolled out to level Afghanistan and then Iraq. It was not, and is not pretty.

“Free Tibet”: Rallying Cry for Counterrevolution in China- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to a very different view of the Dali Lama and his cohorts from the traditional view in the West where everyone is ready to fall all over themselves to hustle for this 'holy man'.

Reflections On The Maine Peace Walk 2016-“Stop The Wars On Mother Nature”

Reflections On The Maine Peace Walk 2016-“Stop The Wars On Mother Nature”

By Zack James

 

Fritz Taylor, the now old Vietnam War veteran and for several years a proud member of the non-violent anti-war oriented Veterans for Peace wasn’t sure just what had gotten him interested in taking his now annual Maine VFP-sponsored Peace Walk in October the preceding few years.  (VFP, a group which had its original foundations in the famous and historic Vietnam Veterans Against the War, VVAW, which he had joined just out of the Army, just out of ‘Nam after he had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace and decided to cast his fate with the anti-warriors of the world seeing the other side had nothing to offer but murder and mayhem.) All he knew was that a couple of years back he had read about the annual walk, now in its fifth iteration, in one of the VFP publications, maybe In These Times, and had been asked, had been cajoled by a number of his fellow members to head up to Maine to catch the last day of the walk as it headed from Saco down to the Pratt-Whitney plant in South Berwick where they make the jet engines for the military, the navy mostly, to rally outside the plant as the day shift left work. He had been so impressed by those on the walk and the idea of another more visceral way to promote peace that he had continued to take some October time out to join his fellow mostly aging “peaceniks” in their endeavors (that Saco by the way pronounced “socko” as he was made painfully aware of despite the fact that he had been going up to Maine periodically for about fifty years and on many occasions had stayed in that very town. He would not even address that even more serious question about his long affection for Maine made him a “Mainaic ” since he had been severely disabused of that idea by an old born in Maine woman who ran a diner and who threw daggers his ways when he made such an outlandish claim).    

The way things had gone as he readied for each new campaign was that each year he was adding a day or two to his commitment as the Walk headed south (usually the Walk started somewhere in the middle of nowhere up-country Maine in places like Rangeley or like this year at the Penobscot Nation, Indian Island, up by Old-Town, if you needed a town name since this really was out in the middle of nowhere from the description one walker gave him since they had to be shuttled thirty-something miles to the nearest point to continue the walk). It didn’t hurt that that southern part of the walk would run along Route One, the old coastal route which he knew well from about Freeport, the place that the outdoors giant merchandiser L.L. Bean had its origins and that this year would follow that same route down to Kittery at the border between Maine and New Hampshire and the site of the Portsmouth Naval Base which strangely is located on the Kittery side of the river that separates the two states for a final protest, a vigil as the day shift left work (and a time of previous hostility or indifference since those very workers felt, some of them anyway as Fritz found out later talking to some of them at a bar in Portsmouth where they were not very ambiguous about their feelings that closing down the base for military purposes and converting to some more socially useful purpose was so much utopian bullshit).

This year’s theme, each year there had been theme which partially determined the route and the stops, was “Stop The Wars Against Mother Nature (that plural is right on wars and not a misspelling by me and missed by the copy editor since the issues addressed were to be the obviously one against the American government’s endless military wars around the globe, big and small, and the degradation of the planet by man-made destruction of the physical space, military and corporate,  and climate change so plural is very right). The previous year’s Walk had centered on the “militarization of the seas” hence that Walk had been almost exclusively down the coast to Kittery and while this year’s started in north central Maine with stops along the way to such places as the Poland Springs plant although continuing to emphasis the militarization of the seas as part of the military degradation of the planet this year’s would finish at the key target naval base at Kittery as well.  

The previous year Fritz had begun at Freeport so this year he had planned to add a couple of days onto his schedule and start in Lewiston up in the center of the state, up in an old working class-etched factory town fallen like a lot of such old American towns by the negative impact of globalization which has made it easy, very easy to shift jobs off-shore for cheaper labor costs and no back talk although he was not sure what had been produced at those Lewiston plants, probably textiles). As this year’s march came nearer though due to a spade of health issues he had had to bail out on the Lewiston start and pick up the walk at the next starting point in Brunswick the home of Bowdoin College.

No question since the last walk the previous year life had taken a turn downward if not for the worse. Not only did Fritz develop several health problems after a lifetime of being fairly healthy if not exactly physically fit but he had turned seventy and that “milestone” had taken its toll on him mentally as the combination of illness and age made him aware, very aware of his own mortality. Worse, worst of all, was that partially due to his cranky reaction to his declining health, his increasing sense of his own mortality and his increased drive to leave his mark on this wicked old world rather than relaxing, rather attempting to find peace within himself as he faced the future music, he had become estranged from his longtime companion, Laura, or rather she had become estranged from him and so shortly before the Walk they had separated, or rather he had seen the writing on the wall after many pleas to the contrary and had reluctantly agreed to a permanent separation. She would stay in their long time home and he would wind up via an Air B and B arrangement staying in Ogunquit up in Maine for several reasons, including easier access to the Walk rather than driving up from Boston a time-consuming and taxing effort a few times.         

Having shortened up his commitment by a day due to a bad reaction from an on-going medical treatment Fritz had been undertaking the past several weeks he was primed to head up to Brunswick to begin the march south. That first morning he went up early to meet the walkers at the designated place at Bowdoin College-the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial as you enter the campus from downtown. Fritz an old time American Civil War buff thought it both fitting and ironic that the caravan had decided to form up at that particular place. Fitting since Professor Chamberlain had led a regiment of Maine’s heartiest and most dedicated to the Union and/or abolitionist cause in the gruesome key day down at Gettysburg, a key turning point along with Grant’s victory at Vicksburg along the Mississippi in the Civil War. Ironic in that that civil war against the scourge of slavery, the bedrock on which the American economy was probably the last time that a “peacenik” could have in good conscience taken up arms in a righteous American cause, here  against the villainous and unforgiving South. Given that this day as all of the days of the march would be dedicated to stopping just those kind of wars, the on-going proliferation of civil wars, as part of the grand strategy of making this wicked old world a more peaceful place the irony was not lost on Fritz.     

Having done the last five days of the walk the year before Fritz knew that he had to pace himself the first day, although the walk to Freeport was not all that long, about ten miles or so. After greeting old friend walkers from the previous years and waiting on other walkers to arrive from their various destinations (walkers were being hosted in various location by friendly patrons mostly from the assorted church denominations who have active social action committees within their congregations) he got back into his automobile to be shuttled along with others who had brought their automobiles to the lunch stop, an abandoned radio station with a porch, luckily with a porch since the day had begun rainy. Returning via the ever present van he joined the walkers as they headed out of Brunswick onto U.S. Route One, a road he was very familiar with further south but would be new ground covered here.

[That van, a rented van from “Rent a Wreck” in Bangor to save money and not worry as much about wear and tear or accidents, had its own history on the Walk as not only the shuttle vehicle but as a place of refuge for those who were willingly at heart to walk but were too infirm to go the daily distance without some additional rest. Also a place on the various daily breaks for people to get snacks and lunches. There was a separate van for personal gear, sleeping bags, knapsacks, other effects. The van as was to be expected had also been geared up, suited up, decorated up with a model dolphin created by Randy Ray, an artist who was also on the walk and a banner on one side which proclaimed the theme-Stop The Wars Against Mother Earth. Randy at one of the informational evening programs which were part of the routine of the Walk told the entranced gathering of walkers, local supporters, and supper and sleeping quarters hosts about the thought process he had gone through to create this beautiful piece of artistic propaganda which as the saying goes was more powerful than a thousand words. See banner above.]       

 

 

Fritz the previous year had noted that despite the fact that he had been coming up to Maine off and on for perhaps the past fifty years or so (which in no way, as he was periodically told and has gone out of his way to tell everybody on the Walk previously like they had not gotten  the point by native Mainers, made you a Mainer you had to have been born and bred to the place) that it had all been done by automobile, at least on U.S. 1 and so he had missed a lot of what Maine, working class and small town trades Maine was about. He had been amazed by the number of small businesses, hair salons, print shops, dentists’ offices adjoining their homes that there were along the way. That same though occurred to him again on this walk as he edged along this new walking stretch of miles. Fritz though it funny as he ambled along how so much of Maine had changed, especially along the coast where many out-of-staters had decided to settle for the cheaper housing prices and the slower way of life ever since the various Interstate highway connections made it easier to rationalize the long drives to the cities for work against the cheaper cost of living. So beside various “estate” dwellings, you know the routine, some The Glendale Estates which meant the low-rent types were not welcome, those same working poor types had their various run-down in desperate need of paint houses with rusted out old cars out back, whelping snarling dogs, screaming under-clothed kids, and cigarette butts and empty beer cans strewn everywhere. But that scene had been getting less notable along the big roads, the U.S. One roads and more likely to be seen on the intricate set of rutted back roads that form a web throughout the state.

Fritz as he traipsed along that first mile or so carrying the dove-centered black on white VFP flag that he had carried on almost every public occasion the last several years thought about the rhythm of the next six days which were pretty predictable, predictable in the best sense of that word because the organizing committee had done it work well and had the benefit of four previous efforts. Each day including this damp drizzling day started by all the various walkers meeting in a central location from their respective home-stay places near the end of the previous day’s march (or a few times when home-stays were not practical then some dusty church basement-nobody said the spreading the word about peace was a luxurious undertaking). Each day, once the issue of the shuttle had been solved with the automobiles pushed forward to the daily luncheon location had been settled, would start with a circle, a circle which he was never clear about its purpose but perhaps had something to do with the ceremonial needs of the Buddhist monks and nuns who would lead the Walk, beating their merciless drums with sticks an chanting some incantation for the well-being of the walkers and to demonstrate the one-ness of the universe. He had been surprised how many of the walkers, several of them hard-core VFPers with many anti-war actions and arrests under their belts were either deferential to the ceremonial or were in some degree sympathetic to Buddhism. He had been almost enraged the first time he saw the Buddhists scarping and bowing and the others following suit as a matter of course. He made a point of not doing the bowing and scraping and although this year he had due to his health and his new-found loneliness status begun to think more spiritually that way of the dharma was not for his as attractive as it seemed to those he admired, including his literary hero Jack Kerouac.

Each day walk covered between twelve and fifteen miles depending on what places were welcoming to this small band of active citizens and had been roughly broken into three mile segments starting about nine in the morning with ten to fifteen minute breaks, an hour or so for lunch and would continue until four or five in the late afternoon. Supper, provided supports mostly form the “usual suspects,” church groups with social action committees bend toward helping peace activists do their walking without themselves necessarily walking the trails as well. Supper were surprisingly good and bountiful as if those who were breaking bread with the righteous in their eyes walking  brethren went way out of their ways to make the best possible pot luck dishes their culinary skills could muster. (A number of walkers, male and female alike, had assumed that during the Walk they would lose some pounds and as it turned out several had gained weight due to those well-done over-the-top culinary delights and unforgettable killer desserts). After a good meal each night ended with a short to medium program centered on the theme of the Walk. One of the walkers would be elected or asked to lead the presentation to the assorted guests.

The first night of this year’s Walk for Fritz had been held at the Friends Meeting House in Durham about ten miles away from Freeport and could serve as an exemplar for the flow of most programs. Betsy Binstock, the long-time and well-known Maine peace activist and veteran walker for a million causes, led the program telling her listeners about several actions that were done by the walkers including a ceremonial sent-off by the Native Americans of the Penobscot Nation up on their sacred grounds, a stop at Poland Springs, and a rally and vigil at the notorious civilian-run Bath Iron Works who have produced more deadly vessels for the Navy than one could shake a stick at. Then Betsy present Robert Ray the designer of the banner and other artwork that graced the side of the support van and on various propaganda pieces put out by the Walk.  The evening ended with a few rousing songs performed by master guitarist Jacob Wright including War No More, a song of his own creation.  

[The evening program which had been organized by the committee to inform local supporters and interested parties and to entertain as well with music a key component of most programs had in Fritz’s mind taken second place as a way to inform people about what was going one to the actual sight of a group of twenty to thirty walkers depending on the day and the location. The sight of  a lead walker along the roads signaling with an orange flag that a procession was coming, somebody carrying the theme sign strapped to their shoulders-Stop The Wars Against Mother Earth- a Buddhist flag leading several monks and nuns chanting and beating drums, various dove-emblemed Veterans for Peace flags furiously fluttering in the wind, a banner expressing solidarity with the Native American land rights struggle out in the Dakotas, other peace and justice oriented signs and a tail-end repeat of the lead banner sign seemed more informative in a way than a few words at a program to people who already were on board. He had mentioned this idea, for which he received some counter-arguments, along the Walk to some walkers stating that the supportive honks from passing motorists, hell, the unacknowledged response even if momentarily of most motorists not hooked to a cellphone or texting  was worth walking for. His idea being that some of those who viewed the passage would have to think a little anyway about what they saw and that some citizens were walking their legs off to make a point worth thinking about. The argument will continue-as usual.]        

 

The routine established Fritz already knew the contours of the next day’s walk from Freeport to Portland, a long walk which he had a certain amount of trepidation about since the previous year that had been the first day of the Walk for him and he was dog-tired at the end of it. With rain expected to dog them that all day he was worried about having the strength to go the distance. He feared, dreaded, stood in horror of having to ride part of the route in the refugee van-that was for old people and he dreaded that notion of refuge-taking worse than anything.             

This is the way Fritz later explained how important to him walking this Peace Walk had become over the previous couple of years to his old friend and fellow anti-war activist, Jack Callahan, who due to severe hip problems had been unable to make the walks. Fritz, they had been in all kinds of anti-war actions from huge demonstrations in Washington to tiny forlorn vigils outside Army bases but he had said of late with the serious decline of any action whatsoever against war in the street sometimes it was necessary to “show the colors,” to make a public display of opposition out in the streets. Now there are still all kinds of small clots of people doing that but a Peace Walk provides an on-going thrust over several days to get the message out. Just the public display along the sometimes lonely roads of Maine can provide a boost as the occasional motorist toots his or her car horn in solidarity, or people as they passed by would say “good work.” Moreover old-fashioned leafletting along the route especially in the towns passed through provide a way to get the message out. An occasional news article by some young budding journalist who got one of the press releases and needed a subject for his or her by-line gave an added publicity push. Lately though as Fritz has become more as ease with the sense of his own mortality just the meditative rush that he received as he walked along helped him get through this rough patch heath and companion problems. No question walking along to the beat of those Buddhist drums and chanting kept him going for more than a few miles this year as he became weary on the road.    

Fritz also told Jack that night as they were slowly sipping their scotches at Jack’s, their favorite watering hole of late, to avoid too much alcohol for their respective rides home that he had met some interesting characters along the line of march, some of whom Jack knew or had heard of from various VFP actions that the pair had participated in the past. Some of the walkers had started out in Penobscot Nation and were going through to Kittery but the that was a small core mostly the long march was peopled by those like Fritz picking up the march for a day, a few days and then leave so turnover was a fairly routine occurrence (although the partings even after a couple of days on the road were emotional, a variation of separation anxiety as one wag on the road put the matter very succinctly). Of course an important element of the core, the Buddhists who led the procession daily, their personas were a book sealed with seven seals both because of language difficulties and, well, cultural differences as well since they seemed totally immersed in the drumming and chanting. Strangely, well maybe not so strangely after all, he tended to stay toward the front this year which was a “quiet zone” out of respect for the work of the Buddhists and those who were doing “walking” meditation. He stayed up with them in setting the pace in order to see if the beat in his head, a beat driven by childhood-driven rock and roll and lately the blues, maybe not even the beat in his head but the fire in his head over his current troubles, could get in synch with the beat the drummers were laying down. This in contrast to his placement the previous year where he staked out the rear of the procession and he could freely talk and let the drummers do their thing far up front but also he was then in a mood reflecting his take on the Chelsea Manning case of not leaving anybody, brother or sister behind, one of the few things felt the Army was positive in emphasizing-but as he told Jack don’t make too much of that idea, that idea that the Army could instill something positive in anybody at any time under any circumstance.     

Bob, the initial organizer of five Peace Walks and a veteran of other walks in other locales, especially down in Florida, was an enigma, rather quiet along the route but determined to give the appearance that this was a democratic effort, although peace walkers, peace activists in general these days an almost extinct species have a history of being self-starters so unless some monster problem came up to expose the reality of who was in charge (him, no question, although not without dispute, friendly dispute) that appearance held up pretty well. Beyond that there were the usual assortment of AARP-worthies who had the time to spare from their lesser pursuits of retirement like golfing or crocheting and could still go the distance (even if with a little help from the dreaded van) whom Fritz tended to stay away from since he didn’t want to get into a pissing match with those fellow worthies who wanted to detail their various illnesses, overcome and pending. The few young people, high school students who actually put the walkers up one night in Kennebuck and recent college graduates without jobs or seeking who they were, tagging along were so earnest and serious, earnest and serious like he had been when he was their age if that was possible that they were beyond the pale, just as he had been in his turn.

The most interesting characters were, as he might have suspected if he thought about it for a while, his fellow ex-servicemen with whom he could swap stories. Like Ivan who had been drafted and sent to Germany during the Vietnam War on a fluke of having been hospitalized when the rest of his training unit was given orders to that hellhole. Only to have orders to go to Vietnam during his tour in Germany as infantrymen, grunts, “cannon fodder” were pretty short on the ground during and after Tet, 1968. Another had just gotten back from Standing Rock out in the Dakotas standing in solidarity with the Native American tribes taking on Big Oil in another titanic struggle to preserve their land and their scared heritage (once again fighting for what was their own according to treaty-the white man’s treaty for what that was worth). Others as well that he could relate to easily enough since they were brethren. A few “tree-huggers” and “do-gooders” who seemed to have had the extra cash to do so were something like professional protestors once he found out their political resumes.         

A lot of oddly funny things would occur along the route like the time they were deep in the treed and nothing else part of U.S.1 and he needed to go to the bathroom, the “men’s restroom” out on the road where no stores or gas stations were within sight, had asked somebody to hold his ever present VFP-dove emblazoned flag and he ran into the woods, into a unseen small creek and got his sneakers all wet (they didn’t dry out until later the next day so he had to wear his alternate pair). Some break areas would have gas stations, restaurants, or diners, which had toilet facilities and some not. Some places would gladly let the walkers use their facilities others not (some of the latter showing a real capitalist instinct even about bodily functions would require a purchase, small or large, before allowing use of their facilities. Bah!)     

And so it went for Fritz those several days on the road. Talk, endless talk trying to get a take on who was walking and why, then quiet up front with the Buddhists to see if he could channel some positive energy out of his dismal fate of late (that effort in itself a cause for remark given the fire in his head, his disquiet), and then the breaks, the rest stops, the lunch of mostly peanut butter sandwiches (he, a lifelong devotee of peanut butterand jelly sandwiches, by the end would pass up that delicacy for granola bars and the like). The end of the day’s walk and the inevitable wait for supper (all timed for 6 PM to give the hosts their proper preparation and set-up time) and the evening program. Then an early bed. So it went until that final day sadly walking pass the Kittery Mall (a place where he had many times with Loretta, waiting patiently or impatiently depending on his mood) on the final leg toward the Portsmouth Naval Base on the Kittery side of the river for a final hour long vigil where as in the previous year they were met with indifference or scorn by most workers driving off to their homes after their shifts were over. Went away unaware that Fritz and his crowd did not want them to lose their well-paying union jobs with benefits, a well-deserved luxury these days, but to change what they were making, making more socially useful things instead of military weapons and the like. Enough said.   

With Skip James’ Lyric I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man In Mind-Why I Won’t Vote For Hillary Clinton (Needless To Say Dump The Trump Too)

With Skip James’ Lyric I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man In Mind-Why I Won’t Vote For Hillary Clinton (Needless To Say Dump The Trump Too)

By Fritz Taylor

Okay, let’s go by the numbers. Sometime in maybe late 2007, early 2008 in any case before it became clear that one Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would pose a serious challenge to then Senator Hillary Clinton of New York I had been bombarded with a few books written probably by minions or otherwise tied to the Clinton brand name. As such things go they were political biographies commissioned to advance Mrs. Clinton’s ultimately ill-fated campaign or material to be used a sound bite fodder for the same purposes. I was asked by some serious political people, maybe political pimps is the better way to put the matter to get on board her train or at least review the various books to let people outside her direct camp know how good a candidate, how well-qualified she was and so on. I balked at such an insidious task although I did to my subsequent regret review some items for which I was sent to the gallows by those same serious political folk. (At that point I had not particular animus against the relatively unknown Obama although I was subsequently to have many a vile word to say against him and his endless wars and endless bullshit about a “post-racial” society and the sand in my mouth “hope” noise he spouted).         

My vantage point for writing about the various Clinton works was encapscalated almost perfectly by the old sweet falsetto-voiced bluesman from the late 1920s Skip James, who would be “discovered” by us budding folkies in the 1960s folk minute and have a second short career before passing on, in a signature song of his-Devil Got My Woman. The key line which I used shamelessly every time I could during the early part of that campaign year before I gave up covering the whole thing as one more act of futility for those of us who were serious about social change and who furthermore had no illusions in anything any candidate speaking for the Democratic Party of war and corruption had to say-“I’d rather be with the devil than be that woman’s man.” (Needless to say the various Republicans were and are beyond the pale and not worth even a sardonic look.) That very factual comment got me in hot water with some of my die-hard Clinton supporter friends (mostly politically savvy women looking to launch the first woman into the barren American presidency). But it also got me in Dutch with my more radically-inclined feminist friends who saw my comment as “sexist,” misanthropic and misogynous. Jesus didn’t they do their own castigations and aspirations against that woman for her lug-head vote with both hands for the Iraq War resolution which still lives with us burnt in our memoires for seemingly all eternity.   

Come 2016 and the age of Dump the Trump supposedly a greater threat to the American democracy than the “reds under every bed” of the red scare Cold War rhetoric of my youth back in the early 1960s and those same cohorts have taken once again to making the same silly accusations about my Neanderthal attitude (I am being kind to myself here since their language was significantly more heated that I care to quote). But everybody knows that bourgeois politics, hell, any politics is a tough dollar so for those who forgot my retort back then about my socially backward ways I am resurrecting my talisman-my defense.     

You see the blues lyrics, folk music in general, is almost always open to copying and tweaking. So the great modern (and very feminist) blues singer Rory Block came to my rescue after I remembered that she had done a version of Skip James’ song. Except naturally when she sang the song she said- I’d rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Touché. I used the masculine version of that statement when somebody asked me if I supported Barack Obama for President in 2008. (I supported the very black, the very beautiful, and very feminist ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in her Green Party-etched efforts and Jill Stein of the same party in hers this year so there). I use the feminine version this year for Mister Clinton once again. Oh yeah, and Dump The Trump.       

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry  

 

Chapter Fourteen
"His Soul Goes Marching On"

Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the Boyd B. Stutler Collection

"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave,
His soul's marching on!"
John Brown Song

George Boniface, actor who played John Brown in 1859

In the century and a half since his execution, John Brown has been debated, discussed, celebrated and condemned. Beginning in 1859, John Brown has been the subject of numerous theater productions, books and articles, songs, paintings and other artwork that have portrayed him variously as a hero or villain, as a martyr or madman. Some of the more memorable portrayals include Thomas Hovendon’s painting depicting John Brown stooping to kiss an African American child (1884), Stephen Vincent Benet’s Pulitzer prizewinning epic poem “John Brown’s Body” (1928), John Steuart Curry’s controversial mural in the Kansas statehouse of a dominating John Brown (1937-40), and Warner Brothers Santa Fe Trail with a villainous John Brown (1940).

James Daugherty illustration of John Brown standing under his gibbet

While popular in print, on stage and the screen, and in art, John Brown also has generated a number of commemorate, preservation, and tourist activities. Perhaps the earliest effort was at North Elba, New York, in 1870, when journalist and lecturer Kate Field and others purchased the farm with the idea of preserving it. In 1896, the property was deeded to the State of New York. The John Brown Memorial Association, a largely black organization with chapters in several cities, formed in 1922 and held an annual pilgrimage to the North Elba farm for many years. Through the association's efforts, a statue of John Brown standing with an African American boy was erected in 1935.

John Brown farm at North Elba

Kate Field

John Brown Memorial Association on annual pilgrimage to North Elba, May 1930

John Brown statue, by Pollia, at North Elba

Nearly sixty years earlier, in 1877, a monument to the Battle of Osawatomie, which featured inscriptions to John Brown and Frederick Brown on two sides, had been erected at the Kansas battle site. John Brown was (and remains) a controversial figure in Kansas history, and the dedication produced much commentary on the man, both for and against, in the years that followed. The idea of having a statue of John Brown placed in Statuary Hall in Washington, DC, which originated about the same time as the monument’s dedication, never came to fruition. Yet, in 1910, a 23-acre area in Osawatomie, containing the monument and “John Brown’s Cabin” (Samuel Adair’s cabin) was dedicated as John Brown Memorial Park, with former president Theodore Roosevelt giving a dedicatory address that barely mentioned John Brown. The following year, African Americans erected a statue of John Brown at Western University, a black institution, in Kansas City. Finally, in 1935, the Women’s Relief Corps of Kansas had a statue of John Brown erected at John Brown Memorial Park on Brown’s 135th birthday.

Dedication of the monument for the Battle of Osawatomie, 1877 John Brown Memorial Park, Osawatomie, Kansas

John Brown Fort tablet Heyward Shepherd Memorial

John Brown Souvenir, World's Columbian Exhibition, 1893 The memory of John Brown has played an important role at Harpers Ferry since the Civil War. It was in part because of Brown that Freewill Baptists looking for a place to establish a school for recently freed African Americans chose Harpers Ferry. Storer College, the first African American college in West Virginia, opened in 1867. In the late 1800s, the fire engine house associated with the 1859 raid became famous as “John Brown’s Fort.” After attracting tourists to Harpers Ferry for several years, it was purchased by a company that had it moved to Chicago for display during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Later the building returned to Harpers Ferry and, in 1910, was placed on the Storer College campus. The college used it as a museum and placed a tablet on the building in 1918 to commemorate John Brown and his fellow raiders. A dozen years earlier, the Niagara Movement, a short-lived African American civil rights organization, had chosen Harpers Ferry for its first public meeting because of John Brown. Devoting an entire day to a celebration of Brown, attendees listened to speeches on the man and made a pilgrimage to John Brown’s Fort. Though disavowing the raid's violence, W. E. B. Du Bois affirmed a belief in John Brown. "And here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom," he proclaimed, "we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free." Nearly two decades later, in 1932, Du Bois wrote the text for a tablet the NAACP tried unsuccessfully to place in Harpers Ferry in memory of John Brown. (In 2006, the NAACP placed a tablet with the wording of the 1932 tablet on the Storer College campus.) John Brown's legacy in Harpers Ferry has not been the exclusive property of his admirers, however. Local critics in the decades after the raid often pointed to the raid's first casualty, African American Heyward Shepherd, a railroad employee at Harpers Ferry, to argue the false premise of Brown's raid. Representing this view, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans placed the Heyward Shepherd Memorial in Harpers Ferry in 1931.

John Brown's Fort, 1880s “Here John Brown Aimed at human slavery A Blow That woke a guilty nation. With him fought Seven slaves and sons of slaves. Over his crucified corpse Marched 200,000 black soldiers And 4,000,000 freedmen Singing 'John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave But his Soul goes marching on!' In Gratitude this Tablet is Erected The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People May 21, 1932." - Inscription for the NAACP's 1932 tablet

Re-enactment of the storming of the engine house during the John Brown Raid Centennial at Harpers Ferry

Congressman Jennings Randolph introduced a bill in 1935 to create the John Brown Military Park at Harpers Ferry, but the bill did not receive widespread support, with one critic suggesting such a park would become "the rallying ground for every group in the country that would overthrow the present government by violence." When Harpers Ferry National Monument (now Historical Park) finally was created in 1944, it was authorized with a broader mission of depicting historical events related to the Civil War and Harpers Ferry. The park became a reality in 1955; however, both area residents and the National Park Service were ambivalent toward John Brown, and the telling of that aspect of Harpers Ferry’s history was downplayed at first. Commemoration of the 1959 centennial of John Brown's raid was not uniformly embraced, the Civil War Centennial Commission being one group that sought to downplay events surrounding the raid in order to avoid any ill-will in a country in the midst of a civil rights struggle. Still, commemorative events were held in Harpers Ferry and North Elba, with activities at the former including a re-enactment of the storming of the engine house.

John Brown continues to attract interest. During the sesquicentennial year in 2009 of his raid on Harpers Ferry, events were held in the 4-state area around Harpers Ferry, as well as in Ohio, New York and other places connected to his life. Included were a number of seminars, dramatic performances, tours, and exhibitions on Brown and his legacy. Several new books and articles on John Brown also were published in 2009. Yet, in some ways, John Brown remains an enigma even after decades of serious scholarly study. And his actions remain the subject of debate, fueled in recent years by comparisons with homegrown and international terrorists. Was John Brown a villain? Or, was he a hero? The answer depends, as it has since the late hours of October 16, 1859, on an individual's perspective.

“Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth to-day? John Brown loved his neighbor as himself. He could not endure therefore to see his neighbor, poor, unfortunate or oppressed. . . . This is the situation to-day. Has John Brown no message—no legacy, then, . . .? He has and it is this great word: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” – W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown, 1909.

__________

"John Brown will live in history; but his name will not be found among the names of those who have wrought for humanity and for righteousness; or among the names of the martyrs and the saints who 'washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.' 'Yet Shall He Live': but it will be as a soldier of fortune, an adventurer. . . ." - Hill Peebles Wilson, John Brown Soldier of Fortune: A Critique, 1913.

Primary Sources:

Play, Ossawattomie Brown or The Insurrection at Harpers Ferry, by Mrs. J. C. Swayze. 1859
Sheet Music, John Brown Song (W. W. Patton lyrics, 1861)
Speech, Frederick Douglass on John Brown, Given at Storer College, 1881
Letter, A. J. Holmes to Messrs. Roberts Brothers, August 16, 1892
Invitation, John Brown Memorial Park dedication, Osawatomie, Kansas, 1910
Flier, John Brown Memorial Association picnic, June 30, 1928
Clipping, New York Herald Tribune, May 10, 1935
Clipping, Osawatomie Graphic, May 16, 1935
Bill, Creation of John Brown Military Park, 1935
Letter, J. Walter Coleman to Boyd B. Stutler, October 1, 1951
Clipping, New York Times, October 4, 1959
Speech, Boyd B. Stutler at John Brown Raid Centennial, October 16, 1959
Program, Governor's Day, John Brown Raid Centennial, October 17, 1959

Secondary Sources:

Manuscript, "The John Brown Song," by Boyd B. Stutler
“John Brown’s Fort,” by Clarence S. Gee (West Virginia History, Vol. 19)
“The Historical Authenticity of John Brown’s Raid in Stephen Vincent Benet’s ‘John Brown’s Body”,” by Mary Lynn Richardson (West Virginia History, Vol. 24)
"An 'Ever Present Bone of Contention': The Heyward Shepherd Memorial," by Mary Johnson (West Virginia History, Vol. 56)

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Free Mumia Abu-Jamal-An Update On The Legal Front From The Partisan Defense Committee

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal-An Update On The Legal Front From The Partisan Defense Committee

Frank Jackman comment:   

No question that back in the 1960s, early 1970s that the government, local, state, federal, any agency that had the guns at their disposal went out after the Black Panther Party. Period. We only know now some of the gruesome details of how extensive and frenzied the desire to shut down the main voice of the black streets had been-to shut it down completely with no quarter given. So that it is no wonder that a then young militant black man like America’s number one political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, the voice of the voiceless, would wind up in the cross-hairs of some police authority. And so he did and so the frame was fitted very tightly around his dreadlocked head-very tightly, indeed, as they almost had him strapped into the electric chair about fifteen years ago. Except an odd thing happened. An international protest by labor unions, leftists, progressives, death penalty abolition advocates and, hell, just justice-seeking liberal stayed the hand of the lord high executioner. Stayed the hand so that Mumia and his supporters could fight for his freedom another day. As the article below demonstrates that fight for freedom has been long, hard and frustrating at almost every turn as the government, high and low, has left no stone unturned in its vendetta against a proud black man. Still the long fight goes on as the article below details -Mumia Abu Jamal must not die in jail. Free Mumia now! 

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

Workers Vanguard No. 1095	9 September 2016

New Legal Papers Filed-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

In a significant development in the decades-long battle for his freedom, on August 7 attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a new petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). Mumia’s application seeks to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his 1982 frame-up conviction for the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia has been in the crosshairs of the capitalist state since his days as a teenage Black Panther Party spokesman in the 1960s. That enmity toward him grew in the 1970s when, as an award-winning journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia exposed the racist Philly police vendetta against MOVE, the largely black back-to-nature group he came to support. The crusade against Mumia exemplifies the determination of the capitalist state to silence through terror those fighting the black oppression that is part of the bedrock of American capitalism.

In December 2011, the state abandoned its relentless efforts to carry out Mumia’s legal lynching, only to consign him to the “slow death” of life imprisonment without parole. Today, as Mumia faces a life-threatening hepatitis C infection, the prison authorities are intent on expediting the completion of that sentence by refusing to give him adequate medical care. Even after 34 years in prison, and now fighting his debilitating illness, Mumia continues to be a prolific voice against brutal racist police violence and U.S. imperialism.

Mumia’s fight to exonerate himself was given a breath of life by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Williams v. Pennsylvania. In that case the court declared it to be a violation of due process for an appellate court judge to fail to recuse himself from deciding an appeal from a trial in which he had been significantly involved in “a critical decision” during the case. The offending jurist in the case of Terrance Williams, Ronald Castille, was also a senior Assistant District Attorney during Mumia’s 1982 trial and the D.A. throughout his direct appeals in the Pennsylvania courts. Castille’s elevation to the state’s Supreme Court gave him the license of black robes to sanctify, through Mumia’s PCRA applications during which he refused to recuse himself, the grotesque violations of Mumia’s rights that he perpetrated as prosecutor.

Mumia’s trial and conviction were a textbook frame-up: racist jury-rigging; concealment of evidence; phony ballistics and other manufactured “evidence;” a “confession” concocted by cops and prosecutors; and massive police intimidation of witnesses. Mumia’s trial was overseen by “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, who was overheard saying he would help the prosecution “fry the n----r.” Mumia was denied the right to represent himself and was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom.

Castille’s pretext for rejecting Mumia’s recusal motions was the threadbare claim that irrespective of his prominence in the D.A.’s office at trial, and his signing off on all the legal documents countering Mumia’s appeals as D.A., he was merely an accidental tourist with no particular familiarity with the details of Mumia’s case. This is ludicrous. Convicting Mumia, procuring the death penalty and upholding it on appeal were top priorities of the D.A.’s office for three decades, as it worked hand in hand with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). A more honest appreciation of Castille’s role was offered in 2007 by Michael Smerconish, a Philadelphia journalist who has dedicated himself to seeing Mumia executed for Faulkner’s killing: “Danny Faulkner has had a good friend in the D.A.’s office. As a matter of fact he’s had three: Ed Rendell, Ron Castille and Lynne Abraham.” Mumia’s petition is seeking discovery to reveal the level of Castille’s responsibility during the trial, including his “participation in meetings amongst senior members of the office during which the Abu-Jamal case was discussed.”

Mumia’s petition notes that as D.A., “Castille was undoubtedly familiar with the sentiments of the FOP, and notably, he received the FOP’s Lodge #5 Man of the Year award in 1986.” In 1992, he unsuccessfully sought appointment as Philadelphia’s police commissioner and was elected the following year to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Terry Williams may be the beneficiary of a dollop of “justice” the high court occasionally metes out to throw a thin veil over the racist injustice that afflicts millions of black lives. But another set of rules applies to Mumia. Court after court has refused to consider the mountain of evidence of his innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. The proof of Mumia’s innocence exposes his frame-up as not just some aberration of a rogue cop or a bad judge, but the result of the workings of a whole “justice” system whose real purpose is the repression of workers, minorities and the poor on behalf of the capitalist rulers.

The latest judicial slap in Mumia’s face is the denial of his struggle to obtain crucial hepatitis C medication. On August 31, eight months after oral argument in Mumia’s lawsuit to obtain the medication, federal judge Robert Mariani rejected his claim on the pretext that the lawsuit wrongly named as defendants the prison warden and the prison system’s medical chief. According to Mariani, the suit should have been directed against the members of the state’s hepatitis committee—a secretive body which Mumia’s attorneys had no way of knowing even existed at the time the suit was initiated!

Though Mumia’s condition has waxed and waned after his hospitalizations last year (see “Court Blocks Medical Treatment—Free Him Now!” WV No. 1075, 2 October 2015), there is no doubt that this setback will greatly jeopardize his life. Coating this bitter pill, Mariani confirmed that Pennsylvania’s hepatitis C protocol for inmates—in which treatment is offered for only a few dozen of the more than 6,000 infected—fails to meet constitutional standards. Mariani’s decision affirmed that Pennsylvania’s “treatment protocol…prolongs the suffering of those who have been diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C” allowing “the progression of the disease to accelerate so that it presents a greater threat” of liver disease, cancer and death.

Just days before his suit was denied, it was reported that Mumia is again experiencing itching all over his body—a symptom of the disease. In lieu of getting drugs for hepatitis C, Mumia’s skin condition is treated with a variety of topical medications, often with harmful side effects. He is also suffering from diarrhea—believed to be linked to contamination of the prison’s water supply.

The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has long fought for Mumia’s freedom. We urge union militants, fighters for black freedom and student activists to demand freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal. We urge our readers to donate to his legal defense. Contributions can be sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, c/o the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, 132 Nassau St., Room 922, New York, NY 10038, earmarked “Mumia legal expenses.”

    

On The 500th Anniversary Of The Passing Of Great Painter Hieronymus Borsch

On The 500^th Anniversary Of The Passing Of Great Painter Hieronymus Borsch

Josh Breslin comment:

Back in the day, back in the later part of the 1960s day when guys like Peter Markin, Sam Lowell, Jimmy Jenkins, Frankie Riley and a few other guys whom I don’t remember headed west to see what was happening in California, what the fuss was all about we were crazy for reproductions of Hieronymus Borsch’s intricate, highly symbolic and to our eyes weird paintings. Now we were all corner boys from North Adamsville who could have under other circumstances given a rat’s ass about art, paintings, or painters. Would have passed on such weirdness.   

Except in the wild world of the 1960s when anything was possible, for a while anyway before the tide ebbed and we had to fight a rear-guard action that we are still fighting to this day, we had through Markin who had headed out there first wound up on Captain Crunch’s merry –prankster-like yellow brick road bus which travelled up and down the West Coast for a few years searching, well, searching for something, for that good night or dreamland. And along that well-travelled road we all had as many drug experiences from pot (marijuana) to LSD, mescaline  and peyote buttons as any other travelling members of 1960s “youth nation.”  

Well, you may ask how does the bus, the drugs, the fuss of the 1960s, fit in with a 1500s masterful mad daddy painter of exotic panels and scenes. Here is where it fits, okay. Captain Crunch had a girlfriend, Susan Stein, road moniker Mustang Sally, who had graduated from Michigan in 1960 as an art major. She had prior to our time festooned the yellow brick road bus with several prints by Borsch. And we, all of us who travelled on that wicked highway, would when high, very high late at night would talk endlessly about what we “saw” in Brother Borsch’s paintings. And I for one hope they will be doing it when the 600^th anniversary of the mad monk’s death rolls around. Hats off!