The Way They Were-With World War II Marriages In Mind

The Way They Were-With World War II Marriages In Mind   

By George Logan 

One night Allan Jackson was talking to an acquaintance about the unusual way that his parents had met. Talking to a recently met lady friend acquaintance, Ellen Johnson, met through an on-line dating service, Seniors Please to give you an idea of the approximate ages of the conversationalists, and why they were comparing notes about how their parents met. Parents who had met, married and eventually stayed together in the throes of World War II, against the closing of the European and Pacific wars with a little hope of a breathing space to pursue their romances for future reference. The subject had come up as Allan and Ellen were collectively trying to outline, broad outline, their family histories, and how they grew up, survived the vicissitudes of childhood, teen-hood and the baggage of adulthood to arrive in free-fall at the same table via cyberspace, something that would have seemed impossible as a way to meet for their parents (or even their younger selves which both had commented on in an e-mail response as indeed a bizarre way to meet companions against the old-fashioned face to face meeting and go from there way).            

Such basic personal history talk is no way unusual for people who have barely known each other except in cyberspace as a way to “break the ice,” get a feel for whether the person sitting opposite you is worthy of further consideration (or are you secretly thinking that he or she has the look of an ax-murderer, a goof, or a crazy and how the hell did you ever get mixed up in such an experiment at your age). The whole thing depending on a certain amount “trust” that what was on their profiles, scanty details at best, and on your instinct after a few phone calls. So family history it was in this case, as in others to get a feel for the situation, for any false notes. The amazing thing about this particular combination was that despite the arbitrariness of on-line dating via the beauties of cyberspace Allan and Ellen had actually grown up not five miles away from each other in North Adamsville a few miles from Boston although it might as well have been five thousand miles but that as will be explained as the family histories unfold.            

Here is the way the Jackson family saga unfolded. Prescott Jackson had been born down in Appalachia, down in coal country, down in Hazard, Kentucky known far and wide in story and song as a bedrock town where you dug coal or didn’t work. In such a situation it was not surprising that Prescott once he attained his coming of age, that being fourteen in coal country, he was yanked out of school to work in the mines. That yanking based on the “principle” that one did not need an education to shovel coal just a strong back and good lungs (book-learning his father would always call education when he wanted to upbraid Allan or his brothers about their knowledge from books against the realities of this wicked old world). And so Prescott shoveled coal when there was work during the Great Depression of the 1930s, times that certainly were rough all over. 

Then came December 7, 1941, a day that for Prescott’s generation would be permanently etched in their psyches as the day the Japanese dropped their bomb loads on Pearl Harbor (as for Allan and Ellen’s generation the JFK assassination in 1963 and today’s 9/11 are permanently etched in their psyches). Prescott the next day put down his shovel and took the bus to Louisville to sign up for the Marines (an act, the signing up the next day whatever branch of the service, many other young men did that next day as well). And he never looked back, looked back on his growing up Hazard hometown. Prescott, a beaten down man not noted for a sense of irony, later made Allan take a double take when he had asked his father about why he had left the coalfields. Prescott’s reply was that he would rather have taken his chances against the Nips (the common and probably the least offensive name for the Japanese foe) than to chance his life on the black lung that would have grabbed him if he had stayed at home. Whether that had been a wise decision with all the sorrows of his later life that were pressing down on him was a question left unanswered and with which he went to the grave.

Prescott, although he never talked about the details which Allan had only gleaned from his maternal uncle after his father’s passing, fought in all the big name island wars in the Pacific with the Marines. With the end of the war in sight (after the horrific atom bombings of two major Japanese cities) he was assigned to the Naval Depot at Riverdale about twenty miles from North Adamsville to await demobilization. [The Marines are the soldiers for the Navy for the confused about Prescott’s assignment.] That is where he met Delores Riley, Allan’s mother, who had been then just out of high school and had been working in one of the offices in the complex. They would meet at a USO dance one Friday night and the rest was history.           

Well not so fast history, maybe not schoolboy history or Mister Wells’ history but history nevertheless as Allan had once read as a line in an old time detective novel so family history of the mortally tragic kind. A history against the flow of the times. Whatever romance, or the bite of romance, hit Prescott and Delores over the head there were some hard-scrabble facts that confronted them from day one of their marriage (although not conclusive of what would happen in the future that marriage had because Prescott was a Protestant and Delores a Catholic been performed by a Roman priest in the rectory not the church of her growing up parish without the benefit of parents who were violently opposed the coupling). The hard fact was that one hard-boiled Marine soldier boy Prescott Jackson, high school drop-out and not well-spoken or a very good writer had no skills that measured up to anything in the Boston economy, an economy markedly not in need of an unskilled son of a coal-miner. 

That hard fact would plague him his whole checkered working career as the last hired, first fired in the various downturns that bogged down the American capitalist economy. In what is now considered something of a golden age of working class America during the hegemonic 1950s the Jackson family (parents and three boys, three boys carried to term close together another hard fact) were left out, left out with a hard thump.             

It had not been pretty down at the bottom of society where everybody is prey to the bottom-feeders, where “the projects” cultural gradient stamped everything with its scarcity face. Small apartment, too small for three growing boys, many times no car in the golden age of the American car to get about in that isolated projects location, a weekly struggle to pay rent and food, cheap-jack clothing and a million other hard knock things that come in the poverty train of the working poor. Worse, one hundred times worse, though was the social and psychological scarring due to that sense that one was left behind, was made to feel less human, less worthy. Of anything. Allan would spent his whole life looking over his shoulder at what others had which in his youth he never had. And of course he was the “lucky,” one, he survived although that was a close thing. His brothers, the older a career criminal, the younger beset by massive mental problems which required long periods of enforced institution did not survive the whole experience. As Allan related that last information a tear formed in his eyes for what might have been but never was in the benighted Jackson family.

Ellen had been visibly shaken by Allan’s story since she had grown up not four or five miles from “the projects” in North Adamsville that Allan had grown up in but it might as well have indeed been that five thousand miles because the twain would never meet. Although she was slightly younger than Allen Ellen had parents who also met during World War II and this hard fact forms the backdrop of what happened to two families from the same town. Ellen’s father, Paul, had come from a large, too large Irish Catholic family of twelve children (three from a previous marriage on his father’s side and nine with Paul’s mother), the O’Brians, due to family economic circumstances had been “shipped out,” given up to another family, the Johnsons, who could afford to take care of him. They lived in the Adams Shore section of town. That, given the less than glorious fate of the scad of children left behind was probably the decisive factor in driving her father toward success in that golden age of the American dream mentioned before. Ellen mother, Gloria, nee Crawford, had come from a very prosperous family from Maine. Ellen’s maternal grandfather had been a doctor in the bargain. Although Paul was smart he, and the Johnsons, did not have enough money to send him to college during the height of the Great Depression and so he did odd jobs here and there before the war. During World War II her father had joined the Navy and would eventually be stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base where he meet Gloria who was working doing her civic duty as a civilian secretary to one of the high naval officers on the base. They had met in the office of that officer when Paul had to take some paperwork for approval there. They were married not too shortly after. The rest is history.                                        

We will dispense with what kind of history it might have been except to say that it was very different from what Allan had experienced. Paul used his G.I Bill benefits to advantage and went to college in Boston at Boston University to study business. [Allan’s father could have qualified to use the G.I. Bill as well except there was nothing available that he could have used it for without a high school diploma and besides he had had to struggle hard to just keep food on the table for three close in age growing boys.] After he finished his studies he and Gloria started a family which would grow to three before they were finished. Now Paul had struggled just like Prescott to put food on the table at first (and made Gloria angry on more than one occasion when her family offered to help and he turned them down flat).But Paul was able to roll with the golden age of the American economy. See he had an idea, an idea based on the quicksilver rise of television in the home. Since his own children, including Ellen, would clamor for watching television during lunch and dinner he thought of the idea of creating those folding television tables that one can put food on and watch television undisturbed. He didn’t design the damn thing but his idea was to get somebody to design the table and he would merchandise it. Bingo, the American dream come true.

Immediately that meant, much to Gloria’s delight, moving from Adams Shore to posh Adams Heights (and later to a WASP haven in Alden down by the sea). Meant that Ellen (and her two siblings) would go to private schools and attend prestigious colleges. Ellen was one of the few women molecular biologists at MIT when that discipline was gaining traction. Mostly and she admitted this she led a straight forward very upper middle class life with a minimum of problems (and baggage). One sister had been in some trouble over drugs and radical politics but the family had the wherewithal to squash all of that. The only thing Ellen expressed sorrow over which had not happened was that she had never been married (Allan had three failed marriages under his belt) and had given up that idea a while back for the easier road of companionship. That idea is where the saga of the two very different family histories might join together. Who knows stranger things have happened in the age of cyberspace.                                  

******One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

******One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

 

Sam Lowell, considered himself a corner boy from the time in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of America were filled to the brim with such guys hanging out on the corners, in his case North Adamsville not far from urban Boston at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys. Places like South Boston (an all Irish enclave then where even those who like Sam’s maternal grandparents had moved out of the enclave to an Irish neighborhood in North Adamsville were considered suspect, were looked at with jaundiced eye even by the relatives left behind), Main Street in Nashua (at the time a dying city what with the mills heading south to cheaper labor and eventually overseas and so a tough place to dream in), New Hampshire, 125^th Street in high Harlem (with all the excitement of jazz and be-bop but with all the high segregation of the South except for the formality of Mister James Crow’s laws), New York City, any of a million spots on Six Mile Road in Detroit (never a place of dreams but of steady work in the golden age of the American automobile from Delta Mister James Crow black refugees and the Okie/Arkie white rabble coming out of the hills and dustbowls), the same on Division Street in Chi town (the beat street divide of many of Nelson Algren’s tales of drugs, urban lost-ness, and disappointments), the lower end of North Beach beyond where the “beats” of a few years before did their beat thing (the places where the longshoremen and waterfront workers did their heavy drinking after work and where the sailors off their Pacific ocean ships fought all comers.

At least Jack Slack’s was the last port of call for the crowd, for that motley collection of corner boys picked up and discarded along the way although the core of Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Allan, Markin and Five-Fingers held throughout which had started at Doc’s Drugstore complete with sofa fountain and shiny glass penny candy-case to draw selections from after  school to energize up for the real world activities of kid-dom in elementary school, Miller’s Diner for the jukebox in junior high when they were just becoming aware of girls, maybe having to dance with them, and maybe trying to figure out, the eternal trying to figure out how to approach them without them giggling back and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in early high school before the new owners decided that unlike Tonio, the previous owner who sold out to go back to Italy from when he came as a boy they did not want rough-necked boys standing one knee against the wall in front of their family friendly establishment. That time, those early 1960s times for some reason known only to them, was time that you had best have had corner boy comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed (that “comrade” not a word to be used then in the tail end of the height of the red scare Cold War night not if you want knuckle sandwiches from the unthinking patriotic guys but that does convey the sense of “having your back” critical to your place in those woe begotten streets.

That corner boy business extended through the 1960s after high for a couple of years when in addition to being a corner boy he became a “flower child” along with his long mourned and lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin (who met a horrible end down in sunny Mexico after the fresh breeze of the 1960s turned in on itself and he got flat-footed by the backlash and could no longer hold back his “from hunger”  wanting habits and made the fatal, very fatal, mistake of trying to broker an independent drug deal and got two slugs to the back of his head for the attempt) heading out west on the hitchhike roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade. Sam, now a sedate grandfatherly semi-retired lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he of late had been thinking about the 1950s, about not just those corner boy days but about the music that drove every corner boy, including Markin, make that perhaps most of all Markin, to distraction as they tried to eke out a sound that they could call their own.

Thinking about the 1950s when he came of age, came of musical age, an age very mixed up with that corner boy comradery, that hanging at Doc’s and Miller’s Diner when he started noticing girls and their charms, started his life-long journey of trying to figure out what made them tick, what they wanted, wanted of him, from a girl-less family making everything that much harder, noticing that they too hung around Miller’s in order to play that fantastic jukebox which had all the latest tunes and plenty of oldies too (oldies being let’s say we are talking about 1958 then maybe 1955 hits like Eddie, My Love, Rock Around The Clock, and Bo Diddley showing that teen time, youth time anyway is measured differently from old man lawyerly time) drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio and their cranky old record player music. Music   emphatically not on Miller’s jukebox or there would have been a civil war no question, a civil war avoided in the home after his parents had bought, to insure domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those last year bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of discussion (by the way in that small crowded room, shared with his two brothers, he found out he could discover the beauty of the “hold up to your ear”  transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly scuffings). 

More than that though, more than just thinking about the old days like every old guy probably does, even guys who had not been lawyers as a professional career, guys who you see sitting on park benches, a little disheveled, maybe some crumbs in their unkempt beards, feeding the birds and half-muttering to themselves about how when FDR was around everybody stood tall, every country bent it knees in homage to America, or else, or old bag ladies rummaging through trash barrels looking for long lost lovers or their faded beauty Sam had been purchasing compilations of what are commercially called “oldies but goodies” CD. Doing so via the user-friendly confines of the Internet, at Amazon if you need a name like today anybody, except maybe three people up in heathen Alaska or the Artic,  doesn’t know that is the site to get such material these days instead of traipsing over half the East Coast trying to cadge a few examples, and  purchasing several record compilations of the “best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of rock and roll.

Sam had to laugh about that situation back then as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back holding up the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, on many of those date-less, date-less because although he might have been all “hail fellow, well met” hard-assed corner boy full of bluster and blah he was sister-less and hence baffled by girls and their ways and very shy around the question of asking for dates although he was quite willing to tell each and every girl who would listen to him about ten thousand fact on any of sixteen subjects, not excluding science, philosophy, and the poor fate of the Red Sox then. Although those ten thousand facts would come in handy when he got to college a couple of years later and he had girls hanging off the walls in debate class waiting for him to ask them out then those precious facts did not add up to a date by osmosis but rather incomprehension even by girls like Patty Lewis and Mary Shea who liked him and would have be glad if he asked them for a date without the ten thousand facts, thank you. Here though in something about the mores of the time that young people today might not comprehend girls just waited for guys to make a move, or moved on to the next guy who would, especially if he had a boss ’55 Chevy, like Patty and Mary did). Also girl-less (already explained but here the question is having a serious girl and the just mentioned facts will hold here as well), and dough-less (self-explanatory in working-class North Adamsville, the sorry fate of the working poor, the marginally employed like his father, no money when the rent was due and Ma had not money for the damn rent collector much less discretionary money for dates with girls) on Friday and Saturday nights when he  proclaimed to all who would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who wondered what he was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”

Mainly, through the archival marvels of modern technology, pay-per-song, look on YouTube, check out Amazon Sam had been right, rock and roll had not died although it clearly no longer provided the same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish, techno music, or edge city rock. But Sam always though it funny when kids, his grandkids, for example, heard (and saw) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in some film clip to make the older almost teenage girls among them almost react like the girls in his time did when they saw him on the Ed Sullivan Show and had half-formed girlish dreams about personally erasing that snarl from his face, especially that flip clip of the prison number in Jailhouse Rock. Bo Diddley proclaiming to the whole wide world that he in fact had put the rock in rock and roll and who could dispute that claim when he went bongers in some Afro-Carib number with that rectangular guitar. Say too Chuck Berry telling a candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then, now too from what he had heard, that Mister Beethoven from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and his cronies and move over because a new be-bop daddy, a new high sheriff was in town was taking the reins, making the kids jump on jump street. Ditto curl-in-hair Buddy Holly pining away for his Peggy Sue. Better mad monk swamp rat Jerry Lee Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world that Chuck was putting on fire everybody had to do the high school hop bop, confidentially. And how about Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy over. Yeah, those kids, those for example grandkids jumping around just like the young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah, jumping around for those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the 1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation something no generation seems to be able to escape since the world had no less dangerous, no less incomprehensible today.

Sam had thought recently about going back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies that he had purchased on Amazon to cull out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost continuously since the 1950s (the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and she is wondering when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by listening to the compilations to be remembered.

But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he (or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when that “youth nation” cohort gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sodas, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.

That is how Sam played the game. Two (or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others could fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours or father borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one  all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be there, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when you were younger and at night when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.                      

  
 

A Short Note On The Late Norman Mailer

 

 

There was time in my youth that I devoured every thing I could get my hands on by Norman Mailer. While that urgency is no longer true I nevertheless still find him an interesting political and philosophical opponent. What was the reason for that enthusiasm in my youth?  Simple, it was Mailer’s commitment to do novelistically and journalistically for the philosophy of existentialism what the French writers, especially, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, did for the philosophical argument itself. That philosophy, borne of terminal despair at the carnage, brutality and inhuman cruelties of World War II, the seeming inability of the international working class to go beyond Stalinism and Social Democratic reformism in the quest for socialism and an acknowledgement that modern humankind had let technological developments outstrip its capacity to understand and control those forces, has nevertheless become threadbare with time. We live too existential lives to find much conform in such philosophy.

 

Let us face it; every political and social commentator is confronted with the need to find some basis to ground his or her analysis of the seemingly random events that demand our attentions and explanations. Over long experience I have found historical materialism a much more grounded philosophy for looking at the apparently random individual facts of existence. Although I have not read very recent Mailer all his works I have read lack this connection. So be it. We are after all political opponents. Nevertheless, the man can turn some rather nice metaphors in his arguments. And he sure as hell can write. For this compilation of articles, reviews etc., written in the mid-1960’s I recommend his articles on Mohammed Ali and prizefighting, bullfighting (apparently obligatory for male writers), his stint as a man of the theater and his polemic against the pretensions of the 1960’s New York liberal literary establishment (which in the end is where his real political fight was always aimed). Read on. 

From The Partisan Defense Committee- 31st Annual Holiday Appeal-Free the Class-War Prisoners!

From The Partisan Defense Committee- 31st Annual Holiday Appeal-Free the Class-War Prisoners! Workers Vanguard No. 1100	18 November 2016

31st Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

Featured NYC Speakers: Albert Woodfox and Robert King of the Angola 3

“The path to freedom leads through a prison....

“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”

— James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926

As the Partisan Defense Committee mobilizes for its 31st annual Holiday Appeal to raise funds for monthly stipends and holiday gifts to class-war prisoners, the capitalists’ jails are being filled with hundreds of young activists who have protested the election of racist demagogue Donald Trump, adding to the many more who have been jailed for protesting racist cop terror over the past couple of years.

At this year’s New York City benefit, featured speakers will be Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who along with Herman Wallace were known as the Angola 3. These intransigent opponents of racial oppression spent decades in prison, victims of a state vendetta for forming a Black Panther Party chapter in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Woodfox and Wallace were falsely convicted of the 1972 killing of prison guard Brent Miller. King, who was framed up for the killing of a fellow inmate in 1973, was released in 2001, and dedicated himself to fighting to prove the innocence of his imprisoned comrades. Wallace was released in October 2013—just three days before dying of liver cancer! Despite seeing his conviction overturned twice, Woodfox spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement—the longest stint of any prisoner in the U.S.—before being released this past February, on his 69th birthday.

The PDC stipend program is a revival of a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), an early leader of the Communist Party who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. Like the ILD before us, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and the oppressed in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]). In its early years, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners—socialists, anarchists, union leaders and militants victimized for their struggles to organize the working class and for opposition to imperialist war.

The PDC started our class-war prisoner stipend program in 1986, during the Reagan years, a period of rampant reaction. Those years were marked by vicious racist repression, brutal union-busting, anti-immigrant hysteria, malicious cutbacks in social services for the predominantly black and Latino poor as well as government efforts to equate leftist political activity with “terrorism.” Over the decades since, we have supported dozens of prisoners on three continents, among them militant workers railroaded for defending their unions during pitched class battles—including coal miners in Britain and Kentucky.

The 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle, but the convulsive battles for black rights in the 1960s and ’70s still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party, the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism. Other early stipend recipients were members of the largely black Philadelphia MOVE commune. Among those prisoners to whom we continue to provide stipends are Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost class-war prisoner, and Ed Poindexter, a leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, Committee to Combat Fascism, whose comrade and fellow stipend recipient Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died in March after 45 years in prison.

There is every reason to believe that the period we are entering will be no less reactionary than the one we faced 30 years ago. Class-struggle legal and social defense, including support for class-war prisoners—those today behind bars and any militants who join them—is of vital importance to labor activists, fighters for black rights and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties. In a small but real way, our prisoner stipend program expresses the commonality of interests between black people, immigrants and the working class. The struggle to free the class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters against exploitation and oppression—a schooling centered on the role of the capitalist state, comprising at its core the military, cops, courts and prisons. Join us in generously donating and building our annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all!

The 12 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia. 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 frame-up conviction. In the meantime he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole. Mumia also faces a life-threatening health crisis related to active hepatitis C, which brought him close to death in March 2015. On August 31, eight months after oral argument in Mumia’s lawsuit to obtain crucial medication, a federal judge rejected his claim on the pretext that the lawsuit 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! The Pennsylvania prison authorities have adamantly refused to treat his dangerous but curable condition.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its Native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 72-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eight years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and has received a confirmed diagnosis of an abdominal aortic aneurysm—a life-threatening condition which the federal officials have refused to treat. He is incarcerated far from his people and family and is currently seeking executive clemency from Barack Obama.

Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 39th year of imprisonment. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. This year Eddie, Debbie, Janet and Janine were all denied parole.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter was railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and he has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjury.

All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252. For more information about the class-war prisoners, including addresses for correspondence, see: partisandefense.org.

A View From The Left- Democrats Paved the Way for Trump-We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1100	18 November 2016

Democrats Paved the Way for Trump

We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

The victory of Donald Trump recalls the old curse, said to come from China, “May you live in interesting times.” The sinister implication is that such times will be ones of suffering and disaster. Who can say what Trump—a demagogic real estate tycoon liable to do anything as long as it benefits him—will do exactly? What he has promised will mean much misery and terror, particularly, but far from only, for undocumented immigrants and Muslims. Since his election, there have been reports of sharp increases in harassment and intimidation of Latinos, Muslim women, black people and gays, along with graffiti reading, “Make America White Again.”

At the same time, integrated protests of thousands of youth have broken out in cities across the country under the slogan #NotMyPresident. These have been met with state repression and mass arrests. Free the arrested protesters, drop all the charges!

Trump’s election is bad news. But the election of Hillary Clinton, a woman with the evident willingness to launch World War III, would not have been good news. Don’t buy the lie that the alternative is refurbishing the capitalist Democratic Party! It means that the working class and all those at the bottom of this society will remain trapped in the thoroughly rigged system of American capitalist democracy, which is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The election made it clear that there is plenty of anger against the Washington elites, but it is not expressed along class lines. It is high time that some genuine class hatred be mobilized against the politicians of the Republicans and Democrats, whatever their race or sex, and the capitalist rulers they serve. The power to resist the depredations of capitalism lies in the hands of the men and women—black, white and immigrant—whose labor keeps the wheels of production turning and produces the capitalists’ wealth. We need a multiracial revolutionary workers party that champions the fight for black freedom, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, for women’s rights and for the liberation of all the oppressed in the struggle for a socialist America.

While the Republicans revel in bashing unions, black people, immigrants and the poor, the Democrats lie and do the same thing. But this time around, Hillary Clinton didn’t even bother making a pretense of throwing a bone to working people. The Democrats figured that they didn’t need to, given that Trump was their competitor. After kicking Bernie Sanders’s supporters to the curb—with that supposed leader of a “political revolution against the billionaire class” going on to campaign for Wall Street’s favored candidate—Clinton went all out to win the endorsements of generals, spies, neocons and other operatives of U.S. imperialism. And, as a proven hawk, she had great success in this endeavor.

Nonetheless, Trump took the White House and the Republicans maintained control of both houses of Congress. Demonstrating that there is no honor among thieves, Republicans who had feigned disdain for Trump’s open racism and sexism are now rallying around their president-elect. It didn’t take long for Clinton’s pals on Wall Street to change the channel either; less than 48 hours after Trump’s victory the Dow Jones soared to record highs.

Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump took the Electoral College, an institution created by the “founding fathers” to give more power to the slaveowning states. Clinton isn’t contesting Trump’s victory. All wings of the bourgeoisie are united over the “peaceful transition of power” to maintain the myth that “the people” choose their rulers. As Obama put it the morning after the elections, “we’re actually all on one team.” True enough.

Clinton’s “Superpredators” and “Deplorables”

Sobbing Democratic Party liberals and the smug (though now temporarily chastened) bourgeois media, which overwhelmingly took up the banner “we’re with her,” are blaming Trump’s win on white workers and poor who don’t share what they call “our values.” To be sure, Trump cornered the market on white Christian fundamentalists as well as the former Confederate South and rural areas. But he also won a lot of the working-class vote in former manufacturing areas of the Midwest Rust Belt. Since many of these voters were part of the base that swept Obama to victory in the same states in both 2008 and 2012, it’s difficult to proclaim this was just a revolt of white racist “deplorables.” In fact, the Democrats and their lackeys in the union officialdom paved the way for Trump’s victory.

Upon coming to office following the 2008 financial meltdown, Obama, a consummate Wall Street Democrat, set to work saving the hides of the high-rolling bankers and hedge fund managers who authored the misery of so many. This time around, the Democrats countered Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” with boasts that “America is great.” Small wonder that this didn’t strike a chord among workers whose unions, jobs, wages and living conditions have been devastated.

Trump gained the support of many of these workers by promising to “save American jobs,” threatening trade war against China and further imperialist plunder of Mexico. Even if more overtly wrapped in racism against immigrants and foreign workers, this rhetoric simply echoed the protectionist poison peddled by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. The union tops have long subordinated workers’ interests to the profitability of U.S. capitalism and denounced foreign-owned companies and foreign-born workers, all the while presiding over the decimation of the unions.

Campaigning hard for Clinton, Obama told black people that anyone who didn’t get out and vote for her was betraying his legacy. While there was a sense of racial solidarity with the first black president, the truth is that during his administration conditions for black people continued to worsen: wages flatlined and the median wealth of black families crashed while cops continued to wantonly gun down their sons, fathers, mothers and sisters. In the end, many black people simply sat out these elections.

They remembered Clinton branding inner-city youth “superpredators,” her support to her husband Bill’s anti-woman destruction of “welfare as we know it” and his anti-crime bill, which vastly increased racist mass incarceration and the number of cops on the streets. When Trump rightly noted that the Democratic Party sees black people as little more than voting cattle and described life in the ghettos as hellish, it was a completely cynical maneuver (not to mention delivered to a suburban Wisconsin white audience while segregated Milwaukee was in flames over yet another racist cop killing). But the response of the Democrats was the lying claim that conditions for black people have vastly improved.

Of course, to see what Trump has in mind for black people, one need look no further than his endorsement by the national Fraternal Order of Police. What lies in store under Trump’s administration is as clear as the ghoulish smile on the face of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani as he embraced the heavily armed NYPD thugs in front of Trump Tower. Throughout his campaign, Trump boasted of the support he got from immigration agents and U.S. border guards, who have desperate immigrants lined up in their sights. But while Trump has made virulent anti-immigrant racism his stock in trade, Obama himself has deported a record number of immigrants. In fact, Obama has expanded the repressive machinery of the capitalist state that Trump will inherit, from imprisonment of whistleblowers and preventive detention to assassination by drone.

Contrary to the liberals’ cries, Trump is not America’s Hitler. The soil in which the Nazis grew was that of an imperialist power that had been defeated in World War I and faced the challenge of an insurgent working class that the rulers had to crush. In contrast, the U.S. is not a defeated imperialist country but rather remains the “world’s only superpower.” Nor does the U.S. ruling class currently face a challenge from the working class. On the contrary, thanks to sellouts at the head of the dwindling ranks of organized labor, the bourgeoisie has been waging a one-sided war against labor for decades.

Trump has arrived at the pinnacle of the capitalist state through the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy, not the mobilization of fascist gangs. However, his election has certainly emboldened the fascists. The KKK in North Carolina has announced that it will hold a “victory” march in December. Similarly, during the presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan, the official racism of the White House encouraged the Klan and Nazis. When the fascists tried to hold rallies in major urban centers, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee initiated calls for mass labor/black mobilizations. From Washington, D.C., where the Klan threatened to stage a provocation especially aimed at immigrants, to Chicago, where the Nazis took aim at a Gay Pride demonstration, and elsewhere, we succeeded in sparking protests of thousands that stopped them. Based on the social power of the multiracial unions standing at the head of the black poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror, these mobilizations provided a small example of the leadership and forces needed to build a party of our class in struggle against the capitalist class enemy.

Beware Snake Oil “Socialists”

The lie that the way to stop Trump is to build a more “progressive” Democratic Party or another capitalist party like the Greens isn’t being pushed just by liberals, but also by self-proclaimed socialist organizations. One example is Socialist Alternative, one of the biggest promoters of Bernie Sanders. In a November 9 leaflet distributed at anti-Trump protests, they argue that “despite his mistake of running inside the Democratic Party and endorsing Clinton, Bernie Sanders’ campaign proved it is possible to win mass support for a bold left-wing program to challenge big business for power.”

Far from making a “mistake,” the Vermont Senator was a collaborative participant in the Democrats’ Congressional Caucus for over 20 years, not to mention an avid supporter of U.S. imperialism’s wars of conquest and occupation. He never had any intention of challenging “big business for power.” Now Sanders argues in a New York Times (11 November) op-ed piece that if Trump “is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families, I’m going to present some real opportunities for him to earn my support.” Wow! However unpredictable Trump might be, the one thing you can be sure of is that he will protect the interests of America’s capitalist rulers because they are his class.

The International Socialist Organization (ISO), which welcomed the election of Obama as an opening to mobilize for “change,” now complains that his administration threw away “the opportunity to marginalize the Republicans for a decade at least” because it “devoted itself to bailing out the banks.” Back in 2008, these reformists argued that with sufficient pressure “from below” Obama would be made to fight. Indeed, he did fight—for the ruling class that he represented. In the wake of Trump’s victory, the ISO points to “the potential for building a stronger grassroots resistance.”

The purpose of genuine socialists is not to build a classless “grassroots” movement, which would sow the seeds of a refurbished Democratic Party or another capitalist “third party,” but to uproot the entire decaying system of American capitalism. Our aim is to build a workers party that will lead a socialist revolution. When the workers get their hands on the tremendous wealth of this country, it will be put to use in making life livable for black people, immigrants and all those now treated like outcasts in this society. Thanks in part to the betrayals of the union misleaders, this seems like a pipe dream to many people, who can’t imagine that the working class could ever be a force for social change.

The rulers and their labor lieutenants in the union bureaucracy cannot extinguish the class struggle that is born of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between workers and their exploiters. The very conditions that grind down workers today will propel them into battle in the future. The capitalists’ pitting of black and white workers against each other can be overcome in integrated class struggle, in which the multiracial working class will see its common interests. These renewed labor battles can also lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, ousting the sellouts and replacing them with a new, class-struggle leadership.

With millions unemployed or scrambling to get by through miserably paid part-time and temporary work, with many thrown out of their homes and reliant on food stamps, with pensions and health benefits slashed, there is a pressing need to build a workers party based on the fundamental understanding that the workers have no common interests with the bosses. Such a party would unite the employed and unemployed, the ghetto poor and immigrants in a struggle for jobs and decent living conditions for all. It would also win the working class to oppose the military adventures of U.S. imperialism and to fight in solidarity with workers and oppressed around the world.

Regardless of who occupies the White House, the president is the chief executive of the American capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. This state cannot be pressured into serving the interests of the working class and oppressed, but must be swept away through a socialist revolution that establishes a workers state where those who labor rule. Only a revolutionary, internationalist workers party can lead such a revolution on the road to an international planned, socialist economy.

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale

Introducing The Committee For International Labor Defense

 

Mission Statement

The Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD) is a legal and political defense organization working on behalf of the international working class and oppressed minorities providing aid and solidarity in legal cases. We stand today in the traditions of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense (ILD) 1925-1946, the defense arm of the American Communist Party which won its authority as a defense organization in cases like Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, defense of Black Sharecropper’ Union and Birmingham steelworkers union efforts in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and garnering support in the United States for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 

The ILD takes a side. In the struggles of working people to defend their unions and independent political organizations and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity against their exploiters. In the struggles of the oppressed and other socially marginalized peoples to defend their communities and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity with their efforts against their oppressors.  While favoring all possible legal proceedings for the cases we support, we recognize that the courts, prisons and police exist to maintain the ruling class’ dominance over all others. To paraphrase one of the founding members of the original ILD said “we place 100% of our faith in the power of the masses to mobilize to defend their own and zero faith, none, in the ‘justice’ of the courts or other tribunals.”

As we take the side of working people and oppressed minorities we also strive to be anti-sectarian. We will, according to our abilities, critically but unconditionally support movements and defend cases of organizations or individuals with whose political views we do not necessarily agree. We defend, to paraphrase the original statement of purpose of the old ILD, “any member of the workers and oppressed movement, regardless of their views, who has suffered persecution by the capitalist courts and other coercive institutions because of their activities or their opinions.” As the old labor slogan goes-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

More information-  c_for_intl_labor_defense@lists.digitalexplorations.org

 

A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.

Ralph Morris comment:

“Never in a million years” if you had asked me the question of whether I knew the words, melody or history of The Internationale before I linked up in 1971 with my old friend and comrade, Sam Eaton, asked me whether I had known how important such a song and protest music in general was to left-wing movements as a motivating force for struggle against whatever the American government is down on in the war or social front to squeeze the life out of average Joes and Joanne. To the contrary I would have looked at you with ice picks in my eyes wondering where you fit into the international communist conspiracy if you has asked me that question say in 1964, 1965 maybe later, as late as 1967. Then living in Troy, New York I imbibed all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with me and my corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like my good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly I was a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around our way).

But things sometimes change in this wicked old world, change when some big events force everybody, or almost everybody since some people will go on about their business as if nothing had happened even come judgment day. That event for me was the Vietnam War, the war that tore this nation, my generation and a whole lot more asunder and has not really been put back together even now. And that Vietnam War was not an abstract thing like it was for a lot of guys who opposed it on principle, or were against the draft at least for themselves since once I got my draft notice in early 1967 I decided to enlist to avoid being cannon fodder for what looked to me a bloodbath going on over there. But I did that enlistment out of patriotic reasons since my idea also was to use some skills I had in the electrical field to aid the cause. When I got my draft notice I was working in my father’s high skill electrical shop where he did precision work for the big outfit in the area, General Electric (which was swamped with defense contract work at the time) and figured that is what I could do best. My recruiting sergeant in Albany led me to believe that as well. Silly boy (silly boy now but then he promised the stars and I taken in by his swagger bought the whole deal).

Pay attention to that year I got my draft notice, 1967. What Uncle was looking for that year (and in 1968 as well) were guys to go out in the bush in some desolate place and kill every commie they could find (and as I know from later experience if you didn’t have a commie to count just throw a red star on some poor son of a peasant who had just been mowed down in the crossfire and claim him, hell, claim her as an enemy kill, Jesus). So I wound up humping the hills of the Central Highlands of Vietnam not just for a year like most guys but I extended for six month to get out a little earlier when I got back to the “real” world. This is not the place to tell what I did, what my buddies did, and what the American government made us do, made us in nothing but animals but whatever you might have heard about atrocities and screw ups is close enough to the truth for now.

All of that made me a very angry young man when I got out of the Army in late 1969. I tried to talk to my father about it but he was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All he really wanted me to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And I did it, for a while.

One day in1970 though I was taking a high compression motor to Albany and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave I thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found out later) military uniforms carrying signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars and who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to me shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all I needed, all I needed to join my “band of brothers.”                                

I still worked in my father’s shop for a while but our relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when he retired I took over the business) and I would take part in whatever actions I could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash). Then in the spring of 1971, the year that I met Sam Eaton, I joined with a group of VVAWers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C.

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

Naturally we were arrested well before we even got close to the place and got a first-hand lesson in what the government was willing to do to maintain itself at all costs. And in the RFK Stadium that day where we had been herded little cattle by the forces of order since we had thousands of people being arrested is where I met Sam who, for his own reasons which he has, I think, described elsewhere on his own hook, had come down from Boston with a group of radicals and reds whose target was to “capture” the White House. And so we met on that forlorn summertime football and formed our lifelong friendship. Sam, I know, if I know anything has already told you about all of that so I will skip past the events of those few days to what we figured out to do afterwards.      

No question we had been spinning our wheels for a long time in trying to oppose the war (and change other things as well as we were coming to realize needed changing as well) and May Day made that very clear. So for a time, for a couple of years after that say until about 1974, 1975 when we knew the high tide of the 1960s was seriously ebbing,  we joined study groups and associated with “red collectives” in Cambridge where Sam lived in a commune at the time. The most serious group “The Red October Collective,”  a group that was studying Marxism in general and “Che” Guevara and Leon Trotsky in particular, is where we learned the most in the summer of 1972 when Sam asked me to join him (my father was pissed off, went a little crazy but I wanted to do it and so I did). The thing was that at the end of each class, each action, each meeting the Internationale, or some version of it would be sung in unison to close the event and express solidarity with all the oppressed.

At the beginning some of my old habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first I had trouble despite all I knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country we called Charlie in derision although in Tet 1968 with much more respect when he came at us and kept coming despite high losses). But I got over it, got in the swing. Funny not long after that time and certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites when socialism took a big hit out of favor to solve world’s pressing problems I very seldom sing it anymore, in public anyway. 

Sam, who likes to write up stuff about the old days more than I do, writes for different blogs and websites on the Internet and he asked me to do this remembrance about my experience learning the Internationale as part of a protest music series that a guy he knows named Fritz Jasper has put together. So I have done my bit and here is what Sam and Fritz want to convey to you:                          

Fritz  Jasper comment:

 

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

*****The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website

*****The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website

- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -No Troops To Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

 

Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

https://unacpeace.org.

Frank Jackman comment: 
 
A while back, maybe a couple of years ago as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before  Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Syria again, the emergence of ISIS and their murderous criminal exploits and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.

Over the summer of 2014 there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to big time with the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”

The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.

And as we hit the fall anti-war trail:

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”    Beat The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- No U.S. Troops In Syria! Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!  Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria,  sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- No U.S Troops In Syria! 

***
Here is something to think about:  

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

 
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! No U.S. Troops In Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

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