This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Steppenwolf's "America When Are You Now...We Can't Fight Lone Against The Monster"
During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!
Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of Kingdom and pope
Like good Christians some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands, to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And till the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
The Blue and Grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war was over
They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has its share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But its protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey
The spirit was freedom and justice
And its keepers seemed generous and kind
Its leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
Now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin'
The cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner we can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin'
America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
He Gave It All
Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind
By Freeman Steel
He had it all. Jeffrey
Davis had it all although until he lost it, until he gave it away, he did not
realize that he had had it all. By the way for the curious who thing that they
recognize the named party to this piece Jeffrey Davis is not the real name of our
protagonist but like the Jeffrey Davis that you do think you know from his
various screen exploits our Jeffrey Davis has his own similar reasons for using
an alias here. Part of the reason is that he although not connected in any way
with the screen, with movies or television is well-known in the literary field
for his work and works of criticism. Part of the reason to be completely candid
is that he was not sure that the statute of limitations might not have run out
of various small crimes and legal evasions in his past so that publishing his
real name might not bring to notice in the circles that he formerly ran in to
haul his ass into court, especially the ex-wives he left high and dry. And part
of the reason was that he just plain asked me as a long-time friend (and one
time victim of his youthful cons) to not use his name as a test of my loyalty
after all these years if I wanted the story. I did and so Jeffrey Davis it is.
But enough of
subterfuges and diversions around identity confidentiality and on to the reason
why our boy, my old corner boy from, well, I had better not say from when, what
times or where since his beginnings are well known to part of the public and
that would defeat his purpose in forcing me at virtual reality gunpoint to
guard like a sacred temple his real name, had lost what he had, had given it
all away. Jeffrey Davis’ wife, Lorraine Daley not her real name either since if
you knew that name you, you the literary sort would figure out who that old
corner boy from wherever he was from back in the day was and I would be out a
“think piece” story about the pitfalls of statutory neglect (not a crime, a
legal crime anyway, and not the reason that Jeffrey was worried about statute
of limitation run outs), had recently left Jeffrey high and dry. Had left him
for her own reasons mostly according to Jeffrey’s frail understandings in the
matter to “find” herself whatever that might have meant to her.
Left in the middle of
the night one night a few months back bag and baggage as they use to say around
the old neighborhood when some married partner high-tailed it out of town with
no explanation (in those unenlightened days either male leaving female or
female leaving male but not one leaving one of the same gender just so you know
we are talking about it has been a while back since that phrase had fresh
currency). NO public explanation but it did not take much to figure out that
some stay married forever woman had had enough of the abuse, physical and
mental, from some bastard of a drunken husband (and father which is how we
began to figure such abnormal leavings, abnormal for the old neighborhood), or
that some husband had done the high-tailing with some barroom floozy. In any
case Lorraine left and left no forwarding address-none. Had discontinued her
previous cellphone and presumably gotten a new one although Jeffrey speculated
that in the process of “finding” herself Lorraine may have decided to forgo the
modern conveniences if she had wound up in some ashram as she had talked about,
had threatened to do in previous versions of the downward slide of their
relationship.
Despite the several
month time lapse Jeff had not really reconciled himself as to what had caused
him to forget that he had had it all with Lorraine, had given it all away. Then
one night he called me on his cellphone, called me Sid Lawrence if I have not
introduced myself before and looking over the previous paragraphs it appears
that I have not although the important information, Jeff and my connection for
the old neighborhood I did give you and wanted me to come over to his house in,
well it is a big city so I can say it and he will proof this piece anyway, Los
Angeles, over in the hills and canyons and sit with him while he tried to tell
me how he had by his own freaking hand, his term, lost it all. I wasn’t sure
that I wanted to hear what he had to say but in the interest of old corner boy
friendship I agreed.
We met at his
well-appointed bungalow a few nights later and after a couple of stiff belts of
well-preserved scotch he sat me down in one of his comfortable (and expensive)
easy chairs and sat himself down on his long couch to speak about what ailed
him about what was on his mind. Jeff whatever his literary skills, whatever
line of pure, unmitigated bullshit he could throw at male or female, but mostly
female and whatever the gods had granted him in the wisdom department was not a
reflective man, did not dwell on the past, conveniently forgot the past (as in
the big time con for several thousand hard-luck earned dollars he ran by me
back in the days when for what he called “literary” purposes he ran tens of thousands
of somebody else’s dollars up his snowman nose) and lived in the moment. I
could tell though by his demeanor (and his willingness to sit me down after
only two stiff scotches) that he had been thinking about some past stuff, about
his character which was so explosive, so unstable at times that giving it all
away in the past was coming back to haunt his dreams-or his desires.
When he began talking
about Annie Dubois, his first real love, his, well, I had better not mentioned
marriages and leave everything as affairs so the smart reader will not figure
out who Jeff really is and we would have wasted good time and cyberspace
creating a ruse, I knew he been in a sullen introspective mood. That sullen
part no literary device on my part Jeff really did get sullen which showed up
remarkably clearly on his face when he had to think through some ramification
of some off-the-wall thing he had done. He just hid that trait these days
better in public than when I first noticed his reaction back in sophomore year in
high school.
What I know is that he had not mentioned her name in front of me
for years, hell, decades so I knew that sullen look was real. I should
mentioned here before I tell you how Jeff related his feelings about how he had
loved and lost that young woman, had given it all away, that I was half, maybe
more, in love with her myself, had seen her first at a college mixer but she
after looking me over on a few dates had decided that my roommate Jeff was more
to her liking (they called them the now rightly taboo “smokers” in those days
for some unknown to me reason but probably because since everybody was hopped
up to find some companion the air was filled with anxious smoke, anxious
Marlboro, Salem, Newport, Winston smoke). So I was not disappointed those many
years when he did not mention her name. That night my heart raced at the
mention of her name just like it had when I was some smitten schoolboy. Damn,
Jeff.
I never, because I did
not want to know and you can understand why now, knew the details of the
break-up between Jeff and Annie. Painfully I listened as Jeff went through the
litany. He and Annie stuck like glue together all through college. They
essentially lived together for much of that time after freshman year in an apartment
in Cambridge (not the real location but close-what I do for Jeff in the
interest of a story) during the school year and at various seaside resorts in
the summer. A classic 1960s romance with the sword of Damocles hanging over it.
That sword –the raging crazy and unjust Vietnam War that we were all very aware
of, we males anyway, since its’ seemingly endless travails put despite huge and
growing protests and calls from even many governmental quarters to stop the
damn thing placed us all at risk of being drafted. Eventually as the reader can
probably figure out by now Jeff’s number came up with no further student
exemption and no serious reason not to accept induction he allowed himself to
be drafted. That “allowed” his term later for what had happened to him.
(Although he and Annie were prominent anti-war rally attendees he did not
consider himself under the rules for such status and under his Catholic
upbringing a conscientious objector and under no circumstances was he going to
jail or to Canada the other options that faced almost every young male then. I
was 4-F, unfit for military duty, because of a crippling knee accident as a kid
and the Army may overlook lots of disabilities but they want their charges to
be able to march- and march great distances- as necessary)
Once he got his draft
notice Jeff began to panic. Started worrying about things like never having
been married if he was killed in Vietnam. Not having any family to mourn him
(he had been estranged from his parents for many years, had lived with his
grandmother who just before senior year had passed away). Stuff like that that
if the times were different he would have not given a fuck about, my term. So
he and Annie tied the knot, got married. A bad move, a “war-time marriage” bad
move that they could have seen coming if they had watched just a few old time
movies like I did although even that might not have helped.
He eventually like some
horrible nightmare coming to pass as things developed against him was trained
as an infantryman, the only thing in the late 1960s the Army cared about
training since the attrition rate with one year deployments in Vietnam was
eating up personnel at a fast clip. And
at just that time the only place in the great wide world that a U.S. infantryman
was heading for was that hell hole Vietnam. So after his training and month’s
leave Jeff had orders issued to him report to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington
for transfer to Vietnam. He panicked, or maybe if not panicked then reverted
back to his corner boy ways-or part of the corner boy ethos-lie like a bastard
and hope things worked out
After his leave was up
he suddenly told Annie that he had through political connections had had his
orders changed and he was to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey where he was to
be discharged under some administrative regulation so that he could go work on
the staff of a Congressman in Washington, D.C. Annie was elated (and relieved)
by the news and ready to run to D.C. with him for their new future. The whole
scenario seemed very reasonable since Jeff had worked like seven dervishes for
the late Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and even as he was telling me
this over forty years later I could see where if he had told me the same story
then I would have bought it hook, line and sinker.
The problem though, and
I would have been harassed like crazy for believing one word of the story back
in corner boy days when he (and we) thought nothing of lying about everything
from having sex with hot girls to how much we paid for a shirt (usually nothing
since we stole stuff like that), it was all bullshit. He had just unilaterally
taken himself AWOL for that whole time, the whole few months. The way the whole
thing exploded was that the FBI had come to Annie’s parents’ house (he had used
their address with their permission on his Army information file) looking for
him, AWOL him. He did turn himself in and faced the music. That however was the
last straw for Annie and her parents. Especially Annie since as it turned out
he had done a number of unsavory or illegal things unknown then to me during
their courtship. She left him to go back to her parents’ home. Eventually Annie
got a civil divorce and as a Catholic member of a church who at the time, maybe
now too, had very strict rules about remarriage after a divorce finally got a
church annulment from Jeff. As for Jeff he on his return to the Army did the
honorable thing and refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in the stockade for
his efforts. But the details of that story are for his next serious giving it
all away and besides this is about his first serious love life, his giving it
all away when the deal went down. Typical Jeff though a heel one day a hero the
next.
As Jeff started to explain why he had never
forgotten about Annie I urged him to change the subject and something in my
tone told him that I meant it, meant that I too had not forgotten Annie and
what she had meant to me back then. So he went on about his thunder-struck
whirlwind relationship with Josie, Josie Stein, a woman who I had never met
because I had stayed on the West Coast while Jeff after a wild man run with me
and a few others from the old neighborhood at various times there returned to
the East. Josie would be the first, and most serious, of a string of young
Jewish women that would checkerboard through his later relationships. Fine
women who he never fully understood either. This meeting up with Josie had come
about because like half of the things that Jeff did in his life he was on a
vengeance roll to obliterate all the stupid things he had done by letting
himself be inducted in the Army.
As I mentioned before
after blowing up the world, the Annie world, with his fears Jeff when he went
back into the Army made up his mind not to go to Vietnam, not to be complicit.
He paid the price with two special court-martials for disobeying orders and did
altogether something over a year in an Army stockade (partly broken up by what
amounted to house arrest in between times). He wound up though getting out of
the Army with an honorable discharge to boot as a conscientious objector
through a writ of habeas corpus which his civilian lawyer had managed to
convince a federal court judge was due him. As part of his struggle, his
righteous struggle okay, a number of anti-war activists and Quaker-types came
to his defense, publicized what he was doing and held vigils and other events
in and around the Army base where he was being held. This was a time when some
elements of the anti-war movement began, after the war was dragging out to what
seemed like eternity, to pay attention to the soldiers, the “grunts” who were
carrying out the war on the ground. So Jeff became for a while before he and I
left for California and some mad but harmless dope-enhanced adventures up and
down the Pacific Coast Highway something of a poster child for the local
anti-war G.I. resistance. Some of that reputation would stick for a while as
the war finally wound down.
Josie had been born in
Manhattan but had gone in order to get away from the city, her parents, her
Jewish roots you name the reason to the University of Wisconsin which the way
Jeff told it was a magnet for New York City and Long Island Jewish kids looking
to break out back then, maybe now too. While there she had become radicalized,
had become somewhat prominent in the campus anti-war, anti-imperialist and the
beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. After graduating from Wisconsin
she had decided to go to graduate school in Boston (at BU for the School of
Social Work). While in Boston she again took up her political causes in the
red-hot milieu there. Jeff had met her a couple of months after he had returned
East at an anti-war conference, no, I have that wrong, at a meeting to discuss
having another in the long line of anti-war conferences. This one to take place
in a rural conference center which had been converted from being a farmhouse
about fifty miles from Boston and had donated by some movement “angels” for
such purposes. Such things happened with some frequency then.
When Jeff was
introduced to speak about his G.I resistance experiences he spied Josie in the
audience. During a break he, she, maybe both at the same time Jeff had
forgotten that detail took dead aim at each other (that part he remembered)
although nothing occurred that night. Their big moment came when both had
showed up at the rural site for the conference and they were almost inseparable
for the rest of the weekend. So started the torrid off and on again five year love
affair between Jeff and Josie. According to Jeff they had their ups and downs,
mostly toward the end downs over Josie’s increasingly incessant desire to
settle down, to have a family, to be “at peace” with herself as the turbulent
‘60s shuttered down around them. Jeff in an uncharacteristic denial of some
kind of realty thought that the whole experiment would go on forever and he
could ride that wave into old age.
Funny about that, funny
that he would still remember that he had felt that way those many years ago
since I remember that we had both distinctly understood that after May Day,
1971 when we foolhardily thought we could close down the U.S. government if
they would not close down the war and had been militarily defeated, had taken
tens of thousands of arrests, we had reached an ebb tide of the movement, had
passed the high water mark.
That however was not
what laid the relationship between Jeff and Josie low but yet another of the
contradictions of the angel-devil Jeffrey Davis. Jeff, and I could see where
this came from since I had thoughts along those lines a little myself, had a
hard-edged chip on his shoulder, thought that because he (and I) had come up
“from hunger,” from utter poverty, from
the old projects ethos that the world owed him a living, or something like
that. I got over it by high school, maybe a little later but Jeff took much
longer, maybe still hasn’t gotten over it even now but if you want to
understand why he periodically would give it all away you have to know that
hard sad fact. The particulars this time were that he had gotten seriously into
dope, first speed and mescaline and later as it became more popular and more
available cocaine. Now we all did our fair share of dope during the 1960s,
usually marijuana and other light-headed drugs like hashish and peyote buttons.
This cocaine thing though was something else, had Jeff by the balls. Had laid
him low. This is where all his past kind of came up and bit him. He couldn’t or
wouldn’t stop. Kept it from Josie mostly although at the end she asked him
point blank if he was on heroin or something. Of course a young guy with no
dough, or not much, not working much with a habit that called out to him needed
dough. So he ran though everybody, everybody including leaving me high and dry
out on the Coast broke as well, who he knew for dough using every lame excuse
in the book to get the dough-and of course would pay it back just as soon as he
could.
He didn’t hit Josie
until the end, or near the end. That was when he was seeing some hopped-up Judy
on the side who kept him company in his wanting habits. Once he started asking
Josie for money for this and that after a while she started getting wise, found
out about the Judy from some friend and that was that. She broke off with him
in a minute once she knew the score (prodded he said by her parents who were
not happy that she was serious about a non-Jewish guy). She got an unlisted
number, moved from their sometimes shared apartment which she paid for, or
rather her parents paid for. The end. Gave it all away for a razor, mirror and
a rolled up dollar line.
Which brings us back to
Lorraine and Jeff’s newly discovered troubled mind and why he gave it all away
once again when she left to find herself.
Or whatever had driven her away from him. After a number of years out in
the West Coast trying to “find” myself I finally headed back to the East, back
to Boston via Riverdale after my last stormy marriage that ended not well. Not
well enough that despite being broken as a smashed soda bottle, splintered if
you like that better, I desperately hitchhiked across the country to get away
from that last horrible scene (which was partly, a big partly, due to my own
“from hunger” thinking that the world owed me a living from getting deeply in
debt to the gambling gods). But enough of that this is Jeff’s story and my
travails can wait another day. I just wanted to point that out since this
return to the East meant that I was back in touch after several year’s absence
with Jeff which was deep in the throes of his stormy relationship with
Lorraine. So unlike Josie whom I had to take Jeff’s word on I knew Lorraine
although unlike Annie of blessed memory I had no half in love thoughts about
her.
Jeff quickly went
through how he had met Lorraine since I knew most of the details of the story.
He had been half in and half out of a bunch of relationships which had not
worked out for several Jeff reasons when one night he happened to be in a bar
in Harvard Square, a country bar if you can believe that, when there had been
outlaw country music minute around the East after people tired once again of
the way rock was heading. That “if you can believe that” reflecting the hard
fact that Jeff, whose father hailed from the South, having been inundated with
that stuff around the house hated that music with a passion growing up. One
night by accident he had heard the late Townes Van Zandt at a local club and
something in his mournful lyrics and presence “spoke” to Jeff. So for a while
he was hopped up on the outlaws, took in the scene. You know it had to be some
kind of fad if in high Brahmin Harvard Square a couple of country music bars
had sprung up and so he headed to one of them, Jackie Speed’s, it is no longer
there, to hear some local country band which was making some noise about
breaking out and heading to the bright lights of Nashville and stardom. He sat at the bar as was his habit when he
was “single” in order to survey the scene and maybe an hour in and a couple of
Anchor Steam beers put away, a beer we had both developed a habit for in Frisco
town, he spied Lorraine all in white sitting at a far corner table with a
couple of girlfriends. When one of those girls came pass the bar he mentioned
to her that he thought her friend in white was cute, pretty, something like
that and to tell her his message. And she was. A delicate flower, thin, longest
black hair and a nice smile that he could see even across the room. His type no
question. That girlfriend not knowing what else to say told him to go over and
tell her himself. For some reason Jeff usually only a little shy about meeting
a young women for the first time definitely did not like to approach a table
full of women to make his play. His play was one on one, in a barroom scene
maybe sitting on a stool at the bar. While they took peep-a-boo meaningful
glances at each other nothing happened that night.
A few weeks later Jeff
was sitting at that same bar one night getting ready to listen to what somebody
had told him previously was the “next best thing” band coming along the
pipeline to break-out Nashville this young woman who he had not recognized came
and sat down at the stool next to his and ordered a drink, an exotic one if he
remembered correctly. She was thin, pretty, had longish black hair and a nice
smile. When it came time for her to order another one Jeff offered to buy her a
drink. She accepted and that kind of broke the ice as they found that they had
several interests in common around art, literature and folk music which was in
a serious hiatus then and the reason that she, Lorraine, was taking in the
insurgent country scene that was beginning to take root around town. She had
been brought up in the country, on a farm in upstate New York so she had heard
country music, a different old-timey Grand Old Opry kind of music, and also
hated it growing up. Toward the end of evening as they were chatting like two
jaybirds Lorraine asked Jeff if had ever seen her before. He said no he did not
think so. Lorraine then reminded him of the night several weeks before when
they had done their peek-a-boos. She also told him that she had looked for him
a couple of times later when she had been at the bar. Funny Jeff said he had
done the same. Fate and an exchange of telephones numbers got them on the start
of their torrid romance.
For a while, a fairly
long while by Jeff’s standards things went along pretty well. They had plenty
in common not only in the like to do things department but a commonality in the
ways they grew up, the hard family lives they had faced as kids. Especially
around holidays when under normal circumstances there was to be a shared joy
they shared a “get through the day” kinship. Like a lot of Jeff things though
known to me or not something in his inner life, something in his vacant soul,
his term, would not leave him alone. Would not let him break from his youthful
defensiveness inherited from years of mother harassment and ill-will when
dealing with Lorraine. In the end, or rather toward the end, the last few years
anyway for a whole assortment of reasons from health to intimations of
immortality to use the phrase from the poet’s brain he shut down, became
unresponsive to Lorraine’s needs. They lived together but were in his words two
ships passing in the night (and hers as well as they tried to figure out what
had gone wrong before she had had to flee for her own sanity). Both tried to do
the right thing, sought various forms of help but in the end she had to flee,
had to find herself and what she wanted to be in this wicked old world. Jeff
didn’t like the idea, actually hated it but he grudgingly respected her for her
bravery in striking out on her own. Had to admit that rather than his lying,
cheating, stealing destruction of his companionships he could be accused of
statutory neglect-a more serious social crime, much more serious.
One night many weeks
later after I had written up this piece from the notes I had taken over the
course of time we were sitting in Jimmy’s Grille, symbolically enough only a
couple of blocks from where Jeff and Lorraine had met at the now defunct Jackie
Speed’s, when he was feeling kind of melancholy since her birthday was
approaching, something they both made a big deal over he mentioned a song he
had heard recently. A song by the old-time folksinger Tom Paxton whom he had
liked to hear in the old folk minute days and whom the local college folk
station was playing to honor his birthday (forget his age), She Is My Reason To
Be. Yeah, too late Jeff figured that hard truth out. But maybe he should have also
checked out Bob Dylan’s I Threw It All Away because once again he had thrown it
all away.
The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review
Book Review
By Sam Lowell
Potshot, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2001
Of late I have been on something of a Spenser crime detection novel run, you know those sagas of the Boston-based P.I. with the big burly physique and the no nonsense grit and determination to see a case through to the end, the bitter end if necessary, written by the late Robert B. Parker. I started out several reviews of those books by explaining that most of the year when I review books I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. I also said that come summer time you never know will turn up on your summer reading list and why. So blame this run on the summer heat if you must. I confessed that like any other heated, roasted urban dweller I was looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Then I went into genesis about how I wound up running the rack, or part of the rack, after all there were some forty Spenser books in the series before Parker passed away in 2010. I will get to the review of his 2001 effort Potshot in a minute after I explain how I came to read for crying out loud yet another Parker crime novel.
See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some of the other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This past summer when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989.
Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character with his chalk board scratching to my mind repetition of his eating habits, his culinary likes and dislikes, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, his continually touting Spenser’s physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his so-called monogamous and almost teenage-like love affair with his flame, Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.
Checking up on what Parker had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed and grabbed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts reviewed in this space previously Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out Spenser again. And because we still had several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.
A
link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this
entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom
Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck [now deceased], whom I had read about
in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war
prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose
cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania [former] death
row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have
languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I
could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more
publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a long -time supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing
the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am
honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this
June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious
leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and
sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a
separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An
injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases here. Likewise any cases, internationally that may come to your
attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this
June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War
Prisoners Now!
“You know, Dad, the only good thing that came out of the break-up with Moira was that I finally cooled the fire in my head a little, finally gained a little peace. Funny it came through taking up meditation which I used to laugh at when Moira would urge me to think about doing it to relax my fevered head a bit. Used to call it just another one of those New Age things that she was always touting as the next best cure for what ailed humankind,” Dan Hawkins said to his uncomprehending father, Jethro, a man he until a few years before he had been estranged from once the old man divorced his late mother to run off with some floosy who left him flat and broken, hearted and financially. They had only reconciled after his mother’s funeral when it seemed that such mending needed doing. That incomprehension of old Jethro about what Dan had just told him was nothing but the truth as the old man was “old school,” had grown up in utter poverty in Riverdale, had done his time in “Nam and had been and was proud of his service and exhibited all the traits of those young men, white men, who had come of age in the late 1950s and were unaffected, or claimed to be unaffected, by all the bullshit, Jethro’s term, that passed for wisdom during the counter-cultural 1960s. So his running off with some floosy, his heavy drinking (and at one point drug use), his sense of Vietnam, my country right or wrong, patriotism were all of a piece. All of piece that would make something like meditation, something he had seen the Buddhists do in Vietnam while good American like him were taking care of the shit train that they had let their country fall into by ignoring the “commies” until it was too late. If his wife, if his girlfriends of which he had had many after that floosy slipped away with his dough and his balls, had suggested that he take up meditation for what ailed him he would have shown, had shown for lesser offenses than that, the back of his hand. (And Dan could through a miserable childhood of merciless criticism, and back hands, testify to the truth of that statement. A truth that contributed mightily to those many years of estrangement between the two men.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Dan? How the hell was whatever that meditation bullshit that ball-buster Moira trying to lay on you going to help keep you to together when she wanted to run the show, ’’ old Jethro answered back with that unknowing grin on his face that what Dan should have done was given her his back hand, and maybe a couple of good fucks and that would have stopped that noise.
“Dad, you can’t do that with women anymore and you probably couldn’t even in your day and if you had tried to lay a hand on Ma she would have left you high and dry way before you got tangled up that floosy Susie that broke you. I don’t want to talk about that, okay. Just hear me out with a word and maybe you can learn something for once,” Dan responded plaintively. His father almost began to say something nasty but the look in Dan’s eye told him to back off.
This is the way Dan’s old high school friend, Rich Bruce, remembered what Dan had said to his father one night when they were having dinner at Elmer’s Diner in old town Riverdale where Rich still lived and Dan needed to confide in somebody about what he was trying to do to be less distraught about Moira’s quick disappearance from his life.
Although at first Dan and Moira were crazy in love like many twenty-somethings who were going through their first serious love affairs right from the start there had been tensions, tensions caused by Dan always being in overdrive as he was starting his career in law at a major law firm, Dale, Dale, and Rutgers where the pressure was great to perform or hit the bricks. Dan had met Moira one night at Jeff’s Grille, a local hang-out for law students at Suffolk once they got over the grind of 1L after he had taken his bar examination and needed to unwind. She was a last year student at the Museum School of Art who was there with a girlfriend and he had asked them if they wanted a drink to celebrate his “victory” since he believed he had passed the damn thing on the basis of the written questions. One thing led to another and they started dating and making plans, in the meantime moved in together.
That’s when the heartache began, that’s when that fire in Dan’s head led to many word fights and Moira’s first threats that things were not working out and that she was leaving. In lieu of that, at least for a while once Dan explained what pressures he was under from the high-pressure law firm he was tied up with, Moira decided to start doing meditation with Don Henderson, the locally famous Buddhist convert who ran classes each week at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Moira admitted for a while that doing her “meds” she called it helped to relieve the tensions between them.
Just for a while though as she became more distraught at Dan’s behavior, including a fear that he might strike he in a keyed-up moment. She suggested to him that he might benefit from meditation. He blew off that suggestion, laughed at her and said that if anybody he knew every found out that he was doing such a New Age thing he would be laughed out of town.
Probably Dan’s response set something off in Moira, he wasn’t sure if that was the moment when he had time to reflect on what had happened after she packed her bags and left but it didn’t help. She got moodier the more he got in that same condition, they made love less often and not as tenderly as before, a sure sign that things were going downhill fast. She would speak wistfully of having to find herself, having to see what she was all about in this wicked old world (Dan’s term, not hers) and the kicker, that she thought Dan’s frenzies were affecting her already delicate health. That last part, the affecting her health part got Dan’s attention and that was when he suggested the trip to Paris. She agreed.
The trip to Paris had been great, they saw the museums, ate well, made love better than they had in a while and came back refreshed. Or so Dan thought. A week later, perhaps seeing how great things could be away the pressure-cooker of their lives together Moira lowered the boomthe first time. Said she wanted out. Dan begged her not to go and the only way he could placate her then was to succumb to her request that they go into couples counselling. Dan had hated even the idea of that kind of thing (and when he told his father about what she had asked him to do the old man gave a look like wasn’t he just pussy-whipped). So they went to a counsellor in Cambridge that Moira had heard of through New Age network and while Dan had held his nose at first once he got into the sessions he told Moira that he was in all the way, one hundred percent.
Those weekly sessions went on for the better part of a year until he and Moira decided to take a week’s vacation to Maine. That week was another great time for fun at the beach, eating out and doing a few goofy things like playing miniature golf, going bowling, and going to an old-fashioned outdoor drive-in theater. A week later Moira lowered the final boom, packed her bags and left (that threatening to leave and leaving after a great vacation had Dan thinking about Moira’s own psychological problems but not much). Her argument was that like before she had to find herself, see what she was about and still thought Dan was aggravating her medical problems. She also told him in uncertain terms that he had better take stock of himself, seek some help, maybe see Don about doing meditation or he would become a human wreak.
Well Dan moped around for a while, several weeks, thinking about where he had let the thing fall apart. Knew that he had been responsible for a lot of what had gone wrong, had been an ass about stuff. Then one day on the bulletin board at the law firm he saw a notice that several institutions in Boston, including Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) were putting on a Hubweek, a week of social, physical, and medical therapy workshops and lectures to let people calm down essentially. He noticed that one workshop was being held at MGH with a Doctor Herbert Benson, a name he knew from a book he had read that Moira had left around the apartment one thing when she was looking for yet another New Age idea. This Doctor Benson had proof, had done research, that practicing meditation would help your health or as Dan put it put out the fire in his head, let him be at peace a little. So he went to the workshop and the rest is history. He started doing that previously scorned meditation. And he felt better, calmer. Old man Jethro Hawkins’ reaction:WTF. Some things never change.
As The 100th
Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution
Breaks The Logjam
The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War
before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers
and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense
of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow
down the flower of European and in some cases colonial youth from all classes)
from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist
parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their
unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath
early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts
(as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various
“small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19th
century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other less
lethal forms ofindustrial production).
Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather
thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings
were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own
capitalist-imperialistnation-state
against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the
Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists,
Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of
the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and
their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th
century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that
clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some
much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.
Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like
Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser
capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of
most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting
stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first
international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915,
the famous Zimmerwald conference, one wag pointed out that they could all fit
in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be
over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of
international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple
white-crossed graves dug in the vast bone-crushed cemeteries that marked the
nearby battle fields too numerous to mention). You see, and the logic is
beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was
built for peace-time but once the cannons roared then the “big tent” needed to
be folded for the duration. Jesus.
Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first
months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in
the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a
necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to
send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s
NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian
Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the
Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not
for long because “Long Live The Communist International,” a new revolutionary international, would
become the slogan and later order of the day in the not distant future),
architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many
revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19th century (including
forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future
communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world
imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist
sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism
was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned
into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it
was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by
the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as
1914 turned to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death
trap for the flower of the European youth.
Lenin also has a "peace"
plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate
eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done
from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the
beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international
working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first
year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be
good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing
would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those
beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace
“scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German
soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking
trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer
before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as
an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns
around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things
around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has
suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)
Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn
the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the
war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced
thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole
trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap
for the flower of the European youth.
The ability to inflict industrial-sized
slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the
American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their
way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one
nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20th
century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow
exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war
carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only
the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and
range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by
the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race
to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried
to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain
a big hold in the Asia seas.
The deeply disturbing submarine warfare
wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other
such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred
years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers
and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched
fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or
nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt
before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went
into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do
anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international
conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement
which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the
party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war
budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the
workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in
the Kaiser’sprisons) and Rosa Luxemburg
( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and
Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being
on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of
left-wing revolutionaries and not just them), some anti-war anarchists like
Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would
controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American
entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and
the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the
truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran
for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),were raised and one hundred years later those
voices have a place of honor in this space.
Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations
centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist
governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were
committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in
our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and
awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most
governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war
amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the
Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the
madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper
war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty
of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with
him).
At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11
when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to
be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a
little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to
begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.
So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality
in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including
the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not
listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not
too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass
mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody
trenches and death.
Over the next period as we continue the
long night of the 100th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will
under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions
from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked
like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were
fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places
like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over
the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the
battlefields.
Leon Trotsky
Pacifism As The Servant of Imperialism
Transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive, now a sub-section of the Marxists’ Internet Archive, by J.J. Plant and HTML markup by David Walters in August of 1996. Transcribed from Communist International, English Edition, No.5 New Series. No translator is credited. No date is provided although it clearly dates from the period of the Provisional Government of mid-1917.
There were never so many pacifists in the world as now, when in all countries men are killing one another. Every historical epoch has not only its own technique and its own political form, but also a hypocrisy peculiar to itself. Once peoples destroyed each other in the name of the Christian teaching of love of humanity. Now only backward governments call upon Christ. Progressive nations cut each others’ throats in the name of pacifism. Wilson drags America into the war in the name of the League of Nations, and perpetual peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli call for an offensive for the sake of an early peace.
Our epoch lacks the indignant satire of a Juvenal. In any case, even the most potential satirical weapons are in danger of being proved powerless and illusory in comparison with triumphant infamy and grovelling stupidity; which two elements were unfettered by the war.
Pacifism is of the same historical lineage as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a great historical attempt to order all human relations in accordance with reason, to supplant blind and dumb tradition by the institutions of critical thought. The guilds with their restriction of production, political institutions with their privileges, monarchistic absolutism – all these were traditional relics of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality for free competition, and for parliamentarism as the means of governing public affairs. It sought also to regulate national relations in the same manner. But here it came up against war, that is against a method of solving all problems which is a complete denial of “reason”. So it began to advise the people in poetry, in philosophy, in ethics, and in business methods, that it is far more useful for them to introduce perpetual peace. These are the logical arguments for pacifism.
The inherited failing of pacifism, however, was the fundamental evil which characterises bourgeois democracy. Its criticism touches only the surface of social phenomena, it has not the courage to cut deeper into the underlying economic facts. Capitalist realism, however, handles the idea of perpetual peace based on the harmony of reason, perhaps more pitilessly than the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity. Capitalism, which developed technique on a rational basis, failed to regulate conditions rationally. It prepared weapons for mutual extermination which would never have occurred to the dreams of the “barbarians”of medieval times.
The rapid intensification of international conditions, and the unremitting growth of militarism, knocked away the ground from under the feet of pacifism. But at the same time, these same forces were giving pacifism a new life before our very eyes, a life as different from the old one as a blood-red sunset is from a rosy dawn.
The ten years which preceded the war were the period of what has been called “armed peace”. The whole time was in reality nothing but an uninterrupted war, a war waged in colonial lands.
This war was fought out upon the territories of backward and weak peoples; it led to the participation of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present war. But, as there had been no European war since 1871, although there had been quite a number of small but sharp conflicts, common opinion among the petty- bourgeois had been systematically encouraged to look upon an ever-growing army as a guarantee of peace, which would gradually bear its fruits in a new organisation of popular international law. As for the capitalistic governments and big business, they naturally saw nothing to object to in this “pacifist”interpretation of militarism. Meanwhile world conflicts were in preparation and the world catastrophe was there.
Theoretically and politically, pacifism has just the same basis as the doctrine of social harmony between different class interests.
The opposition between capitalistic national states has just the same economic basis as the class struggle. If we are ready to assume the possibility of a gradual toning down of the class struggle, then we must also assume the gradual toning down and regulation of nationalistic conflicts.
The guardian of democratic ideology, with all its traditions and illusions, was the petty bourgeoisie. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it had become completely transformed inwardly, but it had not yet disappeared from the scene. At the very time when the development of capitalistic technique was permanently undermining the economic role of the petty bourgeoisie, universal franchise and compulsory military service were giving it, thanks to its numerical strength, the appearance of a political factor. Where the small capitalist had not been crushed out of existence altogether by big business, he was completely subjugated by the credit system. It only remained to the representatives of big business to subjugate the petty bourgeoisie also in the political field, by taking all its theories and prejudices and lending them a fictitious value. This is the explanation of the phenomena which were to be observed in the last ten years before the war, when reactionary imperialism was growing to such a terrific height, while at the same time the illusive blossoming of a bourgeois democracy, with all its reformism and pacifism took place. Big business subjugated the petty bourgeoisie to its imperialistic ends by means of its own prejudices.
France was the classic example of this two sided process. France is a country of finance-capital supported upon the basis of a numerous and generally conservative petty bourgeois. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, and to the alliance with Russia and England, the upper strata of the population were dragged into all the interests and all the conflicts of world capitalism. Meanwhile, the French petty bourgeoisie remained a provincial to his very marrow. He has an instinctive dread of geography, and all his life long he has had the greatest horror of war, mainly because he usually has only one son, to whom he will leave his business and his furniture. This petty bourgeois sends a bourgeois radical to represent him in parliament, for that gentleman promises him that he will preserve peace for him by means of the League of Nations on the one hand and of Russian Cossacks, who will chop off the Kaiser’s head for him, on the other. The radical deputy arrives in Paris from his circle of provincial lawyers, not only full of the will to peace, but also with only the vaguest of notions as to the position of the Persian Gulf, and without any clear idea of why or for whom the Baghdad Railway is necessary. These “radical pacifist” deputies provided from their midst a Radical Ministry, which immediately found itself entangled up to the ears in the meshes of all the previous diplomatic and military obligations undertaken by all the various financial interests of the French Bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. The Ministry and Parliament never ceased intoning their pacifist phraseology, but at the same time they were automatically carrying out a foreign policy which finally brought France into the war.
English and American pacifism, despite all the variety of social conditions and ideology (despite also the lack of any ideology as in America) carry out essentially the same work : they provide an outlet for the petty bourgeoisie citizens’ fear of world-shaking events, which after all can only deprive him of the remnants of his independence; they lull to sleep his watchfulness by useless notions of disarmament, international law, and arbitration tribunals. Then, at a given moment, they hand him over body and soul to capitalistic imperialism which has already mobilised every means necessary for its end: i.e., technical knowledge, art, religion, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic “Socialism.”
“We were against the war, our deputies, our Ministers, were all against the war,”cry the French petty bourgeois: “Therefore, it follows, that we have the war forced upon us, and in order to realise our pacific ideals we must pursue the war to a victorious end.”And the representative of French pacifism, Baron d’Estournel de Constant, consecrates this pacifist philosophy with a solemn “jusqu’au bout!” – war to the end!
The thing which above all others the English Stock Exchange required for the successful conduct of the war, was pacifist like the liberal Asquith, and the radical demagogue Lloyd George. “If these men are running the war,” said the English people, “then we must have right on our side.”
And so pacifism had its allotted part to play in the mechanism of the war, like poison gas, and the ever-rising pile of war loans.
In the USA the pacifism of the petty-bourgeoisie showed itself in its true role, as the servant of imperialism, in an even less disguised manner. There, as elsewhere, it was the banks and the trusts which really managed politics. Even before the war, owing to the extraordinary development of industry, and of the export trade, the USA had been steadily moving in the direction of world interests and of imperialism. But the European war drove on this imperialistic development at a feverish pace. At the very moment when many pious people (even Kautsky) were hoping that the horrors of the butchery in Europe would fill the American bourgeoisie with horror of militarism, the real influence of the events in Europe was proceeding, not on psychological, but on materialistic lines, and was leading to the very opposite results. The exports of the USA, which in 1913 had totalled 2,466 millions of dollars, rose in 1916 to the crazy height of 5,481 milliards of dollars. Naturally the lion’s share of this export trade was allotted to the munitions industry. Then came the sudden threat of a cessation in he export trade to the Entente countries, when unrestricted submarine warfare began. In 1915 the Entente had imported American goods up to thirty-five milliards, while Germany and Austria-Hungary had barely imported as much as fifteen millions. Thus, not only a diminution of the gigantic profits was indicated, but the whole of American industry, which had its basis in war industry, was now threatened with a severe crisis. It is to these figures that we must look for the key to the division of “sympathies”in America. And so the capitalists appealed to the State: “It is you who started this development of war-industry under the banner of pacifism, it is now up to you to find us a new market.” If the State was not in a position to promise the “freedom of the seas” (in other words, freedom to squeeze capital out of human blood) then it must open a new market for the threatened war industries – in America itself. And so the requirements of the European slaughter produced a sudden, a catastrophic militarisation of the USA.
This business was bound to arouse the opposition of the great masses of the people. To conquer this undefined discontent, and transform it into patriotic co-operation was the most important task in the domestic politics of the USA. And it was by a strange irony of fate that the official pacifism of Wilson, like the “opposition” pacifism of Bryan, provided the most powerful weapons for the performance of this task, i.e., the taming of the masses by militaristic methods.
Bryan hastened to give loud expression to the natural dislike of the farmers, and of all the petty-bourgeoisie to imperialism, militarism and increase in taxation. But at the very time when he was sending off wagon-loads of petitions and deputations to his pacifist colleagues, who occupied the highest places in the government, Bryan was also using every effort to break away from the revolutionary lead of this movement.
“If it comes to war,” thus for instance Bryan telegraphed to an anti-war meeting held in Chicago in February, “then, of course, we shall support the government, but up to that moment it is our most sacred duty to do everything that lies in our power to save the people from the horrors of war.” In these few words we have the whole programme of petty bourgeois pacifism. “Everything that is in our power to prevent war,” means to provide an outlet for the opposition of the masses in the shape of harmless manifestos, in which the government is given a guarantee that if war comes, no hindrance will be put in its way by the pacifist opposition.
That indeed, was all that was required by the Official pacifism personified by Wilson, who had already given plenty of proofs to the capitalists who were making the war, of his “readiness to fight.” And even Mr Bryan himself found it enough to have made this declaration, after which he was content to put aside his noisy opposition to the war; simply for one purpose – that of declaring war. Like Mr Wilson, Mr Bryan hastened over to the other side of the government. And not only the petty-bourgeoisie, but also the great mass of the people, said to themselves: “If our government, headed by a pacifist of such world-wide reputation as Wilson, can declare war, and Bryan himself can support the government on the question of war, then surely this must be a righteous and necessary war.” This explains why the pious, Quakerish kind of pacifism, indulged in by the demagogues who led the government, was so highly valued by the Stock Exchange and the leaders of war industry.
Our own Menshevik, social-revolutionary pacifism, despite the difference in outward conditions, played in its own way exactly the same part. The resolution on war, which was adopted by a majority of the All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, is founded not only on the common pacifist prejudices concerning war, but also on the characteristics of an imperialistic war. The Congress declared that the “first and most important task of revolutionary democracy” was the speedy ending of war. But all these assumptions are only directed towards a single end: so long as the international efforts of democracy have failed to make an end of war, so long must Russian revolutionary democracy demand with all its strength that the Red Army shall be prepared to fight whether defensive or offensive.
The revision of the old international treaties makes the Russian Congress dependent upon voluntary understandings with the diplomacy of the Entente, and it is not in the nature of these diplomats to liquidate the imperialistic character of war, even if they could. The “international efforts of democracy” leaves the congress and its leaders dependent upon the will of the Social-Democratic patriots, who are tied and bound to their imperialistic governments. And this same majority of the congress, having first of all led itself into a blind alley with this business of the “quickest possible ending to war,” has now landed itself, where practical politics are concerned, in a definite conclusion: the offensive. A “pacifism” which rallies the petty-bourgeoisie and brings us to the support of the offensive will naturally be most warmly welcomed, not only by Russians but also by Entente imperialism.
Miliukov, for instance, says: “In the name of our loyalty to the allies and to our old (imperialistic) treaties, the offensive must inevitably be entered upon.”
Kerensky and Tseretelli say: “Although our old treaties have not yet been revised, the offensive is inevitable.”
The arguments vary, but the policy is the same. And it could not be otherwise, since Kerensky and Tseretelli are inextricably bound up in the government with Miliukov’s party.
The Social-Democratic, patriotic pacifism of Dan, like the Quaker pacifism of Bryan, are, when we come to actual facts, equally in the service of the imperialists.
It is for this reason that the most important task of Russian diplomacy does not consist in persuading the Entente diplomacy to revise something or other, or to abrogate something else, but in convincing them that the Russian revolution is absolutely reliable, and can safely be trusted.
The Russian ambassador, Bachmatiev, in his speech to the Congress of the USA on June 10th, also characterised the activity of the Provisional Government from this point of view :
“All these events,”he said, “show us that the power and significance of the Provisional Government are growing every day, and the more they grow the more capable will the government be of throwing out all disintegrating elements, whether these come from the reaction or from the agitation of the extreme left. The Provisional Government has just decided to take all possible means to achieve this end, even if it has to resort to force, although it does not cease to strive for a peaceful solution of its problems.”
One need not doubt for a moment that the “national honour” of our Social-Democratic patriots remained undisturbed while he ambassador of the “revolutionary democracy” eagerly proved to the American plutocracy that the Russian government was ready to pour out the blood of the Russian proletariat in the name of law and order. The most important element of law and order being its loyal support of Entente capitalism.
And at the very moment when Herr Bachmatief was standing hat in hand, humbly addressing himself to the hyaenas of the American Stock Exchange, Messieurs Tseretelli and Kerensky were setting the “revolutionary democracy” by the ears, in assuring then that it was impossible to combat the “anarchy of the left” without using force, and were threatening to disarm the workers of Petrograd and the regiment which supported them. We can see now that these threats were delivered at just the right moment: they were the best possible guarantee for the Russian loan from America.
“You see, now,” Herr Bachmatiev might have said to Mr. Wilson, “our revolutionary pacifism does not differ by a hair’s breadth from the pacifism of your Stock Exchange. And if they can believe Mr. Bryan, why should they not believe Herr Tseretelli?”
