Tuesday, June 06, 2017

“Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked”- Tales From The “Pennsylvania Avenue Bunker”-In Defense Of Science

“Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked”- Tales From The “Pennsylvania Avenue Bunker”-In Defense Of Science





By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

Yeah, the legendary now Nobel Literature Laureate Bob Dylan had it right way back in 1965, in the time of Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States and major war criminal when he wrote as part of the lyrics to the early folk rock song It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) the following “… even the president of the United States must have to sometimes stand naked.” Maybe he was thinking LBJ but somehow the current occupant of the White House seems more appropriate. See it took LBJ almost four years to get down into the bunker and today’s occupant, do I need to mention his name, has gone down into the bowels of the Pennsylvania Avenue bunker after only four months. That is newsworthy, worthy moreover of some extended commentary in this space as we begin the “death watch” that has become something of a familiar part of the modern American presidential landscape.     

My, our, motivation on this site for this new series of commentaries is that we are truly worried about the fate of the Republic, the American Republic, republican government, these days. That overarching fear is something that even in the darkest days of the Lyndon Baine Johnson administration and the criminally dark days of his successor one Richard Milhous Nixon, a lowly common criminal as it turned out we did not see tattering. I have “confessed” elsewhere that I had seriously underestimated the differences between the wretch Hillary Clinton and this sociopath we are contenting with now and that underestimation has only led me to become haunted by the specter of having to fight in the streets to defend the hard-fought democratic gains of the past couple of centuries that are now on the chopping block. We are in hard and troubled times and as much as I like to give conventional bourgeois politics the back of my hand the times demand more-demand some contributions to build the resistance, build it right now as a firewall against the time when these guys come up and out of the bunker one more time. Starting with the commentary below we will occasionally chronicle this cheapjack soap opera unfolds before our disbelieving eyes. I can only add where is “Doctor Gonzo,” the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson when you need him. He would have jack-hammered this thing picked lean already. Stay tuned for the, maybe, next four year of the race to the bottom.              

********
In Defense of Science-June 2, 1917
I really, really and truly, believed that somewhere in say the 18th century we began to put our “faith” increasingly in scientific investigation of whatever ailed us, whatever mysteries of the universe which seemed inexplicable needed some rational explanation. And that was a move forward for humankind.  I was, having been steeped in that tradition, prepared to let fact and figures, real facts and figures, not stuff found on the ground, taken from some fortuneteller’s table (sorry fortunetellers of the world this diatribe is not directed at your profession), or made up to score points in a governmental policy argument drive my own sense of the world. Apparently that admittedly quaint notion has taken a beating of late in many quarters from those who found those “facts” on the ground.

That is the only way to explain the inexplicable announcement by one Donald J. Trump, President of the United States in the year 2017, to take this country, America, out of the Climate Change Accords (I will not preface that title with Paris since it was never about the country where the damn thing was hammered out, and that term is no hyperbole as the infighting was fierce). Apparently the nationalist America First wing of what passes for the White House governing group has won the day based on from all reports bad information, spurious arguments, cooked data and that stuff just mentioned found on the ground. Not on any look at scientific evidence. Of course if the “rapture” is your frame of reference then fact and figures are silly. 

                 

This is not the place to detail the manifold reasons why an even non-binding treaty should or should not be adhered to but rather what the withdrawal means about a trend that had previously been slowly (and now more rapidly) creeping up on us about the value of the scientific method that guys like Galileo went to the mat trying to defend. Tried to take out of snake charmer realm and put the evidence from nature, society, on firmer footing. Not infallible, or at least I do not believe that was the intent of those who strove to create what we have come to call what seemingly is also a quaint idea-The Enlightenment. Unfortunately that progressive trend is under assault and while if I had my druthers I would prefer to fight from a more socialistic perspective I am more than willing to fight for the heritage of that very Enlightenment that has gotten us pretty far in the past couple of centuries. If you fear for the Republic, the American Republic, then you too should join and built the resistance. The fight is on and you had better start taking an active side before the waters, winds, fires, and the deluge that we will now stand even more defenseless against take us all down.            

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”




Zack James’ comment June, 2017:
You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   


Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  


Book Review

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, Bantam Books, New York, 1968


The subject of “Gonzo journalism”, a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets “down and dirty” with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, “nothing but the facts, Jack” back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone’s face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to “edge city” in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the “new journalism”. The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak “edge city” Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill “straight” journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at "gonzo” didn’t work either. Here some of Wolfe’s entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms. The most polished form of those attempts is the early, now classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Below is a sketch of that work from another entry in this space today that gives the highlights:


"And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride that cemented their collective experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.

Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, Zen, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breathe, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….unhip. And almost no one, hip, unhip, cloven-footed, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as unhip.

The others, those who claim memory lose today on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents." Actually, read this book.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”




Zack James’ comment June, 2017:
You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   


Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  



Markin comment:

Okay, blame this foam-flecked entry totally on old wanna-be “gonzo” journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe and his infernal 1960s classic countercultural expose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’ll explain the ‘wanna-be’ part in some book review, or in some of other place where talking about and discussing the "new journalism (1960s-style, including the likes of Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion) is called for. But, at least for now, I want to explain the why of that ‘where the blame should be placed’.

And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride that cemented their zany experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.

Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, Zen, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breathe, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….unhip. And almost no one, hip, unhip, cloven-footed devil, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as unhip.

The others, those who today claim memory loses on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents.

Today, however, I am excised on another point. Wolfe mentioned, repeatedly, the quasi-religious, mystical nature of the Kesey-gathered Merry Prankster tribal experience. And central to that, as to all such mystical communal experiences, is the emergence of some kind of “messiah” figure, or at least a chief mystic who guides the group’s actions, including the inevitable breakout into the real wide world when that time comes. Then, the breakout time, is when the power struggle really begins as the increased number of acolytes gather round and begin the long process of the selection of the “ins” and “outs”. To speak nothing of the very serious question of who is to “guard” the wisdom tablet (maybe, literally, a tablet in this case). Or who conducts the ceremonials to adhere the devotees. This is well-trodden ground, in any case.

And what in hell am I mad about that little quirky business for? Kesey was hardly the first guy or gal, and will hardly be the last either, to come down off the mountain to spread the “good news”, if only among the elect-at first. Hear me out though. I am sick and tired, utterly sick and tired, after a life time of listening, or really, half-listening to the latest screeds of the “god-seekers”, secular or religious. And of the side show carnival guys claiming for the umpteenth time they have the “new message” about human redemption. And of the about the 287th, or so, rendition of the story line of those who succumbed to some “conversion” religious experience. Enough, right? Well, perhaps, but what I want to blurt out is that, damn, I think Wolfe, and through him, Kesey were basically right that this was a time, the 1960s that is , when we, and I include myself in this as well, were looking for the “new messiah.”

For starters though, just in case the reader is caught short on the term “new messiah”, forget all the rough and tumble organized traditional religious stuff. That was a non-contender, then anyway. Hell, that was what we were running away from, and running as hard as our wobbly, drug-filled heads would force our legs to take us. (The three of us who have "confessed" to such activity in those days, excuse me. I don’t know in what condition the others were in during their runs.) No, any “church” had to be in some freshly-mown meadow, or among the squirrel-infested pines, or at the edge of the earth on some place where ‘our homeland’ the ocean, the sand and our sense of the vastness of space met. And any “preacher”, of the “good book” or, for that matter, of the virtues of demonology had to wear multi-colored, flowing home-spun robes, or some discarded army& navy store uniform, or some sheepskin vest, or maybe nothing. But, please, no collars around your neck, or ours. There were plenty of candidates looking for the job, looking to be heard, looking to be listened to and looking for those who were looking, for awhile anyway, until they ran out of steam, ran off with their sweeties, or with the cash box.

What we were looking for, at least what I think we were looking for was someone, once the traditional politicians proved to have feet of clay, or were mired in mud and blood up to their necks, or were blown away, to lead us to the “Promised Land.” That’s right the “Promised Land”, not some old quirky, queasy, hard scrabble, no air place that we all knew, or all of us that were “hip” knew, was not where we were at then. You know sometimes it was as simple as finding someone who had an answer or two. If they had a plan, or had the whole thing mapped out, so much the better. Mainly they just didn’t have to shout about it to the whole square world and bring the squares in to corner it, corral it, organize it, and make it a thing that not even your square, square parents could love.

And that, my friends, is where someone like Ken Kesey got some play, got his edge. His simple Western- bred (American Western-bred) ways, his obvious literary talents that acted as a magnet for those who saw no real difference between mad scientist Kesey and ‘mad scientist’ McMurphy (in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), and his strong branding personality held the Prankster commune together. For a while. Until he too proved to have feet of clay, and fled. But here is the main point in the end it required just too much of a leap of faith to sail into the mystic with the mystics. For those like me, and there were many others like me, we had our mystical moment but when the deal went down we had to look elsewhere to other names to “seek the newer world.” World historic names no one, except, maybe, those now professed non-inhalers and vanguard neo-con cultural dead-enders, would confuse with mysticism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky.

Films To While the Time By- Before Gonzo Journalism Was Gonzo- Johnny Depp’s “The Rum Diary” (With Kudos To Hunter S. Thompson)

Films To While the Time By- Before Gonzo Journalism Was Gonzo- Johnny Depp’s “The Rum Diary” (With Kudos To Hunter S. Thompson)




Zack James’ comment June, 2017:
You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   


Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  


DVD Review

The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, GK Films, 2011


Okay, here is the plot line of the film under review, the adaptation of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s legendary (more later on that) The Rum Diary, straight out of the gate. A young aspiring American writer, of the male persuasion, Paul Kemp, played by Thompson pal Johnny Depp, seeks employment in the newspaper business down in then backwater colonial Puerto Rico in the late cold war red scare early 1960s. Said writer, working to win his spurs and to make a name for himself tries six ways to Sunday to upgrade himself as a professional and the newspaper as well (based on a real the San Juan Star of the time). Oh, and chase a few windmills to right some of the egregious wrongs of this world as the young are prone to do (the major wrong confronting him being double-triple rip-out of the place by hungry, very hungry real estate developers). Problems encountered in chasing those windmills: said budding journalist is a bit of a drunk, a bit too close to some ex-pat fellow journalists who gravitated to PR just to be flaky in peace, and a bit too close (but one cannot blame him on this one) to one very hot blonde who happens to be slumming in Puerto Rico just then. But, trust me, one Paul Kemp will straighten that whole thing out, or have us go mad trying.

Sound familiar? Well, for any Hunter Thompson aficionado, and count me as one, hell, any half- aficionado, this plot line is very, very much like the life, the early life of one Hunter S. Thompson. And how would we know?
Well we have read the letters, we have read the Rolling Stone articles, hell we have read Songs of the Doomed and got a taste for snippets of The Rum Diary there. So when viewing this film there was a certain disappointment (just a little) that this did not turn out to be the great film adaptation of Hunter Thompson’s stab at the great American novel.

And here is where the “more later” mentioned above on The Rum Diary comes in. Hunter Thompson, seemingly, spend endless hours as far back as the early 1970s (maybe earlier )trying get this novel published (and in publishable form), and into film form. But here is a case where life (his, his later life anyway) outdid fiction. The ambience of the film seems very dated, very dated indeed in the post-Doctor Gonzo age. For what it is worth this is my “skinny” on Thompson’s career. He was one of the premier journalists of the last half of the twentieth century but as a novelist he was well behind his heroes Fitzgerald and Hemingway. As for Johnny Depp’s performance, well, Johnny Depp knows, knows deep in his bones, how to play off-the wall characters and does a better job, a much better job, here than in his attempt at channeling Hunter Thompson in the film adaptation of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Selah.

*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind


*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

 
Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier

Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up

Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms

Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby
Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh

Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Zack James

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly, wrapped it up neatly in a pretty bow all set for posterity except for the media types who lived day by day in those merciful times for scraps to feed the teletype hot wires and by on-the-make politicians who to this day attempt to make capital making sport of what in the final analysis was a half-thought out desire to create the “newer world” that some old-time English poet was harping about. That seamless thread business had been distracting Frank Jackman’s attention of late now that a new generation of media-types are at hand who want to refight that social battle and the politicians are whipping   up the raw meat good old boys and girls and the staid as well to provide the troops for that new battle against some phantom in their heads. Despite all the rhetoric, despite all the books written disclaiming any responsibility by those who led the march, despite all those who have now “seen the light” and have hopped back into the fold in academia and the professions (in fact that march back to what everybody used to call bourgeois society started the day after the whole movement ebbed or the day they got their doctorates or professional degrees) there was some question even in Franks’ own mind about whether “the movement” for all its high gloss publicity and whirlwind effect dominated the play as much as he and his kindred had thought then or can lay claim to these forty plus years later.
Place plenty of weight on Frank’s observation, maybe not to take to the bank but to have some knowledge about the limits to what a whole generation in all its diversity can claim as its own mark on society and history. Place plenty of weight for the very simple reason that he went through the whole thing in almost all of its contradictions. Had been raised under the star of parents who slogged through the Great Depression although that was a close thing, a very close thing for some like Frank’s parents who were desperately poor. His poor besotted mother having to leave home and head west looking, looking for whatever there was out there before coming back home with three dollars in hand, and maybe her virtue how can you ask that question of your mother when you wouldn’t think to look at her when young, later too, that she was capable of sex, not the sex you had at your pleasure with some sweet Maryjane. His father out of the Southern winds, out of tar-roof shack of a cabin, half naked, down in the coal-rich hills and hollows of Appalachia, the poorest of the poor, leaving that desperate place to seek something, some small fame that always eluded him. They together, collectively, slogged through the war, World War II, his father through Pacific fight, the most savage kind, had his fill of that damn island hopping and his mother waiting, fretfully waiting for the other shoe to drop, to hear her man had laid his head down for his country in some salted coral reef or atoll whatever they were. Get this though, gladly, gladly would lay that head down and she if it came right down to it would survive knowing he had laid that precious head down. That was the salts they were made of, the stuff this country was able to produce even if it had very little hand in forming such faithful servants so no one would, no one could deny their simple patriotism, or doubt that they would pass that feeling on to their progeny.
Made that progeny respect their music too, their misty, moody I’ll see you tomorrow, until we meet again, I’ll get by, if I didn’t care music, music fought and won with great purpose. But Frank balked, balked young as he was, with as little understanding as he had, the minute he heard some serious rhythm back-beat absent from that sugary palp his parents wanted to lay on him and he would, young as he was, stand up in his three brother shared room (when they were not around of course for they older “dug” Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney, stuff like that) and dance some phantom dance based on that beat he kept hearing in his head, and wondered whether anybody else heard what he heard (of course later when it was show and tell time in the 1960s that beat would be the thing that glued those who were kindred together, funny they were legion). Caught the tail end of the “beat” thing that those older brothers dismissed out of hand as faggy, as guys “light on their feet” and gals who seemed black-hearted blank and neurotic. But that was prelude, that, what did somebody in some sociology class call it, the predicate.                      
As the 1960s caught Frank by his throat, caught him in its maw as he liked to call it to swishy-dishy literary effect he got “religion” in about six different ways. Got grabbed  when the folk minute held sway, when guys like Bob Dylan and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez preached “protest” to the hinterlands, reaching down to places like Frank’s Carver, nothing but a working poor town dependent on the ups and downs of the cranberry business. At one time the town was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it. That up and down business depending too on whether people were working and could afford to throw in cranberry sauce with their turkeys come Thanksgiving and Christmas or would be reduced to the eternal fallback beans and franks. But see Carver was close enough, thirty or forty miles south of Boston to Beacon Hill and Harvard Square to be splashed by that new sound and new way of going on dates too, going to coffeehouses or if times were tough just hang around the Harvard Square’s Hayes-Bickford watching with fascination the drunks, hipsters, dipsters, grifters, winos, hoboes, maybe  an odd whore drinking a cup of joe after some John split on her, but also guys and gals perfecting their acts as folk-singers, poets, artists and writers.
Grabbed on the basis of that protest music to the civil rights movement down South, putting Frank at odds with parents, neighbors and his corner boys around Jack Slack’s bowling alleys. Grabbed too the dope, the hope and every girl he could get his hands on, or get this to tell you about the times since he was at best an okay looking guy, they could get their hands on him, on those bedroom blue eyes of his they called it more times than not, that came with the great summers of love from about 1965 on.
Here’s where the contradictions started get all mixed up with things he had no control over, which he was defenseless against. So grabbed too that draft notice from his friends and neighbors at the Carver Draft Board and wound up a dog soldier in Vietnam for his efforts. Wound up on cheap street for a while when he came back unable to deal with the “real” world for a while. That failure to relate to the “real” world cost him his marriage, a conventional marriage to a young woman with conventional white picket fence, a little lawn, kids, and dogs dreams which only had happened because he was afraid that he would not come back from “Nam in one piece, would never get to marriage for what it was worth. Grabbed the streets for a while before he met a woman, a Quaker woman, who saved him, for a while until he went west with some of his corner boys who had also been washed by the great push. Did the whole on the road hitchhike trip, dope, did communes, did zodiacs of love, did lots of things until the hammer came down and the tide ebbed around the middle of the 1970s. So yeah Frank was almost like a bell-weather, no, a poster child for all that ailed society then, and for what needed to be fixed.      
That decade or so from about 1964 to about 1974 Frank decided as he got trapped in old time thoughts and as he related to his old friend Jack Callahan one night at his apartment in Cambridge as they passed a “joint” between them (some things die hard, or don’t die) was nevertheless beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers like him, Jack, Frankie Riley, the late Peter Markin, Sam Lowell and a lot of other guys he passed the corner boy night with (the ones like him born immediately after the war as the troops came home, came off the transports, and guys and gals were all hopped up to start families, figure out how to finance that first white picket fence house and use the GI bill to get a little bit ahead in the world, at least get ahead of their parents’ dead-end great depression woes) who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since those of the so-called generation of ’68, so called by some wag who decided that the bookends of the rage of the American Democratic Convention in Chicago that year and the defeat of the revolutionary possibilities in France in May of that year signaled the beginning of the ebb tide for the whole thing, for those who are still up for a fight against the military monster who is still with us are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive.
Thinking back a bit to that time, Frank as the dope kicked in, a thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, some things new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest came popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of their  childhoods (that time always absurdly symbolically topped off by the sight of elementary school kids, them , crouched under some rickety old desk arms over their heads some air-raid drill practice time as if, as the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are still alive from that time can attest to, that would do the slightest bit of good if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs hit.
Yeah, the Cold War time too when what did they know except to keep their obedient heads down under their desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if they were ready to face the bleak future if they survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally Frank remembered telling somebody then that he would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take his  chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do them.)
For a while anyway Frank and the angel-saints were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with the good green world, the world even if they had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of those who were caught up in the whirl thought it would be for only a while or at least thought it would fade so fast just as they thought, young and healthy as they were, that they would live forever. But if you, anybody when you really think about the matter, took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where Frank liked to start dating his own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then he told Jack he would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South in the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence Frank had found that these too are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star  James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando in The Wild One and a brooding Montgomery Cliff in almost anything during those days, take The Misfits for one, to the mix of what they could relate to as icons of alienation and angst .)   
An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys (and very few gals since that Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-William Burroughs-Allen Ginsberg mix was strictly a male bonding thing) who listened to the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz and wrote up a storm based on that sound, declared a new sound, that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang.
Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what Frank, and some of his friends although not the Carver corner boys except Markin, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed their parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.”
Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for parents Frank wanted guys who set the buzz going, let them think about getting some kicks out of life, that maybe with some thought they would survive, and if they didn’t at least we had the kicks.

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of Frank’s generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought as Frank got older and heard more stories about the guys who like him didn’t make it back to the “real” world after “Nam, didn’t have a sweet mother Quaker lady like Frank to save them, those guys you see downtown in front of the VA hospitals, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.
There were more things, things like the “Pill” (and Frank would always kid Jack who was pretty shy talking about sex despite the fact that he and Chrissie, his high school sweetheart, had had four kids when he asked what pill if you need to know what pill and its purpose where have you been) that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, sex, sex beyond the missionary position of timeless legends, something very different if the dramatic increase in sales of the Kama Sutra meant anything, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward.
Cultural things too like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters (stuff that they only knew negatively about, about staying away from, thru reefer madness propaganda, thru the banning of some drugs that were previously legal like sweet sister cocaine and taunt Nelson Algren hard life down at the base of society in films like The Man With The Golden Arm), the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name (Frank’s moniker at one time was Be-Bop Benny draw what you will out of that the idea being like among some hipster blacks, although with less reason, they wanted to get rid of their  slave names)  fashion (the old college plaid look fading in the face of World War II army surplus, feverish colors, and consciously mismatched outfits and affectation (“cool, man, cool” and “right on’ said it all). More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission when on the road, or later on the bum). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of Frank’s kindred in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of them had their specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that they still lived with for not taking the omens more seriously. (Frank’s ebb tide, as he had  described to Frankie Riley one time, was the events around May Day 1971 when they seriously tried, or thought they were seriously trying, to shut down the government in D.C. if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for their efforts. After those days Frank, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than they were about creating the new and that they had better rethink how to slay the monster they were up against and act accordingly.)

Then Frank passed Jack a photograph that he had taken from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Song Society that his wife, Sarah, who worked to put the item out to raise funds for folk music preservation (see above) that acted as another catalyst for this his short screed, and which pictorially encapsulated a lot of what went then, a lot about “which side were you on” when the deal went down. This photograph Frank pointed out to Jack was almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-“newer world” mix stirred up in the 1960s.
Three self-assured women (the “girls” of photograph a telltale sign of what society, even hip, progressive society thought about women in those slightly pre-women’s liberation time but they would learn the difference) comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt (and mother dread thoughts about whether daughter knew about the pill, and heaven forbid if she was sexually active, a subject not for polite society, not for mother-daughter conversation, then she damn better well know, or else).
They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no, outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, Frank’s choice if you could call his induction a choice what else could he have done gone to Canada, no,  military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home carried on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors, read sexual favors, okay, if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured there.
Frank wondered how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. His own wife, quickly married at the time was if anything more gung-ho about stopping the red menace than his parents. Frank did not refuse induction for a whole bunch of reasons but then he did not have any girlfriends like that sweet mother Quaker woman later, who made that demand, his girl- friends early on, and not just his wife if anyway were as likely to want him to come back carried on a shield as those warrior-proud ancient Greek women. Too bad. But Frank said to Jack as Jack got up ready to head home to Hingham and Chrissie that he liked to think that today they could expect more women to be like the sisters above. Yeah, more, many more of the latter, please as Frank and his comrades in Veterans for Peace continue to struggle against the night-takers in the nightmare world of endless war.

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Herman Bell

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Herman Bell



http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html



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, 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 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 longtime 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 in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that 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!






REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRICA



  • *America Love It, Or Leave It?-No, Stay And Fight For Our Socialist Future-Join The Resistance!

    *America Love It, Or Leave It?-No, Stay And Fight For Our Socialist  Future-Join The Resistance! 



    COMMENTARY

    Recently I reviewed Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson, a book on the very topical issue of the rise of the American Empire. As readers know this space is dedicated to the spreading of socialist ideas. I hold Marx, Lenin and Trotsky in very high regard. I have made no secret of that. I nevertheless have gotten a comment from some irate reader stating that I could use some reality therapy by taking a trip to North Korea for a grass diet. I have been in politics for a long time and have had my share of barbs thrown at me. And done the same in return. That comes with the territory. What has got my Irish up is the utter sameness of the response when one tweaks the “belly of the beast”. Below is my response to that irate reader.

    “I am tired of every Tom, Dick and Harry that wants to defend the American Empire, consciously or unconsciously and I suspect here consciously, volunteering to act as my personal travel agent. In the bad old days of the Cold War when I mentioned that nuclear disarmament might be a rationale idea I was advised to go thresh wheat on some Soviet collective farm. When I argued that mainland China was the legitimate government there I was kindly told to cull rice in some people’s commune. After protesting the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and asking for fair play for Cuba it was suggested that cutting sugar cane might be my life’s work. When I protested that America was raining all hell down on Vietnam some unkindly souls pointed out that I might prefer an air raid shelter in Hanoi. Now I am advised to go eat grass in North Korea. No, I will not have it. My forbears on my father’s side were run out of England in the early 1800’s and my mother’s forbears came here on the ‘famine ships’ from Ireland. That may not give me the pedigree of the Mayflower crowd but it is damn good enough. My fight is here. I will make my own travel plans, thank you.”

    Monday, June 05, 2017

    We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

    We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

    By Frank Jackman

    Usually I place articles and announcement from various left-wing and progressive groupings that I do not necessarily agree with but think that the general radical-left liberal milieu might find of interest in a blog site dedicated to American Left History (and its complement cultural component) past and present. I have noted more than once that I usually do not comment on the views expressed and if I do have differences I can either write my own comments or if the differences are severe or reflect bad taste not post the item. Occasionally in the struggle against the ugly forces that have reared their heads in the age of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States and apparently nothing but a common criminal and maybe a sociopath, have felt the wind at their backs under his tenure I find some article or statement which I am in general agreement with and will as here take the time to express general if not total solidarity with the views expressed by others.  

    The most important point made in the article belong which deals with an analysis and program to defeat the emergent serious extra-parliamentary right-wing threat is that we must learn the hard lessons of history on the question of stopping the fascist and fascistic elements in the egg. If that had been done in Germany at any point up to and including 1933 the history of the Western world could very well have taken a different trajectory and we would today probably not be faced with what looks like yet again a global right-wing counter-revolutionary movement baring its knuckles. Closer to home we have to nip the small but growing fascist threat which seemingly is turning the cold civil war we have been facing for a while now and which is getting more heated in the bud- and in the streets.

    A second point to note is knowing what period we are in and who is and who is not going to benefit from the rise of the fascists (call them as they call themselves “the alt-right” it is the same damn thing that has been with us since post-World War I times). The rise of Trump was by parliamentary means-by regular bourgeois norms elections and does not represent a fascist take-over as some claim. The ruling class at this moment has not been defeated anyplace in the world militarily, at least where it would fatally hurt, as it did in Germany after their World War I defeat and that ruling class here is not now, and I emphasize not now, confronted by any militant mass left-wing movements that would threaten their power necessitating the need to go beyond their normal military/police forces to curb.   

    As this cold civil war heats up there will be plenty of those in the opposition, on our side, who want to call on the government to stop the fascists, or better yet, call on the opposition party, the Democrats, to do something about the matter. Wrong. While we may unite with all who want to oppose the fascist threat on the streets, including democrats, to rely on the good offices of any establishment political organization to do our work for us is fool-hardy and in the end dangerous. We must rely centrally on our ability to gather masses of working people and the oppressed to stop these sewer rats. History shows no other way but a straight up fight to the finish or else these scumbags, excuse my vulgar usage but we are in a fierce fight and the niceties of everyday politics are not called for, will be further emboldened. Those who profess some “rational” and “reasoned” approach to deal with this life-threatening menace are doomed to the scrap heap.

    Finally there is no room for being “liberal” in this fight. These fascists are not a literary/political club movement we can debate with or permit to spew their trash talk under the banner of “free speech.” Those who thought that approach might work in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s either had to flee into exile or found themselves in some death camp. We can give no quarter here. Period. 


    So yes, for once, on this issue of fighting the emerging fascist threat I stand in solidarity with the views expressed below with its sober analysis and program to fight the menace right now.  

    ********

    Workers Vanguard No. 1110
    21 April 2017
    For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!
    Fascists Fueled by Trump Election
    Hundreds of Jewish headstones desecrated. Women wearing the headscarf attacked on the streets. Two software engineers from India shot, one fatally, in Kansas in February by a Navy vet who howled, “Get out of my country.” A Sikh American shot in his driveway in Kent, Washington, last month by a masked white man screaming, “Go back to your own country.” Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old black man, murdered on the streets of Manhattan on March 20 by a white-supremacist who had come to New York City from Baltimore with the express purpose of killing black men.
    The race-terrorists have been emboldened by the campaign and victory of the right-wing demagogue Donald Trump, and are taking their cue from the unabashed racism and anti-immigrant vitriol emanating from the White House. The ultimate aim of the fascists, including those who congregate around the “alt-right,” is racial genocide and the destruction of workers organizations, including unions and the left.
    The race-terrorists have played on the racist backlash against Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Obama’s eight years in office offered nothing to black and working people; the Democratic Party no less than the Republicans represents the very capitalist order that breeds fascism. During the Obama administration, conditions for black people and workers continued to worsen while cops wantonly gunned down black people on the streets. More industrial areas turned into rust bowls, while strongholds of union power continued their steep decline. Obama rigorously pursued U.S. imperialism’s war aims abroad, while ramping up the “war on terror” at home, which targets Muslims in particular. The fascist thugs feed off anger and frustration arising from economic devastation; they scapegoat black people, immigrants and minorities for the misery inflicted on the population by the capitalist rulers.
    On April 15, when hundreds of “protesters” descended on downtown Berkeley for a pro-Trump rally, the fascists infesting the crowd made clear that they were out for blood. Chanting “Hitler did nothing wrong” and giving Nazi salutes, they viciously attacked antifa activists and leftists with clubs, flagpoles and knives. One viral video shows Nathan Damigo, head of the fascist group Identity Evropa, punching a woman in the face. Last June, in Sacramento, white-supremacists of the Traditionalist Workers Party and the Golden Gate Skinheads stabbed and slashed at least seven anti-fascists, sending them to the hospital. In Berkeley, anti-fascists were able to defend themselves from fascist violence but a number were injured.
    Individual acts of courage are not enough to smash the fascist threat. What is needed are massive, integrated, disciplined mobilizations based on the social power of the multiracial working class. The workplace is the only real point of integration in American society, providing the potential basis for unity in struggle to defend working people and the oppressed. Black workers in particular can be the living link that unites the power of the working class with the anger of the ghettos.
    The union movement has been flat on its back for many years under a misleadership that is committed to capitalism and has shackled the unions to the Democratic Party. A fight by militant unionists to organize labor/black power to crush the fascists can give the working class a taste of its social power. It is the fascists—not black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, leftists and others—who must be made to feel the sting of fear.
    Who Are These Scum?
    Today, many fascist groups in the “alt-right” claim that they are something different from the Klan and Nazis. They dress in “respectable” suits and ties and promote themselves as intellectuals. One of their leading voices is Richard Spencer, führer of the innocuously named National Policy Institute (NPI). When the NPI held a conference in Washington, D.C., shortly after Trump’s election, Spencer responded to the audience’s stiff-armed Nazi salutes by declaring: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” (the latter a translation of the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil”).
    Allied with Spencer is Identity Evropa, which describes itself as an organization of “awakened Europeans” and requires that its members be of “European, non-Semitic heritage.” Its leader, Damigo, is a former Marine who was twice deployed to Iraq. After returning, he held up an immigrant taxi driver at gunpoint in San Diego in 2007, believing the man was Iraqi. While in prison for four years, he immersed himself in the writings of “former” Klansman David Duke. Before founding Identity Evropa in March 2016, Damigo—who describes black people as “inferior to whites, genetically”—was a leader of the now-defunct National Youth Front, the youth arm of the white-supremacist American Freedom Party.
    Identity Evropa is currently waging a campaign, called “Project Siege,” to recruit from College Republicans. Its members have appeared at colleges and its posters and stickers have been spotted on campuses around the country. These posters consist of Greco-Roman images with slogans like, “Protect Your Heritage.” Their slick website serves as a portal for those who claim racial superiority and who deny the Holocaust. As part of their recruitment drive, Damigo, Spencer and others held a rally on 6 May 2016 at UC Berkeley, the former bastion of left-wing student protest.
    Today, outfits like Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and others are still small. But they will strike with force, as seen in Sacramento and Berkeley. It is vital that they be crushed in the egg before they grow. Against those who call for bans on “hate speech” or who argue for “free speech” for fascists, we say that when these race-terrorists rear their heads they must be repulsed through mass protest. Fascism is not about speech or ideas; it is about racist terror. “Anti-extremism” bans, whether instituted by campus administrations or government forces, will always be used to silence leftists, anti-racists and minority activists.
    Fascism in the U.S. is rooted in the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union Army in the Civil War, when 200,000 black soldiers and sailors played a key role in destroying slavery. The Klan and other race-terrorists came into being after that victory and bloodily suppressed the newly freed slaves. No less than the KKK, the fascist vermin in the “alt-right” represent a threat to the very right of black people to exist. They aim to reverse the verdict of the Civil War.
    Prepare to Fight!
    Unlike Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis rose to power and went on to carry out the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, America’s capitalist rulers do not at this time feel the need to resort to fascism. The U.S. is not a defeated imperialist power, as Germany was after World War I, nor does the U.S. bourgeoisie currently face a challenge to its rule from the working class. The daily terror meted out by the cops against black people and minorities is today deemed sufficient to keep the oppressed in check. At the same time, the capitalist rulers hold the fascist shock troops in reserve, to be unleashed at times of social crisis in order to spike any prospect of revolutionary struggle by the working class.
    The Trump administration is not fascist, but the fascists sure as hell have a lot of friends in high places. Trump appointed as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, a well-known “white nationalist” who took over Breitbart News and turned it into “the platform of the alt-right,” as he boasted. Trump’s top counter-terrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, is reportedly a member of the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian organization that harks back to the fascistic interwar dictatorship of Admiral Horthy—Gorka wore its medal at Trump’s inauguration ball. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisors, joined Richard Spencer in organizing an anti-immigrant event at Duke University in 2007. He went on to work for notorious racist and defender of the Confederacy, Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. One could go on.
    Bolstered by their high-ranking friends, the fascists have put the left in their deadly sights. We of the Spartacist League were targeted earlier this year, when a fascist secretly videoed one of our comrades distributing Workers Vanguard at the D.C. inauguration protests. The fascist posted the video on YouTube and vowed to “infiltrate” our organization. In Berkeley, the fascists made it clear that they are targeting leftists by chanting “commies, off our street!” It is a matter of life and death for the left to fight for united-front actions, based on the power of the unions, to beat back the fascist threat. In such united fronts, every organization must be free to put forward its political program in the course of struggle. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky put it: “March separately, but strike together!”
    During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, much like today, 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 and organized labor/black mobilizations. From Washington, D.C., where the Klan threatened to stage an anti-immigrant provocation, to Chicago, where the Nazis took aim at a Gay Pride demonstration, and elsewhere, we succeeded in sparking protests of thousands to stop the fascists. At the core of these actions were contingents of determined workers from the multiracial unions standing at the head of the black poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror.
    These mobilizations required a constant political struggle—against the cops, courts and other forces of the capitalist state, as well as capitalist politicians. Fearing the specter of labor/black power, Democratic mayors and other officials preached “tolerance” and “peace.” They called diversionary rallies far from where the fascists intended to march while violence-baiting those who wanted to stop fascist violence. And time and again, they were joined by reformist leftists who promoted reliance on the Democrats. When, in October 1999, we issued a call to stop the Klan from marching in New York City, the International Socialist Organization refused to endorse and instead joined a diversion organized by the Democrats where they shared the platform with a Latino police association. It should be an elementary understanding for leftists that the cops are the enemy. Historically, the policeman and the Klansman have often been the same man.
    What is needed is a fight to finish the Civil War through an American workers revolution that achieves the promise of black equality, the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed and puts the last nail in the coffin of the fascist killers. The labor/black mobilizations we initiated are a small example of the leadership and forces needed to build a party of our class in struggle against the capitalist enemy. In the face of the growing fascist menace, we must be prepared to mobilize.