AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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

Monday, July 24, 2017

Damn It- President Trump Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison!

Damn It- President Trump Free Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison!

Statement by the Committee For International Labor Defense

Now that the bid by Amnesty International and others internationally seeking to get former President Barack Obama to pardon Leonard Peltier have gone for nought we supporters are between a rockand a hard place. (See below.) The denial notice was for very flimsy reasons despite the fact that even the prosecutor does not know who killed those two FBI agents in a firefight at PIne Ridge. Hell it could have been friendly forces who knows sometimes in a war zone, at that was exactly what that situation was who knows. All we know is that Brother Peltier has spent forty some years behind bars and has a slew of medical problems which would have let Obama pardon just on compassionate grounds. He didn't. Don't expect, we almost have to laugh even sayingsuch a thing, one Donald J.Trump,POTUS, and maybe off to jail himself to pardon Leonard Peltier before his term of office is up.

Still Leonard Peltier along with Mumia Abu-Jamal and now Reality Leigh Winner are America's best know political prisoners and need to be supported and freed. To that end we in Boston have committed ourselves to as best we are able to continue ot keep the Peltier case in the public eye by holding periodic vigils calling for his pardon and freedom. We call on all Leonard Peltier supporters to keep his name before the public. Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Prison

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Leonard Peltier Denied Clemency by Obama

Web ExclusiveJANUARY 18, 2017

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TOPICS

The Office of the Pardon Attorney has announced President Obama has denied clemency to imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier is a former member of the American Indian Movement who was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has long maintained his innocence.

Amnesty International condemned the decision.

“We are deeply saddened by the news that President Obama will not let Leonard go home,” said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Despite serious concerns about the fairness of legal proceedings that led to his trial and conviction, Peltier was imprisoned for more than 40 years. He has always maintained his innocence. The families of the FBI agents who were killed during the 1975 confrontation between the FBI and American Indian Movement (AIM) members have a right to justice, but justice will not be served by Peltier’s continued imprisonment.”

Peltier’s attorney Martin Garbus appeared on Democracy Now! today.

"I think it’s fair to say that if he doesn’t get commuted by President Obama, he’ll die in jail. He’s a very sick man," Garbus said. "So, Obama’s not granting him clemency is like a sentence of death. Trump ain’t going to do it. And he’s very sick, and he’s not going to live past that time. I don’t want to be negative, but that’s the reality. He’s very sick, and he’s been in prison over 40 years, hard years, six years of solitary."

Garbus was notified of Obama’s decision earlier today. In an email, the Office of the Pardon Attorney wrote: "The application for commutation of sentence of your client, Mr. Leonard Peltier, was carefully considered in this Department and the White House, and the decision was reached that favorable action is not warranted. Your client’s application was therefore denied by the President on January 18, 2017... Under the Constitution, there is no appeal from this decision."

Click to a Leonard Peltier Defense Committee site.

https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on February 6, 1976, along with Frank Blackhorse, a.k.a. Frank Deluca. The United States presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who said she was Mr. Peltier’s girlfriend and allegedly saw him shoot the agents. In fact, Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and was not present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened her and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

Mr. Peltier was extradited to the United States where he was tried in 1977. The trial was held in North Dakota before United States District Judge Paul Benson, a conservative jurist appointed to the federal bench by Richard M. Nixon. Key witnesses like Myrtle Poor Bear were not allowed to testify and unlike the Robideau/Butler trial in Iowa, evidence regarding violence on Pine Ridge was severely restricted.

An FBI agent who had previously testified that the agents followed a pick-up truck onto the scene, a vehicle that could not be tied to Mr. Peltier, changed his account, stating that the agents had followed a red and white van onto the scene, a vehicle which Mr. Peltier drove occasionally.

Three teenaged Native witnesses testified against Mr. Peltier, they all later admitted that the FBI forced them to testify. Still, not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter.

The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case claimed that the government had provided the defense with all FBI documents concerning the case. To the contrary, more than 140,000 pages had been withheld in their entirety.

An FBI ballistics expert testified that a casing found near the agents’ bodies matched the gun tied to Mr. Peltier. However, a ballistic test proving that the casing did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.

The jury, unaware of the aforementioned facts, found Mr. Peltier guilty. Judge Benson, in turn, sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.

Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Mr. Peltier sought a new trial. The Eighth Circuit ruled, “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case." Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial.

During oral argument, the government attorney conceded that the government does not know who shot the agents, stating that Mr. Peltier is equally guilty whether he shot the agents at point-blank range, or participated in the shoot-out from a distance. Mr. Peltier’s co-defendants participated in the shoot-out from a distance, but were acquitted.

Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict Mr. Peltier, the FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out, and that Mr. Peltier's release would promote healing with Native Americans.

Mr. Peltier has served over 29 years in prison and is long overdue for parole. He has received several human rights awards for his good deeds from behind bars which include annual gift drives for the children of Pine Ridge, fund raisers for battered women’s shelters, and donations of his paintings to Native American recovery programs.

Mr. Peltier suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. Time for justice is short.

Currently, Mr. Peltier’s attorneys have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests with FBI Headquarters and all FBI field offices in an attempt to secure the release of all files relating to Mr. Peltier and the RESMURS investigation. To date, the FBI has engaged in a number of dilatory tactics in order to avoid the processing of these requests.

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

Peltier is one of the class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. Google for information on the sipend program. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to:

Mail

Correspondence, donations, merchandise orders
ILPDC
P.O. Box 329
Fargo, ND 58107

Phone

(701) 293-4806

Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners!

A Grunt’s Saga –James Hogan’s “Nam ‘68”-A Book Review

A Grunt’s Saga –James Hogan’s “Nam ‘68: A Novel”-A Book Review

Book Review

By Fritz Taylor

Nam ’68: A Novel, James Hogan, Hellgate Press, 2015

If you want to get a birds’ eye view of the existential nature of warfare at close quarters then perhaps you should check out Norman Mailer’s World War II classic standard in The Naked And The Dead. If you are looking for a slice of Army life in the calm just before the storm of the Pacific War then check out James Jones’ classic From Here To Eternity. If you want to get an overview of the Vietnam War in novelistic form at the larger unit level then check out Tim O’Brien or Phillip Caputo. But if you want a ringside view of what it was like for the average infantryman, the “grunt” of hoary legend down at the squad level, down at the base then check out James Hogan’s novelistic treatment of that latter war in his Nam ’68 saga.

Although it is in novelistic form for obvious reasons the book’s story-line centered on main characters High Pockets and Brownie are based on the adventures, misadventures, screw-ups, weird actions and camaraderie is based on the author’s experiences as a grunt in the 7^th Cavalry mostly up in the Central Highland in that critical year of 1968 when all hell was brewing in Vietnam-and in America. When the guys out in the boondocks taking a line from the famous Country Joe and the Fish song asked “what are we fighting for” while trying to survive-and help their buddies survive too. As it said on the blurb on the back of the book the story rings true to any Vietnam veteran, heck, any veteran on some of the stuff from the well-known rough barracks language to the seemingly irrational details that brass were forever dreaming up.

Of course when one thinks of 1968 in terms of the Vietnam War, at least as those from my, from Hogan’s generation experienced it was the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese/South Vietnamese Liberation Army which in many ways exposed the futility of going along the road to further American escalation of the troop levels. And while that feeling is reflected in the story line even among the grunts here down at the fighting squad level something more like having “your buddy’s back” and survival were closer to day to day reality and not what was happening with the politicians in Washington or Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).

The two key characters honed in on in this squad’s eye view of the war are High Pockets who is mostly a private (the author a very tall man and hence the moniker) and Brownie who is mostly a sergeant in both cases depending on what craziness they got themselves into. Craziness determined in the Army, in the military by how far away from regulation you have drifted in whatever you were up to. The scene is filled out by a shifting array of other rank and file squad members like Dudley, Big Mike and Eli and anchored by NCO Top (top sergeant) who let this squad go through its paces without much supervision he trusted the guys that much. A high compliment from a career Army man. (That “shifting array” determined by when a squad member’s tour was up either by time, grievous wounds or death). More distance were a revolving array of officers mostly lieutenants most famously one named Pineapple, a respected captain and a sporadically seen colonel. But the main action and hijinks are were among those rank and file soldiers holding ground, or trying to.

The scene of most of the action in the book is in various firebases in the Central Highlands (with a shorter stay in the Mekong Delta near the Cambodian border later on toward the end of the High Pocket’s tour). And mostly the action is about the fate of various patrols the squad goes out on into the bush looking for enemy soldiers-and finding them (or they finding the squad). High Pockets usually walked the “point”-figured out where the landmines and other traps the enemy had laid down and got the squad to its objective and back (that latter part very important). As the story develops it becomes apparent that for a city boy this High Pockets is an exceptional soldier, exceptional in the ability to stay alive and keep others alive as well. Brownie a little less impulsive than High Pockets is also an excellent soldier. If you were knee-deep in a fire fight then High Pockets was your man due to his personal bravery and what the hell manner. If you needed to figure out the best use of personal, a leader making quick on-the-spot decisions then Brownie was your man. The two anchored the day to day operations of the unit from those fire fights to guard duty to digging fortifications.

I really couldn’t do justice to all of the actions that this squad carried out in this short review. Let’s leave it that in the Central Highlands there was plenty of action, plenty of experience, inexperienced soldiers and officers and plenty of mistakes. Enough to keep the story moving at a steady pace. And plenty of description of the “down” time, the time in base camps when the favorite activity of the squad was to get high on drugs and “chill” out (rampart drug usage to keep your head on the great “secret” of that war and a whole separate issue of what happened to those guys when they got back to the real world). Check this novel out if you want the skinny on the real face of war down on the ground where the bloody action takes place.

Activists Challenge US Nukes in Germany; Occupy Bunker Deep Inside Nuclear Weapons Base" by JOHN LAFORGE

2:29 PM

Cole Harrison via mapa-nuclear-disarmament

To MAPA Nuclear Disarmament Copy Christopher Spicer

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Christopher Spicer <spicer.christopher04@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 2:24 PM
Subject: Fwd: "Activists Challenge US Nukes in Germany; Occupy Bunker Deep Inside Nuclear Weapons Base" by JOHN LAFORGE, Counter Punch, July 21,Activists Challenge US Nukes in Germany; Occupy Bunker Deep Inside Nuclear Weapons Base by JOHN LAFORGE, July 21, 2017
To: Cole Harrison <cole@masspeaceaction.org>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Frank Cordaro" <frank.cordaro@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2017 9:34 AM
Subject: "Activists Challenge US Nukes in Germany; Occupy Bunker Deep Inside Nuclear Weapons Base" by JOHN LAFORGE, Counter Punch, July 21,Activists Challenge US Nukes in Germany; Occupy Bunker Deep Inside Nuclear Weapons Base by JOHN LAFORGE, July 21, 2017
To: "A National Catholic Worker List:" <National-CW-E-mail-List@googlegroups.com>
Cc:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/21/activists-challenge-us-nukes-in-germany-occupy-bunker-deep-inside-nuclear-weapons-base/

BÜCHEL, Germany

The fairy tale that nuclear weapons provide state security is a fiction believed by millions. On July 17, five of us proved that state guarantees of “highly secure” nuclear weapon facilities are just as fictitious.

After nightfall, an international group of five peace activists, me included, got deep inside the Büchel Air Base here, and for the first time in a 21-year long series of protests against its deployment of US nuclear bombs, we occupied the top of one of the large bunkers potentially used for storing nuclear weapons. The US still deploys up to 20 B61 gravity bombs at the air base and German pilots train to use them in war from their Tornado jet fighter bombers.

After hiking along shadowy farm roads, shushing through a dark row of tall corn, clipping through the base’s outer fence, crossing a brightly lit air base road, and tramping noisily through a few wooded brambles, our small group cut through a second chain-link fence, bumbled past a giant hanger and under the wing of a jet fighter bomber, and reached a double-fence surrounding the broad, earth- bermed bunkers. After cutting through the two non-electrified fences without tripping a single alarm or even having the lights snap on, the five of us scurried up to the top of the wide-topped, grass covered concrete Quonset hut. No motion detector or alarm, no Klieg light or guard had noted our intrusion at all. We spent over an hour chatting, star gazing, checking our radiation monitor, and enjoying being flabbergasted that our implausible plan and Google-earth route had worked. This was supposedly a severely controlled H-bomb storage depot, but we’ll never know. We didn’t try breaking into it.

It started getting cold around 1 a.m. and we’d come prepared weeks or months in jail, but not for being outside all night. So Steve Baggarly, 52, of the Norfolk, Virginia Catholic Worker, and I climbed down to scratch “DISARM NOW” on the bunker’s giant metal doors, finally alerting some guards. The two of us hustled back up to the others on top and were soon surrounded by vehicles’ scanning spot lights and guards searching on foot with flashlights. Rather comically, we were still unnoticed as we watched the patrols scurry around. We ultimately decided to announce our presence by singing “The Vine & Fig Tree,” prompting them for the first time to look up. We were taken into custody over two hours after entering the base, and after being searched, photographed and briefly lectured, we were released without charges. Some may be pending.

The five, Baggarly, Susan Crane, 73, of California, Bonnie Urfer, 65, of Wisconsin, Gerd Buentzly, 67, of Germany, and I, said in a prepared statement, “We are nonviolent and have entered Büchel Air Base to denounce the nuclear weapons deployed here. We ask Germany to either disarm the weapons or send them back to the United States for disarming….”

Our bunker occupation, called a “go-in” action by German anti-nuclear campaigners here, was the fourth act of civil resistance during “international week” at the base. Organized by “Non-violent Action to Abolish Nukes” (GAAA), the week saw over 60 people — from Russia, China, Mexico, Germany, Britain, the US, The Netherlands, France and Belgium — participate. The 7-day effort was part of a 20-week-long set of actions — “20 Weeks for 20 Bombs” — launched on March 26, 2017 — in conjunction with the start of final negotiations at the UN for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — by a 50-group nation-wide coalition called “Büchel is Everywhere!”

Two earlier protest actions succeeded in a couple of ‘firsts’: an unprecedented meeting between blockaders and the base commander and the removal of the otherwise very prominent United States flag. During an early morning blockade, “Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer personally approached protesters — something unheard of in similar US protests — and accepted a copy of the newly-minted UN Treaty Ban from Sister Ardeth Platte, OP, of Baltimore, Maryland. A day earlier, when over 35 activists streamed through the main gate which was mistakenly left unlocked, spontaneously lowered the US flag, and placed loaves of bread around the memorialized jet bombers, Sr. Platte and Sr. Carol Gilbert, OP, also of Baltimore, demanded a meeting with Mr. Schlemmer so they could deliver the treaty. The next day’s shocking appearance prompted a joke: “Yesterday we took down the flag, and today the commander surrendered.”

Eleven activists from the United States came to Büchel to put a spotlight on US plans to replace the B61s instead of removing them. Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Tennessee — where a new thermonuclear core for the “B61-Model12” might be manufactured — said, “It is important that we show this is a global movement. The resistance to nuclear weapons is not limited to one country.” The new “B61-12” program will cost over $12 billion, if and when production starts sometime after 2020, and “Bushel is scheduled to get new hydrogen bombs. Nothing could be stupider when 90% of Germans want them out and the when world wants to abolish nuclear weapons,” he said.

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From The Archives-THE OTHER SIDE IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR-ROME HONORS FRANCO'S 'MARTYRS'

COMMENTARY

Under ordinary circumstances I do not give a tinker’s damn about the internal ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, or for that matter, any church but a recent news item hit me square in the eye. On Sunday October 28, 2007 at Vatican City some 498 priest and nuns killed just prior to or during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 were given a mass of beatification. Apparently beatification is a direct step in the process to sainthood- the Catholic Hall of Fame. Unfortunately the article did not give a list of reasons why these ‘martyrs’ were chosen other than the fact that they had been killed, presumably by forces that supported the lawfully designated Republican government, in the Civil War.

But wait a minute- this is Spain, this is the Spanish Civil War-what the hell- these are General Franco’s agents who fell all over themselves to aid his rebellion and ultimately led to forty years of hell. Those are the kinds of people that the Roman church is giving its blessing to. Let us further set the historical record straight - these were agents of that Romish church that owned significant lands and assumed all the prerogatives of feudal landlords in relationship to their peasant tenants. This, I might add, is the church of the Inquisition; the church that oppressed the poor, downtrodden and otherwise confused people of Spain for centuries. Yes, there seems to be some symbolic ‘justice’ here as Mother Church honors her most trusted agents.

Popular anti-clericalism had a long tradition in Spain, justifiably so from any fair reading of the history of that benighted land. Many times during social turmoil ignited by the fed up peasantry and the plebes in the smaller cities prior to the Civil War the first plebian act was to go lay waste to the local church and scatter or otherwise harm the clergy. The period of the Spanish Civil War was no different in that sense. Except that by that time the anti-clerics had also taken on an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist coloration. In fact during this period they made church vandalism into an art form. Thus this batch of ‘martyred’ clergy were likely the victims of that tradition, although a stray irate republican, insolent socialist or undisciplined communist may have gotten caught up in it depending on the furies of the local population. Ernest Hemingway in his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bells Toll has one of his characters narrate a very graphic description of what anti-clerical (and anti-central government) revenge was like in one locale.

Historically attacks on churches are an elemental first reaction by the plebian masses in a revolutionary period. In the English Revolution the yeomen of the Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army made a regular practice of reducing churches (for their silverware to be used as ammunition as well as an expression of rage). In the French Revolution the same thing occurred although on a less disciplined basis. Thus Civil War Spain is hardly an exception to that general trend. However socialists, especially Marxist socialists, have always drawn the line on the question how to deal with religion differently. We stand in solidarity with such elemental acts against the oppressions brought by religion however that is not our program. We recognize that we must change the whole material basis of society in order to get rid of the ‘need’ for religion as solace for an unjust and chaotic world. Hey, we are the ‘religion is the opiate of the people’ guys, remember? Thus we spill no tears over the fate of these Popish ‘martyrs’ but neither do we advocate such action to create social change. We go after the big guns- the capitalists.

While we are on the question of honoring those who died in the Spanish Civil War we have our own heroes to recognize. Like those who fought under the banner of the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias and saved the republic, in the short haul, as Franco’s rebellion reared its ugly head. Or those far flung legions of "pre-mature” anti-fascists who came from all over Europe and the Americas and formed the International Brigades that did valiant service on the Ebro, the Jarama and elsewhere. Or those who defended Madrid in its hour of need so that Franco should not pass. And the anarchist Friends of Durritti (to speak nothing of Durritti himself) and the fighters of the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) who were ready to give their all in the last ditch effort to save the revolution in the May Days in Barcelona in 1937. Yes, those are OUR kindred spirits. They stand in no need of beatification. However, in the end the best way to honor their efforts is to fight for socialism. Then we can put religions in the museums as historical curiosities

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing. Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.

Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.

Films To While Away The Time By- Humphrey Bogart’s “In A Lonely Place”

Films To While Away The Time By- Humphrey Bogart’s “In A Lonely Place”

DVD Review

In A Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Columbia Pictures, 1950

I admit, admit up front, that I am partial to rugged windmill-chasing Humphrey Bogart roles like him as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon trying to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world and not afraid to take a beating for the cause, or bust up some wrong gee dreams in the process (although admittedly getting a little thrown off the tracks by a whiff of Mary Astor’s perfume, but that is to be expected). Or another windmill-chaser, Rick, in Casablanca when he knows, knows deep in his soul that the troubles of three love-stuck people in that wicked old World War II Nazi world didn’t amount to a “hill of beans” against the darkening night (although there too he was thrown off by that damn dame perfume). And what about his role in To Have And Have Not when he is again forced, as Captain Harry Morgan, to step it up a notch in that still wicked old World War II world (that time, come to think of it, he too got thrown off the tracks by a woman, by a whistler of all things).

After that big manly, windmill-chasing build-up, complete with cigarette, unfiltered, of course, Luckies probably, in hand it is hard to see old Bogie as kind of troubled, well, dope. A guy who can’t handle his emotions, or his fists, when some little breeze problem come s through the door. Against friend of foe, against some Johnny Rico or some frail. However that is exactly the problem before us as Bogie plays a troubled screen writer (aren’t they all, troubled that is, having to write some pretty tough stuff to earn their dollar a word).

Maybe I had better give you the “skinny” here so you’ll get my drift. Dix (Bogie) is a maybe “has been” writer who is in a dry spell. He invites a hat- check girl from the club home (what club? any club, any gin joint in the world) to give him the story line of a book that he is supposed to do the screenplay for. And that is all he wants. (Ya, I know that “come on” is weak but there it is). The problem: early next morning she is found dead, very dead, in some arroyo road side ditch. And Dix is primo suspect numero uno. Enter one lovely blond alibi, Lauren (played by Gloria Grahame), who had seen Dix sent the hat check girl off alone. Dix is still not off the hook though since downtown (the cops, okay) are not convinced that Dix didn’t do it. This unlikely pair begins an affair. The story then gets tense as Lauren (and others) begin to believe Dix did do it after he exhibited extreme anger (and violent acts) at the accusations. Well, Dix didn’t do it but he lost Laurel by his mad man American Psych 101 demeanor. And so he walks alone at the end, a contrite but broken man.

See, no foggy airfield sent-offs amid the clamor of war next fights, no fast boat get-aways to Free French territory and the fight continues, and no wacko stuff of dreams busted wiser man here, just alone. Bogie alone. Jesus.

On The 100th Anniversary-The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation

	Workers Vanguard No. 1107	10 March 2017

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation

(Quote of the Week)

On International Women’s Day in Petrograd in March 1917, a mass outpouring of working women sparked the revolutionary upheaval that culminated in the Russian October Revolution. The smashing of capitalist class rule brought unheard-of gains for women in all areas of public and private life. Despite economic backwardness and poverty, the young Soviet workers government sought to undermine the material foundations of women’s oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the family. The Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality could only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist society. In a 1920 commemoration of International Working Women’s Day, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underscored the fact that the fight for women’s liberation is inseparable from the fight for international socialist revolution.

Capitalism combines formal equality with economic and, consequently, social inequality. That is one of the principal features of capitalism, one that is deliberately obscured by the supporters of the bourgeoisie, the liberals, and is not understood by petty-bourgeois democrats. This feature of capitalism, incidentally, renders it necessary for us in our resolute fight for economic equality openly to admit capitalist inequality, and even, under certain conditions, to make this open admission of inequality the basis of the proletarian statehood (the Soviet Constitution).

But even in the matter of formal equality (equality before the law, the “equality” of the well-fed and the hungry, of the man of property and the propertyless), capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women. Complete equality has not been granted even by the most progressive republican, and democratic bourgeois states.

The Soviet Republic of Russia, on the other hand, at once swept away all legislative traces of the inequality of women without exception, and immediately ensured their complete equality before the law.

It is said that the best criterion of the cultural level is the legal status of women. This aphorism contains a grain of profound truth. From this standpoint only the dictatorship of the proletariat, only the socialist state could attain, as it has attained, the highest cultural level. The new, mighty and unparalleled stimulus given to the working women’s movement is therefore inevitably associated with the foundation (and consolidation) of the first Soviet Republic—and, in addition to and in connection with this, with the Communist International.

Since mention has been made of those who were oppressed by capitalism, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, it must be said that the Soviet system, and only the Soviet system, guarantees democracy. This is clearly shown by the position of the working class and the poor peasants. It is clearly shown by the position of women.

But the Soviet system is the last decisive struggle for the abolition of classes, for economic and social equality. Democracy, even democracy for those who were oppressed by capitalism, including the oppressed sex, is not enough for us.

It is the chief task of the working women’s movement to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women. The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labour, to liberate them from “domestic slavery,” to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery.

This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction both of social technique and of morals. But it will end in the complete triumph of communism.

—V.I. Lenin, “International Working Women’s Day” (4 March 1920)

Sunday, July 23, 2017

The Lodz Ghetto In World War II-Henryk Ross' Photographs At Boston's Museum Of Fine Arts-Never Forget, Never Forgive

Artists' Corner- Matisse At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8^th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton.

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9^th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress.

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20^th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.

Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance