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
Please come if you can and pass this announcement on (flyer attached). . .
We Need to Remember the Past . . .
If We Want to Avoid Another Korean War
Please join DORCHESTER PEOPLE FOR PEACE for a film-showing and discussion about the first US war against North Korea – and what we can do to avoid another one. A new Korean War would be even more catastrophic than the last one, with the possibility of a nuclear exchange and untold thousands of deaths.
WE NEED TO PRESS FOR A DIPLOMATIC, NOT A MILITARY SOLUTION TO THE CURRENT CRISIS BETWEEN THE US AND NORTH KOREA.
MEMORY OF FORGOTTEN WARconveys the human costs of military conflict through deeply personal accounts of the Korean War (1950-53) by four Korean-American survivors. Their stories take audiences through the trajectory of the war, from extensive bombing campaigns, to day-to-day struggle for survival and separation from family members across the DMZ. Decades later, each person reunites with relatives in North Korea, conveying beyond words the meaning of family loss. These stories belie the notion that war ends when the guns are silenced and foreshadow the future of countless others displaced by ongoing military conflict today.
Wednesday, November 1
Adams Street Branch, Boston Public Library
(690 Adams St, Dorchester)
6:30-8:00pm
DORCHESTER
PEOPLE for PEACE
DPP works with other local groups
to build a Multi-Racial Peace Movement:
End wars abroad and work for justice at home. dotpeace.org / 617-282-3783
The antiwar movement worldwide will be heard when people hold events in towns and cities everywhere to mark Armistice / Remembrance day on November 11th.
Can you plan a local event? Can we help you do so?
Let us know about any event you’re planning. We’ll list it on our events page, and in the calendar on the right side of our website. And we’ll email everyone on our list who lives in your area asking them to attend. We’ll also email your local media outlets if you’d like us to.
We are eager to help you hold a World Beyond War event anywhere you are in the world — or to help add to whatever event you have planned.
Check out the speakers in our speakers bureau. You may want to invite one or more of them to speak — in person or via live or recorded video. We can make something work!
Use the videos and ideas from our online study and action guide: Study War No More!
Documentary filmmakers Alice & Lincoln Day have generously offered to waive a Community Screening Licensing fee ($89 savings) through November 11th (Armistice Day) to all World Beyond War members. The waiver allows members to host a public screening for up to 200 people, with permission to charge admission, and raise funds at the events through other avenues. To Request Waiver: Email Margaret Poindexter at mpoindexter5300 [AT] gmail [DOT] com with “Waiver Request” in the subject line. See also: Scarred Lands Film Clips and Scarred Lands Companion Shorts.
Numerous successful events have already been held that have screened some of our other recently recorded videos, such as these:
We can also work with you to help prepare you to make a World Beyond War presentation yourself! Are you or would you like to be a public speaker? Contact us for assistance!
Speaking about ending war can be quite easy, informative, and entertaining if you use one of these power point or prezi slide presentations:
How an event can build a movement:Use flyers, sign-up cards, sign-up sheets. You can let every person at your event sign the peace pledge and indicate how they’d like to be involved. You can use your sign-up sheets to build your local email list and to build World Beyond War’s — Just type the info in on the peace pledge page or into a spread sheet that you email to WBW, or photograph the sheets and email us that, or mail hardcopies to World Beyond War, PO Box 1484, Charlottesville VA 22902, USA.
How an event can raise funds for your local group and/or World Beyond War: Wear sky blue scarves and bracelets. Contact WBW here about getting a supply of scarves and/or buttons and/or books to use for raising funds for WBW. And collect donations.
You can also buy a supply of shirts, stickers, cups, etc. and resell them at cost or for profit. More cool shirts and sweatshirts here.
Here’s a sign you can modify and use that offers people buttons, scarves, and books for various levels of donations.
Here’s a form for keeping track of people who need to have free books mailed to them by WBW.
Here are receipts for people who make donations to WBW and request a receipt.
Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from World Beyond War, please click here.
Federal judge Brian Epps of Augusta, Georgia has denied bail for alleged whistleblower Reality Winner in an aggressively worded ruling that claims the 25-year-old intelligence contractor “hates the United States and desires to damage national security.” Epps also cited social media comments by Winner that she”admires Edward Snowden and Julian Assange” as evidence against her bond request.
Reality Winner faces an Espionage Act charge for allegedly passing classified material to media outlet The Intercept. The documents in question summarise the NSA’s view at the time of evidence suggesting Russia’s military intelligence attempted to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.
In a ruling that reads like a prosecutor’s character assassination, Epps willfully misrepresents Winner’s statements, accepts government talking points as fact, and adds Winner to “the side of Assange and Snowden” to paint her as a duplicitous traitor who was determined to damage national security. Epps ignores Winner’s six years of service with the Air Force as a translator and ignores the substance of the material she allegedly disclosed in his effort to malign her character. A disinterested judge would observe basic facts about Winner’s case, including the nature of the disclosure and her previous service, rather than the prosecution’s deliberate misrepresentation’s of her casual comments in deciding whether she would be a threat if released on bail. Judges in other US whistleblower cases, it’s worth noting, have managed not to appear quite so partisan.
Epps’ ruling continues to allow the prosecution to set the terms of debate throughout Reality’s case. Back in August, the judge sided with prosecutors in ruling the defense would not be allowed to mention “any information deemed classified by the government, even if it has been widely reported in local, national and international media publications.”
None of this bodes well for Winner’s trial, which is now scheduled for March 2018. Reality will remain in detention until then, with all the hardships that implies. Neither does Judge Epps’ ruling suggest that Reality will receive a fair hearing when her case does finally come to trial, where she faces a potential sentence of 10 years in prison. If the judge is already this predisposed against Winner’s character, and this willing to accept prosecutorial misrepresentations as established fact, how will he fairly adjudicate whether Winner breached the Espionage Act? Not only does Judge Epps appear unwilling to consider that Winner’s alleged leak might have aided public understanding of a major political issue, he seems already prepared to accept the opposite without much debate, that Winner merely sought to harm the United States.
Epps’ ruling is all the more significant given the heavily politicised atmosphere in the United States, led by the Trump Administration’s virulent rhetoric on journalists and their sources. Reality Winner’s is the first media leak prosecution to be brought under a president who has claimed willingness to extend and expand the war on whistleblowers to include prosecution of publishers. It’s reasonable to assume that whatever happens, Winner’s case will give us an indication of the trials ahead for national security reporting in the United States.
You can donate to Reality Winner’s legal defence fund here, and find the Stand with Reality support network here.
"Put Out The Fire In Your
Head"-With The Line From Patti Griffin’s “You Are Not Alone” In Mind
By Special Guest Writer
Greg Gordon
Normally I don’t write
for blog and on-line publications preferring still the hard copy route to have
my work appreciated by any who would appreciate my efforts. The reason that I
am writing this little comment is the editor here, my old friend Pete Markin,
has asked me to comment on a line from Patti Griffin’s song You Are Not Alone where she asks her
lover to “put on the fire in your head”-calm down, take it easy, be with her. I
am not personally much into music so that I did not know the song, or the line
from the song, nor did I know who Patti Griffin was. But the line intrigued me.
Intrigued me more when Pete told me the reason that he wanted me to comment
rather than take a stab at it himself since he loves the song is that he wanted
my take on who among our still standing old-time from the neighborhood friends
could rightfully be asked to do what the phrase asks. And he included himself
in the mix so for all practical purposes he is recusing himself.
Now Pete Markin, Seth
Garth, Frankie Riley, Fritz Taylor, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Josh
Breslin and about fifty other guys, from what Pete calls the Generation of ’68,
whom Pete and I have come to know over the years whatever neighborhood they
grew up in, mostly poor white guys like me and him, whatever achievements they
have accumulated over a lifetime, whatever heartaches they have suffered as
well they, we all have one thing in common. We all have since youth, maybe
since, hell, maybe from the womb, had outsized wanting habits, have had the
hunger. So each and every one of us one way or another could fall under the
sign of “put out the fire in your head.”
For me it has always
been an outsized and maybe overblown sense that I have been under-appreciated
as a writer now that Gothic detective novels, the niche I had made for myself started
way back in maybe middle school when my English teacher Miss Winot encouraged me
to flush out my private detective Galen Fiske, are a dime a dozen, maybe
cheaper. So maybe I should chill out about it, throw water on that last dream
and not to worry. That said I do not intend to go chapter and verse over every
guy whom I have mentioned above but give a few words and here and there. I
might as well start with Pete who has always had this thing about this woman,
let’s call her Josie to give her a name whom he treated like dirt when he was
young and was crazy to go to bed with every dame who gave him a second look.
Leaving Josie holding the bag.
He had not seen her in
about forty years, didn’t know what had become of her (although he belatedly
wished her well) but nevertheless on whiskey-sodden barstool nights in some
dank barroom he will inevitably bring up her name, his sins against her, and
that wistful what might have been had he had the sense God gave geese. I know I
have been on the stool beside him. This despite the intervening three marriages
and assorted well-behaved kids who came with them. So that fire in his head has
been smoldering for a long time, caused him some sweaty, dreamless nights. At
this point I don’t think it will ever go out. Some things are like that.
Fritz Taylor’s fire is
maybe really fire, really fire that he brought down on the heads of people in
Vietnam with whom he had no quarrel, never had except his friends and neighbors
at his local draft board in the days when that was the way non-enlistees got called
up to military service called his ticket, gave him the ride. He spent years
hiding from the “real” world with a bunch of brothers under the bridge out in
Southern California trying to drink/drug/cut himself to some place of peace but
that vagabond stuff never did the trick. Nor did his three marriages with a
mixed bag of good and bad kids. Will still drink himself to a coma, or maybe sleep
is better and yell out of nowhere An Loc (a small town/ village/hamlet which he
and his men burned to the ground one awful August 1968 night). That fire too
seems like an endless sleep.
Now that the reader is
getting my drift, getting that maybe that Patty Griffin song, those lyrics might
not be susceptible to dousing I will like I said not go through the whole litany
of the fire nights among the guys. But one last case should sum things up a bit.
Josh Breslin is a guy we met, those of us from the old North Adamsville neighborhood,
out in the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967 night. Josh, a little younger than
us but a kindred working class guy from up in Olde Saco, Maine, was a real good-looking
guy whose moniker was the Prince of Love in those moniker-filled days. Had half
the girls around Golden Gate Park in something like his harem. For a while
anyway. Then he got caught into the grasp of a woman we called (and will still call
her here) Mustang Sally and can draw your own conclusions about why she took
that name. The long and short of it was that before too long she got pregnant.
Josh was set to marry her or something like that. One night she split we think
with a guy named Pirate Johnny and we/he never heard from her again. So Josh,
the love them and leave them Prince of Love, too would on moonless ill-begotten
nights wonder out loud what had happened to his child. That after two marriages
and a parcel of I am not sure what kind of kids. So maybe Patti and her song are
wrong. Maybe you can’t put out the fire in your head.
“One Johnny Rocco More
Or Less Is Not Worth Dying For ” –With Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart’s “Key
Largo” In Mind
By Special Guest
Commentator Lance Lawrence
Here is the genesis for
this commentary. I don’t normally as much as I love the old time 1940s and
1950s black and white movies do film reviews here or in other hard copy and
on-line publications I write for. That was usually handled by my old friend, old
neighborhood North Adamsville growing up friend, and colleague at this site Sam
Lowell. The “was” part is because Sam has recently retired from the day to day
fuss of film editor handing it over to our common colleague Sandy Salmon. He
has taken the outlandish and over-the-top title of film editor emeritus. That
has allowed him to do occasional commentary without the hassle of every
impending deadline and having to watch film he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about
(his, our, old-time neighborhood expression which I think is
self-explanatory.)
Sam recently had a
problem having to do with the film Key
Largo I am keeping in mind as I do this piece. Sandy who does not like
doing old-time black and white movie reviews as a rule had asked Sam to review
this film. He agreed figuring this would be an easy punt since he had always
been crazy for Humphrey Bogart films and had always been half in love with foxy
Lauren Bacall ever since she and Bogart steamed up the theater in the very loose
film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To
Have And Have Not. Also many years ago he had already reviewed the film and
could use that as a basis for a current review. (Sam never throws anything out
and of course now the computer doesn’t
have to so he probably has his first grade papers stored somewhere.) Once he
had watched, no, re-watched the film though he had another idea. His angle was
looking at the Humphrey Bogart character, ex-World War II soldier Frank
McCloud, from the perspective of a guy who had had a hard time coming back the
“real” world after the war like many guys probably did (and do so now in Iraq-Afghanistan
time as well).
That is when he thought
of me, although really it is the late Peter Paul Markin always and forever
known as Scribe, another North Adamsville corner boy of ours that he was really
thinking about when he had that grand idea (his expression). (The late Scribe
not to be confused with the administrator of this site another North Adamsville
guy speaking of nepotism who took the Scribe’s name as his on-line moniker in
honor of our fallen comrade.) See the Scribe after he got back from Vietnam
where he had been an infantryman and had seen some pretty horrible stuff which
he seldom talked about had had serious problems coming back the “real” war
after his war. Had been up and down emotionally for a while out in California
where he lived after he got back from Vietnam. Had once he settled down a bit
(for a while) taken up the journalist’s life which he had gone to college for
before he made fateful decision to drop out his sophomore year to get tangled
up in the Summer of Love experience out in San Francisco in 1967 (and since he
had no student deferment was subject to draft and induction into the military
and therefore “fateful” is the right word).
While working for the
now long gone but then influential alternative newspaper East Bay Other the Scribe was handed a plum assignment from the
editor Sally Jacobs. Handed it because he was the only Vietnam veteran, the
only one with enough street “cred” to do the assignment. It seems that a whole
bunch of guys were in the Scribe’s boat, had had a tough time coming back to
the “real” world and had formed a “community” or better communities down in
Southern California along the riverbanks, railroad tracks and under the
multifarious bridges. He was assigned to tell their stories, those that wanted
to talk and some did and some didn’t. Those who did formed the basis for what
was called the Brothers Under The Bridge
series which ran for a while in the newspaper and won the Scribe some awards
and stuff.
So what does the
Scribe’s work back then have to do with Sam Lowell asking me to give my take on
a guy like ex-soldier Frank McCloud. The Scribe, the logical choice, is no
longer with us having succumbed to those Vietnam demons, demons which led to
his addiction to cocaine as relief and another fateful and fatal decision to do
drug dealing which eventually got him two slugs in the head down in Mexico when
a deal went bad. Most of us who knew him count him as an uncounted casualty of
the war and maybe his name should be etched in that black granite down in
Washington with the 58, 000 others. But we haven’t spoken about it much of late
although maybe before we pass on we should make an effort even if we have to
get a black granite slab and do it up ourselves in North Adamsville Square.
Since the Scribe can’t do the job Sam asked me because I too unlike him, who
felt it needed a soldier to soldier touch, was a Vietnam veteran as well. Although
I didn’t have as many problems as the Scribe I had my fair share in the
immediate aftermath of my military discharge. I have written about those
experiences extensively elsewhere so I need not repeat them here after all this
is Frank McCloud’s story not mine. More importantly I have taken up the
Scribe’s cudgels and written plenty about my fellow Vietnam veterans who are
still haunted by that fucking war. Still haven’t come back to the “real” world
even though the hobo camps are long vanished and they have been left to their
own inadequate devises.
I want to describe Frank
McCloud, ex-Major in the European Theater of World War II under the sign of
‘one Johnny Rocco more or less in the world isn’t worth dying for ” a classic
line uttered a few times throughout the film. That refers to the villain of the
piece bastard gangster Johnny Rocco, played by gangster film fixture Edward G.
Robinson, deported by the federal authorities as a no account blight alien
residing in Cuba but late of Chicago and the gang wars that dominated that town
back in the day and how good men let guys like Johnny breathe and breed.
As the background to why soldier Frank McCloud
had taken the Greyhound bus down to the
Keys, down to Key Largo at the beginning one of America land’s end. Why he was
to wind up at that very spot locking horns with one Johnny Rocco probably the
last thing he had expected to deal with in sunny tropical Florida. Why he had
been drifting along in the post-war period after that war had taken the starch
out of him, made him cynical. Why he had, sound familiar, a tough time coming
back to the “real” world after slogging through the Italian campaign. See he
had gone back to the old job he held before the war but just couldn’t make it
make sense. Became a drifter, day worker, low rung work, a man of no fixed
abode. Not quite down in the under the bridge jungle like out in post-Vietnam California
but still restless and moving aimlessly.
So one day Frank decided
to take that fateful bus ride down to the Keys to make sense of the life, and
death, of one of the guys under his command whose grieving father, played by
Lionel Barrymore, and a young done on the run wife, played by Lauren Bacall
running the Largo Hotel. Supposedly this was just a courtesy call at least that
was what he told one of Johnny’s boys, guys like Johnny always travelled with a
“don’t give a fuck” entourage when he was told by that guy there was no room
for him in the inn. Then the damn hurricane winds started picking up and that
tidy metaphor-filled event would blow the lid off Frank’s duel with the real
world.
Enter Johnny, no, enter
a snoopy cop who was looking for a couple of wild-eyed Seminoles who fled the
coop on him and sought safe harbor at the hotel. That copper after taking a
beating took a couple to the heart by dear Johnny just to prove he had not lost
the old touch. Along the way Frank had
chances to show some of the bravery he had shown in war but he was no longer
the knight-errant going after bad guys for other guys who would not give him a
fair shake. That when he said it all, made it clear the, his post-war world
would be every man and woman for his or herself. That shocked that dead G.I.s
people, that broken down old man and that fetching wife who had heard better
things about Frank from that son-husband’s letters but that was that.
Now is the time to tell
why undesirable alien Johnny Rocco was in some stinking off-season deadbeat
hotel facing down hurricane winds and playing with fire-power. He was trying to
pass paper, trying to unload counterfeit money for dimes on the dollar to a
rival gangster and his confederates. This hole-in-the-wall hotel was the
meeting place for the exchange which actually happened despite the hurricane
coming to blow all the people all away. Problem (beside the sheriff showing up
and finding his copper deputy washed up by hurricane) was the big yacht he
arrived on had been taken to a safe harbor by the skipper. No boat. No boat to
flee back that ninety or so miles to friendly Havana.
Well almost no boat. See
among his skills our man Frank had been an expert sailor, had been so since he
was a kid. He made the mistake of telling one of Johnny’s boys that fact when
he was helping to secure the hotel’s boat against the hurricane blow. So
naturally Johnny latched onto the Frank-boat idea as the way to get him, his
boys, and that ill-gotten dough back to Cuba. Johnny had taken the measure of
the man, had seen that Frank had that beaten down look a lot of returning
soldiers had after finding all the patriotic stuff, all the making the world safe against the
night-takers from guys like Hitler and Mussolini down to punk gangster Johnny
Rocco was a lot of hooey. Johnny’s entreaty picking up on what Frank had said
previously that after all what was it to small guy Frank McCloud whether a
putting a guy like Johnny out of commission was worth breaking a sweat for
played its part. After a couple of threats to put Frank on the rack and to the
disappointment of that disillusioned old man and that comely daughter-in-law he
consented.
You never know what will
push a man’s buttons, and what won’t. Given a handy pistol filched from Johnny
by the gangster’s moll, Gaye, seemed to have put life back into Frank, got him
thinking maybe another small fight against the night-takers was in order. In
the end there would now be no brothers under the bridge fate for our boy. It
was a thing of beauty to watch as Frank totally outmaneuvered Johnny and his
four confederates, one overboard with a nice turning maneuver, another
bang-bang, a third bang-bang, ditto the fourth. Then the inevitable mano a mano
with evil Johnny. Johnny Too Bad. Johnny gone to push up the daisies. Yeah, you
never know what will push a man’s buttons. Bring him back to the “real” world.
I wished the Scribe could have figured that one out.
