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
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.
Feds holding last public hearing on draft registration
Los Angeles, California
Thursday, September 20
At California State University Los Angeles More info
50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny
San Francisco, California
Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13
Commemoration on Sunday, October 14
At the former Presidio Army Base More info
Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance
By Josh Breslin
My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal
I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.
Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year.
The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
PDC
Box 99 Canal Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10013
Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates
During the Vietnam War era, the Presidio Stockade was a military prison notorious for its poor conditions and overcrowding with many troops imprisoned for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. When Richard Bunch, a mentally disturbed prisoner, was shot and killed on October 11th, 1968, Presidio inmates began organizing. Three days later, 27 Stockade prisoners broke formation and walked over to a corner of the lawn, where they read a list of grievances about their prison conditions and the larger war effort and sang “We Shall Overcome.” The prisoners were charged and tried for “mutiny,” and several got 14 to 16 years of confinement. Meanwhile, disillusionment about the Vietnam War continued to grow inside and outside of the military.
“This was for real. We laid it down, and the response by the commanding general changed our lives,” recalls Keith Mather, Presidio “mutineer” who escaped to Canada before his trial came up and lived there for 11 years, only to be arrested upon his return to the United States. Mather is currently a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Veterans for Peace. Listen to the Courage to Resist podcast with Keith.
50th anniversary events at the former Presidio Army Base
October 13th & 14th, 2018
PANEL DISCUSSION
Saturday, October 13, 7 to 9 pm
Presidio Officers’ Club
50 Moraga Ave, San Francisco
Featuring panelists: David Cortright (peace scholar), Brendan Sullivan (attorney for mutineers), Randy Rowland (mutiny participant), Keith Mather (mutiny participant), and Jeff Paterson (Courage to Resist).
ON SITE COMMEMORATION
Sunday, October 14, 1 to 3 pm
Fort Scott Stockade
1213 Ralston (near Storey), San Francisco
The events are sponsored by the Presidio Land Trust in collaboration with Veterans For Peace Chapter 69-San Francisco with support from Courage to Resist.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- When Woody Allen Ruled The Social Satire (And Adult Angst) Night
[In a recent introduction to this new series, a series based on short film reviews for films that deserve short reviews if not just a thumb’s up or down I noted that Allan Jackson, the deposed previous site manager, required his film reviewers to write endlessly about the film giving the material an almost cinema studies academic journal take on it. That caused a serious decline in the number of reviews over the years which I hope to make up with a flurry of snap reviews for busy people. To see in full why check the archives for November 28, 2018- Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Series Greg Green]
Short Film Clips
From an American Left History blog review of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall-
… Hey, haven’t I already reviewed this movie. No, sorry that was Manhattan another in the line of very witty Woody Allen movies. But the point is this it is the same subject that Woody addressed there even though chronologically Annie Hall came first by a couple of years and received the lion’s share of kudos and awards. As virtually always Allen is intent upon commenting on New York life and its intellectual trends and the ups and downs of relationships, mainly with women. Here he adds a flourish by contrasting old New York (in the 1970’s) to up and coming California as the cultural mecca of the American empire. And, as should be the case, New York wins.
Add to that the perennial issue of Woody’s struggle with ‘interpersonal’ relationships and his angst-driven desire to understand the modern world and you have a very fine social commentary of the times. Needless to say Woody’s love interest Annie Hall (as played by his then paramour Diane Keaton) keeps him hopping. As does an ensemble cast that works well together as foils for his ironic and savage humor. The only surprise in revisiting this film recently is how well Keaton plays her role as an up and coming torch singer. Of course, I have always been a sucker for torch singers but that is another matter. Some of the humor may seem dated and very 1970’s New Yorkish. Some of Woody’s mannerism and use of sight gags may seem like old news. But this is a film to watch or re-watch if you have seen it before.
And hence…
Alice
I having been retrospectively over the past year running through films Woody Allen directed, wrote, acted in or produced. Interestingly they run the gamut of his intellectual and cultural interests but I must admit that I did not realize how many of his films featured his old paramour Mia Farrow. She must be the number one actress featured in his various efforts. That is the case here with Allen’s whimsical modern day take on the Alice in Wonderland saga in good old New York City (naturally).
Here Farrow is the unfulfilled wife of a stockbroker who along the way has lost her moorings and her values and is desperately seeking a solution. In that effort she runs to the wisdom of the East exemplified by Doctor Yang, the acupuncturist. Going through a series of madcap false starts and pseudo-affairs she finally is able to right her course, leave her husband and bring up her children out of harm’s way. Damn, I want the telephone (or more correctly these days, the cell phone number) of the good Doctor Yang, pronto. A piece of fluff.Woody has had better ideas for a film in his time but not a bad performance by Farrow.
From The
Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His
First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-Civil Disobedience At Maine Bath Iron Works
November 14,
2018 marked the first anniversary of my officially becoming site manager at
this publication and in acknowledgement of that tight touch first year I
started going back to the archives here from the time this publication went to
totally on-line existence due to financial considerations in 2006. (Previously
from its inception in 1974 it had been hard copy for many years and then in the
early 2000s was both hard copy and on-line before turning solely to on-line
publication.) This first year has been hard starting with the residue of the
“water-cooler fist fight” started by some of the younger writers who balked at
the incessant coverage of the 1960s, highlighted in 2017 by the 50th
anniversary commemorations of the Summer of Love, 1967 ordered by previous site
manager Allan Jackson. They had not even been born, had had to consult in many
cases parents and the older writers here when Allan assigned them say a review
of the Jefferson Airplane rock band which dominated the San Francisco scene at
the height of the 1960s. That balking led to a decisive vote of “no confidence”
requested by the “youth cabal” in the Jackson regime and replacement by me. You
can read all about the various “takes” on the situation in these very archives
from the fall of 2017 on if you can stand it. If you want to know if Allan was
“purged,” “sent into exile,” variously ran a whorehouse in San Francisco with
old flame Madame LaRue or shacked up with a drag queen named Miss Judy Garland
or sold out to the Mormons to get a press agent job with the Mitt Romney for
Senate campaign after he left here it is all there. I, having been brought in by
Allan from American Film Gazette to
run the day to day operations as he concentrated on “the big picture” stayed on
the sidelines, didn’t have a vote in any case since I was only on
“probation.”
A lot of the
rocky road I faced was of my own making early on since to make my mark, and to
look toward the future I came up with what even I now see as a silly idea of
trying to reach a younger demographic (than the 1960s devotees who have
sustained this publication since its founding). I went on a crash program of
having writers, young and old, do reviews of Marvel/DC cinematic comic book
characters, graphic novels, hip-hop, techno music and such. The blow-back came
fast and furious by young and old writers alike and so the Editorial Board that
had been put in place in the wake of Allan’s departure called a halt to that
direction. A lot of the reasons why I am presenting the archival material along
with this piece is both to see where we can go from here that makes sense to
the Ed Board and through that body the cohort of writers who grace this
publication and which deals with the reality of a fading demographic as the
“Generation of ’68” passes on. Additionally, like every publication hard copy
or on-line, we receive much material we can’t or won’t use although that too
falls into the archives so here is a chance to give that material a “second
life.”
When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)
By Seth Garth
Recently in a quick acknowledgement of the centennial of American composer Leonard Bernstein’s birthday I mentioned that I don't know much about the man but I did know his breakthrough West Side Story and could relate to the turf warfare in the piece from my old corner boy days when we defended our turf just as fervently as any New York City kid. Any Jet, any Shark.
The story has been told many times in this publication by me and others about growing up, particularly that high school coming of age corner boy scene that animated our lives, gave us a certain tribal identity, in the impoverished Acre section of working-class North Adamsville south of Boston but Josh Breslin has told me that the same fierce defenses applied in the Ocean View section of Olde Saco up in Maine, Ralph Morris the Tappan Street section of Troy in New York and Sam Eaton ditto down the Bog section of Carver also south of Boston. Mostly those youthful stories have been given a positive spin, or have been sweetened up for public consumption, but there was a dark side, a very dark side to much of what went on-and how we related to our poverty and other corner boy aggregates.
Maybe the single best way to describe this dark side is to give the event that made the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, take this corner boy stuff, this from hunger stuff to heart. Before he met most of us, except I think Sam Lowell whom he had known since elementary school when they would hustle the younger kids out of their milk money, the Scribe used to hang around a spot familiar to all of us-mainly to stay away from-Harry’s Variety Store since Harry had a great pin-ball machine there and a very cool ice-filled container of all kind of soft drinks. Being a kid and if you saw Scribe then you would know he was no threat to anybody, in the physical sense, to the guys who hung around Harry’s, that corner’s corner boys and so he was something like a mascot to them. Would run errand for them, and in turn they would give him some of their free games which they inevitably won since they were wizards at the game, knew how to sway the thing just right, especially when some young girlfriend was tucked in between his arms.
The funny thing is that this group, these guys were nothing like what Scribe and others would do and put together when their corner boy time came up at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. These Harry’s guys were hoods, hoodlums, bad-ass motorcycle guys, guys who nobody, and according to Scribe nobody messed with. Their leader was one Harold, never called that under penalty of broken bones, “Red” Riley, a guy who lived near Scribe’s grandmother, another reason why he may have been taken on as a mascot, was the baddest of them all. Nobody challenged his authority, not and be able to tell anybody about it. The corners, the corners with corner boys, in the Acre in those days sprawled out to maybe half a dozen locations, all protected by their members. That was the rules and you lived or maybe died by them. One day Scribe saw what Red could do when somebody from another corner even came near Harry’s. This guy who Scribe swore did nothing except walk across the baseball field the other side of Harry’s. Somehow Red knew though that the guy was from another corner, a different turf. Without word one Red pulled out his whipsaw chain, went up to the guy and beat his mercilessly leaving him a lump on the ground. Somebody called the cops and they called an ambulance which took the guy away a bloody stump. Get this-the guy never finked on Red, hell, the cops who actually used Harry for his real purpose at the store to make book-to gamble on the horses-never even asked what happened. Asked if there were any witnesses. Nobody, not Scribe, nobody said word one with that bloody stump in their minds. So the Sharks and the Jets had nothing on the Irish bad boys around Harry’s.
Scribe, or really Frankie Riley who was the real leader of softer and younger Irish boys, mostly in high school where Frankie’s con artist, grifter ways were quickly recognized even by Scribe who couldn’t have organized his socks despite his brilliant plans and dreams, of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys once he told him the Red Riley story, always made sure to have a tough guy or two hanging around in case some assholes wanted to rumble, to cut our turf. Enter one Johnny Blade, Johnny Rizzo really who was one of the few Italians allowed on the corner as a favor to Tonio who was Johnny’s uncle but really by his saving grace that his mother was Irish, a Doherty who had also grown up in the Acre. Johnny Blade, nobody ever said the Johnny without the blade even a couple of industrial arts teachers at school, the track they threw Johnny on, who heard about him early on. I hope I don’t need to explain how Johnny got the blade part but for those who might not be quite sure Acre boys at some point, maybe about puberty, sixth grade somewhere around there became fascinated with knives, jackknives at first which everybody had and the more dangerous ones, the kind Johnny carried around from early on-and used.
Johnny Blade maybe could have gone a different root, that Irish-Italian mix made an Acre girl’s dream and he could have if for no other reason that by force of will had whomever he wanted, some older girls too, college girls later so he had something. The thing is Johnny Blade loved his knife (knives really but only carried one at a time by law I think). Like I said Frankie, larcenous Frankie Riley, funny to say now, maybe, since he has been a very successful lawyer in Boston for many years, knew that Johnny Blade was just what we needed to defend our turf if trouble came. Naturally when a guy gets a tough guy reputation somebody is bound as if by osmosis to challenge him, test him. Usually the excuse would be looking at some girl, some “spoken for” girl the wrong way and the boyfriend had to assert his prerogative. This time, this time I speak of which shows not only Johnny’s usefulness but Frankie’s via Scribe’s wisdom to have a “hitman” on board, it was Mother Goose, a member of Red Riley’s corner boys, an older guy like Red and most of his boys, a twenty something although nobody said that then, who took umbrage ( I am being polite) that Cecilia Duggan had caught Johnny’s eye, or more probably she had glanced his way. Bad blood, bad blood no question. (By the way nobody knows why he was called Mother Goose except maybe he never had a mother because he was one tough and fierce looking guy who I would cross the street when I saw him approaching me.
One dark, probably weekend night I forget now, Mother came strutting, or maybe lumbering is better, into our Tonio’s space not looking for pizza but Johnny. Called Johnny out, started talking the talk that tough guys talk and guys who want to be tough guys have to respond to. I think Johnny was in having pizza or listening to the already mentioned fabulous Tonio’s jukebox (placed there as we later learned by the local Mafia who controlled all that kind of action then, maybe now too for all I know) when he heard the clarion call. He went up to Mother said something like “let’s go out back” who knows but that sounds right. That back was the alleyway between building in the commercial section of the Acre, the area where Tonio’s was located, dark, dark as the dungeon. They went out back together, alone (frankly most of us, whether we admitted it or not, would have freaked out if we had to watch this hand to hand combat in person). Several minutes later Johnny Blade came out breathing heavily, sweating from his forehead and maybe a little peaked. All he said was “maybe somebody should call an ambulance.” Somebody, I think Tonio but don’t quote me on that, did call and the cops and ambulance came. Mother had been cut up badly, a few deep gashes although mostly arm and leg wounds, nothing life threatening. Mother, eyes looking right at Johnny Blade when asked by a cop who had done this horrible deed said he had not been able to identify his assailant. Followed the time-honored, time-worn code of not finking out, ratting out to the coppers. Funny the cops never asked anybody if they knew anything, saw anybody run since they also knew they would get the time-honored, time-worn didn’t see a fucking thing. Didn’t ask sweated Johnny Blade anything.
We expected some blow-back, serious blow-back when Red Riley found out what had happened to Mother and by whom, but he may have been in shock that anybody would waste one of his corner boys and that person must have been a mean mother, meaner than Mother indeed. Or maybe it was just “collateral damage,” another term not used then in the turf wars since Mother had chosen, wisely or not, to confront a corner boy on his own turf. A few years later Red Riley, motorcycle at the ready and motorcycle mama in tow, got wasted by some redneck cops down in some freaking White Hen store in North Carolina trying to rob the place.
Johnny Blade Postscript: After high school we went our various ways as usually happens, and Johnny Blade whether he finished high school or not I am not sure I know he had been kept back at least one year, went his way. The story goes around the old neighborhood that Johnny Blade almost killed a man, by knife of course, in Riverdale out west of Boston, got caught and was given “the choice.” The choice in those days given by a judge was a nickel in the state pen or go in the Army. Johnny Blade, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, took the latter course and laid down his head in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967. He forever has his name etched on the Adamsville town memorial wall and down in that black granite-etched wall in Washington, D.C. Every time I go down there, I go to the wall and shed a tear for him (and Frank White). Thanks for defending your corner boys. RIP, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, “Johnny Blade” (1946-1967)
This book, published after the death of Ernest Hemingway, but written in 1960 is a little gold mine of insights about the personalities and places that made Paris in the 1920’s the home of the post- World War I “lost generation” (Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age denizens when they travelled abroad). Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through that lens. Certainly the writing is as sparse and well turned as any of his short stories, including the characteristic last sentence or two of each section built to sharply give the point he was trying to get across.
A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway’s perspective this was a very difficult man but one who he tried to befriend. And of course there, as always, was the Zelda problem. If you want to understand the inner strain of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night read Hemingway’s tidbits. At some level Hemingway was trying to ‘save’ Fitzgerald as a writer but as we know it was not to be. Read his take here and then go out and read other books on, and by, the literary lights of the “lost ‘generation.” Some of it will make more sense then.
The First Lady Of The
Mountains-The First Lady Of The Hills And Hollows Wind-Swept Saturday Night Red
Barn Dance-So Long, Jean Ritchie-A Belated RIP
Zack James
Earlier in bthe year
(2018) I did an extended series on the role that my oldest brother, Alex,
straight Alex not Alexander as you might expect, played on my early
musical development growing up in the 1970s. He, as many of the older writers
who either started this publication back in the mid-1970s or were grafted onto
the staff by former site manager/editor Allan Jackson have done, cut his teeth
on, or as he put it recently when commenting on the series, he was “present at
the creation” of rock and roll, now called the classic age, the 1950s and early
1960s. The series was originally supposed to deal solely with that influence
channeled through him. The was before a feeling of late that other
unarticulated influences based on what Alex taught me had some say in the
matter. When we were discussing that feeling one night, along with a general
discussion about the various threads which contributed to the genre, Alex
pulled me up short when he mentioned how “our father’s music, mountain music,
hillbilly music,” had played a role in the development of rock and roll. Had
also contributed to the emergence of the folk scene in the early 1960s which
Alex had also taken a small part in through his best friend, Peter Paul Markin,
who was crazy for the stuff and was always sneaking over to Harvard Square,
sometimes
with Alex in tow, on weekend nights.
According to Alex, again
via Markin, people, young people, some of them anyway, were looking for
authentic music, roots music, traditional music. In this case music that
came over from the British Isles maybe Europe and planted itself down in the
hills and hollows of Appalachia especially. There was a convergence
of “academic” interest by certain college types along with a desire
to learn some new music by poring through the music down in the hills and
hollows. Alex’s remarks, his placing my unarticulated feelings in a context
connected to our father got me permission from the site manager, currently Greg
Green, to extend that
rock and roll series to see what fit in and what didn’t from mountain music. My
scurrying around looking for material got me looking straight at the music of
Jean Ritchie far from rock and roll but close, very close to our father’s roots
music.
Something in her voice,
in her lyrics, in her mournful playing of the dulcimer “spoke” to me, connected
me with my father and where he had come from not matter that we
had been very distance from each other long before he passed away. I had heard
her music before when I went through my own period of interest in folk music in
the early 1980s at a time when I had had what Alex has called my “outlaw
country moment” when guys like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt and gals
like Jessie Logan and Emmy Lou Harris got me interested in that genre.
Along the way I explored a few other sub-groups like Tex-Mex, Western Swing
with Bob Wills and Milton Brown and bluegrass with the likes of Earl
Monroe and Kitty Diamond. Songs from the mountains too.
So yes as Alex intuited
I, we, had via some strange transplanting of DNA had turned out to be our
father’s sons, had the hills and hollows, the Saturday red barn dance complete
with fiddles and mandos, maybe a sweet dulcimer, hidden in some
recesses of our brains ready to come out, come out too late for us to thank
him, but come out nevertheless. Which finally brings us back to why I am
writing this secular elegy to Jean Ritchie. Somehow, despite paying close
attention to the passing of various authors, writers, film people and singers
and song-writers in this space dedicated ‘keeping the torch burning” the
passing of Jean Ritchie got short shrift at the time. I make slight amends
here.
Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance
By Josh Breslin
My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal
I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.
Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year.
The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
PDC
Box 99 Canal Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10013
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PANEL DISCUSSION
