When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right   

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends “generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]    

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to five  important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the great jailbreak.”     

A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.) Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw connections bears separate mention these days.  

       

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.

I have already mentioned that night Alex startled me while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe Every Times You Leave, when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the hillbilly mountain music stuff in our genes. It took me a long time, too long to do our father any good but I finally  figured out a few years ago that DNA stuff, why of late I see, really see where the hillbilly  good old boy hills and hollows Saturday night local hooch courage red barn dance fit in on the long arch of classic rock and roll as it passed through the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Lenny Ladd, Jerry Lee, Old Slim Fanon, Texas Mac Devlin, Warren Smith and a whole list of guys and a couple of gals like Belinda Wales and Sara Webb. What the hell did I know then when stuff like that hillbilly mountain had plenty to do with estrangements from distance father, righteous hillbilly from down in the muds or not.

Alex,  okay King Alex, then completed the third leg of my classic roots of rock and roll on another night when he had I guess if I recall correctly had had another tough day grinding up some legal sweat somebody up the food chain in that sullen law office he worked in while doing that hard-ass (I will give him that) law school nights got credit for from some judge whose law clerk actually read the thing and wrote the decision based on Alex’s work (I am telling no tales out of school everybody these days knows that the higher up the food chain you are including SCOTUS the less writing of legal decisions you do which makes that law school education pretty damn expensive way up on the top for some poor benighted parents who thought they were doing the right thing). That night he asked me if I ever remember hearing some music on the radio, the family radio to boot, when our parents were on one of their rather infrequent nights out meaning when Dad had steady work and Ma was not afraid going out would break the family bank, that came booming out Chicago, always at night, usually Saturday or Sunday DJed by Brother Blues out of WAJB.   

I had to plead that I hadn’t until he mentioned a song called Little Red Rooster which I remember from his Stones collection but which he said had actually been written by a guy named Willie Dixon who was associated with a couple of brothers at Chess Records in Chicago who recorded had Howlin’ Wolf doing it and making a smash hit of it of the R&B charts (fuck it even the music was segregated by race on those record popularity charts). That is when Alex told me that he had first heard the song on that Chicago station on a program called Brother Blues’ Blues Hour (which was actually two hours each Saturday and Sunday night on nights when it came in clear enough to hear). Of course the ghost of Peter Paul Markin has to enter into the lists on this one (that ghost as new site manager Greg Green has found out during his short tenure and has commented on hovers over everything including its share of former site manager Allan Jackson’s demise giving Greg his job). Alex didn’t discover Brother Blues and his show Markin had one night up in his room on his transistor radio which is the way the young of Markin’s and Alex’s generation got to listen to the music of their lives without nosey parents interfering just as today one way kids do is listen to their MP3s or iPods.

Somehow on Markin’s radio the winds were just right one Sunday night when he was really trying to get WMEX the local max daddy rock and roll station and Brother Blues popped up. Markin went crazy listening to Muddy Waters, Howlin’s Wolf, Jimmy Smith, Mamma Smith, Memphis Minnie, Big Mama Thornton and a whole raft of other blues singers whose beat seemed so much like lets’ say where Chuck Berry or Randy Rhodes was coming from, that R&B-etched back beat that formed over half of all classic rock. So Alex and Markin would listen whenever the winds were right (more in winter than summer) and got an education about this branch root of the blues. Alex made this point blank to me (again via Markin who gave it to him point  blank) when he mentioned the famous smash hit Elvis made of Hound Dog (a strange song for a guy who girls, women too, married women, sweated over in between bouts of swooning but that understanding by me would only come later) and then played Big Mama Thornton’s version from the early 1950s where she made a three dollars on her version but ripped the thing apart, had every Tom, Dick and Harry jumping the jump.  

Of course ignorant as I was at the time Alex had to clue me to the difference between the root roots of the blues in the country, down in the sweat swamp Delta plantation Saturday night white lightening brave juke joint no electricity dance (probably no different except color, the eternal race issue always just below or on the surface at all times in America) guy with some beat up Sear& Roebuck-ordered guitar  making the joint jump. He gave me a whole slew of names like Robert Johnson, Charly Patton, Son House, Ben Jamison, Mississippi John Hurt, a few Big Bills, a couple of Slims Memphis and Kansas City and a lifetime’s interest in that sound. That interest though as important as it was as the root of the roots of the blues really only hooks up to classic rock when the blues move north, move up what did Alex call it, oh yeah, moved up the Mississippi out of the sweated South and had an electric cord to put on that guitar and blow the place away (the liquor and  hooch fight over dames would stay the same). Names like Muddy Waters, that same Howlin’ Wolf, Ben Attuck, Little Jimmy (and a ton of other Littles), Junior Wells and the like. Yes Alex, you went by the numbers and I am going to pass on point blank to the good people reading this to give the real skinny on the music of your generation, on what caused that big wave coming down upon the land in your time.         

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.   

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]    

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145 30 November 2018 Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison. In 2004, Cooper was less than four hours away from being murdered by the State of California when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a stay of execution issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That stay was granted after questions were raised over the prosecution’s evidence against Cooper in his 1985 trial. As one of the appeals court judges, William Fletcher, later wrote: “Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be—and in my view probably is—innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.” Cooper’s case returned to the public spotlight earlier this year after the New York Times published a May 17 op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof that compellingly detailed the police frame-up. It began almost immediately after the brutally mutilated bodies of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old neighbor were found in the Ryens’ house in Chino Hills, California, on 5 June 1983. Incredibly, the Ryens’ 8-year-old son Joshua, whose throat was slit and skull fractured, survived. At the hospital, Joshua communicated to a social worker that the killers were three or four white men. This matched the coroner’s initial conclusion that there had been several killers who had used a hatchet, an ice pick and knives. But this and other evidence was thrown out by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department as soon as they realized they could pin the murders on Cooper. A 25-year-old black man with a criminal record, he more than fit the police profile of a wanted suspect in racist, capitalist America. Three days before the murders, Cooper had escaped from a nearby minimum-security prison, where he was serving a four-year sentence for burglary. He had then hidden out in a house next door to the Ryens before fleeing to Mexico. Evidence shows that Cooper checked into a Tijuana hotel on June 5. The next day, cops looked through the house where Cooper had hidden and found nothing. But as soon as Cooper became their prime suspect, “evidence” suddenly turned up, including a bloodstained button from a green prison uniform. Cooper’s was brown. A hatchet sheath was all of a sudden found in the house. Cigarette butts that the cops claimed were Cooper’s were likewise suddenly discovered in the ashtray of the Ryens’ station wagon, which had been stolen the night of the murders. Buried was the testimony of local residents who reported seeing three white men driving the station wagon, as well as the accounts of witnesses who had seen three white men in bloody clothing in a nearby bar. Two bloody shirts were later found down the street from the bar. On June 9, a call was made to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department by a woman saying that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had come home on the night of the Ryen murders in an unfamiliar station wagon, wearing bloody coveralls but not the T-shirt he had on earlier in the day. She turned the coveralls over to the police, who threw them away! Cooper, who has maintained his innocence from the beginning, fought to have a DNA test done on a bloody T-shirt that had been found near the Ryens’ house. When the test, which was conducted in 2002, showed his blood on the shirt, Cooper insisted that it had been planted by the police. Further testing after the 2004 stay of execution revealed that the blood on the shirt included a chemical that the police use to preserve blood samples. When a vial of the blood taken from Cooper was tested, it was found to contain the DNA of Cooper and another person. In short, it’s likely that the police planted blood from the vial on the shirt and then topped it off with someone else’s blood to make it look like the vial hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, the court upheld Cooper’s conviction and death sentence. In his op-ed, Kristof noted that the defense attorney’s repeated requests for advanced DNA testing had been refused by California’s Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown, as well as by Kamala Harris, who was the state’s attorney general from 2011-17. Now a U.S. Senator and hopeful contender for the top slot on the Democrats’ presidential ticket in 2020, Harris immediately responded to Kristof’s column, declaring: “As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing.” The cynicism is breathtaking. For his part, Governor Brown, who leaves office in January, has refused to grant Cooper’s request for DNA testing. When Kristof suggested that every day matters “for an innocent man on death row,” Brown simply shrugged that “California has 130,000 prisoners.” He should know. For years, Brown openly defied a Supreme Court ruling that conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons were so atrocious that they violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” In his previous stint as attorney general of California, which has the most death row inmates in the U.S., Brown similarly shrugged off the notion that anyone on death row could be innocent. Kristof presents the case of Kevin Cooper as “the story of a broken justice system.” Far from it. The police frame-up of Cooper is an object lesson in how the racist injustice system of American capitalism actually works. As Cooper himself observed: “I’m frameable, because I’m an uneducated black man in America. Sometimes it’s race, and sometimes it’s class.” The cops, courts, prisons and military are at the core of a state apparatus whose purpose is the defense of the profits, property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s machinery of violence. In the U.S., legal lynching is rooted in the very foundation of American capitalism, which was built on black chattel slavery and continues to be maintained through the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society. Those condemned to death row have always been disproportionately black. The fight for Cooper’s freedom is a cause that is in the interest of the multiracial working class and all opponents of the brutal racism, exploitation and oppression enforced by the capitalist state. Free Kevin Cooper now! Abolish the racist death penalty!

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two Free Ed Poindexter! (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145	30 November 2018

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two

Free Ed Poindexter!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom. Along with his codefendant Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, then known as David Rice, Poindexter was framed up on bogus charges of killing Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard in an August 1970 bomb explosion. Without a shred of physical evidence and based on the perjured testimony of teenager Duane Peak at their 1971 trial, Poindexter and Mondo, leaders of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a Black Panther Party (BPP) affiliate, were sentenced to life. Mondo died in prison in 2016. The racist capitalist rulers have made it clear that is the only way they will let Poindexter leave his prison hell.

A July 2018 book by Michael Richardson, Framed: J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO & the Omaha Two Story, lays bare the racist conspiracy by the FBI and Omaha police to frame up Poindexter and Mondo as part of the murderous FBI COINTELPRO vendetta against the Panthers. Based on a decade of meticulous research, the book exposes the lies of cops, prosecutors and FBI agents. It details collusion at the highest levels of the FBI with the Omaha police to suppress evidence, as well as prosecutorial intimidation and coaching of Duane Peak to concoct a scenario that tied Poindexter and Mondo to Minard’s killing.

Like the Panthers, the NCCF rejected the turn-the-other-cheek pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr., advocating armed self-defense in the face of racist cop terror. The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist BPP crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But the program of the Panthers was disdainful of the multiracial working class, which has real social power based on its role in production. This isolation from the proletariat left the Panthers especially vulnerable to government repression.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” He said of an expanded COINTELPRO: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” Hoover spelled out what he meant in 1968, when he stated: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

This was no idle threat. Thirty-eight Panthers were killed and hundreds more arrested on bogus charges. Richardson describes the 4 December 1969 FBI-orchestrated raid by Chicago cops on the apartment of 20-year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was assassinated together with Mark Clark as they slept in their beds. Four days later, a SWAT team laid siege to the Panther office in Los Angeles, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition. The primary target was L.A. BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Vietnam War vet whose military knowledge was crucial that day to saving his own life and those of his comrades. Geronimo was subsequently framed up for a 1968 murder and spent 27 years in prison (eight of them in solitary) before his conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1997; he died in 2011. Those the authorities couldn’t kill were railroaded to prison hell. Among them is class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was falsely convicted of the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

The sinister motivation for the frame-up of Poindexter and Mondo was made clear two decades later by Jack Swanson, the Omaha Police Intelligence Division liaison with the FBI. In a 1991 documentary by George Case, Black Panthers, Swanson boasted: “I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from the city of Omaha.” For his role in the frame-up, Swanson was promoted to lieutenant and later became Omaha’s chief of police.

By the time he joined the BPP, Mondo was known as a performance artist and anti-poverty worker. Like many military veterans, Poindexter was radicalized by the Vietnam War and sought in the BPP the vehicle to place his military experience in the service of the black freedom struggle. The two joined with the BPP in response to relentless racist police brutality—which brought Omaha to a boil with the killing of black 14-year-old Vivian Strong, who was shot in the back of the head by a cop in the summer of 1969. Strong’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury. A year earlier, a black high school student had been shot dead by the cops during protests against arch-segregationist George Wallace, who held a rally in the city during his presidential election campaign.

In the early morning hours of 17 August 1970, Omaha police received a 911 call from a man speaking with a deep gravelly voice, reporting that a woman was screaming from a vacant house. When the cops arrived, the house was empty except for a suitcase inside the doorway. That suitcase exploded, killing Minard. Afterward, Omaha police rounded up dozens of black people in a racist dragnet. Richardson points out that within hours, the FBI knew from its informants that Mondo and Poindexter were not involved in Minard’s death—but it is the two of them that the cops and FBI targeted.

Among those picked up was 15-year-old Duane Peak, who confessed to placing the bomb. Peak told the cops at least six versions of what happened. Initially, he stated that he acted alone, and that Poindexter and Mondo were not involved. Threatened with the death penalty and promised a deal, Peak agreed to implicate them.

At a preliminary hearing, he effectively recanted his accusations against Poindexter and Mondo. The prosecution asked for a break. Two hours later, Peak returned to court wearing sunglasses, which when removed revealed swollen eyes. He then repeated his earlier fabrication that Poindexter had built the bomb using dynamite that was stored in Mondo’s basement. The next day, Peak confided in a letter from jail to a family friend, Olivia Norris: “From now on I refuse to call myself a man, or anything close to a man, because I did what I did.” He added, “I not only turned against those two bloods, but I turned against myself and my own people.” That letter, which prosecutors knew about, was suppressed along with other evidence.

Peak testified that he carried the suitcase bomb around North Omaha from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., taking it into three different cars and two residences. Four witnesses, including two cousins of Peak, testified that Peak was never together with Poindexter and Mondo at the times and places that Peak claimed. Peak also testified that it was he who made the 911 call. A recording of the 911 call was never played for the jury. Omaha police had sent a copy of the tape to FBI headquarters for analysis but later asked that no written report be issued, putting a stop to the search for the identity of the caller. An FBI memo pointed to a warning by the Omaha assistant chief of police that use of the tapes “might be prejudicial to the police murder trial.” Hoover himself signed off on this suppression of evidence. Testifying at a 2007 hearing on Poindexter’s petition for a new trial, vocal analyst Tom Owen confirmed that Peak could not have made that phone call.

Peak testified that he never entered into a deal with the prosecution, and the prosecutor denied that any bargain was struck. After testifying against Mondo and Poindexter, Peak pleaded guilty to juvenile delinquency in juvenile court.

The cops’ claim that they had recovered dynamite from the basement of Mondo’s house was transparently false. Of the more than two dozen police photos of the basement, not one shows any dynamite—which only appears in photos of the trunk of a police cruiser. Jack Swanson testified at the 1971 trial that he found the dynamite in a coal bin but changed his story in a 1974 federal appeal hearing, saying he saw it by the furnace. In the 2007 hearing, another cop who at trial had backed up Swanson’s story claimed that he, not Swanson, discovered the dynamite. The court ruled these contradictions “immaterial.” Neither Mondo’s nor Poindexter’s fingerprints were found on the dynamite. In the George Case documentary, Marvin McClarty, a former Omaha policeman present at the search, said he knew that the cops “were out to get those two,” adding: “To this day I still believe that it [the dynamite] was planted in that house.”

The cops also claimed that residue recovered from Mondo’s pants and Poindexter’s pockets tested positive for dynamite. A photo of Mondo taken moments before he surrendered his pants showed him with his hands deeply thrust in his pockets, yet swabs from their hands tested negative. In 1999, a retired top FBI explosives expert, Fred Whitehurst, submitted an analysis. “I still find that suspicious. The dynamite is in cartridges that don’t need to be opened ever except to punch a hole in them and stick a blasting cap in them. But there are dynamite particles in many places. This is not right.” He concluded: “Something doesn’t add up here unless that evidence was salted.” Many of those initially rounded up tested positive for dynamite, only to be released with charges dropped immediately after Poindexter and Mondo were convicted.

Mondo remained an unbroken fighter against racial oppression until his last breath. Poindexter, who just turned 74, remains unbowed despite numerous health conditions, including recent triple-bypass heart surgery, no doubt exacerbated by nearly five decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment. He has earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is recognized as a caring mentor for fellow prisoners.

COINTELPRO was formally terminated two weeks after the conviction of the Omaha Two in the early 1970s. But it lives today not only in the ongoing imprisonment of a generation of Panthers and other fighters for black freedom but also in the surveillance, harassment and state terror directed against those who oppose depredations of racist American capitalism.

In 1974, a federal district court overturned Mondo’s conviction based on the illegal search of his house, a decision affirmed by a federal appellate court a year later. But in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case returned to Nebraska state court. The Nebraska Supreme Court then ruled that Mondo’s time to appeal had lapsed. Since 1993, Nebraska’s Parole Board has voted for the release of Poindexter and Mondo. However, the Nebraska Board of Pardons, made up of the governor, the attorney general and secretary of state, has refused to commute the life sentences to a term of years—a prerequisite to a grant of parole.

The FBI, cops and courts are core components of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to safeguard the bosses’ profit system through breaking strikes, terrorizing ghetto and barrio youth and repressing social protest. There will be no end to cop terror and racist frame-ups without getting rid of the capitalist system and its state through workers revolution. Ed Poindexter is an innocent man—Free him now!

*   *   *

Ed Poindexter is among the 11 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee, which is preparing to hold its 33rd annual Holiday Appeal fundraiser in support of this program. We first started providing stipends to Poindexter and Mondo in 1986. For more information about the PDC and its class-war prisoners fund, see www.partisandefense.org. You can write to Poindexter at: Ed Poindexter, 27767, 1-A-09, Nebraska State Penitentiary, P.O. Box 22500, Lincoln, NE 68542-2500.

Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters! (Quote of the Week) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II

Workers Vanguard No. 1145 30 November 2018 TROTSKY LENIN Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters! (Quote of the Week) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II. Some 40,000 men, women and children held off elite Nazi troops for 42 days before they were nearly all dragged off to the gas chambers. We reprint below an excerpt from Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), the newspaper of the Jewish Trotskyists in the Warsaw Ghetto, hailing the Red Army shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This selection originally appeared in WV No. 573 (9 April 1993). In the intervening period, we have misplaced the source material. The first workers state is fighting for its existence. The fate of the Russian Revolution and—to a considerable degree—the fate of the international revolution weigh in the balance. The workers of the whole world follow with bated breath the course of the greatest class war in the world, and their hearts and souls are with the Red Army…. Under which slogans will the Soviet bureaucracy lead the war? Under patriotic or revolutionary ones, “democratic” or class? The history of the last 17 years, beginning from the foundation of the theory of “socialism in one country,” and especially the “gains” of the last six years—the “people’s front,” betrayal of the Spanish revolution, the Moscow trials, the pogrom against the Bolshevik elite, the restoration of the officer caste in the Red Army, triumphant reaction in all spheres of Soviet life, the propagation of the cult of [tsarist generals] Suvorov, Kutuzov and similar “heroes,” the assassination of Trotsky and the friendship with Hitler, all Stalin’s crimes—the whole Soviet Thermidor would have had no sense if the Soviet bureaucracy were to show itself suddenly willing and capable to conduct revolutionary war…. We defend the workers state regardless of the Stalinist regime, as we defend every workers organization from the blows of the class enemy regardless of the reformist regime ruling it…. The war of the USSR against Hitler—is the war of the international proletariat, it is our war! “We accept the workers’ state as it is and we assert, ‘This is our state.’ Despite its heritage of backwardness, despite starvation and sluggishness, despite the bureaucratic mistakes and even abominations, the workers of the entire world must defend tooth and nail their future socialist fatherland which this state represents” (Trotsky, 1932). Long Live the Red Army! Long Live the Russian Revolution! Long Live the International Revolution! —“Our War,” Czerwony Sztandar (July 1941)

A View From The International Left- Down With Chauvinist “National Remembrance” Law! Poland: Capitalist Rulers Glorify Anti-Jewish Pogromists

Workers Vanguard No. 1145	30 November 2018

Down With Chauvinist “National Remembrance” Law!

Poland: Capitalist Rulers Glorify Anti-Jewish Pogromists

The triumph of Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland nearly 30 years ago ushered in imperialist-dictated “shock therapy” that razed the collectivized foundations of the former bureaucratically deformed workers state and reduced much of the population to penury, forcing many Polish workers to seek a livelihood abroad. Accompanying this devastation was the steady drumbeat of a reactionary crusade reasserting the dominance of the Catholic church over Polish society and glorifying the interwar Poland of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski and the ultraright National Democrats (Endeks).

A new edition of the Inquisition, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), was established to root out and punish those who deny or minimize “crimes against the Polish nation.” The law heinously equates the World War II Nazi occupation with the Soviet “invasion” of 1944-45 that smashed the Nazis. Earlier this year, the IPN Act was amended by the latter-day Endeks of the Law and Justice (PiS) government to also criminalize, with penalties ranging up to three years’ imprisonment, any assertion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Jewish survivors protesting outside the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv proclaimed, “No law will erase history!”

Some six million European Jews, half of them Polish, were murdered by Hitler’s Nazis, along with millions more, particularly Roma, Soviet war prisoners and homosexuals. Yet in the eyes of the contemporary heirs of Pilsudski and the Endeks, the Soviet liberation of Poland from the Nazi scourge was indeed the greatest “crime” against capitalist Poland. The main activity of the Polish bourgeois-nationalist “resistance”—the Home Army (AK) of the London government in exile and the openly anti-Jewish terror gangs of the Endek National Armed Forces (NSZ)—was to shoot down Communist and Jewish partisans who were fighting the Nazis throughout the German occupation. However, the AK engaged in battle with the Germans after the Red Army began its offensive toward the eastern bank of the Vistula River. (See “The Warsaw Uprising of 1944” [WV No. 294, 4 December 1981; Platforma Spartakusowców No. 9, Spring-Summer 1999] for an exposé of the anti-Soviet myths surrounding that event.)

As the Nazis began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, the AK’s Antyk (Anti-Communist) department declared: “The extermination of the Jews in Europe by the Germans...represents from our point of view an undoubtedly favorable development, for it will weaken the explosive power of Communism” (quoted in Reuben Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt [1979]). After Soviet forces defeated the Nazi occupiers, the NSZ and remnants of the AK—today dubbed “cursed soldiers”—waged a war of terror, assassinations and pogroms against Soviet soldiers, Communists, Ukrainians and Jewish survivors. As the Spartacist Group of Poland has noted previously: “Hitler’s war against ‘Jew-Bolshevism’ fit in neatly with the Polish nationalist myth of a ‘Jewish-Communist’ conspiracy against Poland” (Platforma Spartakusowców No. 20, April 2016; reprinted in WV No. 1090, 20 May 2016).

The International Communist League is committed to the forging of a revolutionary internationalist party of the Polish proletariat. As a necessary task in this struggle, the SGP seeks to sear into the consciousness of the working class the record of the Polish bourgeoisie’s complicity in the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

Trotskyists Said: Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!

The enactment of the Holocaust law was met with hypocritical protest from Polish Civic Platform (PO), the parliamentary opposition party, whose embrace of the European Union makes it more sensitive to imperialist “public opinion.” As well, many liberals warned that the law would suppress historical research and debate. We oppose all state censorship. However, the criminal role of the interwar Polish bourgeoisie and its World War II anti-Communist cutthroats is not a matter of debate but of historical fact.

The record of Polish nationalism, suitably prettified for Western consumption, is embraced by all parties of the Polish bourgeoisie, including the PO as well as the PiS. In 2011, the PO-led coalition government commemorated the postwar terrorists by declaring March 1 a “National Day of Cursed Soldiers.” In 2017, the PiS-dominated Sejm (lower house of parliament) further honored these anti-Jewish and anti-Communist killers, by acclamation, for making “a valuable contribution to the Homeland” because “NSZ troops never accepted the Soviet Union’s conquest of Poland and the imposition of Communist rule.” Meanwhile, at November 11 “Independence Day” celebrations, government leaders stand side by side with outright fascists howling, “Communists will hang on trees” and “Save Europe from emigration.” We Trotskyists say: All honor to the millions of Red Army soldiers and officers who died liberating East and Central Europe from the Nazis!

Interwar Poland was a capitalist dictatorship enforcing intense exploitation and marked by virulent chauvinism, anti-Communism and anti-Jewish bigotry. It was also deeply oppressive of the Ukrainian and Belorussian national minorities. The Red Army’s entry in 1944-45 was welcomed by wide swaths of the populace. The Polish People’s Republic that was later erected as a result of the Soviet presence marked an end to the capitalists and landlords and their pogromist gangs; provided jobs, health care and education for all; and freed women from the draconian dictates of the church.

However, decades of Stalinist bureaucratic mismanagement under the dogma of “socialism in one country”—which included conciliation of the Catholic hierarchy and peasant smallholders and the mortgaging of the economy to the Western bankers—ultimately drove much of the working class into the arms of Solidarność and its CIA and Vatican sponsors. Standing on the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the bureaucratically deformed workers states, we called for the smashing of Solidarność from the moment it consolidated around an open program of capitalist restoration in 1981. At the same time, we fought for a proletarian political revolution to oust the bankrupt Stalinist bureaucracy. As we warned it would be, Solidarność was the spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution throughout East Europe and in the Soviet Union itself.

The purpose of the Holocaust law was clear from the choice of its first target in March: a press article about a 1941 massacre of Jews illustrated with a photo of “cursed soldiers” executed by the postwar Soviet-backed government. The article, published in the Argentine newspaper Página/12 last December, was based on the book Neighbors (2001) by historian Jan T. Gross, an account of the July 1941 Jedwabne pogrom. As further documented by liberal journalist Anna Bikont in The Crime and the Silence (English edition, 2015), Jedwabne was one of many towns where Endeks and local priests organized anti-Jewish pogroms in the days after Soviet troops pulled out from eastern Poland following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Bikont also described the chauvinist anti-Jewish rage directed at those who exposed or condemned the pogroms.

Facing international pressure, especially from Israel and the U.S., the Polish government quickly stopped the prosecution of Página/12 and finally agreed in June to remove the threat of criminal penalties from the new law. PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared: “Those who say that Poland may be responsible for the crimes of World War Two deserve jail terms. But we operate in an international context and we take that into account.” This is a cynical nod to fascists and other nationalist vigilantes who operate “outside the international context” to go after perceived “enemies of the Polish nation,” as they have already in terrorizing guides at the Auschwitz memorial.

For its part, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, butchers of the Palestinian people, signed off on a statement asserting that “the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people” (reuters.com, 5 July). This is such a blatant lie that the government-funded Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel was compelled to protest that the London government and its underground forces “did not act resolutely on behalf of Poland’s Jewish citizens at any point during the war. Much of the Polish resistance in its various movements not only failed to help Jews, but was also not infrequently actively involved in persecuting them” (haaretz.com, 5 July). The Zionist rulers spit on the memory of Samuel Zygelboim, representative of the reformist socialist Jewish Bund in the government in exile who, in the wake of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, committed suicide in an anguished protest over the lack of assistance to the Jews.

For Proletarian Internationalism!

Unlike nationalists and liberals, Marxists do not subscribe to the notion of “collective guilt,” which blames an entire people (be they Germans, Poles or Israeli Jews) for the crimes perpetrated by the capitalist rulers and their murderous underlings from other classes. Among the latter in Poland were particularly backward elements of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry (as well as some workers), who were incited by bourgeois nationalists and clergy to target the Jews as scapegoats for their own miserable conditions.

Some two million ethnic Poles lost their lives under the Nazi occupation, including many hundreds who were executed for hiding Jews. Before the Holocaust, Jewish workers were a vibrant component of the historically pro-socialist proletariat in Poland, which also included Ukrainians and Belorussians. While the bourgeois nationalists in Poland either ignored the suffering of the Jewish people or acted as henchmen for the Nazis, this was not true of the working class. Notably, the main source of support for the beleaguered Jews, including the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, was the Communist-led People’s Guard. As our German comrades noted in a statement of internationalist greetings to Polish workers in the DDR (East German) deformed workers state in 1989: “The revolutionary workers of Poland can proudly remember the instances of heroic resistance against Nazi terror, not least the valiant uprising of the Jewish masses of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943” (Arprekorr, 22 December 1989).

We called on Polish workers in the DDR, saddled with the fresh memory of Solidarność counterrevolution, to join in the fight against capitalist restoration in the DDR and for a proletarian political revolution against the abdicating Stalinist bureaucracy, in order to open the door to the creation of a united red Germany of workers councils. We fought to revive the slogan of the Communist International of Lenin’s time: For the revolutionary unity of the German, Polish and Russian workers! It was this internationalist perspective that won to the ICL the Polish Trotskyist militants who went on to form the Spartacist Group of Poland.

Intent on suppressing any future challenge to the capitalist order, the bourgeoisie has buried the revolutionary traditions of the Polish workers movement under a dung heap of nationalist and clericalist lies. The founding document of the SGP states:

“The drive to restore capitalism revives and intensifies all the ‘old crap’ of the prewar social order, from reactionary clericalism to Pilsudskiite nationalism and anti-Semitism.…

“Polish Trotskyists must seek to reclaim the best traditions of the Polish workers movement, forged in the struggle against national chauvinism. This is exemplified by Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jewish communist and leader of the revolutionary German proletariat.”

— Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 45-46, Winter 1990-91

Today there are few Jews left in Poland, but the pogromists are back in force, targeting Roma and Muslims and other immigrants. Yet anti-Jewish bigotry still serves as a battle cry for all-sided bourgeois reaction and clerical nationalism. A Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party, section of a reborn Fourth International, will be a tribune of the people—capable of mobilizing the proletariat in the fight for free abortion on demand, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and for all causes in the interests of the exploited and oppressed. Such was the Bolshevik Party that led the first and to date only victorious proletarian socialist revolution, the October Revolution of 1917. The ICL is dedicated to the task of forging new Bolshevik parties to fight for new October Revolutions.

A View From The American Left- Squabble over Khashoggi Murder Down With U.S./Saudi War on Yemen!iew From

Workers Vanguard No. 1145	30 November 2018

Squabble over Khashoggi Murder

Down With U.S./Saudi War on Yemen!

More than three and a half years of unrelenting war by Saudi Arabia aided by the U.S., British and French imperialists have turned Yemen into a slaughterhouse and the world’s most horrific scene of mass starvation and disease. Along with a bombing campaign, a naval blockade enforced with the help of U.S. warships has largely sealed off aid to Yemen, worsening the human toll in a country heavily reliant on food, fuel and other imports. An estimated 56,000 people have been killed while some 14 million—half the country’s population—teeter on the brink of starvation. With the collapse of health care and basic sanitation, including clean water, one of the largest cholera outbreaks in history has raged uncontrollably. At least one million people have contracted the disease; more than 2,500 have died from it. According to UNICEF, a child dies in Yemen every ten minutes due to malnutrition and disease.

In March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition launched the bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen with key support provided by the Obama administration, including precision weaponry, in-flight fueling of warplanes and satellite intel. The assault began after the Houthi movement, which is based on the Zaidi Shia minority, seized control of the capital, Sana’a, and other parts of the country. As expectations in Riyadh and Washington of early victory proved hollow, the coalition increasingly massacred civilians and sought to destroy the economy.

To starve the Houthis into submission, airstrikes have been aimed at food production and transportation facilities. Roads, bridges, electric grids, seaports, airports and water supply facilities have been destroyed. Helicopters and warships have blasted hundreds of fishing boats in the Red Sea, killing more than 150 fishermen. Thousands have died in precision airstrikes against civilian targets: homes, weddings, funerals, marketplaces, hospitals and schools, including one for the blind. Scores of cars and buses have been bombed. Forty-four children and ten adults died in one attack on a school bus.

Prior to 2015, Marxists took no side in the conflict between the Houthis and their tribal and religious rivals. However, from the start of the U.S.-backed Saudi war, workers in the U.S. and internationally have had a side: with the Houthis and their allies against the Saudi-led coalition and its proxies. This position does not lessen our Marxist political opposition to all forms of religious reaction and bourgeois nationalism. But we stress that it is U.S. imperialism that is the enemy of working people throughout the world. A setback for the Saudi-led coalition would redound not only against this deeply reactionary, theocratic state but also against U.S. imperialist designs in the region.

The Khashoggi Affair

With world attention focused on the barbaric Saudi monarchy, Donald Trump has steadfastly refused to follow the example of Obama, who, when Riyadh’s torture and killing of dissidents became too conspicuous, would gently admonish the Saudis about the importance of “human rights” while continuing to arm them to the teeth. Since the October 2 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Trump has maintained his unabashed support of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi ruler, citing among other things his recent help in lowering oil prices. As evidence leaked by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan made clear, Khashoggi, a journalist critical of bin Salman, was murdered by Saudi security forces in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. While Trump trotted out a litany of excuses to deflect blame from the royal family, the CIA slapped at the White House by categorically declaring the obvious: bin Salman was guilty of ordering the murder. Trump slapped back: Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

Khashoggi was a longtime member of the Saudi elite and supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and other reactionary Islamist forces. As a young man in the 1980s, he made a pilgrimage of sorts, at Osama bin Laden’s invitation, to Afghanistan. There he was photographed brandishing an assault rifle as he cheered the CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats fighting the liberating forces of the Soviet Red Army. Khashoggi later forged close ties with members of the Saudi royalty, notably the former head of the bloodsoaked intelligence services, for whom he served as “media adviser.”

In more recent years, he butted heads with bin Salman, including by coming out for a negotiated end to the quagmire in Yemen. Khashoggi was also making pals with Erdogan at a time of intensifying regional tensions between Saudi Arabia and Turkey. To bin Salman, Khashoggi’s tepid opposition was a betrayal as well as a threat to his campaign to cultivate an image as a reformer. Khashoggi, fearing arrest, had for the past year lived outside Washington, D.C., writing columns for the Washington Post.

Democrats in Washington have had a field day criticizing Trump for his rapport with the Saudi royal family. This is pure cynicism. The partnership between Washington and Riyadh has been reaffirmed by every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt negotiated the 1945 U.S.-Saudi accord with King Ibn Saud. That agreement guaranteed U.S. protection of the Saudi monarchy in return for access to the country’s oil fields. The largest in the long history of U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia—over $115 billion—was concluded under Obama. For well over a year after the outbreak of the Yemen war, the Obama administration supplied Riyadh with anti-personnel cluster bombs, and after a brief hiatus resumed sales.

Last March, when bin Salman visited the U.S. after announcing an easing of restrictions on women driving, the supposed “reformer” was embraced by a full gamut of politicians and celebrities, from Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to Oprah Winfrey. Following that visit, the arrest of Saudi women’s rights activists provoked little more in Washington than a collective yawn. A number of the 18 activists arrested this year have reportedly been tortured with electric shocks and whippings.

Now Congressional Democrats, and several Republicans, are calling for a halt to U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia as they press for an end to the Yemen war. This position reflects concerns in sections of the U.S. ruling class that by further pursuing an unwinnable war in Yemen, the Saudis are undercutting their ability to act as a linchpin, along with Israel, for U.S. interests in the Near East. As he did during his presidential bid, imperialist running dog Bernie Sanders has called for ending the war; his campaign indicated that the rationale was to free up warplanes and troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to join U.S. forces fighting ISIS in Syria.

Military depredations are part of the normal workings of imperialism. As we wrote in “Down With Saudi-led War in Yemen!” (WV No. 1070, 12 June 2015), “Every time one of its tentacles is weakened or cut off, every time a blow is struck against the American imperialist monster and its local agents and allies, working people and oppressed around the world benefit, not least in the U.S. itself.” That also applies when ISIS lands blows against the U.S. and its proxies in Syria. We demand: All U.S. forces and bases out of the Near East and Afghanistan now!

The same imperialists who slaughter and wreak havoc across the globe are in an extended war against the workers and the oppressed at home in the search for ever-greater profits. Workers have seen their wages slashed and benefits gutted. Black people, forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, continue to be gunned down by the killer cops. The disillusionment and anger of working people in the U.S. must be turned into class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. Our aim is to build the workers party that will intervene into such struggle to win the multiracial proletariat to the program of socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.

Imperialist Merchants of Death

While the war in Yemen is led by the Saudis, the country’s devastation is very much an American product. Years before the Saudis started their air assault, Yemen had been transformed by the Obama administration into a killing field for U.S. Special Forces and a firing range for drone attacks. In the name of combating the local Al Qaeda franchise, scores of Yemeni civilians were targeted for assassination, as were several U.S. citizens, such as Anwar al-Awlaki.

What makes Yemen so important for the imperialists and the Gulf monarchies is its strategic position on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen sits on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. If blocked, this choke point, through which some 3.8 million barrels of oil pass each day, would cut off all shipping between the Suez and points east.

Since early in the current war, U.S. and British military officials have worked in the command and control center in Riyadh that directs Saudi airstrikes. Britain, like the U.S., has supplied Saudi Arabia with billions’ worth of fighter jets and other military hardware. British Royal Air Force personnel are helping to train Saudi crews. France, in addition to supplying weapons to the Saudis and other Gulf states, has sent special forces to fight alongside troops from the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. And U.S. Green Berets are at the Saudi-Yemen border. (The U.S. announced the suspension of aerial refueling of Saudi warplanes following Khashoggi’s murder.)

The background to the war is the arch rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran over influence in the region. Washington fully backs the Saudis, who play a critical role in financially sustaining U.S. client states in the area, such as Egypt and Jordan, and propping up other oil-rich Gulf kingdoms and emirates. Although U.S. reliance on Saudi oil has declined considerably in recent years with the increased fracking on American soil, Washington wants to retain control over the flow of Gulf oil to the rest of the world.

The Saudis and their allies present the war as a fight against Iran. Iran’s clerical bourgeois regime is based on Shia Islam, while the Saudi monarchy is rooted in the extreme, Wahhabi variant of Sunni Muslim fundamentalism, whose social strictures are similar to those of the reactionaries of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ISIS in Iraq and Syria. At the outset of the war, there was no evidence to justify the accusation that Iran was arming and financing the Houthis. But one result of the Saudi onslaught has been to drive them into the arms of Tehran.

Saudi Arabia took on special importance for the U.S. rulers after the 1979 “Islamic revolution” that brought Iran’s reactionary clerical regime to power amid a social upheaval against the despised, U.S.-backed Shah. Iran’s proletariat had the potential to seize power in struggle against both the monarchists and the reactionary Islamist forces. But it was betrayed by its leftist leaders who threw their support to the Ayatollah Khomeini. We were unique on the left internationally in calling for “Down with the Shah! No support to the mullahs! Workers to power!” The new regime of the mullahs moved rapidly to enslave women in the veil and unleash murderous repression of workers, leftists, national minorities and others.

The sectarian divide across the region was greatly enflamed by the U.S. overthrow of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the establishment in Baghdad of a Shia-dominated regime, the Saudi theocracy appointed itself guardian of the Sunni Arab peoples against the Shia theocracy in Iran. Not least among the Saudi rulers’ concerns is that their country’s major oil fields are in its majority-Shia Eastern Province. There and elsewhere in the country thousands of foreign workers live in virtual indentured servitude.

In 2011, the Saudis suppressed Shia protests in neighboring Bahrain, where domination of the Shia majority by a Sunni royal family is a vestige of British colonialism. That same year saw the first of a series of large protests in Eastern Province. One of the protest leaders, Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, was executed in 2016, an act that Khashoggi hailed. Half a dozen other activists were recently convicted of participating in the protests and are threatened with beheading.

Regional Rivalries and Imperialist Machinations

Regional rivalries explain how Turkey is playing the Khashoggi killing. Exposing the murder of the journalist certainly has nothing to do with defending the press on the part of Erdogan, whose normal response to media and political critics at home is mass incarceration. In slowly leaking the evidence and keeping the story on the front pages, the Turkish government is trying to pressure Washington and Riyadh into granting political concessions.

What Erdogan wants from Washington is no secret. First, he has demanded since 2016 that the U.S. extradite his former ally, Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he accuses of fomenting a coup attempt that year (see “Turkey’s Failed Coup: Both Sides Bad for Workers—Down With the State of Emergency!” WV No. 1093, 29 July 2016). Secondly, Erdogan has long insisted that Washington distance itself from the Kurdish forces in Syria, who have served as ground troops in the U.S. war against ISIS. With regard to the Saudis, Erdogan is angling to knock bin Salman down a notch or two, and maybe get the U.S. to push for his removal from power. According to the Guardian (12 November), the royal court in Riyadh was furious when Turkey rejected a Saudi offer of “significant” financial compensation if it dropped the Khashoggi affair.

Following the murder, Erdogan declared that only Turkey “can lead the Muslim world.” Turkey and Saudi Arabia have long jockeyed for dominant influence in the Near East. Tensions between the two have heightened enormously since June 2017, when bin Salman was named heir to the throne. Erdogan had supported the Saudi war in Yemen, denouncing “Iran and the terrorist groups” there. However, when several countries led by Saudi Arabia imposed an embargo on Qatar last year because of its ties with Iran, Turkey reinforced its military base in Qatar and joined Iran in breaking the economic blockade. The new crown prince in turn denounced Turkey as part of a “triangle of evil,” along with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Bin Salman’s embargo backfired, as Qatar strengthened its ties with Tehran.

The regional interests of Turkey’s capitalist rulers require them to tread a fine line between Iran and the coalition of the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia directed against Tehran. The Trump administration recently made good on its pledge to restore punishing sanctions on Iran, having withdrawn earlier this year from the nuclear deal struck by the Obama White House. In contrast, Turkey has repeatedly supported Iran’s “right to enrich,” i.e., to further develop its nuclear capacity. Heavily dependent on gas and oil imports from Iran, Ankara has pledged to defy the sanctions, as it did the earlier round. While Tehran claims that its nuclear program is purely for energy purposes, U.S. bellicosity underlines that Iran needs nukes as a means to defend its sovereignty. Down with all imperialist sanctions against Iran!

Toward a Socialist Future

From Yemen to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, imperialist intervention and machinations have brought ever more misery and devastation, strengthening retrograde tribal and religious forces and fueling sectarian conflicts and pogroms. The region’s bourgeois rulers are dependent on one or more of the U.S., European and Japanese imperialist powers, whether or not the imperialists currently consider them enemies or allies/flunkeys. All of these regimes brutally repress the toiling masses.

Overcoming backwardness and casting off the imperialist yoke requires the working class, leading the oppressed masses, to overturn the capitalist order through socialist revolution. There are powerful proletarian concentrations in the region, from the Turkish auto plants to the Iranian oil fields and Egyptian textile mills. An end to capitalist rule will open the door to liberating all—women, Kurds and other oppressed nations and minorities, the urban and rural poor. Only in a socialist federation of the Near East will there be a full and equal place for all the myriad peoples of the region. To open the way to a socialist future, proletarian revolutions in these countries must necessarily be combined with the fight for workers rule in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries.

What must be done is to build revolutionary workers parties that can intervene into class and social struggles and lead the working class and its allies to victory, as the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky did in 1917 in Russia. This is the understanding that guides the International Communist League as we fight to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.

One Last Time On The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

One Last Time On The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?       

By Phil Larkin

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

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Today I choose not to go on and on about the recent internal disputes on this site which has led to the canny and “exile” of the former site administrator, Allan Jackman who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin when posting, etc., because I have bigger fish to fry as they used to say in the old days in my Irish Catholic growing up Acre section of North Adamsville south of Boston. (Allan in a retro piece written well before all the controversies has given his take on this dispute in a posting dated December 15, 2014.) Those “fish” meaning in this 50^th anniversary year of the Beatle’s world record bestselling album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  the world-historic dispute of that Acre growing up time about whether the Beatles or the Stones (Rolling Stones) were the band that fit our moods.  “Spoke” to us although we would have torn each other’s hearts out, or did a huge amount of “fag” baiting (yeah, we were way behind the curve then on sexual identity issues even though one of our hang-around guys, the biggest “fag-baiter” ultimately to our collective shock “came out” a couple of years after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City and for a while “shunned” him until we wised up a bit mainly through our own chances in politics and ways of looking at the world) if anybody had dared to use such an expression in the year of our Lord 1960 something.      

I have gone round and round on this one and by overwhelming general consensus, excepting our leader Frankie Riley, who tough and smart as he was, couldn’t get us to buy into his view that the “boys for Liverpool,” meaning po’ boy working class guys like us were superior to the Stones. And here is the funny part some fifty plus years later those of us who are still around from that time and still speaking to each other, including that gay brother (a couple of guys are not for very long ago reasons but in the baby-boomer male psyche “forgive and forget” was, is, a tough dollar) having recently gathered together to listen to a ton of Beatles and Stones material still believe that our youthful opinions hold true. That truth despite most of us, having survived the “from hunger” neighborhood, wound up having decent and honorable careers. Even Frankie belatedly to be sure feels that the “angry young men” Stones still represent best our own anger at our situations in a world we did not make than the more wistful Beatles. Personal preferences, time, and whatever youthful angst and alienation obviously mixing up the pot when comparison time comes around but there you have my take on that still simmering controversy.

So the Stones “win” that battle but today I want give a “shout out” especially to those on the Beatles side about a program on NPR’s Terry Gross- hosted Fresh Air. One day she had, in an encore edition originally aired on June 1^st, the son of George Martin, the guy who produced Sgt. Pepper who for the 50^th anniversary remixed his father’s original album work. For an hour he spoke about many interesting things that occurred during the original production and the things that he had done to give the thing a 50^th anniversary retooling.

Here’s the link but listen to Stones stuff before final judgment-okay:   

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531040084/50-years-later-producer-remixes-sgt-pepper-to-bring-it-into-the-modern-world

On The 50th Anniversary Of Beatle's "Sgt Pepper" Album (2017) The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

On The 50th Anniversary Of Beatle's "Sgt Pepper" Album (2017)    The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

Allan Jackson (using the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) commentary

Working Class Hero

Street Fighting Man

The following is a response to a canned Q&A section from a committee of my high school Class of 1964 (a few edits here to delete personal information). I share it with the aging lefties and rock and roll aficionados in the audience.

Okay, so Markin has come in from the cold and reunited with the Class of 1964 after over forty years of ignoring that fact. Big deal, right? For those interested in my profile you can read my comments in the My Story section. But today, since I have joined this work and it is my dime, I feel I might as well use it for the purpose that I joined, to network with some of the old crowd.

I propose to use my bulletin board space to pose certain questions to my fellow classmates to which I am interested in getting answers. Thus I will be periodically throwing a question out and would appreciate an answer. No, I do not want to ask personal family questions. After forty years this space is hardly the place to air our dirty little secrets. No, I do not want to talk religion. That is everyone private affair. No, I do not want to talk politics, although those who might remember me know that I am a ‘political junkie’ from way back. In fact I mean to get myself into some 12 step rehab program as soon as this current campaign is over, if ever. What I want to do is ask questions like that posed below. Join me…..

“Manchurian Candidate” McCain vs. The Huckster”? Boring. Ms. Hillary vs. Obama ‘The Charma”? Ho, hum. Three dollar gas at the pump? Oh, well. No, what has my blood boiling is a question that I am, after forty years, desperate to know about my classmates from 1964. In your callow youth, back in the mist of time, did you prefer the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? The question was posed in the canned Q&A section above but I feel the issue warrants a full airing out. I make no bones about my preference for the Rolling Stones and will motivate that below but here let me just set the parameters. I am talking about when we were in high school. I do not mean the later material like the Beatles "Sergeant Pepper" or the Stones' "Gimme Shelter". And no, I do not want to hear about how you really swooned over Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee. Answer the question asked, please.

I am not sure exactly when I first hear a Stones song although it was probably “Satisfaction”. However, what really hooked me on them was when I hear them cover the old Willie Dixon blues classic “The Red Rooster”. If you will recall that song was banned, at first, from the radio stations of Boston. Later, I think, and someone can maybe help me out on this, WMEX broke the ban and played it. And no, the song was not about the doings of our barnyard friends. But, beyond that it was the fact that it was banned that made me, and perhaps you, want to hear it at any cost. That says as much about my personality then, and now, as any long-winded statement I could make.

That event began my long love affair with the blues. And that is probably why, although American blues also influenced the Beatles, it is the Stones that I favor. Their cover still holds up, by the way. Not as good, as I found out later, as the legendary Howlin' Wolf’s version but good. I have also thought about The Stones influence recently as I have thought about the long ago past of my youth. Compare some works like John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and The Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” (yes, I know these are later works) and I believe that you will find that something in the way The Stones’ presented that angry, defiant sound appealed to my working class alienation. But enough. I will close with this. I have put my money where my mouth is with my preference. When the Stones’ toured Boston at Fenway Park in the summer of 2005 I spend many (too many) dollars to get down near the stage and watch old Mick and friends rock. Beat that.

From The Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-Veterans For Peace

From The Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His First Year By Site Manager Greg Green

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 50^th 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.”