The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Third Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Third Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise”- A Companion Piece

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise”- A Companion Piece  

By Zack James

No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the applecart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.        

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last “i” before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.          

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21^st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20^th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids he would take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various products. Like vacuum cleansers which he knew nothing about or maybe hammers which he knew marginally better. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own careers out of the literary mass of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                  

Josh told Sam that he was rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long since dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed him about how wrong he was to compare the juvenile antics, her term of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.   

End of debate. No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars had to put their two-cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if he had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I period and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.

It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from mucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placid kinds of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano a mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to germinate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devils’ advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together.      

Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald In A Ten Round Bout For The Literary Championship Of The Jazz Age-Two Corner Boys Do What Corner Boys Always Do “Bet” The Over-Under

Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald In A Ten Round Bout For The Literary Championship Of The Jazz Age-Two Corner Boys Do What Corner Boys Always Do “Bet” The Over-Under

By Zack James

Recenty I did what I thought would be a little fluff piece about then freshly-retired, maybe semi-retired is better since old writers like old generals don’t seem to fade away Josh Breslin. The piece centered on a “think piece” that he did off-the cuff for his old boss Ben Gold over at The Literary Gazette who basically gave him carte blanche to write whatever came into his head. What came into his head was a little mischievous piece to tweak the academic who have created more fake news about various writers and their influence than you can shake a stick at. Josh’s idea then was to raise hackles with the big academic types over which of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early novels best typified the Jazz Age his first novel This Side Of Paradise or his classic The Great Gatsby. To ignite the fires he claimed both represented that time equally with the idea that a few sullen undergraduates with time on their hands might take up the cudgels for one side or the other. And they did until they had to clear the path for an Ivy League throwdown between two heavyweight professors who were the acknowledged experts on these respective books. Josh told me they were probably still at it throwing footnotes and epitaphs at each other like a couple of pigs in mud.

Josh, having gotten a taste for the flames after that episode, moved on quickly once he saw how easy it was to frost the academy and so he tweaked out a battle royal between Hemingway and Fitzgerald for the title of literary king of the Jazz Age. As expected he stirred up another hornet’s nest when he decided to fire up Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the big boy of the genre, making him the champ. Like the earlier piece the academics went berserk and again are probably still at it. What Josh did not expect although if he had remembered his corner boy days it would have come naturally was that he would be challenged to a bet on who was that literary king back in those hoary Jazz Age days.

               

The bet had been triggered after Josh had told Sam Lowell one night at Terry James’ Grille in Riverdale where they occasionally met to rekindle old time stories from their growing up days about a “firestorm” that he had created. Josh had added that at the end of that review which had caused the battle royal that he had wink, wink “wondered aloud” whether Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises might be more evocative of the Jazz Age doing than Gatsby. Nobody in the melee had seen fit to note that blasphemous statement since they were all Fitzgerald specialists as far as he could tell he told Sam with a wicked grin on his face that a future article would present that case for dissection. Josh had casually mentioned to Sam that he would be willing to bet that bringing that battle of the Titians to the pages of the Gazette would create another set of fireworks in the academy.     

Suddenly Sam called out “Bet.” Josh retorted quickly and almost automatically “Bet.” The only question then was the size of the wager which turned out to be for one hundred dollars. See back in their school boy days Sam, Josh and the other guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor on lonesome, date-less Friday or Saturday nights would to wile the time away make bets on almost anything from sports to the size of some girl’s bra. Of course those bets were for quarters, maybe a dollar or two revealing the low dough nature of their existences in those days. The most famous “bet” of all just to give the reader a flavor of how deeply embedded in the night these issues were had been the night the late Peter Paul Markin had challenged Frankie Riley, the leader of the guys around Tonio’s, to bet on how high Tonio (or whoever was working that night) could make the pizza dough they were kneading go. Frankie “won” the bet that night because he had an arrangement with the guy doing the pizza dough who owed him some moola. Markin did not find out about the switch-up until much later. The important point was that when a guy called “Bet” to a guy on any proposition no matter how screwy the other guy was duty-bound to take the bet under penalty of becoming a social outcast. Therefore the speed in which Josh answered Sam’s call to wager on whether there would be another flameless flare-up after Josh’s next article.  

As these propositions went, for a quarter or one hundred dollars, Josh always prided himself on taking pains to try to win. Sam had, perhaps being a lawyer even more naïve about the incessant in-fighting in the academy than Josh had declared that he would bet that there would be no controversy surrounding Josh’s notion that Hemingway’s book was more evocative that Fitzgerald’s. The whole thing seemed childish, his term, and after the dust-up between Professors Jacobs and Lord had exposed all to charges of infantile behavior no one would dare to read even a cursory letter challenging Josh’s frayed little idea. Josh, truth be told, had not read Gatsby in a few years and due to the press of other commitments he did not intend, since he believed he could win the bet without doing so, to do another of his periodical re-readings of the book, one of his favorites. He figured that he could do an end around by viewing the 1970s film adaptation of the book, the one starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. One night he along with his third wife, Millie, streamed the Netflix version of the two- hour film.    

After viewing this film Josh began to panic a little at the prospect of, kiddingly or not, trying to defend Hemingway’s book as the definite literature on the mores of the Jazz Age. Afraid that his written claim that The Sun Also Rises was better at that seemed pretty threadbare. He was worried and as he tossed and turned that night he tried to see what in Gatsby, even the film version he would have to deal with in order to draw enough fire to flame up a controversy.

Although any book, any piece of literature, words, printed material   always were more important to Josh’s understanding of the world, understanding in this case of the period he had to admit that the feel of the film really did give a sense of what the Jazz Age was about from the scenes at Gatsby’s over the top mansion where the party-goers danced, wined, ate the night and early mornings away. There was definitely a sense that those who had survived the World War had left their pre-war sense of order and proper manners behind and that “wine, women [men] and song” was a mantra that both sexes could buy into as working day to day premise. It was like the survivors, those who had slogged through France and those who were left behind to wait for the other shoe to drop had a veil lifted. That dramatic effect, that sense of abandoning the old life on a re-reading of the expatriate life in Hemingway’s novel didn’t strike Josh as decisive as in Gatsby.       

The real thread though that Josh thought would undo him was that striving for the main chance that drove Gatsby either to grab the dough or grab the love flame with a show of what he had achieved by his efforts to “prove” himself worthy of Daisy. The new money though couldn’t break through in the end because Gatsby forgot rule number one about the old monied rich, and about Daisy as a representative character, they may make the social messes but somebody else is left to clean up afterward. Funny because in a sense Gatsby really knew that when he was asked to explain what he heard in Daisy’s voice-the sound of money. That said it all.    

Although the film did not quote the whole paragraph from the last summing up page of the book Josh once he heard the talk by Nick about the Dutch sailors and the fresh breast of new land that they found when they came up Long Island Sound back in the 1500s he knew in the back of his brain that he would never have more than a weak argument in defending Hemingway’s book as the definitive Jazz Age take. How could he beat out the notion that the fresh breast of land which had caused those long ago sailors to set out in ragged ships heading into uncharted waters to find their own dreams, to refresh their sense of wonder which had taken a beating in the old country from which they had taken the chance to flee.  

[Sam not unexpectedly won the bet since the only response that Josh got from anybody about his article that time was why he didn’t view the updated 2000s version of Gatsby by some undergraduate student who had never heard of Mia Farrow. And so it goes.]

Jailed for Refusing to Fink on Julian Assange Free Chelsea Manning! Former Army intelligence analyst and truth-teller Chelsea Manning has been jailed again by the vindictive U.S. capitalist state.

Workers Vanguard No. 1151	22 March 2019

Jailed for Refusing to Fink on Julian Assange

Free Chelsea Manning!

Former Army intelligence analyst and truth-teller Chelsea Manning has been jailed again by the vindictive U.S. capitalist state. Tortured in prison for seven years by the Obama regime for exposing U.S. imperialist war crimes, Manning was thrown back behind bars on March 8 because she refused to testify before a grand jury in a secretive star-chamber inquiry against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Manning declared: “I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.” Held in contempt of federal court for her principled stand, Manning was sent to jail, where she could remain for a year or more as the investigation proceeds. Release Chelsea Manning now!

In 2010, WikiLeaks published files leaked by Manning that cast a spotlight on the bloody work of U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best-known of these is the graphic aerial video, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” which shows a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship massacring at least 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007 while the Army pilots gloated over the carnage. After releasing the video, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified documents recording more murder, torture and rape carried out by the imperialists.

Manning was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years, the most severe punishment ever inflicted on any whistle-blower. Torture at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the relentless stress of having to fight for treatment while gender transitioning drove her to attempt suicide twice. Obama’s granting clemency for Manning on his way out of the White House in 2017 was a ploy to pose as a defender of transgender rights and conceal his true “legacy”—one of persecuting whistle-blowers and ramping up drone strikes and mass surveillance.

The cruel persecution of Manning is directly tied to Washington’s vendetta against Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks has been trapped for nearly seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. British cops posted outside stand ready to seize him for extradition to the U.S., where he faces a potential life sentence for the “crime” of publishing the truth about U.S. imperialism. For the past year, the new Ecuadorean regime, under pressure from the U.S., has made his life unbearable, cutting off his internet access for six months and even forcing him to give away his cat. Meanwhile, Assange’s health continues to deteriorate.

In November 2018, a mistaken court filing revealed that U.S. federal prosecutors had secretly filed charges against Assange, most likely multiple counts of espionage. The charges were filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, known as the “Espionage Court,” where no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty.

Obama’s Justice Department, which used the 1917 Espionage Act against leakers and whistle-blowers more times than all prior administrations combined, had for years looked to indict Assange for a criminal offense. The Feds found it problematic to prosecute him for publishing classified documents without also prosecuting the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and others, which had also published these documents. Thus, the Justice Department is aiming to frame up Assange as a co-conspirator with Manning in the unauthorized disclosure of national defense secrets. This would give the government a means to prosecute Assange, an Australian citizen, under the Espionage Act, which has repeatedly been used to criminalize dissent and opposition to U.S. wars but has rarely been applied to non-citizens. Hands off Julian Assange! Drop all charges!

The witchhunt against Assange comes in the context of the anti-Russia hysteria pushed by the Democratic Party ever since the dirty maneuvers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election campaign were revealed by WikiLeaks. With U.S. spy agencies claiming that Russian operatives hacked DNC emails, Democrats and their media mouthpieces have branded Assange a Moscow agent. Although the Democrats have sought to place Trump at the center of an alleged Russian conspiracy to throw the election in his favor, his administration has itself continued the vendetta against Assange. Referring to a 2017 WikiLeaks release exposing CIA hacking and cyberwarfare exploits, Vice President Mike Pence vowed to “use the full force of the law and resources of the United States to hold all of those to account that were involved.”

Imperialists always accompany their depredations around the world with gag orders and secret dealings. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky observed in November 1917: “Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level.” The American masters of war, enraged at any light being shed on their machinations, are determined to send the message to potential whistle-blowers that they will incur the most severe punishment. Witness former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, forced to live in exile in Russia as the price for having revealed in 2013 the sweep and scope of U.S. global electronic spying.

By unmasking the bourgeoisie’s lies and intrigues, brave individuals like Manning, Assange, Snowden and others have carried out a service to workers and the oppressed throughout the world. It is in the interests of the working class to defend them and to fight against the attempt to silence opponents of imperialist war and occupations. But leaks and revelations by whistle-blowers will not fundamentally change this rotten system. The manifold discontents engendered by endless war, racial oppression, economic misery and state repression must be directed against the capitalist class enemy, with the social power of the multiracial proletariat mobilized on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed. Our aim as Marxists is to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the working class in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with proletarian-socialist rule. Only then will U.S. capitalism’s spying, lying and violence at home and abroad come to an end and the full extent of its bloody crimes and secrets be laid bare to the world.

Presentamos Suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard Durante el último año, la Spartacist League ha formalizado la publicación de números semiregulares de suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard y la inclusión de páginas bilingües en la prensa.

Workers Vanguard No. 1151	22 March 2019

Presentamos

Suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard

Durante el último año, la Spartacist League ha formalizado la publicación de números semiregulares de suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard y la inclusión de páginas bilingües en la prensa. Estas traducciones al español de artículos de WV nos ayudan a llevar nuestro programa marxista a los trabajadores que hablan español en EE.UU. Nuestros artículos en español también tienen como propósito llegar al pueblo puertorriqueño, oprimido como sujeto colonial de EE.UU., y víctima de represión masiva en las luchas por su independencia.

Los suplementos y las páginas bilingües son una expresión de nuestro compromiso para abordar en español la opresión de los latinos, así como la cuestión negra: el factor clave de la revolución socialista estadounidense. Esta propaganda es una extensión de las lecciones codificadas en la VII Conferencia Internacional de la Liga Comunista Internacional en 2017, la cual reafirmó la necesidad de comunicarnos en los idiomas de los trabajadores y los oprimidos como contrapeso al chovinista English only de la clase capitalista gobernante de EE.UU. (Ver “La batalla contra la hidra chovinista” Spartacist [edición en español No. 40, septiembre de 2017]).

Durante décadas hemos distribuido Espartaco, la publicación del Grupo Espartaquista de México, sección mexicana de la LCI. Espartaco es clave tanto para nuestro trabajo en EE.UU. —el país con la segunda población de habla hispana más grande del mundo—, como en América Latina, el Caribe y España. Los suplementos en español de WV, que producimos en colaboración con los camaradas del GEM, aumentan nuestra capacidad de intervención en las luchas de la clase obrera multirracial estadounidense, como lo muestra nuestro volante bilingüe reciente “Maestros de L.A.: ¡A la huelga para vencer!” (WV No. 1147, 18 de enero). Publicamos este volante y lo distribuimos en las líneas de piquete desde el primer día de esta importante huelga en defensa de la educación pública y de un sindicato con muchos maestros hispanoparlantes.

Nuestra meta es construir un partido dedicado a dirigir al proletariado para que barra con el sistema capitalista y establezca el poder obrero. Para este propósito queremos armar a la clase obrera, incluyendo a su mayoría blanca, con un programa para luchar por sus intereses y los de las masas negras y latinas. Es necesario que el movimiento obrero se movilice en oposición a la represión antiinmigrante y que levante las demandas: por plenos derechos de ciudadanía para todos aquellos que están en este país y contra las deportaciones.

Otra demanda crucial al abordar la opresión de los latinos es el derecho a la educación bilingüe para aprender inglés y conservar el español. Esto se ve claramente en el suroeste de los EE.UU. cerca de la frontera con México, donde muchas personas hablan español con fluidez pero no pueden leerlo o escribirlo porque no hay acceso real a la educación bilingüe de calidad. Como parte de nuestra oposición a los privilegios del inglés, estamos por que el español sea un idioma reconocido como el estándar en el suroeste.

La lucha por educación bilingüe no se limita a las personas que hablan español sino que es vital para todas las comunidades de inmigrantes y beneficia a los que han nacido aquí sin importar su origen étnico. Cuando los trabajadores hablan más de un idioma esto ayuda a contrarrestar las divisiones entre la clase obrera. La educación bilingüe es un componente esencial de la lucha por educación pública gratuita, de calidad e integrada. También buscamos acabar con el aislamiento de los guetos y barrios, es decir, luchamos por vivienda de calidad, a bajo costo e integrada, donde las personas negras y los latinos puedan vivir entre los blancos como iguales.

Hoy, los trabajadores hispanoparlantes son un componente estratégico del proletariado estadounidense y muchos de ellos representan un puente vivo que crea un vínculo con las luchas de sus hermanos de clase en sus países de origen. La Spartacist League busca construir un partido cuya membresía y dirección se compongan en un 70 por ciento de negros, latinos y otras minorías. Nuestro trabajo para publicar propaganda en español aquí en la bestia imperialista nos permite tener más capacidad para ganar a los trabajadores latinos más avanzados quienes lucharán bajo la bandera de la Cuarta Internacional para construir el partido multirracial y multilingüe de vanguardia que llevará a la clase obrera al poder.

Nuestros lectores en EE.UU. y en Puerto Rico que están suscritos a Espartaco también recibirán los suplementos en español de WV. El archivo de los suplementos está en el sitio de la LCI: www.icl-fi.org.

Britain: Corbyn Betrays Working-Class Brexit Voters Down With Racist, Anti-Worker European Union! We print below a leaflet produced by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain in defense of Brexit (Britain leaving the European Union). It was distributed at demonstrations in London and Cardiff, Wales, on March 16.

Workers Vanguard No. 1151	22 March 2019

Britain: Corbyn Betrays Working-Class Brexit Voters

Down With Racist, Anti-Worker European Union!

We print below a leaflet produced by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain in defense of Brexit (Britain leaving the European Union). It was distributed at demonstrations in London and Cardiff, Wales, on March 16.

MARCH 15—Last night Westminster voted to delay Brexit beyond the long-anticipated 29 March deadline, although the EU must approve any delay. With the Tory government in disarray, the Labour Party stands solidly behind the interests of the dominant section of the bourgeoisie which opposes Brexit. The decisive leave vote in the 2016 referendum was a stunning defeat for the City of London [financial center], which it has been trying to reverse ever since.

After betraying his working-class supporters by campaigning for remain in 2016, [Labour Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn has spent the last three years touting the EU. Last month, in blatant disregard for the vote of the populace, he came out for binning [trashing] the referendum result and making everyone vote again. The only choice the Labour leader proposes to give voters is remain or the Brexit in name only of a permanent customs union with the EU. While Labour MPs were whipped to abstain on Thursday’s vote to hold a second referendum, Corbyn immediately reiterated his support for such a referendum when he deems the time to be right. Britain out of the EU now!

As the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Corbyn is demonstrating to the British imperialists that he is fit to govern on their behalf. That includes forcing the EU down the throats of working people who know it has brought them nothing good. Corbyn’s support to the EU has ceded the ground of opposition to that imperialist cartel to racist, right-wing Tories and UKIP, and has put wind in the sails of outright fascists like Tommy Robinson.

Contrary to myths pushed by Corbyn and trade union bureaucrats, EU membership does not mean peaceful integration into a “social Europe.” The EU is a set of treaties the European imperialists use to increase their competitiveness against their imperialist rivals, the U.S. and Japan. At the same time Germany, and to a lesser extent France and Britain, have used the EU to plunder the weaker member states such as Greece, Ireland and Poland. Under the EU’s free market banner, member states bash the unions, slash social services and privatise everything they can get their hands on.

While shutting the gates of Fortress Europe on immigrants from Africa and Asia, the EU boasts of the supposed “freedom of movement.” Intended to provide a supply of low-paid migrant workers lacking the legal protections of the native-born, the right to travel between EU countries is manipulated to suit the needs of the capitalists. A patchwork of national regulations governs exactly who can live and work where. In the face of the bosses’ divide-and-rule, the response of the union movement must be to organise immigrant workers into the unions and insist on equal pay for equal work. No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

If the British ruling class still treat Corbyn as a red menace, it is no fault of his. As Labour leader Corbyn has consistently abandoned his stated political principles in the interests of British imperialism. In addition to dropping his longstanding opposition to the EU, he dodged a vote on [former Labour prime minister Tony] Blair’s responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, came out for support to NATO and Trident [missile system] and has been conciliating the “anti-Semitism” witch hunt in Labour which conflates criticism of the Zionist state of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

In demonstrating how ready he is to sacrifice the needs of workers and the oppressed to the interests of the capitalist ruling class, Corbyn is expressing the very nature of Labourism. Labour has always defended the interests of the bourgeoisie when the chips are down—from sabotaging the 1926 General Strike to overseeing the 1947 Partition of India to initiating the reign of military terror in Northern Ireland in 1969. Labour is a bourgeois workers party, with a working-class base but a pro-capitalist leadership and programme. A central task of revolutionaries in Britain is to split Labour’s base away from its treacherous leadership in the process of building a Leninist vanguard party that fights for the interests of all the oppressed and exploited.

Labour’s ultimate aim is to form a capitalist government through winning a parliamentary majority. But the crisis confronting working people across Britain—plummeting living standards, factory closures and the decimation of unions—cannot be solved in Parliament. The task of rebuilding the fighting strength of the workers movement is tied to forging a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party.

To achieve a decent standard of living for every one, good jobs, quality housing and a regeneration of the deindustrialised areas across Britain, it is necessary for the working class to take the productive forces out of the hands of the capitalist profiteers. This requires a proletarian revolution that sweeps away the whole apparatus of capitalist class rule, and establishes workers rule.

Our call for a leave vote in the 2016 referendum explained: “Amid the growing chaos besetting the EU, a British exit would deal a real blow to this imperialist-dominated conglomerate, further destabilising it and creating more favourable conditions for working-class struggle across Europe—including against a weakened and discredited Tory government in Britain” (Workers Hammer No. 234, Spring 2016). Opposition to the EU is integral to our revolutionary Marxist perspective: the overthrow of capitalism worldwide by the working class.

The establishment of an internationally planned and collectivised economy under proletarian rule will allow for a qualitative development of the productive forces and the overcoming of class divisions in society—the starting point for a world communist order. For a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles! For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Hollywood Bingo-With Primo Detective Fiction Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

Hollywood Bingo-With Primo Detective Fiction Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

By Zack James

Matt Dolan was a “fixer” man. No, not the drug-dealer fixer man famous, or infamous, in mean streets lore or in the hard-edged short stories of addiction, mostly heroin (horse, H, boy) by the crusty writer Nelson Algren who had that scene down in an earlier age, an age when such addictions were sidebars and not front page headlines like today. Matt Dolan, called Mack for some reason buried so far back in childhood that nobody, including Matt knows how he came by that moniker, was a writer, is a writer who comes in an fixes up some film, some “picture” as they say in the trade when it is going off the wheels for any number of a hundred reasons that a script, even if the scriptwriter is the guy or gal who wrote the thing that the studio paid all that money for but was getting dragged down because somewhere after production had started the thing started turning in on itself and the studio, or more likely the producer of the particular film would call Mack in to bail the film out, bail the director and everybody who worked the sets who saw their wages ending if the damn thing was not  “fixed” by guys and gals like Mack.

Sure there are a million writers, some good, some bad who write anything from multi-week best sellers on some publications lists to stinkpots (pardon the old-fashioned word but it applies to some of the thousands of writings Mack had run through in his time). Sure there are a million screenwriters, or it seems like it when they roll the credits, mostly good or were at one time good and were either protected by the Guild or by somebody in management who owed them something. But there were, are surprisingly few “fixers” in the whole of the film industry and so they command high wages (really these days some fixed amount usually in the six figures agreed to in advance and signed on the dotted line as per Guild agreement which covers fixers as well as all the other categories of writers and musicians). Mack was, is among the best and has been since the 1950s when he broke into the industry and after a few false starts, and disappointments, got his reputation cemented when he saved the “stinker” High School Confidential. 

Mack came up with the very bright idea that that worthless cautionary tale about high school kids succumbing to the lure of heroin provided by evil nightclub owners and other denizens of the back alleys was going nowhere. The way Mack saw it no kid in his or her right mind was going to sit through their precious Saturday afternoon double-feature at the local Majestic Theater to be told stuff they got at home every day for free, and endlessly too. So Mack, a little younger then than the average screenwriter on the Hollywood scene and savvy to the role that music, specifically rock and roll music after Elvis and others broke the ground, came up with the idea of putting the then “hot” rock and roll mad monk saint Jerry Lee Lewis on the back of a flatbed truck with his piano and his sidemen and have the truck tooling toward the high school as he played his flame-throwing song High School Confidential. The film grossed a ton of money off of a shoestring budget because all the kids cared about was that scene and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies. Mack could name his price after that, usually. All the studios wanted him after that.          

But the supply and demand stresses of being a fixer put a lot of pressure on Mack, especially when he was working on some play or screenplay of his own which he was looking to have produced. One night Mack, who besides being a fixer man loved the ladies, loved the young ones especially even as he got older, said they kept him young, or whatever reason older guys give these days for chasing young skirts (or for older gay guys and lesbian women these days when the great secret of Hollywood same sex lives had become passe what the object of their affections might be wearing), was telling Jack Curran, an executive at Excelsior Films, the company that he had the closest ties to over the previous  twenty years or over drinks at his favorite watering hole, The Dirty Duck, off of Vine Street, about how he got his first contract to fix a “stinker” at Excelsior.

At that time maybe the summer of 1972 Max Stein called him up when he was up in Big Sur trying to work out some kinks in a screenplay that would later be produced under the title Love In The Park (and which made that studio, the now defunct Blue Blaze Films, a ton of money but not enough to keep the wolves away when they produced a big series of flops, real stinkers, none of which they saw the wisdom of bringing him or any fixer in on) and told him that the latest film he was producing, Hurry, My Sweet, was losing steam, needed a fixer man and he had heard through Harry Swann at Delta Films that Mack was the man he needed. Mack pleaded prior commitment but Max threw up a number that Mack couldn’t refuse and so he committed to a two week stint back down at La Jolla where the film was shot to try to work something out of the air once again. Max sent him along with the contract a copy of the screenplay as it was then being worked on.

What the script was about was an old-time kind of detective story, a genre that was making a comeback on the screen, after a long absence since the time of the great black and white film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. The plotline involved as those type films always did some nefarious murder (or murders depending on how grizzly the producer and director though they could take the thing and not have irate parents banning their kids from spending their dough to see it) to be solved by a resourceful detective. One hook here was that the hard-boiled female detective, they always had to be hard-boiled whatever their gender since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler switched things up back in the 1920s and 1930s, Patty Lane, being played by veteran screen actress Mara Whiting.

Another hook was that the bad guy was a bad gal, Laura Devine, played by the beautiful Gina Saint-Germain, who had wasted her drug-dealing lover, Gary Lawlor, played by rising star Sam Lawrence, after he had turned Laura’s sister, Sarah, played by new comer Sissy Moore, on to drugs and to the streets doing tricks for short money to feed her habit. The big hook though is that Sarah, after Laura wasted Gary, was holding five kilos of pure high grade Columbian cocaine which she intended to sell to the highest bidder, Laura or anybody else, so she could get off the streets and feed her own habit in the comfort of some high-end bungalow. Laura putting pure greed over sisterly love sent some of her boys (and a girl sharpshooter as well) out to find the sister, find the dope really. Hard-pressed Sarah looks up in the Los Angeles telephone directory for a detective to help her out, for protection really, and to broker a deal if necessary and comes up with Patty who she thinks is a guy because the listing of the agency was Pat Lane and Associates. Pretty standard stuff but Mack could see where Max was a little panicky because even if the theme reflected more contemporary times and concerns it was still a “stinker” as far as he was concerned.                         

When Mack got to the set down in La Jolla not far from the university and close to the rock-strewn ocean that was playing a nice visual backdrop to the action he told the director, Josh Lannon, well-known for working B films on short money, and short storyline filling out the meek dialogue with plenty of action, the thing was a stinker, no question and no amount of action was going to cover-up a beaten down storyline. Of course Josh took umbrage at that statement saying that he was given the thing for short money by Max and if Mack could bring it around well fine, if not then that was that. Mack was used to that kind of reaction and knowing he had money-man Max’s backing let it ride, let the ill-tempered director blow off steam.  

Of course Mack also knew that once production was started, once the actors had committed to their parts as best they could that all the interpersonal problems that face any collective effort, egos, bruised feelings, hostility, make-shift love, and desire for bigger roles in the film-and in future films if an actor showed promise, especially in a stinker came into play. That is where Mack’s fixer skills and love of younger women got a serious work-out.

About an hour and a half after Mack got on the set while sitting in an off-stage cubicle trying to figure out a new hook to make the audience interested enough in any character to take a chance and see the movie Sissy Moore came into his space. No question she was a good-looking young woman and as soon as she entered he had ideas, knowing she had ideas. Tall, slender, red-hair, long legs, not beautiful, not Gina Saint-Germaine beautiful for even a Hollywood novice knew, knows that you cannot have two beautiful women on one screen because they will not stand for it, and the audience won’t either even the women, but the kind of woman that once the film is over you think about, think about to the exclusion of the serious beauty.          

Sissy had heard that morning that the famous Mack Dolan was coming to fix the script and while she was only a new-comer people around the set and around Hollywood said with some proper training and proper roles she could be somebody. That was all she needed to know to get her small-town girl (Lima, Ohio) wanting habits on. She took dead aim at Mack, despite the fact that at the time she was maybe twenty years younger than him, and he had due to that huge alcohol and lately drug consumption not aged gracefully, and coming right up to him so he could smell that gardenia perfume she was wearing mixed with thoughts of hard sex ahead she laid it on the line (she, as she told Mack after they had hit the satin sheets over at the Biltmore a few times, knew through the usually very reliable starlet grapevine that he had a thing for younger women, with or without the gardenia perfume).

Sissy wanted her part built up, thought bad ass bad girl Laura in the story, meaning really Gina, after she wasted Gary was nothing to the whole plot, that she should be seen more, have more lines around her ability to evade the bad boys Laura sent after her, played more of a role helping Patty take the heat off of her. In return Mack could have, as she rather coyly put it, given what she was offering, could have anything he wanted from her, anything she had to give.

Now, as Mack told Jack that night the Dirty Duck, there are more urban legends about how famous stars, male and female, yes, males in the then male-dominated management end, worked their way up the cinematic food chain by “offering anything somebody in power wanted, anything they had to give” and a fair amount was just that-urban legend. But even then back in 1972 there was plenty of sex being traded for stardom, or hopes of stardom, or better somebody in power taking advantage of some youngster’s hopes of stardom before being shunted back to Topeka, Toledo, or Boise. So Mack made his pact with Sissy, made it tight, and for the length of his time on the set he got his ashes and whatever else he wanted hauled by her. This time, unlike a few times before when he was a guy in power himself playing on some young thing’s hope for stardom, his agreement to get Sissy more screen time, more to say, was based on what he had seen in the rushes, had seen that star quality, maybe not the top but she would not have to sit by the midnight phone hoping for work.    

Naturally the increase of one actor’s role at the expense of another, here Gina, caused an uproar on the set, caused Gina to say she would not perform at her usual high level. Mack knew he had Max’s okay, since he had called him after the pact with Sissy was consummated the first time so he was able to ride it out. Here’s how: Mack determined that what the film needed with so many good-looking females was more sex, or in those days when it was still dicey to get too graphic in sex scenes, was the allure of sex. Now it wasn’t going to be Patty as the crusading detective ready to save an errant young woman and Gina flat out refused to do any sex scenes but Sissy, well, Sissy really was up for anything that would get her up the food chain, especially after Mack put the bug in her ear that such efforts would enhance her career opportunities. There wasn’t much that Mack could do with the script with what was already in the can but that is when he came up with the idea that would save the damn thing.

Sarah, Sissy's now beefed up role, early on as she got more addicted to the drugs Gary was feeding her and was out doing tricks on the streets got into a situation where some guys Gary knew propositioned her to come to a poker party with them. She agreed once Gary said he would “make her well.” So the scene got set up in a smoky hotel room, cards out, chips out, cigarettes out, drinks out on the table and then Sissy dressed scantily like a Playboy bunny, popular at the time, without saying a word starts going provocatively under the table. Nothing on film showing what is happening but obviously Sissy is going down to “play the flute” on the guys as Mack put it euphemistically in his stage directions. That B film made a ton of money for Excelsior because all the kids cared about was that scene once they heard about it and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies, go back with a vengeance. Made Sissy a “hot” property (and forced Gina in a later film to do a “play the flute” scene more graphically shown than anything Sissy had done although among the gossips of the town your average red-blooded males out in the hinterlands Sissy was almost always thereafter called “the flutist” and nobody had to ask twice who that was or what it meant). Brilliance, pure brilliance.

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The Hard Years Of War- A Sketch- Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Four

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The  Hard Years Of War- A Sketch- Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Four

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the last year of which we are commemorating this month.

*****

Private Wilhelm Sorge looked once again at his now bullet-nicked heart-shaped locket stained sepia photograph of Miss Lucinda Mason heading back to his quarters after his third round of guard duty that night since old First Sergeant Winot had in for him. That bullet nick compliments of some Johnny Reb skirmisher as his regiment, the proud 20^th Massachusetts organized by the Harvards, headed south after Gettysburg victory.

Private Sorge began to tear up though, tear up in the privacy of his tent (really a lean-to but according to his platoon sergeant a stickler for army terminology a four-man tent, one like you could see an example if you wanted to know what they looked like of done by the painter Winslow Homer for Leslie’s Illustrated as he suggested in a letter to the lady in the picture) now that the Army of the Potomac had settled into winter quarters. He had been through a lot over the past several months since that same dear Lucinda had dragooned him into enlisting. Lucinda had declared that he had “no guts,” her actual wording, unlike her brothers and cousins now scattered over all the Eastern fronts fighting for “Old Abe” and glory, when he told her one night at a Union League dance that he was more a lover than a fighter. Said he didn’t give a fig about Old Abe and his slave brethren like Frederick Douglass, a friend of his father, Friedrich, who had been raising holy hell to get more black regiments into battle after they had acquitted themselves well in front of Fort Wagner down in the Carolinas a few weeks after he and the boys of the 20^th Massachusetts what men were made of. Was not going to lose life and limb either.  She had scowled at him, had immediately withdrawn her favors which he had come to expect when they were alone in her house on Commonwealth Avenue and would not to speak him again until several days later after he had seen the writing on the wall after their last fight and had gone the next day down to Tremont Street to enlist when he showed up wearing Union Blue. See Wilhelm, like many another young man then, and now, liked, liked very much to partake of his sweetheart’s favors.  

Wilhelm had seen hot action in the killing fields of Gettysburg with the remnants of the 20^th Massachusetts which had been chewed up along the way (the 20^th organized by the Harvard grandees over in Cambridge later built a memorial hall to commemorate their Civil War dead and Gettysburg has an inordinate list of Harvards who laid down their heads there) and lots of other small spot skirmishes on the way back south before the army went into winter quarters. That action had included a skirmish where he had been slightly wounded and where his beloved locket had been nicked by a stray bullet. No, the locket did not, like a lot of stories told around grizzled campfires about how this or that Bible or other cherished keepsake had deflected a fatal bullet, save his life since he had been carrying the locket in his pocket just then since his Union blue uniform jacket, his now faded, dirty, disheveled uniform had been “shoddy,” had fallen off at the touch one day.

Wilhelm had grown up a lot during that time as well seeing now that his fighting for President Lincoln’s plan to save the Union by crushing the illegal Confederacy was bigger than he had thought, meant more than in the early carefree days (his carefree to court that Miss Mason of the locket days) when he had urged that the southern brethren to go on their own without anger. Since then he had learned that “King Cotton” was not worth the price of disunion on this green-blazed continent.

Now a lot of what he had learned had been from sitting around camp fires with some of those fellow private Harvard boys and their hell-fire talk of turning the South back to the Stone Age if necessary in order to win (by the way he also learned that though there were many Harvards in the regiment the barriers between the enlisted men and the officers from that institution were as strong they were against his young German ass). Many a night there was nothing but talk, talk, talk about how Johnny Reb had to be shown a lesson, about how the South had to come into the nineteenth century. He breathed in that new air, slowly at first but something in what his old father had spoken of and that he had dismissed out of hand from that source began to sink in.

But the real forces behind the changes in young Wilhelm’s demeanor came about from two sources- an old grizzled sergeant from another platoon, Heinz Grosz, who knew his father, Friedrich, had fought on those hometown Cologne barricades with him, and had after serving a two- year sentence there exiled himself first to England and then to America. Many a night the old man would talk, endlessly talk, about what it meant to be free, what it meant to be your own man, and that if anything was evil then slavery was the thing. Grosz emphasized something to Wilhelm that he had heard while in a London meeting of like-minded types-as long as the black man was not free in America then the white working- man was doomed to fall under the wheel of the budding capitalist juggernaut that was building a full head of steam on this continent. The other source-the kindness without reward or favor of a Negro sutler in giving him water and some first aid when he had been wounded and the old black man had put himself at some risk to do so since Johnny was hell-bent on chewing up another Yankee blue shirt. Still he wished they did not sweat to high heaven when they were near him.