Monday, August 26, 2019

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

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


By Frank Jackman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *Defeated, But Unbowed-The Writings Of Leon Trotsky, 1932

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-    *Defeated, But Unbowed-The Writings  Of  Leon Trotsky, 1932




Google the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for a copy of an article, "German Bonapartism", from the pen of Leon Trotsky for 1932, the period of the book reviewed below.

BOOK REVIEWS

If you are interested in the history of the International Left in the first half of the 20th century or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. I have reviewed elsewhere Trotsky’s writings published under the title The Left Opposition, 1923-1929 (in three volumes) dealing with Trotsky’s political struggles for power inside the Russian Communist Party (and by extension, the political struggles inside the Communist International) in order to save the Russian Revolution. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes in English of his writings from his various points of external exile from 1929 up until his death in 1940. These volumes were published by the organization that James P. Cannon, early American Communist Party and later Trotskyist leader founded, the Socialist Workers Party, during the 1970’s and 1980’s. (Cannon’s writings in support of Trotsky’s work are reviewed elsewhere in this space). Look in the archives in this space for other related reviews on and by this important world communist leader.

After the political defeat of the various Trotsky-led Left Oppositions 1923 to 1929 by Stalin and his state and party bureaucracy he nevertheless found it far too dangerous to keep Trotsky in Moscow. He therefore had Trotsky placed in internal exile at Ata Alma in the Soviet Far East in 1928. Even that turned out to be too much for Stalin’s tastes and in 1929 he arranged for the external exile of Trotsky to Turkey. Although Stalin probably rued the day that he did it this exile was the first of a number of places which Trotsky found himself in external exile. Other places included, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940.

As these volumes, and many others from this period attest to, Trotsky continued to write on behalf of a revolutionary perspective. Damn, did he write. Some, including a few of his biographers, have argued that he should have given up the struggle, retired to who knows where, and acted the role of proper bourgeois writer or professor. Please! These volumes scream out against such a fate, despite the long odds against him and his efforts on behalf of international socialist revolution. Remember this is a revolutionary who had been through more exiles and prisons than one can easily count, held various positions of power and authority in the Soviet state and given the vicissitudes of his life could reasonably expect to return to power with a new revolutionary upsurge. Personally, I think Trotsky liked and was driven harder by the long odds.

The political prospects for socialist revolution in the period under discussion are, to say the least, rather bleak, or ultimately turned out that way. The post-World War I revolutionary upsurge has dissipated leaving Soviet Russia isolated. Various other promising revolutionary situations, most notably the aborted German revolution of 1923 that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution, had come to nought. In the period under discussion there is a real sense of defensiveness about the prospects for revolutionary change. The specter of fascism loomed heavily and we know at what cost to the international working class. The capitulation to fascism by the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties in 1933, the defeat of the heroic Austrian working class in 1934, the defeat in Spain in 1939, and the outlines of the impending Second World War colored all political prospects, not the least Trotsky’s.

Organizationally, Trotsky developed two tactical orientations. The first was a continuation of the policy of the Left Opposition during the 1920’s. The International Left Opposition as it cohered in 1930 still acted as an external and unjustly expelled faction of the official Communist parties and of the Communist International and oriented itself to winning militants from those organizations. After the debacle in Germany in 1933 a call for new national parties and a new, fourth, international became the organizational focus. Many of the volumes here contain letters, circulars, and manifestos around these orientations. The daunting struggle to create an international cadre and to gain some sort of mass base animate many of the writings collected in this series. Many of these pieces show Trotsky’s unbending determination to make a breakthrough. That these effort were, ultimately, in large part militarily defeated during the course of World War Two does not take away from the grandeur of the efforts. Hats off to Leon Trotsky.

I WILL ADD TO THIS SERIES AS I REREAD OR ACQUIRE THE OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES. HERE GOES FOR NOW.

THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1932, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

As to the 1932 volume this reviewer recommends a careful reading of the following articles: The Left Opposition and the Right Opposition (a polemic against the tendency of his comrades to try to form a bloc with the defeated remnants of the Bukharinite Right Opposition in the Russian Party and internationally); International and National Questions (an important analysis of the question of the national to self-determination in the age of imperialism); Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg! (a spirited defense of that great revolutionary whom the Stalinists were trying eliminate from the revolutionary pantheon for her various political differences from the Bolsheviks); Peasant War in China and the Proletariat (a analysis of the Chinese Revolution after the defeat in the cities in 1927 and the subsequent drive to awaken the peasant masses to revolution as Japan began its imperialist siege); and, the Declaration to the Antiwar Congress in Amsterdam (a rather nice polemic against the muddle-headedness of depending on pacifists to stop the impending war everyone knew was coming).

A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War


A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War
As we approach the 50th anniversary of both the Moratorium and Mobilization, it’s worth recalling one critical anti-war constituency whose role was less visible then and remains little acknowledged today.  While student demonstrators and draft resisters drew more mass media attention at the time, many military draftees, reservists and recently returned veterans also protested the Vietnam war—with equal fervor and often greater impact…  Now in their late 60s and 70s, many anti-warriors profiled in Waging Peace are long-distance runners in the field. Some remain active in Veterans for Peace (VFP), which held its national convention last weekend in Spokane. One highlight of that annual gathering was the unveiling of archival material and photos which appear in Waging Peace.  More

Thursday, September 12:  Waging Peace in Vietnam: Opening and Book Launch, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
UMass Boston – Grossman Galley, Healey Library 5th Floor MA United States + Google MapU.S. Soldiers and Veterans who Opposed the War The William Joiner Institute Presents a New Exhibit: Sept 3 to 20, 2019.  Contactmitch.manning@umb.edu for more information. Opening Reception and Companion Book Launch: Sept. 12, 4-6pm, Grossman Gallery, 5th floor Healey Library Intergenerational Veterans Panel Discussion: Sept. 18, 3-5, Campus Center 2nd floor. Find out more »

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CIA whistleblower: "I don't know if I can ever forget the pain" RootsAction Education Fund

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“After close to 10 years trying to live under the oppressive shadow of the criminal justice system in this country,” Jeffrey Sterling told us a few days ago, “I am still adjusting to this new life of mine, a life not under the gaze or thumb of the CIA and the Department of Justice.”

Jeffrey’s “new life” is a far cry from his years in prison that followed what BBC News called a “trial by metadata.” The government’s anti-whistleblower crusade has tried to crushJeffrey. That effort has been unsuccessful, in part due to assistance that he has received from RootsAction Education Fund supporters.

The Education Fund was proud to work in solidarity with Jeffrey during his long imprisonment, and we’re now equally proud to sponsor his work as the coordinator of The Project for Accountability. You’ll give him a lift if you make a tax-deductible donation in support of that exciting new venture.

After Jeffrey readily acknowledged going through channels to blow the whistle on an ill-conceived and dangerous CIA operation against Iran involving flawed diagrams for nuclear weaponry, the U.S. government prosecuted him on charges that he provided classified information to a New York Timesreporter who included it in a book.

The January 2015 trial had a jury that included no African Americans and was filled with people sympathetic to local Northern Virginia mega-employers like the Pentagon and CIA.

Now, as Jeffrey explains below, his life is starting to turn around. He just became extricated from probation. And his long-awaited book Unwanted Spy will be published this fall.

You can help The Project for Accountability if you click here and make a tax-deductible contribution. Half of every dollar you donate will go directly to Jeffrey as he works to rebuild his life, while the other half will go to sustaining his project.

To learn more about Jeffrey’s real-life nightmare of harassment, legal threats and persecution, please take a look at the Background information we link to at the bottom of this email.

We asked Jeffrey to share with you some of his current thoughts, and he responded quickly.
_________________________

[From Jeffrey:]

I did realize so long ago when I decided to say “no” to being discriminated against at the CIA that the road would be a difficult one, but I could not, or more accurately did not want to imagine that the journey would include arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. That part of the journey ended last month when the court granted, despite objection by the Department of Justice, my request to terminate the pointless supervised release I was shackled with. After such a long time, I am not sure if I know or remember what freedom is or at least what it is supposed to feel like. One thing is for certain, I am grateful for having survived the ordeal. Now, there is the matter of how to reconcile what I have experienced with loving my country.

I don’t know if I can ever forget the pain that I have experienced at the hands of the CIA who discriminated against me because of the color of my skin, or the Department of Justice and the criminal justice system that wrongfully prosecuted and imprisoned me for an alleged crime I did not commit, but I am confident that I will and can journey beyond it. Part of that journey has to include feeling a part of the country that I love. Recently, while still trying to get used to the idea of no longer being under the thumb of the probation office, I received something in the mail which affirmed that my return can happen.

It was a manila envelope with the return address of the local probation office that I fell under for the past year. I certainly wasn’t expecting any additional contact with my former overseers, so I was nervously curious about what the letter contained. To my ultimate surprise, it was a certificate of completion, commemorating a successful end to supervised release. What an insult! I wondered if I was expected to frame the certificate as a memento of the ordeal and benevolence of the criminal justice system.

As I began to toss the certificate into the recycle bin, I noticed that there was another sheet of paper along with the certificate. It was a notification of reinstatement of voting rights once a convicted felon has completed his sentence as well as parole, or probation. I cannot overstate how important the restoration of one civil right means to me. The persecution I endured meant more to me than just being convicted and being sent to prison, it meant I was essentially stripped of being a citizen of the country I believed in and fought so hard to be a part of. Now, I have at least one hallmark of citizenship returned to me, I could once again vote. 

I have often wondered whether I would partake in any more civic duties as a convicted felon, I had difficulty finding the worth in doing so. Previous to the horrible ordeal, I was an emphatic voter. I not only felt voting a right but also a responsibility that I thankfully had because of the struggle against wrongs that so many sacrificed so much for me to be able to enjoy. But, given my experience, I didn’t know if I could find it within myself to vote again.

Then, I reminded myself of the words of Nelson Mandela who was describing the day he was released from prison, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

I realized that if I choose to not take advantage of having a cherished civil right returned to me, then I would still be a prisoner of the unjust system that persecuted me. Yes, I have some bitterness and anger over what has happened, but if I hold on to those feelings then that means giving up on not only my country but myself.

I eagerly await the next election and I don’t care if it is for dogcatcher or coroner, I will gladly cast my ballot. If I am going to return to this country, then it is my duty to take advantage of the rights I have, especially those that have been restored. And, isn’t such a thing what accountability is all about? Ultimately, the vote is the most powerful tool of accountability that we as citizens have. I imagine that the coming elections will be watershed moments holding government accountable and that I will be joined by many others who want and expect meaningful change.

I hope to meet many of my fellow citizens during the forthcoming fall tour for my bookUnwanted Spy.

_________________________

Jeffrey’s refusal to knuckle under to illegitimate power has come at a very steep personal cost. That’s the way top CIA officials wanted it. His enduring capacity to speak truthfully can help strengthen a wide range of whistleblowers -- past, present and future.

You can help make that happen with a tax-deductible donation of any amount.

Please do what you can to support Jeffrey’s work as coordinator of The Project for Accountability.

Thank you!



-- The RootsAction Education Fund team

Please share on Facebook and Twitter.

Background:
>>  Jeffrey Sterling: “Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower”
>>  BBC News: "Jeffrey Sterling's Trial by Metadata"
>>  John Kiriakou: “CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Placed in Solitary Confinement”
>>  ExposeFacts: Special Coverage of the Jeffrey Sterling Trial
>>  Marcy Wheeler, ExposeFacts: "Sterling Verdict Another Measure of Declining Government Credibility on Secrets"
>>  Norman Solomon, The Nation: "CIA Officer Jeffrey Sterling Sentenced to Prison: The Latest Blow in the Government's War on Journalism"
>>  Reporters Without Borders: "Jeffrey Sterling Latest Victim of the U.S.' War on Whistleblowers"
>>  AFP: "Pardon Sought for Ex-CIA Officer in Leak Case"
>>  Documentary film: "The Invisible Man: CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling"


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