*Does Anyone On The Left Want To Reconsider Their Opposition to Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan in 1979?

Click On Title To Link To The International Communist League's Theoretical Journal"Spartacist" (English Edition, Number 29, Summer 1980)For An Important Historical Article "Afghanistan And The Left". The tale told there for all unrepentant leftists is to watch what you wish for. While the word "blowback" was not in currency then it is an appropriate word to use to describe the Western Left's short-sighted anti-Sovietism and even more short-sighted link up with Western imperialism political and military aims, a link up that it still has not broken with. This hard secularist will nevertheless point a finger and say "you reap what you sow". Read on.


Commentary

Sometimes a news story stands by itself. That is the case with this Thursday April 16, 2009 story by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times entitled “Afghan women march to protest restrictions”. I have posted the article below. That, along with the recent news of a Taliban execution of a young Afghan couple for- ah, eloping- should give even the most brazen liberal cultural relativist cause for pause.

I also address all those leftists, feminists, socialist-feminists and pseudo-feminists who “howled with the wolves” along with all the Western imperial establishment, led by Jimmy Carter’s American imperial state, when the ex-Soviet Union in 1979, at the repeated request of the then Afghan government, intervened against the same kind of yahoos who are running the show in Afghanistan now. The question posed by the headline above stands as a challenge to those who are not totally ideologically wedded to adherence to American imperial policy in Afghanistan.

The Soviets, to be sure, may have had other additional more geo-political and ideological considerations for their support to the Afghan Peoples’ National Democratic government in 1979 but an important component of their support was to protect those gains for women that that Peoples’ government was trying to preserve in the face of the then savage pre-Taliban Islamic fundamentalist opposition. A photograph then of un-scarfed women students at Kabul University studying along with men compared with any photograph I have seen recently, including the one accompanying the article that I am posting below, from that benighted region tells the tale. In short, one need not be a flaming socialist, although it helps here, to question a policy that thirty years later empowers, in many cases, the very same Islamic fundamentalists the Soviets fought and who now enjoy American support and dollars. Let’s get this thing straight right now- Obama- U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!

*****

“Afghan women march to protest restrictions”.

By Dexter Filkins
New York Times / April 16, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan - The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

"Get out of here, you whores!" the men shouted. "Get out!"

The women scattered as the men moved in.

"We want our rights!" one of the women shouted, turning to face them. "We want equality!"

The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

"Whores!"

But the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital yesterday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked 2 miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law's repeal.

"Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse," said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. "It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."

The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, applies to the Shi'ite minority only, essentially giving clerics authority over intimate matters between women and men. Women here and governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law especially.

One provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband's sexual advances. A second provision requires a husband's permission for a woman to work outside the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to "make herself up" or "dress up" if that is what her husband wants.

The passage of the law has amounted to something of a historical irony. Afghan Shi'ites, who make up about 10 percent of the population, suffered horrendously under the Taliban, who regarded them as apostates. Since 2001, the Shi'ites, particularly the Hazara minority, have been enjoying a renaissance.

Karzai, who relies on vast support from the United States and other Western governments to stay in power, has come under intense international criticism for signing the bill into law. Many people here suspect that he did so to gain the favor of the Shi'ite clergy; Karzai is up for reelection this year.

Responding to the outcry, Karzai has begun looking for a way to remove the most controversial parts of the law.

In an interview yesterday, his spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said that the legislation was not yet law because it had not been published in the government's official register. That, Hamidzada said, meant that it could still be changed. Karzai has asked his justice minister to look it over.

"We have no doubt that whatever comes out of this process will be consistent with the rights provided for in the constitution - equality and the protection of women," Hamidzada said.

The women who protested yesterday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country's most powerful Shi'ite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting of the new law.

"We are here to campaign for our rights," one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

"Death to the enemies of Islam!" the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. "We want Islamic law!"

The women stared ahead and kept walking.

A phalanx of police, some of them women, held the crowds apart.

Afterward, when the demonstrators had left, one of the madrassa's senior clerics walked outside.

Asked about the dispute, he said it was between professionals and nonprofessionals; that is, between the clerics, who understood the Koran and Islamic law, and the women calling for the law's repeal who did not.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

*Vote NO On The Bush (Oops!) Obama Iraq/Afghan War Budget

Click On Title To Link To "Common Dreams" Site And An Analysis Of The Obama Afghan War Budget. I Pass This Link Along For Informational Purposes Only. I Do Not Know What Their Political Perspective Is But I Doubt That It Is In Accord With Mine. The Budget Breakdown Is Interesting, Though. It Has The 'Wonkish" Aspect To It That Comes In Handy When Making Arguments Against The Bush (Oops, Again)Obama Administration's' War Policy.

Commentary

The latest news out of Washington on the Iraq/Afghan war front is that President Obama (unlike the “dovish” Illinois Senator Obama) is asking Congress for some 85 billion additional dollars to cover the cost of his war projects in Iraq and Afghanistan (Associated Press, Andrew Taylor, Friday, April 10, 2009).

******

I am so sorry for my almost error in the headline to this commentary above concerning which presidential administration, Bush’s or Obama’s, is asking for a supplemental war budget of some 85 billion dollars to cover incidental war expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year or so. Over the past several years we have gotten so use to seeing this little ploy used and having to make an additional fight against the imperial war budget that I felt that I was in something of a time warp.

However, you can hardly fault me for my little mistake when the Obama administration takes a page from the Bush playbook and tries to do an “end around” by special pleading for separate funding for these little military adventures. The Obama administration does, however, promise according to the AP report that this will be the last time this little ploy will be used. So next time instead of an overall military budget of say, 500 billion dollars, it will be an overall budget of some 600 million dollars. Thank heaven for tender mercies. Then we will only have to do one propaganda fight to call for a NO vote on the war budget. Nice, right?

But enough of all this emphasis on the bloody Obama administration. The crux of the matter here is that the Congress must appropriate these funds and that is where the struggle lies. I have spilled no little ink each year around this time dealing with calling for a NO vote on these bloated imperial war budgets, supplementary or other wise. This year is no exception. Here is one of the good things about the Internet though; one can save information readily without the muss and fuss of spending a lot of time looking for it. Thus, I was able to conger up some old commentary from 2006 and 2007 around the question of the fight against the war budget.

I repost some of that commentary here. I have not done much editing so where its says Bush put Obama, where it says Republicans put Democrats and where it says political con job put political con job. The funny thing is that except for changing a few of the names of the politicians in charge, a few of the purposes that the money to be appropriated for and the fact that we are a couple of more years into this Middle Eastern quagmire they could have been written today. So maybe, just maybe, it was not some Freudian slip (or other psychological quirk of mine) when I make my 'mistake' in the headline. To be on the safe side let’s just leave it at this- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops From Iraq/Afghanistan. Vote NO on Funding For The War Budget.

******

“Hold Their Feet To The Fire”, April 22, 2006

Commentary

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY

The election cycle of 2006-2008 has started, a time for all militants to run for cover. It will not be pretty and certainly is not for the faint-hearted. The Democrats smell blood in the water. The Greens smell that the Democrats smell blood. Various parliamentary leftists and some ostensibly socialists smell that the Greens smell blood. You get the drift. Before we go to ground let me make a point.

The central issue in the 2006 elections is the Iraq quagmire. As we enter the fourth year in the bloody war in Iraq many liberals, and some not so liberal, in Congress and elsewhere are looking to rehabilitate their sorry records on Iraq and are having a cheap field day. As militants we know that the only serious call is- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of all U.S. and Allied Forces Now (or rather yesterday). Many politicians have supported a pale imitation of this slogan-now that it safe to do so. These courageous positions range from immediate withdrawal in six months, one year, six years, etc... My personal favorite is withdrawal when the situation in Iraq stabilizes. Compared to that position, Mr. Bush’s statement in May, 2003 that the mission in Iraq was accomplished seems the height of political realism. Hold on though.

After the last slogan has faded from the last mass anti-war demonstration, after the last e-mail has been sent to the last unresponsive Congressman, after the last petition signed on behalf of the fellowship of humankind has been signed where do we stand in 2006. When the vast majority of Americans (and the world) are against the Iraq war and it still goes on and yet the “masses” are not ready for more drastic action we need some immediate leverage.

The only material way to end the war on the parliamentary level is opposition to the continued funding for the occupation. For that, however, you need votes in Congress. Here is my proposal. Make a N0 vote on the war budget a condition for your vote. When the Democrats, Republicans, Greens, or whoever, come to your door, your mailbox , your computer or calls you on the telephone or cell phone ask this simple question- YES or NO on the war budget.

Now, lest I be accused of being an ultra left let me make this clear. I am talking about the supplementary budget for Iraq. Heaven forbid that I mean the real war budget, you know, the 400 billion plus one. No, we are reasonable people and until we get universal health care we do not want these “leaders” to suffer heart attacks. And being reasonable people we can be proper parliamentarians when the occasion requires it. If the answer is YES, then we ask YES or NO on the appropriations for bombs in the war budget. And if the answer is still YES, then we ask YES or NO on the appropriations for gold-plated kitchen sinks in the war budget. If to your utter surprise any politician says NO here’s your comeback- Since you have approximated the beginning of wisdom, get the hell out of the party you represent. You are in the wrong place. Come down here in the mud and fight for party workers can call their own. Then, maybe, just maybe, I can support you.

I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems an irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS THE KIND OF POLITICIAN I CAN SUPPORT. AS FOR THE REST- HOLD THEIR FEET TO THE FIRE.

******

“ONCE AGAIN ON THE DEMOCRATS AND THEIR IRAQ WAR”, March 9, 2007

Commentary

ON THE WAR BUDGET FIGHT FOR A NO VOTE

I can hold out no longer. It seems like a political eternity since I have commented on the question of the Democrats and their response to their Iraq war. I have been waiting patiently for my liberal political friends to cry “uncle” over my prediction, made in the wake of the midterm elections, that when all the hoopla died down their Democrats would take a political dive on the Iraq question. Oh, yes I forgot the House of Representatives did pass a non-binding ‘softball’ resolution that even my mother, a life long Republican, was in favor of-as long as it had not teeth. Be still my heart, that one sure had President Bush shaking in his cowboy boots. While my liberal friends wait until Iraq freezes over for their Democrats to turn the corner those of us who really want to end this damn war need to take stock.

For the past year I have been propagandizing for the formation of anti-war soldier and sailor solidarity committees in order to lead the way out of Iraq. If one thinks about it for a moment in that time anti-war soldiers and sailors have done more to end this war than all the parliamentary actions of Democrats and all the anti-war demonstrations put together. As noted in an earlier commentary in this space (SEE THE CALIFORNIA SOLDIERS MUST NOT STAND ALONE in the January 2007 archives) many anti-war service personnel have signed onto a petition for the redress of grievance- and that grievance is the continuation of the war in Iraq. That is a good start but more will have to be done than petitions to get out of Iraq before hell freezes over. More on this later.

The next matter is getting a little redundant, that is of having to bring up the question every time the war appropriations are up for a vote, but I will repeat it once again. In wartime the only parliamentary question that matters is the question of funding the war budget. You know, the way the war gets paid for. A few thoughtful Democrats know that but, more importantly, President Bush and his coterie damn well know it. And have thumbed their noses at Congress whenever any slight rumbling about ending the war funding comes on the horizon.

There is a Democratic-sponsored bill before Congress now that speaks to tying war funding to some specific exit date. It is, however, as is true of much such legislation, so filled with loopholes, exemptions, exceptions and fallback positions as to be worthless. This is not a supportable bill. Moreover, it has as much chance of passing the Democratically-controlled Congress as Iraq freezing over. Here are the ABC’s of the situation. For those who still suffer a belief in the Democrats pose this question, STRAIGHT UP-on the war budget – YES OR NO. I fear you will not like the answer. And if you do not like the answer then you had better hurry along and form those anti-war soldier and sailor solidarity committees. Forward.

******

“ON THE HOUSE WAR BUDGET VOTE-THE DEMOCRATS OFFICIALLY OWN THE IRAQ WAR”, March 24, 2007

Commentary

NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE SOLDIER FOR THESE WARS!

On Friday March 23, 2007 the United States House of Representatives by a narrow vote of 218 to 212 voted for a 124 billion dollar war budget for funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, among other things. That is more than the Bush Administration requested. However, attached to this budget was a binding (finally, something other than smoke and mirrors) resolution for withdrawal of troops from Iraq no later than August 31, 2008. President Bush in response stated unequivocally that he would veto this budget due to the withdrawal resolution and the fact the war budget was more than he wanted. Who would have thought?

Militants call for a straight no vote to any capitalist war budget. That is a given. However, some comment is required here. Clearly a war budget that was patched together with little goodies by the Democratic House leadership in order to get a majority vote is not supportable. Nor is a budget that is passed on the basis that the President is going to veto it anyway but everyone gets to look good for the folks back home. That is cynical but hardly unusual in bourgeois politics. What I find important out of this jumble is the amount of pressure that the House leadership felt was on it to carry out its mandate from the mid-term elections about doing something to get the hell out of Iraq. Unfortunately this is not the road out of Iraq. Increasing the war budget and then leaving it up to Bush to veto the damn thing smacks of parliamentary cretinism. Forget the Democrats (on this one the Republicans are not even on the radar).

A semi-kudo to Democratic presidential candidate Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich for voting against this charade. At least he had the forthrightness to state that if you wanted to end the war you needed to vote against the measure. That he is a voice in the wilderness and is in the wrong party is a fact of life. That his candidacy is thus not politically supportable by militants does not negate the fact that he is right on this one. NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE SOLDIER FOR THE WAR! UNITED STATES OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN! BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM!

*Where Have All The Anti-War Protestors Gone?- Part III

Click ON Title To Link To United For Justice With Peace Website. I Have No Political Sympathies With The Anti-War Strategies Presented By This Umbrella Organization. This Link Is Merely To Demonstrate At Least Part Of The Reason We Are At An Impasse In The Anti-Afghan War (And The Iraq War, As Well) Struggle.

COMMENTARY

What passes these days for the anti-war protest spring season has just been wrapped up and the results are, frankly, discouraging. Here are a few items to fill out the story of that pathetic showing. Locally, here in Boston there were two small demonstrations in mid-March around the 6th Anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, one a stand out vigil sponsored by local pacifists the other another such effort this time with the ritual reading of the names of the American soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. From what I can gather from the very few sources that I have found that covered the event (none in the mainstream press, at least that I saw) the “radical” ANSWER coalition’s March On The Pentagon on March 21st drew, at most, a few thousand. To top the season off a New York City rally against war and corporate greed that I did attend (and that also got minimal media coverage, as well) sponsored by the United For Justice and Peace (UJP), coalition drew, at most, a thousand or so. I should note that UJP, as an organization went out of its way, despite internal dissent, to NOT protest in the streets during the recently completed 2008 American presidential campaign (for fear of stirring up the red necks against Obama, I assume). So much for parliamentary cretinism of the second mobilization.

So what gives? Well, of course, we are in the age of the Obamiad and there are more than enough illusions in that presidency than one can shake a stick at. This despite that hard facts on the ground, as the mainstream reporters like to say, that Obama has upped the ante in Afghanistan by his escalation of troop levels to amounts similar to that of ex-President George W. Bush when he presented his “surge” strategy for Iraq that had anti-warriors howling in the streets. Recent developments in the aftermath of various European summits have also indicated that that same Afghan war has become, or will shortly with the increased American troop presence, become Americanized. Obama has plenty of Teflon, a chemical compound that old W never had. But there is more to it than that, at least for now, reflected in the worn out strategies that various anti-war coalitions have put forth in reaction to Obama’s current popularity.

I have addressed this issue of differences in the strategy and tactics of the Vietnam anti-war movement and the current Iraq/Afghanistan/ Pakistan fiasco a couple of time before in this space. I have reposted (and updated somewhat) those comments as I believe that we anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist anti-warriors (that is a mouthful, right?) face many of the same problems that we faced in trying to end that still continuing Iraq war and/or bringing down the Bush (and now Obama) government. And just for the record I aver now as I did then- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops From Iraq And Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!

Originally posted on November 6, 2006 (around the time of the mid-term Congressional elections that brought a wave of “progressive” Democrats to Congress.

“Where Have All The Protests Against The Iraq War Gone?

UPDATED: NOVEMBER 16, 2006

Below are some thoughts concerning the lack of major street protests against the war in Iraq despite the rise in opinion polls of opposition to the war which will apparently filter through the upcoming midterm election results. These thoughts are a response to an article in the “IDEAS” section of November 5, 2006 “Sunday Boston Globe” entitled-“Where Have the Protests Gone?” The theme of the article is the rather apparent contradiction between the rise of opposition to the war and the lack of response on the streets in comparison to various stages of the Vietnam War.

Some of those interviewed commented that the lack of a draft and therefore a general immediacy of the effects of the war on vast sections of the population as a reason. Others argued that the movement was alive and well but that the parliamentary route was the way to go. Others that the rise of high technology has changed the nature of left-wing political opposition. (You know, the Internet as an organizing tool, the cell phone, Sidekick, various social organizing sites, etc.) Yes, okay but we still have the damn hard fact of political life that the war continues unabated, will continue unabated and that unless we take action outside the parliamentary framework and off the Internet that will continue to be the case. In any case, here are a couple of points to consider.

The writer came of political age during the Vietnam War. Here are a few thoughts then from someone who came to protesting from a leftist political perspective the Vietnam War rather late (1968) and the Iraq War very early (early summer of 2002) who also wonders where the heck the protests have gone.

I am as enamored of the potential political uses of today high speed technologies as the next person but let us face it this is a very passive medium. One cannot create social change or create “community” in the privacy of one’s office or recreation room. In fact a very good argument can be made that current technological uses are making us more individualized, or as someone recently put it hyper-individualized, beyond the trends noted in the book “Bowling Alone In America”. There is no substitute for face to face organizing. One of the most interesting parts of organizing against the Vietnam War was when local PTA-type groups would ask me, a known radical at the time, to come and talk about the war. While these suburban matrons did not come away as devotees of Ho Chi Minh they did take what I had to say seriously. To finish the thought up in one phrase- if the revolution will not be televised neither will it be broadcast over the Internet.

A thought on the effectiveness of street protests. Most people I know believe that the huge anti-war rallies were decisive in ending the Vietnam War. Wrong. In the final analysis it was the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese Army that sent the United States packing. Please remember (or find a photo of) those evacuations from the roof top of the United States Embassy in 1975 as the American left scurrying like rats. I have, as others have as well, noted the many differences between Vietnam and Iraq but every week Baghdad politically looks more and more like Saigon 1975. That said, it is still necessary for the good of our political souls as well as an act of elementary political hygiene to hit the streets to protest this war- against the policies of both Republicans and Democrats.

While the initial strong opposition to the Iraq War was welcome, if surprising, I believe that it was (and is) more shallow that the opposition to the Vietnam War. Vietnam occurred in the, perhaps, unique context of the 1960’s. No only were there many movements going on or created like the black liberation struggle, women’s liberation and assorted anti-imperialist struggles but fights to create alternate cultural traditions in music, the arts and social life in general were everywhere. That most of these failed or still have not achieved their goals does not negate the effect that it had on the times. When there was, for example, a vibrant Student for a Democratic Society (SDS, one of the main villains for most conservatives at that time) in places like South Dakota you knew something was giving way at the base of society.

In contrast, today’s protesters have virtually no connection with past social and political struggles which could help to drive the movement forward. And to some extent, from my experiences, they willfully do not want to know these lessons. Taking to the streets en masse again in 2008 after the Democrats fail to get the troops out of Iraq is way too late. Additionally, almost forty years of relentless right-wing attacks that would have made Genghis Klan blush have made many fearful of challenging this government. But that is another story for another time.

I have noted the following point previously, but as we close in on the 89th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7th, it bears repeating. That revolution was truly the only time that I know of that an anti-war movement actually ended a war. Without going into all the details here or all the many causes for it the Bolshevik seizure of power from those in the Russian Provisional Government who were committed to continuing Russian participation in World War I on the Allied side graphically points out our dilemma. The Russian soldiers, aided by Bolshevik propaganda, voted with their feet to leave the trenches. The American troops should do the same. Who will help them?


Originally posted October 15, 2008 around the time of the 6th Anniversary of the United States Senate’s “green signal” for the Bush Administration to pursue its war aims in Iraq and during the height of the Obama love fest in the 2008 American presidential campaign.

Commentary

October 11, 2008 marked the sixth anniversary of the United States Senate’s signing off on authorization for President Bush’s war on Iraq. That date and March 20th (the date of the start of the actual invasion of Iraq in 2003) seem to be the focal points for the spring and fall “anti-war” campaign seasons each year. As such one would have expected a huge outpouring of anti-war sentiment on Saturday to “keep fire” under the feet of the various so-called ‘anti-war’ Democrats in the struggle to end the war. Or, at least, to end the funding of the war that so many of them had promised to stop in the Congressional campaign of 2006.

Not so, at least at the local gathering here at the Boston Common. At most a few hundred protesters showed up, mainly the tried and true veterans of the movement. I found myself talking mostly to old anti-warriors from past campaigns. The rather ‘shocking’ part of this sad spectacle was that in the very first lead up action in opposition to the war in the summer of 2002, when the Bush Administration started seriously beating the public tom-toms for war, there were actually more (and varied) people present at the first local demonstration. What has happened to that vaunted ‘street’ anti-war movement?

Well, the short answer, as always in a presidential election year, is that the focus shifts to parliamentary politics. Especially true this year, as year Barack Obama, the Democratic standard bearer, is “committed” to ending the war in Iraq (and shifting the forces and resources to Afghanistan, as the small print of his position reads. But who are we to quibble over such a detail). Moreover, the main anti-war coalitions like Troops Out Now and United For Peace and Justice (or is it justice and peace?) have purposefully, as they do in every presidential fall season, refrained from mass demonstrations in Washington and other major cities so as not to upset people (read, mainly Democrats) with such wild and outlandish slogans such as immediate withdrawal from Iraq AND Afghanistan.

That is the real nub of the matter. The vast majority of the “movement”, such as it is, really believes that one of the lessons that should have been learned from the vast Vietnam War-era protest was to keep off the streets and let the parliamentary road work its ‘magic’ as the way to end the Iraq war. We know now, painfully, the results of that strategy- almost six years of non-stop war. And if we are at all honest no end is in sight. Of course, to be fair there are other reasons for the dwindling number of protests and protesters but let’s address the one reason that we have control over. A new anti-war leadership has to be thrown up and a new strategy of serious opposition has to be embarked on (The odd thing is that even the vaunted current commitment to the parliamentary road has not been seriously organized). In any case- until that day- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops and Their Mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan is still the order of the day. Forward.

*American Roots Music- From Soup To Nuts-The PBS Documentary

Click on title to link to PBS's website for the "American Roots Music" documentary.

DVD Review

American Roots Music, narrated by Kris Kristofferson, various artists, 2 CD set, PBS Productions, 2001

From soup to nuts, indeed. I have over the past couple of years gone through the back pages of the American songbook to look at old style country music-eastern and western varieties, the blues both country and electric and all the regional variations like the Delta and Texas sounds to name a couple and the quintessential American music –jazz. I have gone back, way back, to the pre-radio, pre-recording days to get the lyrics for songs that dealt with hard times, soft times, soft loving, hard loving and no loving. I have taken musical trips through the bayous of Louisiana to get that Acadian/Cajun sound. I have gone to the hills and hollows of Kentucky to get that old time mountain music. I have goe to the Western caverns to hear the sounds that inspired the Native American traditions. I have looked at the roots of rock and roll backward, forward and sideways from rhythm and blues and gospel to rockabilly.

Frankly, I had wanted to do the project for a long time and I was glad to do it. For those who have just come to an appreciation of roots music or who want the long view though this Public Broadcasting System (PBS) production will give you all you need to know in capsule form, complete with the informative “talking head” commentary with well-known musicians in each genre covered, in a 2 CD four hour series that goes though all the genres mentioned above and some that I have not spend much time on yet, especially Tejano and Carib-derived music.

The producers of this effort have gone back to the old days of barn dances, local radio shows and vaudeville to bring out the various regional musics that form the roots of today’ musical expression. They trace the divergent black and white trends that converge in the post World War II period with the arrival of blacks in great numbers in the urban setting and whites, especially white teenagers hungry for new musical expression- as long as it was not something that their parents liked. Some time is also spent on the importance of the urban folk revival movement of the early 1960s as a central element in helping a whole generation search for those lost roots- all the way from gospel (in the church and in the streets), mountain music (especially the use of the old time musical instruments), Cajun (the whole Acadian exile experience when the bloody British took over in Canada) and the country blues, especially the work of those Mississippi Delta artists who influenced the post-World War II Chicago-based electric blues explosion. The best parts for me though were the Tejano and Carib-derived music sections that I had not previously been as familiar with. But I will get familiar fast. ‘Til then, the roots is the toots

***A Man Of Africa- The Music Of Tony Bird

Click on title to link to Rounder Record promotional material on the "Sorry Africa" CD reviewed below. I could find nothing on YouTube of Tony Bird doing that title song, "Mango Time" or the incredible "Rift Valley" and my personal favorite "She Came From The Karoo". Maybe someone else will have more luck.

CD REVIEW

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, Rounder Records, 1990

Blues and rural folk music, historically important on the American music scene, have always been in debt, acknowledged or not, to the sounds of Africa. Without getting into a treatise here on that subject if one is interested in the blues then it should be one's business as it was for a poet like Langston Hughes, for example, to dig into the African roots. The same quest, obviously, needs to be taken for those in who live in an increasing urbanized Africa today. Tony Bird, the artist under review here, is a man of Africa and takes that identity seriously. Moreover he is a white man of Africa. And to top that off he is a white man, one of the few unfortunately when it counted, who stood up against colonialism, neo-colonialism, white racism and apartheid. Hats off.

Somehow, someway Tony Bird through that experience has incorporated the language, the sound and, most importantly, the spirit of Africa in his music. That feat is put on display front and center in this nicely done, although all too short, CD that shows that he has assimilated those traditions. Starting from the lushly poetic, upbeat "Rift Valley" through to his signature jump tune "Mango Time" through the politically-driven title track "Sorry Africa" his sense of his African homeland shines through. He is not as successful when he slows down the beat and gets caught up with trying to deliver a message on a track like "Athlone Place" but that is merely a minor flaw in this well-produced CD by Rounder Records. By the way, Tony, for your efforts against colonialism and white racism there is no need to say sorry. The new Africa that is struggling, painfully, fitfully and with reverses to be `aborning' should recognize that.

Note: I first heard Tony Bird many years ago on an old vinyl record album entitled "Tony Bird" where I was mesmerized by his "Rift Valley" and more so by "She Came From The Karoo". The reason that I am reviewing this 1990 CD is that I recently attended a Tony Bird concert where he did a few of the songs from that old album. I make the same comment about that performance as I do about this CD. He does his Africa-centered songs as lustily and with the verve of twenty years ago, and still is as mesmerizing. His `message' songs, none of them included here, are more uneven. "New Jerusalem' is very powerful (if a little long) concerning the need for some kind of just settlement to the Palestinian question. However, "Mr. Meanie" a parable about the Bush years, "Aint't Nobody's Business Who You Love" about the varieties of possibilities inherent in the love experience and "Well Done, America", his Africa tribute to the election of Barack Obama as the first black American president were less so. Still, if you get a chance, he is well worth seeing when he hits his stride.

*Another Small Victory For Gay Marriage Rights-Vermont Legalizes Gay Marriage With Veto Override

Click On Title To Link To Article On Califronia Supreme Court Gay Marriage Ruling.

*Another Small Victory For Gay Marriage Rights-Vermont Legalizes Gay Marriage With Veto Override

Here are a few paragraphs from the Associated Press report of April 7, 2009 on the Vermont legislative actions that legalized gay marriage in that state.

******

MONTPELIER, Vt. — Vermont on Tuesday became the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature's vote.

The House recorded a dramatic 100-49 vote, the minimum needed, to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto. Its vote followed a much easier override vote in the Senate, which rebuffed the Republican governor with a vote of 23-5.

Vermont was the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples and joins Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in giving gays the right to marry. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.

Tuesday morning's legislative action came less than a day after Douglas issued a veto message saying the bill would not improve the lot of gay and lesbian couples because it still would not provide them rights under federal and other states' laws....

*****

Commentary

Full Marriage (And Divorce) Rights For Gays And Lesbians In Every State!

As I noted just last week in this space (see “A Small Victory For Gay Marriage Rights- The Iowa Case”, dated April 4, 2009) I have, more often than I would like, noted that on some key democratic questions, here the question of equal access to the marriage bureau for gays and lesbians, we get help from some unlikely sources. As always though, we will take our small but important victories anyway we can get them. In that case it was the Iowa Supreme Court doing yeomen’s work on this issue. Here, in the Vermont case, it is the state legislature that has provided the impetus.

That is indeed unusual as most legislative action has been going in the opposite direction. This has allegedly reflected the social opinions and political desires of the so-called ”silent majority” of heterosexual marrieds who are assumed to feel threatened by opening the marriage bureaus to gays and lesbians, including those here in Massachusetts. Here, unsuccessful attempts were made to override the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s landmark decision by calling a constitutional convention as the prologue to initiative action like California’s successful efforts to put the issue before the voters. The Vermont decision may not have the same political impact as the Iowa decision as it may seem to be seen as reflecting some exotic New England quirk but the legislative action should nevertheless not be underrated for its value as precedent. In short, a good talking point for further actions as the struggle heads to other states.

As I also mentioned in that Iowa commentary in discussing this issue the core location of the struggle for the democratic right for gays and lesbians to have access to the marriage bureaus now appears to be in the states. The highest courts of three states (Massachusetts and Connecticut, along with this recent Iowa case) and a now overturned fourth, California, have held that such restrictive marriage regulations are unconstitutional in their unequal application and do not serve any rational governmental purpose. Although this represents a small minority (and here is where the initiative defeat in California in November 2008 really slowed down the momentum) there is something of a “snowball” effect to these kinds of judicial decisions as other state supreme courts now have some precedents to hang their hands on. But as I said then that is for later. For now though, another small victory goes into the books. As always our slogan remains- Full democratic rights for gays and lesbians, for the full rights of marriage (and divorce) to all. Everywhere.

*Local Boy Makes Good?- The Music Of New Orleans' Snooks Eaglin

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Snooks Eaglin performing "Baby Please".

CD Review

Snooks Eaglin: The Complete Imperial Recordings, Snooks Eaglin, Imperial Records, 1995

One of the themes that have animated the musical reviews in this space is how and why some perfectly competent performer, either through his or her own limitations, predilections or just plain happenstance does not attain the kind of recognition that they deserve. That is the case of local New Orleans singer and instrumentalist Snooks Englin who, as this CD demonstrates, had the capacity to make a big name for himself in the blues world. Certainly his history of accompanying many other musicians who did go on to greater fame makes one wonder about the fickle fates that the musical gods have in store for those who challenge them.

In any case, one knows that Snooks’ pedigree as a premier New Orleans player, with its intersection of Cajun, Zydeco, electric and country blues and jazz, as reflected in his work should have led to greater success. Listen to his very nice covers of “C.C. Rider”, “Little Eva”, “Long Gone” and “Willy Lee” for proof of that proposition or his own works such as “Is It True”and "Down Yonder” and see what I mean.

Here are lyrics to:

C.C. Rider

You C C Rider, see what you done done
C C Rider, you see what you done done
You C C Rider, you see what you done done
You done made me love you and now your man done come

My home is on the water, I don't like no land at all
Home's on the water and I don't like no land at all
My home's on the water and I don't like no land at all
I'd rather be dead than to stay here and be your dog

So you C C Rider, see what you done done
C C Rider, you see what you done done
You C C Rider, you see what you done done
You done made me love you and now your man done come

I'm goin' away babe, sure don't wanna go
Goin' away babe, but I sure don't wanna go
I'm goin' away babe, but I sure don't wanna go
When I'm leaving this town you will never see me no more

*Hands Off Professor Bill Ayers- Let Him Speak

Click on title to link to "Boston Globe", April 2, 2009, article on Professor Bill Ayers discussed below.

Commentary

Okay, Okay I know that I have invoked the word professor ironically and in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner in discussing controversial Professor Bill Ayers in this space as an object lesson about the career paths of 1960’s ex-radicals once they have reconciled themselves to bourgeois society. Naturally when his name came up prominently in relation to the emergence of then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama I could not resist sticking a few well-deserved barbs Ayers’ way. But they were rather politically pointed barbs from the left about why an ex-Weatherman would be hanging around with a bourgeois candidate on the make like Obama.

But now news (somewhat dated news as I have been out of town and did not pick up the controversy until after it was over) about Boston College’s thinly- veiled slap at academic freedom by refusing to let the good professor speak in person or via satellite has crossed the line, even for the very arbitrary and capricious of so-called “academic freedom”. This is, moreover, is not solely a case of right wing commentators having a field day with the issue, although a local “Rush Limbaugh” wannabe helped fan the flames. I am sure that the right-wingers were more than happy when the Boston College administration decided to keep the academy and the minds of their young charges there “pure” from the taint of any old time radical. However, this is just one more in an ever- growing line of cases (think of Ward Churchill and the Finklestein case) where a college administration was more than capable, as in the past, of putting the clamps on by itself.

Here are the facts. Apparently, Professor Ayers was scheduled to deliver some kind of lecture on urban education (his specialty) at Boston College during the week of March 29, 2009 at the invitation of some student groups, including the College Democrats of Boston College. Such lectures by newsworthy figures are not unknown events on college campuses and moreover are a rather lucrative proposition for professors on the academic lecture circuit. The Boston College administration balked at that invitation citing a groundswell of opposition from local neighbors. Why? It seems that there is some lingering animosity concerning the shooting of a Boston Police officer by people allegedly connected with Professor Ayers’ old organization, the Weathermen. Professor Ayers, however, has never been charged, much less convicted, with any connection to that crime.

Why the furor then? Well, the Boston College administration, bowing to those inevitable amorphous unknown forces (although we can guess what those forces are now, can’t we), expressed its profound concern for the safety of the student community and “respect” for the local community (where it has been busily buying up real estate in order to expand its campus). Well, ho hum we have heard that ‘justification’ before. The kicker here on this bogus ‘safety’ issue is that when a televised Ayers lecture by satellite was proposed that too was deemed too “hot” to handle.

What really gives here though? One of the students in the article I am using for information (“BC won’t air Ayers lecture by satellite”, Boston Globe, Peter Schworm, April 2, 2009) let the cat out of the bag. This Ayers controversy, while an easy one for the administration to raise holy hell over, is not the first time that the BC administration has vetoed speaking engagements for controversial figures on campus. That interviewed student did not state who else had been banned but we can figure that one out also.

Needless to say birthday boy Charles Darwin might find it hard to get invited to this august university what with his oddball quirky theory of evolution (BC is an old-time Jesuit school). Much less the heroic Kansas Doctor George Tiller, one of the few abortion providers in that state (they would probably have a lynch mob out for him). So much for that vaunted “academic freedom”. Fortunately we never took that profession of freedom as anything but a very vulnerable “right”, although we gladly use it to get our socialist message out when we can. We remember the “red scare” of the 1950’s here in America when the academy knuckled under without a whimper. And, left to its own devises, most of the academy would have loved to have clapped down during the anti-Vietnam war movement; it was just too big and got way beyond the ability of campus administrations to effectively curtail it. Let us not kid ourselves on that score.

But what about Professor Bill Ayers? Apparently this Boston College incident is not the first college where some furor that has dogged him. I do not, at this time, have the details of Ayers’ other problems at other campuses. However, I heard him last November, just after the 2008 elections when he was touting his revised memoir, on the “Terry Gross Show” on NPR (as any Boston College student could have done, as well). He seemed none too radical in his presentation of his current politics which were tired garden variety left-Democratic Party ones that we have become all too familiar with from repentant radicals, although to his credit he did not abase himself in denial of his revolutionary past. Nor should he have. We were dealing with serious war criminals then in the Johnson/Nixon wielding the most powerful military machine/police apparatus the world has ever known in case one has forgotten or wasn’t around then. For now though. Hands Off Professor Ayers! - Let him speak on politics, education or whatever the hell he wants to talk about. Anywhere.

*Poet's Corner- Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead"

Click on title to link to the "Modern American Poetry" web site entry for Robert Lowell "On The Union Dead".

Guest Commentary

In Honor Of The Union forces who fought and died defending the union and/or the abolition of slavery a poem written by Robert Lowell during the Centenary. Markin

Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead- 1964


"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

***From The Archives- 75th Anniversary Of The 13th Amendment Concert (1940)

Click on title to link to Josh White performing on YouTube.

CD REVIEW

February is Black History Month

Freedom: A Concert in Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (1940). The Golden Gate Quartet and Josh White at the Library of Congress, Bridge Records, 2002

Originally I had intended to review this historically valuable CD as part of my review of the work of Josh White (see Josh White review, “Free and Equal Man”, Archives February 2, 2009). However, after reading the copious liner notes provided by the Library of Congress, as always informative, that accompany the CD and then hearing the songs and oral presentations I believe that this work deserved a separate entry in this space. Especially as this is being reviewed during Black History Month.

One can argue for the historical value of this work on two levels. First as a tribute to the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the one that formally abolished slavery after the Northern victory in the bloody Civil War. That is a worthy tribute in itself. Second, the Cd has value as an extremely informative and almost scholarly presentation of the way that black musical culture acted as an integral part of the general American musical milieu as it evolved over the past couple of centuries. The first reason needs no special explanation here as the issue of the roots of slavery, the central fact of slavery (and its aftermath) in American history and the fight against it have been detailed in many entries and at many times elsewhere in this space. I will thus concentrate on the musical element.

Needless to say any musical program that has Josh White on it is assured of being a quality presentation. Here Josh accompanies the Quartet as guitarist and does a couple of his own songs. Moreover, the Golden Gate Quartet is a rather fine example of that old jubilee singing tradition popular in the early part of the 20th century that is discussed in the liner notes. What is surprising, although it should not be, is that the oral presentations are so informative. Based on the well-known researches of John and Alan Lomax and others like Sterling Brown and Alain Locke this is one of the best compilations of information about the roots of black music in all its forms: work songs, labor camp songs, prison songs; the farm; the hard life; the hard loves; and, in a few pieces just plain whimsy.

Most importantly though, this 1940 Concert CD and its accompanying booklet should let one and all know that well before we of the “Generation of ’68” , who cut our political teeth on the civil rights struggle in the South in the early 1960’s, took up the battle other forces had already paved our way. I speak here of the ground work done by the Lomaxes and others to bring this music to the notice of the larger public, but also of Josh White and others like Big Bill Broonzy in the cultural struggle against segregation as well as attempts by black scholars like John Hope Franklin and the above-mentioned Sterling Brown and Alain Locke to give some historic perspective to the struggle against slavery. I would hope that in 2015 when the 150th Anniversary celebration comes along we have a comparable piece of work to present on that occasion. And a more, much more, equitable society.

*In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln's 200th Birthday Anniversary- Karl Marx's Letter On Lincoln's Re-election in 1864

Click on title to link to Karl Marx Internet site for more of Karl Marx on Lincoln and the American Civil War.

Guest Commentary

Some people are always surprised when socialists, like myself, these days praise a figure like Abraham Lincoln from the American capitalist past. They do not understand that capitalism at one point (against feudalism and its remnants)was a serious historically progressive system. That it is no longer so does not take away from the import of such figures as Lincoln, especially his role in the abolition of slavery. This too is one of those lessons from history we are always harping on. Forward!


The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865 [A]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Basgen;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.


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[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."


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Ambassador Adams Replies
Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

Charles Francis Adams

*Another Small Victory For Gay Marriage Rights- The Iowa Case

Click On Title To Link To July 2, 2009 "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "The Same-Sex Future" By David Cole That Gives An Update On This Struggle And A Capsule Of The Various Positions On The Issue.

Commentary

Full Marriage (And Divorce) Rights For Gays And Lesbians!

In this space I have, more often than I would like, noted that on some key democratic questions, here the question of equal access to the marriage bureau for gays and lesbians, we get help from some unlikely sources. As always though, we will take our small but important victories anyway we can get them. In this case it is the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous verdict in the gay marriage case before the justices of that court. The Iowa decision was unusual in that it was unanimous, unlike in the other successful cases in Massachusetts, Connecticut and California where the justices were closely divided (as were decisions in some other states like New York and Washington that went the other way). Moreover, it is very significant that this is a case decided in the heartland of America, the “mainstream”, and not on either of the two “assumed” to be more liberal coasts.

As I have mentioned before in discussing this issue the core location of the struggle for the democratic right for gays and lesbians to have access to the marriage bureaus now appears to be in the states. The highest courts of three states (Massachusetts and Connecticut, along with this recent Iowa case) and a now overturned fourth, California, have held that such restrictive marriage regulations are unconstitutional in their unequal application and do not serve any rational governmental purpose. Although this represents a small minority (and here is where the initiative defeat in California in November 2008 really slowed down the momentum) there is something of a “snowball” effect to these kinds of judicial decisions as other state supreme courts now have some precedents to hang their hands on.

But that is for later. For now though, another small victory goes into the books as it does not appear that the Iowa state legislature is up to overturning the court’s decision by either supporting an initiative petition or convening a constitutional convention. As always our slogan remains- Full democratic rights for gays and lesbians, for the full rights of marriage (and divorce) to all.

*A Look At The Racial Fault Line In America- Studs Terkel Style

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

Division Street Revisited- Stud Terkel’s America

BOOK REVIEW

Division Street: America, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 2004

As I have done on other occasion when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments, where they are pertinent, here as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War II.

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review, his first serious effort at plebeian oral history, Division Street: America, despite the metaphorically nature of that title, focuses on a serves a narrower milieu, his “Sweet Home, Chicago” and more local concerns than his later works.

Mainly, this oral history is Studs’ effort to reflect on the lives of working people (circa 1970 here but the relevant points could be articulated, as well, in 2008) from Studs’ own generation who survived that event, fought World War II and did or did not benefit from the fact of American military victory and world economic preeminence, including those blacks and mountain whites who made the internal migratory trek from the South to the North. Moreover, this book presents the first telltale signs that those defining events for that generation were not unalloyed gold. As channeled through the most important interviewee in this book, Frances Scala, who led an unsuccessful but important 1960’s fight against indiscriminate “urban renewal” of her neighborhood (the old Hull House of Jane Addams fame area) Studs make his argument that the sense of social solidarity, in many cases virtually necessary for survival, was eroding.

Studs includes other stories, including the lumpen proletarian extraordinaire Kid Pharaoh who will be met later in Hard Times and the atypical Chicago character who gladly joins the John Birch Society in order to assert his manhood, who do not easily fit into any of those patterns but who nevertheless have stories to tell. And grievances, just, unjust or whimsical, to spill.

One thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book, and as is true of the majority of Terkel’s interview books, is that he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else’s story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn’t to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. He has a point he wants to make and that is that although most “ordinary” people do not make the history books they certainly make history, if not always of their own accord or to their own liking. Again, kudos and adieu Studs.

*On The Road With Uncle Billie's "Bummers"-"Marching Through Georgia"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Uncle Billy Sherman's "bummers" route song-"Marching Through Georgia".

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
LYRICS

Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.

Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.

*In Honor of Charles Darwin- In Defense Of Science And The Scientific Method

Click on title to link to AboutDarwin.com web site.

COMMENTARY

This a repost of an entry of March 24, 2007. I have placed it here in honor of the 200th Birthday Anniversary year of Charles Darwin and the 150th Anniversary year of the publishing of his seminal "Origin Of The Species". Kudos, Brother Darwin and Happy Birthday.

March 24, 2007

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH. MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. EVERY MONTH IS DEFENSE OF SCIENCE MONTH

From global warming and its effects to stem cell research to the 'theory' of intelligent design the hard fought gains of science and the scientific method are under attack by politicians of every ilk and their allies. Apparently gone are the days when the bourgeoisie desperately fought for the scientific method against feudal reaction and church obscurantism. Also apparent is that the fight for preservation of the scientific method is one of the tasks of today's leftist militants. This article is a contribution in that fight.


Workers Vanguard No. 854 16 September 2005

The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression

Hail Charles Darwin!

If ever there were an argument against "intelligent design," it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:

"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."

—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they're stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the "E" word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt "pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!

A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed "think tanks" (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The "Wedge Document," an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" (New York Times, 21 August).

For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the "original intent" of the slaveowning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, "women's lib" and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.

Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.

A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding "scientific" justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people "far below" whites "in the scale of created beings" and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that awhite man was bound to respect.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate "races." The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amid curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:

"Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modification' is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.

"To the organizations here filing as amid curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man's quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority."

The Materialist View of History

Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:

"The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change."

—Science and History (1954)

Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:

"The revolutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level."

—"Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism," WVNo. 797, 14 February 2003

Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the "social Darwinists" who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term "survival of the fittest" as "scientific" evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, "Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.... Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!"

Evolution is not "progressive," nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word "evolution" because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist "scientific" illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term "descent with modification" and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): "Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn't care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought."

Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the "Academia" to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Segur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:

"Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an 'apostle of dirt worship'."

Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.

Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the "intelligent design" argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book's theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:

"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" (Pocono Record, 28 August).

Darwin's discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:

"Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically.... In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years."

Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been "concealed by an overgrowth of ideology." As Engels remarked in his 1883 "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx":

"The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."

Engels drew directly on Darwin's work in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man." Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, "the hand had become free," allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:

"Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion."

The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and "all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind." So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.

Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

You Can't Fight Republicans with Democrats

While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word "om" is hidden in the word "communism"?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposes of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site's banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.

It's not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, "A Debate Over Darwin," makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Parry opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute's purpose by accepting the logic of Bush's demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.

We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler"), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):

"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."

Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of "all the news that's fit to print" in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of "intelligent design" was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the "little guy."

The "culture wars" in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton's 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.

These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the "lesser evil" is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to "end welfare as we know it," by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.

Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being "born again" from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against "godless Communism."

Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions

America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, "Hispanics may be of any race." Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.

America's other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.

Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight "godless Communism," immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the "World's Christian Fundamentals Association" was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic "crimes against society" and "conspiracies against the government," and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.

The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that "education today is chained to the devil's throne," Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against "the old bastard theory of evolution." Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:

"Thousands attended Men's Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies' Night. The newspaper reported that '15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God's glory' on Negro Night. An equal number of 'Kluxers'— some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night."

That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In 1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation's capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn't as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.

John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee's statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being "finally, the highest type of all." A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the "feebleminded" through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed "eugenically unfit." In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for "poor white trash," black people and immigrants.

Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, "Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons."

John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan's religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment."

Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God's gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.

What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists." They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in "the thousand-year reign of Christ." Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in "Welcome to Doomsday" (New York Review of Books, 24 March):

"Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.

"I'm not making this up."

Communism = America's Last Best Hope

Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution's philosophy of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism.

The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.

The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.

Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas' Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state's anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools' Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson's constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin's theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as "anachronistic."

So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today's deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.

Leningrad's Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what's changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.

Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that "communism is dead." With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world's, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for "democracy," the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.

Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.

The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie's own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can't be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.

To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn't possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin's theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.