Christmas in the Trenches, 1914

Christmas in the Trenches, 1914

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By the end of November 1914 the crushing German advance that had swallowed the Low Countries and threatened France had been checked by the allies before it could reach Paris. The opposing armies stared at each other from a line of hastily built defensive trenches that began at the edge of the English Channel and continued to the border of Switzerland. Barbed wire and parapets defended the trenches and between them stretched a "No-Mans-Land" that in some areas was no more than 30 yards wide.

British troops in the trenches

Life in the trenches was abominable. Continuous sniping, machinegun fire and artillery shelling took a deadly toll. The misery was heightened by the ravages of Mother Nature, including rain, snow and cold. Many of the trenches, especially those in the low-lying British sector to the west, were continually flooded, exposing the troops to frost bite and "trench foot."

This treacherous monotony was briefly interrupted during an unofficial and spontaneous "Christmas Truce" that began on Christmas Eve. Both sides had received Christmas packages of food and presents. The clear skies that ended the rain further lifted the spirits on both sides of no-mans-land.

The Germans seem to have made the first move. During the evening of December 24 they delivered a chocolate cake to the British line accompanied by a note that proposed a cease fire so that the Germans could have a concert. The British accepted the proposal and offered some tobacco as their present to the Germans. The good will soon spread along the 27-mile length of the British line. Enemy soldiers shouted to one another from the trenches, joined in singing songs and soon met one another in the middle of no-mans-land to talk, exchange gifts and in some areas to take part in impromptu soccer matches.

The high command on both sides took a dim view of the activities and orders were issued to stop the fraternizing with varying results. In some areas the truce ended Christmas Day in others the following day and in others it extended into January. One thing is for sure - it never happened again.

"We and the Germans met in the middle of no-man's-land."

Frank Richards was a British soldier who experienced the "Christmas Truce". We join his story on Christmas morning 1914:

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"On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with 'A Merry Christmas' on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. Platoons would sometimes go out for twenty-four hours' rest - it was a day at least out of the trench and relieved the monotony a bit - and my platoon had gone out in this way the night before, but a few of us stayed behind to see what would happen. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

Buffalo Bill [the Company Commander] rushed into the trench and endeavoured to prevent it, but he was too late: the whole of the Company were now out, and so were the Germans. He had to accept the situation, so soon he and the other company officers climbed out too. We and the Germans met in the middle of no-man's-land. Their officers was also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them. One of the German officers said that he wished he had a camera to take a snapshot, but they were not allowed to carry cameras. Neither were our officers.

We mucked in all day with one another. They were Saxons and some of them could speak English. By the look of them their trenches were in as bad a state as our own. One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn't the only one that was fed up with it. We did not allow them in our trench and they did not allow us in theirs.

The German Company-Commander asked Buffalo Bill if he would accept a couple of barrels of beer and assured him that they would not make his men drunk. They had plenty of it in the brewery. He accepted the offer with thanks and a couple of their men rolled the barrels over and we took them into our trench. The German officer sent one of his men back to the trench, who appeared shortly after carrying a tray with bottles and glasses on it. Officers of both sides clinked glasses and drunk one another's health. Buffalo Bill had presented them with a plum pudding just before. The officers came to an understanding that the unofficial truce would end at midnight. At dusk we went back to our respective trenches.

British and German troops mingle in No Mans Land Christmas 1914

...The two barrels of beer were drunk, and the German officer was right: if it was possible for a man to have drunk the two barrels himself he would have bursted before he had got drunk. French beer was rotten stuff.

Just before midnight we all made it up not to commence firing before they did. At night there was always plenty of firing by both sides if there were no working parties or patrols out. Mr Richardson, a young officer who had just joined the Battalion and was now a platoon officer in my company wrote a poem during the night about the Briton and the Bosche meeting in no-man's-land on Christmas Day, which he read out to us. A few days later it was published in The Times or Morning Post, I believe.

During the whole of Boxing Day [the day after Christmas] we never fired a shot, and they the same, each side seemed to be waiting for the other to set the ball a-rolling. One of their men shouted across in English and inquired how we had enjoyed the beer. We shouted back and told him it was very weak but that we were very grateful for it. We were conversing off and on during the whole of the day.

We were relieved that evening at dusk by a battalion of another brigade. We were mighty surprised as we had heard no whisper of any relief during the day. We told the men who relieved us how we had spent the last couple of days with the enemy, and they told us that by what they had been told the whole of the British troops in the line, with one or two exceptions, had mucked in with the enemy. They had only been out of action themselves forty-eight hours after being twenty-eight days in the front-line trenches. They also told us that the French people had heard how we had spent Christmas Day and were saying all manner of nasty things about the British Army."

References:
   This eyewitness account appears in Richards, Frank, Old Soldiers Never Die (1933); Keegan, John, The First World War (1999); Simkins, Peter, World War I, the Western Front (1991).

*****Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-James P. Cannon

*****Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-James P. Cannon

 Click below to link to the James Cannon Internet Archives 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Back in the early 1970s after they had worked out between themselves the rudiment of what had gone wrong with the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions, ill-conceived as they in the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government. All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a round-up into the bastinado. Sam had been picked off in the round-up on Pennsylvania Avenue as his group (his “affinity group” for the action) had been on their way to “capture” the White House. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward the Pentagon (they had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround it like had occurred in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s prize-winning book Armies Of The Night). For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins football team) had been the main holding area for those arrested and detained. The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world” political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection.

Sam, from Carver in Massachusetts, who had been a late convert to the anti-war movement in 1969 after his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullin, had been blown away in some jungle town in the Central Highlands and was like many late converts to a cause a “true believer,” had taken part in many acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the one in hometown Carver, federal buildings and military bases. From an indifference, no that’s not right, from a mildly patriotic average young American citizen that you could find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, he had become a long-haired bearded “hippie anti-warrior.” Not too long though by the standards of “youth nation” of the day since he was running a small print shop in Carver in order to support his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 and which exempted him from military service. Not too short either since those “squares” were either poor bastards who got tagged by the military and had to wear their hair short an appearance which stuck out in towns like Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Berkeley and L.A. when the anti-war movement started embracing the increasingly frustrated and anti-war soldiers that  they were beginning to run across or, worse, cops before they got “hip” to the idea that guys wearing short hair, no beard, looked like they had just taken a bath, and wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and chinos might as well have a bulls-eye target on their backs surveilling the counter-cultural crowd.

Ralph, from Troy, New York, had been working in his father’s electrical shop which had major orders from General Electric the big employer in the area when he got his draft notice and had decided to enlist in order to avoid being an 11B, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon fodder,” although he would not have known to call it that at the time, that would come later. He had expected to go into something which he knew something about in the electrical field at least that is what the recruiting sergeant in Albany had “promised” him. But in the year 1967 (and 1968 too since he had extended his tour six months to get out of the service a little early) what the military needed in Vietnam whatever else they might have needed was “cannon fodder,” guys to go out into the bushes and kill commies. Simple as that. And that was what Ralph Morris, a mildly patriotic average young American citizen, no that is not right, a very patriotic average young American citizen that you could also find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, did. But see he got “religion” up there in Pleiku, up there in the bush and so when he had been discharged from the Army in late 1969 he was in a rage against the machine.

Sure he had gone back to the grind of his father’s electrical shop but he was out of place just then, out of sorts, needed to find an outlet for his anger at what he had done, what had happened to buddies very close to him, what buddies had done, and how the military had made them animals, nothing less. (Ralph after his father retired would take over the electric shop business on his own in 1991 and would thereafter give it to his son to take over after he retired in 2011.)

One day he had gone to Albany on a job for his father and while on State Street he had seen a group of guys in mismatched military garb marching in the streets without talking, silent which was amazing in itself from what he had previously seen of such anti-war marches and were just carrying a big sign-Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and nobody stopped them, no cops, nobody, nobody yelled “commie” either or a lot of other macho stuff that he and his hang out guys used to do in Troy when some peaceniks held peace vigils in the square. The civilian on-lookers held their tongues that day although Ralph knew that the whole area still retained a lot of residual pro-war feeling just because America was fighting somewhere for something. He parked his father’s truck and walked over to the march just to watch at first. Some guy in a tattered Marine mismatched uniform wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers in the march called out to the crowd for anybody who had served in Vietnam, served in the military to join them shouting out their military affiliation as they did so. Ralph almost automatically blurred out-“Big Red One” and walked right into the street. There were other Big Red One  guys there that day so he was among kindred. So yeah, Ralph did a lot of actions with VVAW and with “civilian” collectives who were planning more dramatic actions. Ralph always would say later that if it hadn’t been for getting “religion” on the war issue and doing all those political actions then he would have gone crazy, would have wound up like a lot of guys he would see later at the VA, see out in the cardboard box for a home streets, and would not until this day have continued to support in any way he could, although lately not physically since his knee replacement, those who had the audacity to march for the “good old cause.”                           

That is the back story of a relationship has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was happening in a world they did not create, and were not asked about there were plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Ralph had noticed while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting to be released, Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the damn thing. That got them talking, talking well into the first night of their captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy. Carver is something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that dots U.S. Interstate 495.) After a couple of days in the bastinado Sam and Ralph hunger, thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some side exits. They decided to surreptiously attempt an “escape” which proved successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of letter, number and state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence, Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in Cambridge to live in a commune Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem. Ralph did, although his father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that.    

So in the summer of 1971 Sam and Ralph began to read that old time literature, although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader and some of the stuff was way over his head, Sam’s too. Mostly they read socialist and communist literature, a little of the old IWW (Wobblie) stuff since they both were enthrall to the exploits of the likes of Big Bill Haywood out West which seemed to dominate the politics of that earlier time. They had even for a time joined a loose study group sponsored by one of the myriad “red collectives” that had sprung up like weeds in the Cambridge area. Both thought it ironic at the time, and others who were questioning the direction the “movement” was heading in stated the same thing when they were in the study groups, that before that time in the heyday of their anti-war activity everybody dismissed the old white guys (a term not in common use then like now) like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their progeny as irrelevant. Then everybody was glued to the books.

It was from that time that Sam and Ralph got a better appreciation of a lot of the events, places, and personalities from the old time radicals. Events like the start of May Day in 1886 as an international working class holiday which they had been clueless about despite the  May Day actions in Washington, the Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolutions, August 1914 as a watershed against war, the Communist International, those aforementioned radicals Marx, Lenin, Trostky, adding in Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho whose names were on everybody’s tongue (and on posters in every bedroom) even if the reason for that was not known. Most surprising of all were the American radicals like Haywood, Browder, Cannon, Foster, and others who nobody then, or almost nobody cared to know about at all.

As they learned more information about past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to write appreciation of past events, places and personalities. His first effort was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior college and the third not at all. Here is what he had to say then which he recently freshly updated. Sam told Ralph after he had read the piece and asked if he was still a “true believer” said a lot of piece he would still stand by today:       

“Every January, as readers of this piece are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. [Sam did so for a few years but as the times changed, he expanded his printing business and started a family he gave that up.] That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist Party and American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon.

Note on inclusion: this year’s honoree does not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levelers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

**********

BOOK REVIEW

SPEECHES FOR SOCIALISM- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party. [Cannon died in 1974.]

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.

This volume is a compendium of Cannon’s speeches over most of his active political life beginning with his leadership role in the early American Communist Party and his secondary role in the Communist International. Some of the selections are also available in other parts of the series mentioned above. I would also note here that in contrast to his "Notebook of an Agitator" the pieces here tend to be longer and based on more general socialist principles. The socialist movement has always emphasized two ways of getting its message out- propaganda and agitation. The selections here represent a more propagandistic approach to that message. Many of the presentations hold their own even today in 1972 [and in 2015] as thoughtful expositions of the aims of socialism and how to struggle for it. I particularly draw the reader’s attention to "Sixty Years of American Radicalism" a speech given in 1959 in which Cannon draws a general overview of the ebbs and flows of the socialist movement from the turn of the 20th century until then. At that time Cannon also predicted a new radical upsurge which did occur shortly thereafter [the blazing 1960s of Sam, Frank and my youth.] but unfortunately has long since ended.

Cannon’s speech correctly marks the great divide in the American socialist movement at World War I and the socialist response American participation in that war and subsequently to the Russian Revolution. Prior to that time socialist activity was a loose, federated affair driven by a more evolutionary approach to ultimate socialist success i.e. reformism. That trend was symbolized by the work of the great socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs. While that approach had many, ultimately, fatal flaws it did represent a solid attempt to draw a class struggle line for independent (from the capitalist parties) political action by the working class.

Drawing on those lessons the early Communist Party, basing itself on support of the Russian Revolution, became dominant on the American left by expanding on that concept. That is, until the mid-1930’s after it had already long been an agency under orders from Moscow in support, by one means or another, of the Rooseveltian Democratic Party, a capitalist party. That was fatal to long term prospects for independent working class political action and Cannon has harsh words for the party’s policy. He also noted that the next upsurge would have to right that policy by again demanding an independent political expression for the working class. Unfortunately, when that radical upsurge did occur in the 1960’s and early 1970’s the party that he formed, the Socialist Workers Party, essentially replicated in the anti-Vietnam War movement and elsewhere the Communist Party’s class collaborationist policy with the remnants of American liberalism.

Obviously, as a man in his sixties Cannon was no longer able or willing to fight against that policy by the party that he had created. Thus, the third wave of radicalism also ebbed and the American Left declined. Nevertheless this speech is Cannon’s legacy to the youth today. [2015] A new upsurge, and it will come, must learn this lesson and fight tooth and nail for independent political expression for the working class to avoid another failure.

31st Annual Holiday Appeal Free the Class-War Prisoners! Featured NYC Speakers: Albert Woodfox and Robert King of the Angola 3

Workers Vanguard No. 1100	18 November 2016

31st Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

Featured NYC Speakers: Albert Woodfox and Robert King of the Angola 3

“The path to freedom leads through a prison....

“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”

— James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926

As the Partisan Defense Committee mobilizes for its 31st annual Holiday Appeal to raise funds for monthly stipends and holiday gifts to class-war prisoners, the capitalists’ jails are being filled with hundreds of young activists who have protested the election of racist demagogue Donald Trump, adding to the many more who have been jailed for protesting racist cop terror over the past couple of years.

At this year’s New York City benefit, featured speakers will be Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who along with Herman Wallace were known as the Angola 3. These intransigent opponents of racial oppression spent decades in prison, victims of a state vendetta for forming a Black Panther Party chapter in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Woodfox and Wallace were falsely convicted of the 1972 killing of prison guard Brent Miller. King, who was framed up for the killing of a fellow inmate in 1973, was released in 2001, and dedicated himself to fighting to prove the innocence of his imprisoned comrades. Wallace was released in October 2013—just three days before dying of liver cancer! Despite seeing his conviction overturned twice, Woodfox spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement—the longest stint of any prisoner in the U.S.—before being released this past February, on his 69th birthday.

The PDC stipend program is a revival of a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), an early leader of the Communist Party who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. Like the ILD before us, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and the oppressed in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]). In its early years, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners—socialists, anarchists, union leaders and militants victimized for their struggles to organize the working class and for opposition to imperialist war.

The PDC started our class-war prisoner stipend program in 1986, during the Reagan years, a period of rampant reaction. Those years were marked by vicious racist repression, brutal union-busting, anti-immigrant hysteria, malicious cutbacks in social services for the predominantly black and Latino poor as well as government efforts to equate leftist political activity with “terrorism.” Over the decades since, we have supported dozens of prisoners on three continents, among them militant workers railroaded for defending their unions during pitched class battles—including coal miners in Britain and Kentucky.

The 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle, but the convulsive battles for black rights in the 1960s and ’70s still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party, the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism. Other early stipend recipients were members of the largely black Philadelphia MOVE commune. Among those prisoners to whom we continue to provide stipends are Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost class-war prisoner, and Ed Poindexter, a leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, Committee to Combat Fascism, whose comrade and fellow stipend recipient Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died in March after 45 years in prison.

There is every reason to believe that the period we are entering will be no less reactionary than the one we faced 30 years ago. Class-struggle legal and social defense, including support for class-war prisoners—those today behind bars and any militants who join them—is of vital importance to labor activists, fighters for black rights and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties. In a small but real way, our prisoner stipend program expresses the commonality of interests between black people, immigrants and the working class. The struggle to free the class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters against exploitation and oppression—a schooling centered on the role of the capitalist state, comprising at its core the military, cops, courts and prisons. Join us in generously donating and building our annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all!

The 12 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia. In a significant development in the decades-long battle for his freedom, on August 7, attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a new petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). Mumia’s application seeks to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his frame-up conviction. In the meantime he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole. Mumia also faces a life-threatening health crisis related to active hepatitis C, which brought him close to death in March 2015. On August 31, eight months after oral argument in Mumia’s lawsuit to obtain crucial medication, a federal judge rejected his claim on the pretext that the lawsuit should have been directed against the members of the state’s hepatitis committee—a secretive body which Mumia’s attorneys had no way of knowing even existed at the time the suit was initiated! The Pennsylvania prison authorities have adamantly refused to treat his dangerous but curable condition.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its Native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 72-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eight years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and has received a confirmed diagnosis of an abdominal aortic aneurysm—a life-threatening condition which the federal officials have refused to treat. He is incarcerated far from his people and family and is currently seeking executive clemency from Barack Obama.

Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 39th year of imprisonment. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. This year Eddie, Debbie, Janet and Janine were all denied parole.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter was railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and he has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjury.

All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252. For more information about the class-war prisoners, including addresses for correspondence, see: partisandefense.org.

Former Class-War Prisoner Speaks- Albert Woodfox: Unbowed, Unbroken

Workers Vanguard No. 1102	16 December 2016

Albert Woodfox: Unbowed, Unbroken

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

We print below Albert Woodfox’s speech to the December 2 New York City Holiday Appeal benefit.

All power to the people! It is an honor for me to be here. I want to thank the Partisan Defense Committee and all the comrades who are here in attendance for asking me to come here and speak before you. Given all the wonderful things that have been said by wonderful comrades before me, I feel like a backup dancer right now.

I guess my message to you is that for those of you who are just entering social struggle, welcome. To those of you who have spent decades, look at me and see that the strength and determination of human spirit defies all evil.

I wish I could say that I can see the horizon. I have been struggling for the last 44 years in solitary confinement. But we just elected a maniac. For those of you who are involved in social struggle, I say: You must be more determined. You must be willing to make whatever sacrifice is necessary because this struggle is not about us.

A young man asked me—we were visiting Harlem—why was I still involved in social struggle? And I thought about it for a moment and I said, “Old men like me struggle so young men like you could know victory.”

For 44 years I defied the State of Louisiana and the Department of Corrections. Their main objective was to break my spirit. I saw other men who had been broken by the state—by the use of other inmates and by the brutality of prison guards. Once a man’s spirit has been broken he can never get it back. He will never be the same. And those are the kind of things that motivated me, my comrades Robert Hillary King and Herman Hooks Wallace, to continue to struggle at a time when all we had was one another.

So I will ask you here tonight to look at me: unbowed, unbroken. You played a part in that. Everyone here tonight who has ever written a letter to me or to another prisoner, it is that kind of strength that gives us the will to keep going, to keep making a sacrifice.

I have been asked many times would I change anything? Not one thing. Because what I went through allowed me to be the man I am today, the Black Panther I will always be. Thank you.

*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Heroic Age Of The Communist International

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1922 "Report On The Communist International".

BOOK REVIEW

THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, VOLUMES I AND II, 1970

World War I was a watershed for modern history in many ways. For the purposes of this review the preceding point is a predicate for understanding the revolutionary socialist response to that war during the events of its immediate aftermath.The failure of the bulk of the European social democracy organized in the Socialist International - representing the masses of their respective working classes- to not only not oppose their own ruling classes’ plunges into war, which would be a minimal practical expectation, but to go over and directly support their own respective ruling classes in that war indicated that sometime had gone very wrong in the European labor movement in the previous period.

This failure was most famously demonstrated when the entire parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic party voted for the war credits for the Kaiser on August 4, 1914. This action initially left the anti-war elements of international social democracy, including Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht almost totally isolated. As the carnage of that war mounted in endless and senseless slaughter on both sides it became clear that a new political alignment in the labor movement was necessary. The old, basically useless Socialist International (also known as the Second International), which in its time held some promise of bringing in the new socialist order, needed to give way to a new revolutionary International. That eventually occurred in 1919 in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia with the foundation of the Communist International (also known as the Third International). Horror of horrors, particularly for reformists of all stripes, this meant that the international labor movement, one way or another, had to split into its reformist and revolutionary components.

It was during the war that Trotsky’s and Lenin’s political positions coalesced, although not without some lingering differences, and as a result they drew closer and began the process of several years, only ended by Lenin’s death, of close political collaboration. This is also the period of their close collaboration around the central questions facing the new International: who should (and who should not) be allowed in it; what strategic and tactical positions should be taken; and, what types of organizational forms should be the norm. These volumes contain many of Trotsky’s personal contributions to the debates in the International in the form of reports to its first four Congresses, manifestos, and additional polemics concerning the work of various national sections of the Comintern. Much of the public writing of the early period of the Comintern was Trotsky’s work and therefore it is doubly important to read to get a flavor of what the beleaguered Soviet leadership was thinking at the time.

Of particular interest the reader should note Trotsky speeches and summaries surrounding the Third World Congress. That is a time, 1921, when the signals were clear that the immediate post-war revolutionary upsurge was, at least temporarily and not necessarily everywhere, ebbing and therefore the tasks of the young Communist Parties was to go to the masses which were for the most part still under the influence of the Social Democratic Parties. However, the aim was not to just to go to those masses in a bid to outdo the socialists at their parliamentary game but to win the masses for the struggle for state power, for a workers government. This is the heyday of Lenin’s tactic of the united front, an idea that has been misused more than once, many times willfully, by communists to gain influence.

Another aspect of the Third Congress worth mentioning was the fight over the way to analyze the apparently ultra-left March 1921 actions of the young, inexperienced and poorly led German Communist party. That is, in essence, the question of the fate of the unlamented party leader of the time Paul Levi whose ‘plight’ later generations of reformist socialists have latched on in order to chart the point of the definitive degeneration of the Comintern. That action and Levi’s fate, however, are more properly a question which I will address as part of a review of the aborted German Revolution of 1923 in a later review. (See archives for commentary labeled The German Revolution of 1923).

I have headlined this review with the title the Heroic Age of the Communist International. Why? One can clearly see a dividing line in the history of the organization as a vehicle for revolution. The activities of the first Four Congresses represented the accumulated wisdom of the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the failure of the other efforts in Europe to pull off a socialist revolution, centrally in Germany from 1918-23. In that period the mistakes, egregious as some of them were, were mistakes due to political immaturity, carelessness, or a misunderstanding of the situation on the ground. But it was, however, still an organization committed to making an international revolution. Later after the death of Lenin, the defeat of the Left Opposition and its international allies in the Soviet Communist Party and the International, and as the process of Stalinization in both the Soviet Union and the Communist International set in this dramatically changed. The Communist International became, for all intents and purposes, merely an adjunct for Soviet foreign policy. In short, it consciously became anti-revolutionary, and as the case of Spain in the 1930’s demonstrated, at times counter-revolutionary. However, that is the wave of the future. Here read what the Communist International was like, warts and all, in its glory days.

A View From The Left-On The Kurdish National Struggle

Workers Vanguard No. 1102	16 December 2016

Kurds Under the Gun

Massive Repression in Turkey

Over 125,000 people fired or suspended from their jobs, tens of thousands jailed and awaiting trial—that’s the toll exacted by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the months after his suppression of the July 15 military coup. In his drive to consolidate an authoritarian Islamist state in which he would wield dictatorial powers, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have gone after a host of opponents and critics, including Kurdish political leaders, teachers and unions. Some 150 media outlets have been closed, while more than a hundred journalists have been jailed, including a number from Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers. Meanwhile, since last summer the military has been attacking Kurdish towns and cities in southeastern Turkey, bombarding them with artillery and tank fire and killing hundreds of Kurdish civilians.

Erdogan has also purged thousands of cops, soldiers, judges and other erstwhile representatives of the Turkish capitalist regime, accusing them of being in cahoots with the Muslim cleric and former Erdogan ally Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in the U.S. since 1999. For his part, Gulen denies any connection to the coup. As we wrote in “Turkey’s Failed Coup: Both Sides Bad for Workers” (WV No. 1093, 29 July): “We don’t know who the coup plotters were, but one thing is clear: the only position in the interest of workers was to oppose both the Erdogan regime and the coup.”

Even before the coup, the Erdogan government had been on the warpath against critics, arresting people for “insulting” the president, stripping members of parliament of immunity and detaining the leader of the leftist Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK). After the coup, the regime declared a state of emergency, allowing Erdogan to rule by decree. Continuing the oppression of the Kurds, it used these emergency powers in November to detain eleven Kurdish members of parliament. These included Selhattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, cochairmen of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a petty-bourgeois nationalist party that has considerable backing among secular Turks and leftists. Despite government intimidation, some 5,000 demonstrators mobilized in Istanbul on November 20 to protest these arrests. The government also detained many Kurdish mayors and muzzled at least 20 Kurdish media outlets.

The Erdogan government is now using a December 10 bombing claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) as a pretext to further escalate its war against the Kurdish people. The bombers targeted security personnel outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul, killing 36 riot cops (as well as eight civilians). The TAK says it is an offshoot of the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), though the PKK denies any links to it. As Marxists, we oppose the strategy of individual terrorism, which rejects the mass mobilization of the working class and oppressed against the capitalist regime. And, invariably, attacks like the one outside the soccer stadium kill innocent civilians, further driving the Turkish masses into the arms of their rulers. Since the bombing, the government has detained nearly 570 people, including politicians from the HDP, which condemned the attack, in operations spanning 28 cities, while the Turkish interior minister has vowed that Kurdish militants will be “wiped from this geography.”

As Marxists who stand for the political independence of the working class, we do not politically support the HDP, a petty-bourgeois party whose program is by definition hostile to the historic interests of the proletariat. However, we defend the HDP and its leaders from the assaults of the Turkish state. The Turkish workers movement must oppose Erdogan’s all-sided repression, fight for the immediate release of Kurdish victims of the government’s purges and demand: All Turkish forces out of Kurdistan!

The government has also suspended or fired 60,000 teachers, although some 6,000 were reinstated in November in the face of a massive teacher shortage. While the regime has accused many of the victimized teachers of alleged ties to Gulen, some 11,500 of them were accused of being supporters of the PKK. Most of these Kurdish teachers live in the Kurdish-majority southeast and belong to Egitim Sen, a teachers union that is part of the leftist public-sector workers union confederation KESK.

While Erdogan is popular among conservative and religious Turks as well as sections of the poor who have benefited from infrastructure improvements, he is widely hated by secular Turks for his growing crusade to extend the reach of Islam in public life. During his first term as prime minister, he unsuccessfully sought to criminalize adultery. In recent years, fundamentalist goons have taken to patrolling the streets and attacking bars and other establishments selling alcohol. A sign of the times was the attempt last month to pass a law that in effect would have given the state’s seal of approval to forced child marriages. Following a huge outcry and demonstrations around the country, the bill was eventually withdrawn. Nevertheless, it was emblematic of the deeply ingrained oppression of women in Turkish society, expressed in the prevalence of such vile acts of violence as “honor killings.”

The European imperialists are seizing on Erdogan’s massive wave of repression to posture as defenders of civil liberties and bring Erdogan to heel. On November 24, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding vote to suspend talks with Turkey on its membership in the European Union (EU), throwing a wrench in the country’s years-long (and unlikely) bid to join this consortium of imperialist brigands and the weaker countries they exploit. Among other things, the Parliament cited Erdogan’s outrageous threat to re-enact the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004. Erdogan shot back that the EU decision had “no value” and threatened to terminate a deal with the imperialists to stanch the flow of refugees to Europe in exchange for billions of euros.

The imperialists’ “humanitarian” pretensions are utter cynicism. For more than two decades, EU boss Germany has banned the PKK and has joined the U.S. in arming the Turkish military to the teeth in its war against the Kurds. Across Europe, from Theresa May’s England to Angela Merkel’s Germany, the capitalist rulers have unleashed the furies of Islamophobia that embolden the fascists and other racist forces.

Turkey, the Kurds and the Syrian Quagmire

The Turkish government’s decades-long campaign to root out the PKK massively escalated last year, when the Turkish army launched a furious assault on Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey. These attacks were partly in response to military gains in northern Syria by the PKK-affiliated Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Committees (YPG). They were also in retaliation for the HDP’s gains in the June 2015 parliamentary election, in which the HDP became the first Kurdish party in Turkish history to enter parliament, and Erdogan’s AKP lost its parliamentary majority.

Through years of struggle, the Kurds have clearly demonstrated their desire for independence. But far from fighting for self-determination, the petty-bourgeois nationalist PKK is using the military conflict to force the Turkish rulers to the bargaining table to achieve a negotiated settlement and expanded local control. Likewise, HDP leader Demirtas seeks a “political solution” in which the Kurds would supposedly be granted more rights within the framework of the oppressive Turkish state. Such a plan would simply renegotiate the terms of oppression of the Kurdish masses, who would remain under Turkish domination.

It is vital for the working class of Turkey to stand for the military defense of the PKK against the Turkish state. If the proletariat is to ever liberate itself from capitalist exploitation, it must oppose anti-Kurdish chauvinism and take up the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. We aim to win the Turkish working class, as well as the workers of the region, to the fight for a united, independent Kurdistan embracing the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. That fight is part of the struggle for a socialist federation of the Near East, which would include a socialist republic of united Kurdistan.

We also support Kurdish independence from individual capitalist states—e.g., the right of Kurds in Turkey to secede. However, in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalists have currently subordinated the just fight for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism. This is a crime that will redound against the long-oppressed Kurdish people.

In Syria, the YPG is U.S. imperialism’s most reliable ally in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS). In acting as boots on the ground for the U.S., these Kurdish nationalists are betraying the interests of the Near East masses, not least the national aspirations of the Kurdish people. Washington’s occupations and interventions in the Near East have escalated communal tensions in the region, setting Shia against Sunni, Sunni against Alawite and Arab against Kurd.

We Marxists have no side in the reactionary and sectarian Syrian civil war, including in the clashes between the U.S.’s Turkish allies and its Kurdish tools. But we do have a side in resolutely opposing the U.S. and other imperialist powers. Thus, while we abhor and reject everything that the ISIS cutthroats represent, we stand for the military defense of ISIS against the U.S. and its proxies, including the YPG. Every blow struck against U.S. imperialism coincides with the interest of the working and oppressed masses of the world. At the same time, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in Syria, such as Turkey, Russia and Iran, and demand that they get out.

From the Armenian genocide during World War I to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Kurdish leaders have collaborated with regional powers or the imperialists. In a 2011 interview, former national security official Brent Scowcroft remarked: “The Kurds are pawns in great power politics...as they have been for a long time.” But pawns are dispensable, and imperialist tools are discarded after serving their reactionary purpose. This is a fact that many Kurds themselves know only too well, even if some leftists and Kurdish activists justify these treacherous blocs with imperialism as clever tactics. As Joost Hiltermann commented in “They Were Expendable” in the London Review of Books (17 November): “The history of the Kurds’ long struggle is therefore one of a series of fleeting alliances with more powerful states, and cries of betrayal once these alliances fall apart, each followed by atrocities from which it takes them a generation to recover.”

Notwithstanding its current relationship with the PYD/YPG, the U.S. is and has always been opposed to Kurdish independence. When Turkey entered Syria in August, ostensibly against ISIS, its main objective was to prevent PYD/YPG fighters from linking the two semiautonomous Kurdish regions in northeast and northwest Syria. The U.S. supported the Turkish intervention with stepped-up airstrikes and military advisers—as well as a forceful statement by Vice President Joe Biden during a visit to Ankara in which he ordered YPG forces to retreat to the east of the Euphrates River.

More recently, the 10,000-strong Turkish force has been backing fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA)—which is also supported by the U.S.—poised to take the Syrian town of al-Bab, ISIS’s last significant stronghold before its Syrian capital of Raqqa. Supported by Turkish armor and warplanes, FSA fighters have clashed with the YPG-dominated Syrian Defense Forces, again pitting the Turkish military against the Syrian Kurds. U.S. commanders struggling to coordinate the assault on Raqqa have been frustrated as their Kurdish proxies have insisted on attacking Arab-majority al-Bab. Meanwhile, Turkish troops continue to defy Washington by turning their fire on the YPG.

In Iraq, Turkish warplanes, with U.S. approval, have been bombing PKK positions for over a year. Now, the Erdogan regime, which has hundreds of Turkish soldiers stationed north of Mosul, is insisting on a Turkish role in the battle to retake the city from ISIS. That battle, which began in October, is being carried out by Kurdish pesh merga fighters, Shia militias and Iraqi government forces, backed by U.S. aerial power and Special Operations troops. Ankara’s maneuvers in this former region of the Ottoman Empire are heightening tensions with the Baghdad government.

The growing acrimony between the U.S. and its Turkish NATO ally has coincided with, and helped feed, a rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow, which has exercised NATO officials. As a result, Russian president Vladimir Putin has given tacit approval to Turkey’s actions in northern Syria. While Turkey and Russia have divergent interests in Syria, with the latter backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, they agree with the U.S. on maintaining the “territorial integrity” of Syria—i.e., no independent Kurdish statelet.

For a Bi-National Revolutionary Workers Party in Turkey

Millions of Kurds—many of them victims of army terror, high unemployment rates and impoverishment—have migrated to such key western industrial centers as Istanbul, Izmir and Bursa. Despite the fierce discrimination they suffer, this migration has strengthened the objective basis for uniting the Turkish and Kurdish working masses. But because anti-Kurdish chauvinism is integral to the maintenance of bourgeois rule in Turkey, unity can only be sporadic unless the Turkish proletariat is won to the fight for Kurdish national independence.

As Leninists, we defend the national rights of all peoples and uphold the principle of national equality, including the equality of languages. In defending the right of nations to self-determination, our purpose is to tear down the barriers created by bourgeois class society to keep the working people of different nationalities at one another’s throats. By championing Kurdish self-determination, the working class in Turkey would place itself squarely in opposition to its “own” capitalist class enemy. It would also undercut U.S. imperialism’s capacity to manipulate the Kurds’ grievances in order to further dominate the region.

Erdogan has gone a long way toward consolidating his autocratic rule and strengthening the sway of Islam over Turkey. Nevertheless, the society he rules over remains a pressure cooker of social and political discontents. What is vital is the forging of a bi-national, Turkish-Kurdish workers party that would also draw in Turkey’s oppressed ethnic and religious minorities. Acting as a tribune of the people, such a party, section of a reforged Fourth International, would lead the proletariat in the struggle for its own rule. In power, the working class would expropriate the bourgeoisie and break the hold of the imperialist masters over the country; establish a collectivized, planned economy; lay the material basis for the emancipation of women; and fight to ensure Kurdish self-determination.

The struggle for proletarian power in Turkey, and more broadly in the Near East, must be linked to the fight for workers rule in the imperialist centers. Centrally important to this perspective is the presence of some two million ethnic Turks and a million Kurds in Germany, where they are heavily integrated into the working class. These workers can serve as a living bridge linking the fight for socialist revolution in the Near East to working-class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries of West Europe. In the U.S., the working class must be won to the understanding that the American ruling class is its enemy and that it must oppose imperialist aggression abroad. Our aim is a socialist revolution to overthrow U.S. imperialism, the greatest enemy of the world’s working and oppressed masses.

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

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

 

By Frank Jackman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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