Thursday, October 11, 2012

Rally For HEI Rights


Harvard students will be meeting at 3:45 and at 4:05 in front of Lamont Library to head over to the picket line, or just meet us there!


Rally for HEI workers' rights!
Thursday 10/11, 4-6PM

20 Sidney Street, Cambridge
(near Central Square)
Protest and rally to support workers at the Le Meridien Hotel in Cambridge
The Le Meridien Cambridge is trying to decrease hotel standards for workers. Starwood owns the Le Meridien brand, but the hotel is owned and operated by an hotel equity company called HEI Hospitality.
Over 70% of workers at the Le Meridien in Cambridge have asked for a fair process to decide whether to have a union on the job. HEI has refused. HEI workers have low wages, rising health care contributions, and work overloads. HEI hotel workers are part of a growing effort to stand up for basic working standards. On October 11th, hotel workers across the country are launching a national boycott of HEI Hotels.
This summer Harvard, Yale, and Brown decided not to invest any new funds into HEI.
All workers deserve respect, dignity and a voice on the job. Show Le Meridien workers your support by joining us at a rally and march on Thursday, October 11 at 4 pm. We will meet in front of the Le Meridien Hotel at 20 Sidney Street in Cambridge (Central Square Red Line stop). Download the flyer here and download the directions here.

Judges Doubt Need for Secrecy in Bradley Manning Court-Martial




Judges Doubt Need for Secrecy in Bradley Manning Court-Martial

WASHINGTON (CN) - A military appeals court blasted the government Wednesday for guarding records on the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning more closely than it guards terror cases.
Manning's alleged disclosure of diplomatic and warfare secrets to WikiLeaks led to criminal charges that carry a potential life sentence for the young soldier.
The Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces, or CAAF, looked Wednesday at whether the government has violated the First and Sixth Amendment safeguards for a free press and a public trial by choking off access to filings and transcripts related to Manning's court-martial.
A sea of blue-uniformed soldiers, and with a handful of journalists and Manning supporters in casual clothes, filled the pews of the majestic courtroom.
Eventually, a panel of five judges stepped through regal red curtains to hear the pending case. Though they quickly showed frustratration at the policies preventing disclosure, they also appeared uncertain of their ability to force a change.
Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Shayana Kadidal had barely started his opening arguments about the public's hunger for more information on the case when one of the judges interrupted him.
"Counsel, how do we have the jurisdiction over this matter?" Judge Margaret Ryan asked.
Kadidal appeared unprepared to answer, noting that the matter had not been disputed.
"It certainly wasn't challenged by the government," he replied.
Other judges had the question in mind as well.
Judge Scott Stucky asked whether the journalists fighting the policy had standing to challenge a restriction that affects the press and public alike.
Kadilal replied that the "fact that the injury is widely shared" did not harm his clients' case.
Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, the Nation's Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, American Conservative contributor Chase Madar, Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztola, Wikileaks and the organization's founder Julian Assange have all petitioned for access.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press backed their effort in an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief on behalf of 31 news outlets.
"[The] pervasive secrecy underlying the Manning prosecution has reinforced and indeed fueled a theory that the U.S. government keeps far too many secrets in an attempt to evade public oversight of its misconduct," the amicus brief stated.
Judge William Cox wondered whether the solution called for a court-martial analog to the federal court database, Pacer.
Chief Judge James Baker added that this would raise issues of cost and implementation.
Kadilal proposed several possibilities, such as paying stenographers for the cost of copies, transmitting audio of the proceedings online or having the parties release redacted documents on the court's website.
The CAAF, unlike the courts-martial it reviews, makes documents and audiotapes available over the Internet, Kadilal noted.
Baker ordered the parties to submit written arguments about whether the court has jurisdiction to grant this type of relief.
If the journalists vault procedural hurdles, the judges seem inclined to open court-martial access.
The panel peppered the government lawyer, Capt. Chad Fisher, about why the executive branch forced the case to go to court rather than devise a system for public access.
"Instead of making a constitutional case about this, why not just make it available?" Judge Ryan asked, adding that the government chose litigation over "simple and reasonable" solutions.
In an amicus brief, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press pointed out that military commissions at Guantanamo Bay put court records online.
Judge Erdman picked up this point in asking, "If they can do it, why can't you?"
Chief Judge Baker pointed out that journalists, like lawyers, need to read briefings to understand arguments at the live hearings.
"If one didn't have the brief, one would have a pretty uncertain idea of what's going on," Baker said.
Fisher replied that the hearings are "not in a foreign language."
The captain insisted that courts-martial are a "creature of the executive" branch, rather than the judiciary.
While courts must provide prompt access to records, the public can seek executive-branch files only through Freedom of Information Act. Such requests, however, are subject to delays and exemptions. Many news outlets, including Courthouse News, have had their FOIA requests for documents in the Manning case denied.
Instead of publicizing government records, the FOIA statute has ironically closed off access in the Manning case, one judge noted.
Though the trial briefs and transcripts are not under seal, Fisher said that the government has no obligation to make them available.
Judge Erdmann ridiculed that position. "You don't see anything wrong with giving the public the documents, but you don't have to so you're not going to," he said.
Baker highlighted the discrepancy by noting that Fisher, like his courtroom adversary, would get to speak after his allotted time.
"You're entitled to more time as a matter of fairness, but the Constitution does not require it," Baker said.
Fisher availed himself of his right to sit down.
In his rebuttal, Kadilal urged the court to simply find that courts-martial have a First Amendment obligation to public access, letting the lower court handle implementation.
Kadilal speculated that Manning's trial judge, Col. Denise Lind, might welcome such a ruling because she supported the media's right to access to court-martial records in a March 2000 essay for the Military Law Review.
If the CAAF finds that it lacks jurisdiction, Kadilal said he plans to seek emergency relief in federal court. He added that this maneuver might force him to seek a stay of trial, currently slated for Feb. 4, to ensure that it will be sufficiently public.
Such a move would further extend Manning's pre-trial incarceration, on top of the more than 900 days the young soldier has spent behind bars.
His attorney, David Coombs, says that the military has let the 120-day speedy trial clock expire several times over, and he will seek to penalize prosecutors for the delays at the end of the month.


Who Is Barack Obama?

The World Can't Wait
Stop the Crimes of Your Government
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Funds Urgently Needed NOW to Publish Anti-NDAA Statement

If you haven’t donated already, your contribution is needed now to publish the ad for the “Call to Stand Together to Oppose the Obama Administration’s Assault on Fundamental Rights.” $4,000 is needed by this Thursday to secure a full-page ad (the entire back cover) in The Nation. The ad would appear at the end of October.

Publishing the Call now is crucial. Far too few understand that the NDAA is an assault on basic rights or that it’s now in full effect! The ad is crucial in reaching many more people to sound the alarm and affirm the principle that we must stand together in resisting repression.

Again, if you haven’t donated already,
click here now! Reach out to others and encourage them to donate.
Dear ,

Dennis Loo writes:
As Rebecca Solnit put it in admonishing the Left to support Obama’s re-election: Obama may be killing innocent children abroad, but that’s not new for American presidents (!!), and Obama at least is promoting health care in ways that Mitt Romney wouldn’t.

In other words, even if the Democrats and the Republicans are not distinguishable in terms of foreign policy, at least with the Democrats you get more humane domestic policies.These supposed differences in domestic policies between the two parties are taken for granted as conventional wisdom, but upon closer examination a very different picture emerges.

Continue reading:
Who is Barack Obama Really? An Examination of Obama’s Domestic Policies

Protesting Obama's Wars this Past Weekend

From the speech by Stephanie Tang for the San Francisco rally against the war in Afghanistan:

Yesterday I was at a high school with a young army vet on the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour. We spoke in 3 classes, telling the students the truth about America’s wars.

These students were between 4 and 6 years old the day the U.S. attacked Afghanistan. Now they see military recruiters prowling their campuses because the empire needs them to fight, kill, and die for it. I am outraged - Are you?

We here know the story of these 11 years. How Bush launched illegal illegitimate war in Iraq/Afghanistan. How Obama’s expanded those wars into 3 more countries.

In Pakistan, 45 drone bombings during the entire Bush Regime. During Obama’s first year alone he sent 51 – and he’s now up to 284 in Pakistan alone.

Afghan casualties are higher now than at any other time since the invasion. Special Forces, military operations that terrorize those they don’t kill, night raids, the ongoing use of torture, and mythology spun by the mass media to make the public think all this is OK.


Obama himself has declared this will continue for at least another ten years. This is happening in our names. Are you for this or against it?Continue reading...

News coverage from San Francisco, where activists have been conducting We Are Not Your Soldiers presentations in schools, protested the war this past weekend, and interacted with thousands of Obama supporters lined up for a fundraiser on Monday:
Protesters gather in Civic Center Plaza for Obama fundraiser (KTVU)Obama pursues base, bucks in California (SFGate)
Evening News (
Pacifica Radio)
Protesters Gather Outside Obama Fundraiser (SF Appeal)
More photos

Photos from
Times Square NYC, where we gathered with a replica drone, shoes symbolizing the countless civilians being killed, and chalk for passersby to contribute their messages:
In Chicago, protesters had a die-in in Tribune Plaza amidst the crowds downtown for the marathon. They then marched on Obama's campaign HQ where they chanted "Obama, Romney, all the same, no more war crimes in our name!"
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, anti-war activists from the U.S. joined a march of thousands against US drones in the tribal areas, drawing further attention to this hidden—and bipartisan—terror inflicted on the people of the region. Read Kevin Gosztola's report, Peace March Against Drones in Pakistan Ends with Rally After Convoy Stopped by Army:

To show solidarity with the people of Waziristan in Pakistan, who have experienced and been victims of US drone strikes, thousands of Pakistanis marched in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan led the march. Thirty-one American peace activists affiliated with CODEPINK participated in the march as well.

The motorcade, which left Islamabad on October 6, took a route that ended in Dera Ismail Khan (DIK) on the first day. There was a rally in DIK at the end of this phase of the march. Then, on October 7, the motorcade continued onward and passed through Tank, a city nearby Waziristan, where tens of thousands of people met the march as it arrived.


October 16: Stop the U.S. Drone Wars Protest @ Presidential Debate

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate foreign policy at Hofstra University, we will be outside with Reaper drone replicas. More information: 866-973-4463. Also sponsored by KnowDrones.com
More Protest in Upstate New York:
Read the press release from Upstate Drone Action about their recent action at the Hancock Air Base.

Join the conference call with Gregory Koger

On the phone Thursday October 11
10pm Eastern / 7pm Pacific

Gregory Koger, activist and videographer from Chicago will join us for a special conversation on his case, his activism as a former prisoner struggling against all forms of injustice, and the "criminal justice" system which has cruelly persecuted him for years now. Find out more about his conviction and add your support to a statement which will be delivered to Cook County officials very soon. We look forward to hearing directly from this dedicated and principled human being, who has said,

"...outrages happened in a political prosecution in my case, but they happen on a daily basis to millions of people herded through the courts into the United States’ historically unprecedented system of mass incarceration. Our struggle to defeat these charges has been a small part of the broader struggle against this oppressive system that inflicts monumental suffering on the people, here and around the world."
Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait
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Where Is War Making Taking Us?



Where Is War Making Taking Us?

By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/content/where-war-making-taking-us
Remarks at the New Hampshire Peace Action 30th Anniversary Celebration in Concord, NH, October 5, 2012.
First of all, congratulations on 30 years! Give yourselves some applause.
I should tell you now that I don't trust anyone over 30, so your time is running out quickly here.
Actually, when it comes to organizations and the principles they've been founded on, I am more likely to trust organizations over 30. New Hampshire Peace Action's website says that you envision a world committed to disarmament, peace, and nonviolent conflict resolution. More organizations used to be founded on that vision in the past, I think, than are today. The Center for American Progress favors "national security" in its mission statement, and the Campaign for America's Future wants to move "away from Middle East occupation" while warning us about terrorism, and the only warfare mentioned in Moveon.org's mission statement is that very worst and most intolerably evil form of warfare: "partisan warfare." If the two political party's could only agree on such basics as corporate trade agreements, drug policies, prison policies, basic budgetary priorities, immunity for U.S. war criminals, the need to support for-profit health insurance companies if it kills us, the appropriateness of denying basic human needs while funding banks and bombs, and the president's prerogative to select winners in a murder lottery from a list of nominees every Tuesday, what a wonderful world it would be. Or is. Or something.
The typically greater wisdom of older groups (even when they contain younger people) is indicative of certain negative trends, but there have been positive trends as well, some of them as a direct result of the kind of work you do.
During these past 30 years, we've seen dents put in the culture of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. We've seen violence decline around the world and in our own society, in our treatment of our personal acquaintances, sexual partners, children, pets, and other animals. And we've seen nonviolence really come into its own as a force for change. The same year New Hampshire Peace Action began, an International Day of Peace was created. We've seen the Cold War ended. We've seen the death penalty retreat abroad and even in some U.S. states. We've reduced the number of nuclear weapons on earth. We've seen most of the world ban chemical weapons and land mines. We've prevented the launching or escalation of numerous wars desired by members of our government, as well as slowly and not-always-completely bringing other wars to an end.
It's important, in fact, to remember that when the war planners don't get to have a war that they want, they don't hold an annual press conference to announce that the peace movement has won again. And the peace movement doesn't do so either. So for those of you who are a little bit success-dependent you have to remember to hold a little celebration inside your head. We didn't go to war with Iran or China or Russia this year. Say it to yourself. We didn't go to war with Iran or China or Russia this year. At least not yet. And if you think that has had nothing to do with the peace movement, you aren't paying attention to the slips that people like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton make in revealing, after the fact, the degree to which they've been moved by the peace movement's pressure. There are powerful people in the U.S. government who want more wars now. And almost all powerful people in Washington have learned the highly refined skill of convincing protesters that protest has no influence. It's the most ludicrous and dangerous lie they tell. Even Barack Obama would quite easily be moved by public pressure for peace if it were ever applied to him.
We've also seen occasional incidents of accountability imposed on war makers, from the World Court's sanctioning of the United States for its war crimes in Nicaragua, just two years into the life of New Hampshire Peace Action, to Italy's upholding last month the convictions of 22 CIA agents and 1 U.S. military official for kidnapping a man in Italy and shipping him off to be tortured in Egypt, as well as numerous prosecutions of non-Western war makers. And then there's the accountability of the polling place, even in our nearly completely corrupted election system. The more war-hungry candidates were more likely to be thrown out of office in Washington in 2006 and 2008. U.S. public understanding has moved against war, and remarkably toward awareness of the lies that support war. The lies that the Bush-Cheney gang told about Iraq were not unusual as war lies go, except in one respect. Those men were incompetent liars, just as they were incompetent at so much else. The lies were doomed to be undeniably exposed as falsehoods very quickly, and so they were. The weapons that they knew weren't there turned out not to be there. The result has been a big boost for public resistance to similar lies about Iran, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, etc.
That list, by no means complete, indicates that the full picture of the past 30 years is not all pleasant. The glass is certainly half empty as well as half full. In fact, the glass is flowing over with blood, and too many are eagerly drinking from it. We may be kinder to our dogs and horses, but our fossil fuel consumption is killing off species faster than Mitt Romney changes his opinions. Racism and religious bigotry are alive and well in U.S. foreign policy, and consequently in domestic policies as well. We treat non-white, non-Christian, non-NATO nations in a manner in which we would never want to be treated ourselves. At a Republican presidential primary last year, Ron Paul proposed applying the Golden Rule to U.S. foreign policy, and the crowd booed him. In fairness, he proposed ending our wars, in the next breath, and they cheered, just as they cheered in Tampa when Clint Eastwood proposed immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan to an empty chair. What too many Americans, including millions who've sworn their souls away to both big political parties, want is not so much bloodshed as superiority, exceptionalism, and the ability to keep anything unpleasant out of their heads. So, wars on others are either genocidal or humanitarian, depending on how one prefers to imagine them, but as long as not many Americans die, and as long as the deaths of others are not pointed out or dwelled on or displayed visually, well, we do what must be done as the one nation that must live up to the sacred indispensible responsibility of using its brute force to . . . well, to do whatever it damn well pleases.
The Cold War may have ended, but the U.S. government is hard on the trail of possible enemies, building bases, and positioning missiles around all possible borders of Iran, China, and Russia. The United States now dumps a greater percentage of discretionary spending, and of global military spending into its military, shortchanging everything else. And, while this is beginning to fuel military spending elsewhere, the United States also accounts for over 85 percent of international weapons sales. We arm the dictatorships and so-called democracies of the world. We go to war against our own weapons to protect those we've sold weapons to from others we've sold weapons to. And our corporate media almost universally discusses war preparations as a socialistic jobs program -- saved from the "Socialist" label purely by virtue of its ability to kill lots of people. Humanitarian war justifications, purely hypocritical though they are for those in power, indicate a certain progress as well as a tragic and embarrassing weakness. Propagandists can't take us to war anymore without pretending it's philanthropy -- or pretending it isn't war. The downside is that this works. At least as long as the president is a Democrat, the peace movement collapses, and millions of otherwise mentally healthy people decide that war is not such a bad idea after all.
The awareness of war lies still has a long way to go, which is why I wrote "War Is A Lie" as a manual to help everyone recognize them. We then also have the problem of wars not based on lies but begun and carried out in secret. We now have a secret agency, the CIA, conducting wars halfway around the world with robotic planes. The United States has been at war throughout the history of New Hampshire Peace Action, which was just a 19-year-old kid when the current war on Afghanistan began. An eleven-year-old today, and effectively most teenagers today, have learned a great deal since they were born, but they've had no chance to learn to live in a world in which the United States was not at war in Afghanistan. And, of course, among Afghans there is virtually no one alive with any experience of peace. Permanent war is now considered the societal and legal norm here, and it's becoming as hard for Americans to imagine their government at peace abroad as it is for Afghans to imagine peace at home.
The Bush-Obama tag team has bestowed on all future presidents the ability to openly spy on anyone without a warrant, imprison anyone without a trial, torture anyone using Army Field Manual approved methods or indeed with any methods at all, ship anyone abroad to be tortured, test drugs on prisoners in foreign death camps, and assassinate anyone -- man, woman, child, American, non-American -- as long as the killing is done abroad. And future presidents will have the undisputed bipartisan-approved power to do these things in secret, announcing bits and pieces of them, as they see fit, while punishing whistleblowers to the full extent of … I can't say the law exactly … to the full extent of a government without legal limits. This gloomy and socio-suicidal future will be possible without any of that nasty partisan warfare at all.
Obama has not yet killed anything like the number of people Bush killed. But Obama has claimed and fixed in place for the future more abusive powers with more reach than anyone in the history of the earth. This was predictable and predicted. When we tried to get Bush and Cheney impeached we were told that we were vengeful and hateful and prejudiced and partisan. My response was that I carried no ill will toward Bush or Cheney. I simply wanted to deter the next president, who would be even worse if Bush wasn't held accountable. Take just the example of trial-free imprisonment to see how this has worked. Bush began locking people up in secret foreign locations. Some of those secrets were gradually leaked. Debates raged in Congress. Supreme Court decisions pushed back against this new power. Democrats campaigned against it, but did nothing against it. Obama moved into the White House with a plan to move Guantanamo to Illinois, but didn't try very hard to enact it. He closed some secret sites but not others. He enlarged his lawless prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. He stood in front of the Constitution and the Magna Carta in the National Archives and declared that he had the power to imprison people forever without a trial. He gave himself that power in an executive order. And then he wanted it in a piece of Congressional legislation as well.
What would Democrats in Congress say? They worked for him. He held many carrots and sticks and dollars with which to manipulate their votes.
What would Republicans say? If they didn't legalize Bush's crimes, what would become of Bush? And shouldn't future Republican presidents have the powers of gods?
So last year's National Defense Authorization Act included the presidential power to imprison anyone, including U.S. citizens, forever and ever, with no trial. This was at the insistence of President Obama, according the public testimony of Senator Carl Levin, as well as according to a careful study of what was proposed, what was vetoed, and what was signed. Then journalist Chris Hedges and others sued and won an injunction in federal court, but the U.S. Justice Department that does Obama's bidding put up a furious appeal and is working hard to keep the power to imprison Americans without trial in place for all future presidents. That Dick Cheney still thinks George W. Bush was a better president than Obama simply shows how disloyal Cheney is to his own principles. But he's got nothing on loyal liberals. I read an article a couple of weeks ago that went to great length to demonstrate that Obama had appointed the judge that overturned his law, because he secretly wanted it overturned, and he was struggling in court to keep it in place merely as an elaborate pretense that would intentionally fail in the end.
Oh, and he messed up the debate this week because of a bad format, bad camera angles, and bad coaches. Never mind that four years ago he could talk about closing Gitmo, ending the very mindset that gets us into wars, providing universal healthcare, restoring the rule of law, reforming NAFTA, creating the right to organize in the workplace, ending the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. Now, you can blame his failure to actually attempt any of those things on the Republicans or Rahm Emanuel or his dog Bo, but all the post-debate analysis ignores the real way in which Obama must now debate with one hand tied behind his back. If there were debate insurance, neither candidate could by it given their pre-existing positions.
OK, so I just meant to say congratulations on 30 years and ended up on a five-page-long tangent. Now what I really wanted to do was to go back further than 30 years.
One place to look for the origins of war, as well as religion and many other things, including goose bumps and the little muscles that make hair stand up on the back of your neck if you have any hair on the back of your neck, is in early foreign relations -- that is, relations between tribes of humans and the ferocious wild beasts that liked to eat them. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out so well in her book "Blood Rites," early humans were not so much hunters as hunted. The supposed weapons marks on early human bones turn out to be teeth marks. We were what's for dinner. We lived in fear, and we still do. Fear still makes us do things that made sense then and no longer make any sense at all. We're easily moved by dangers that resemble those our ancestors faced, and largely indifferent to greater dangers that kill more of us but don't resemble predatory attacks. More of us die from unsafe workplaces, lack of healthcare, cigarettes, automobiles, too much McDonald's, etc., than from terrorism. But which one scares us?
Bears and lions couldn't be reasoned with, and so, preemptive war carried a certain logic that it lacks in intrahuman relations today. But when the wild beasts had been largely eliminated, war took on its true purpose, the purpose it has fulfilled right up through those taxes you earned yesterday to pay for nuclear submarines or that groping I got at the airport this morning. The purpose of war became the propagation of war itself.
Which came first, the wars or the weapons? The answer is the weapons. They came for defense from animals. But when the animals had been killed off, the warrior class that didn't feed itself or arm itself but lived as parasitically as Mitt's vision of 47% of us, didn't want to just give up the warrior status any more than a president would. A ready substitute for tigers and leopards was found in the warriors of other human tribes. By fighting each other, warriors could continue their accustomed lifestyle. Which is not to say that they sat down and planned it that way together, any more than Americans sat down and planned to waste 40% of their food each year. Small conflicts between tribes were no doubt more easily escalated without a common four-footed enemy to fight off. The substitution happened. The animals became gods. Animal killings of humans became intentional human sacrifices. And other humans took the place of the animal enemies.
These many years later, labor unions (with a few wonderful exceptions like the Chicago teachers) go on pointless one-day strikes as a vestigial reenactment of strikes that once halted production. And fathers give their daughters away to grooms who carry them over the threshold, even though daughters aren't owned and brides aren't kidnapped anymore. Similarly, we continue to glorify war, to speak of the war dead as making the ultimate sacrifice, to imagine that war is a means of keeping us safe, and to suppose that by funding war profiteers we hold off the menace of foreigners, who are still depicted as wild animals in editorial cartoons. We sanctify the troops even as the warrior class has been shifted from the wealthy to the poor and is in many ways treated as that would lead one to expect. Our homeless shelters are full of discarded warriors, revealing clearly which group is master and which servant. War as it was is no more. But old ways can hang on tenaciously.
The history of war is of a behavior that has been spotty and sporadic. War has only been around for a small fraction of human existence. And as long as it's been around, it's been a part of some cultures but not others. Nations have limited and eliminated war. China and Japan have had periods of peace. One in Japan lasted from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as culture flourished until the United States came knocking. Costa Rica has thrown away its military -- put it in a museum in fact. Numerous nations never go to war, or participate after a campaign of bribes and threats. Coalitions of the willing are not coalitions of the eager. Some tribes in pre-Columbian America, Australia, and elsewhere did not know war. During a lengthy cold war, two nations chose to avoid actual war. Western Europe has chosen not to go to war with itself for 65 years. Some cultures are so far removed from war that their people cannot even understand it. A Batek man in Malaysia was asked why his ancestors did not use their poison darts (which they had for hunting animals) to shoot slave-raiders. His shocked reply was "Because it would kill them!"
Now there's opposition to the motto of "Live Free or Die" if I've ever heard it. These people's motto must be "Be enslaved rather than kill." Of course, both of those attitudes are easily conceived of in too-simplistic a manner, by neglected the power of nonviolent action to resist tyranny without killing -- and often without prematurely dying either.
The idea that war is in our genes is an incoherent proposition because so many people have lived and do live without war. Taking part in it traumatizes us, whereas avoidance of war -- war deprivation -- has never given anyone post traumatic stress disorder. But war in the genes is an incoherent concept for another reason as well. Namely, humans are free, no matter how they behave or what they put on their license plates, they are free. We can choose not to eat or drink or have sex or even breathe. There is nothing we are compelled to do. The idea that we could be internally compelled to join together to construct such an elaborate activity as war is absurd. Many have inclinations that lead them willingly toward war when it's offered in the absence of anything better, but that is a very different thing from having no choice in the matter.
Wars used to profit the victors with territory, slaves, and treasures. Now wars only profit specific war profiteers, not their whole nation. Wars and war preparation drain away the resources of a nation, and because one of those resources traded away for war is education, we aren't able to recognize what is happening. We see people with jobs at BAE or in the military and we imagine that without war spending they'd have no jobs. In fact, military spending produces fewer jobs than most ways our government could spend that money, and even than tax cuts for working people. The choice is not war jobs or nothing. The choice is war jobs or peace jobs and more of them. In fact the choice is peace jobs and more of them or war jobs and economic collapse … and war. Beyond that, in fact, the choice is jobs in a massive emergency campaign to save our natural environment or war jobs and economic collapse and environmental collapse and civic and cultural collapse and war. This is not a difficult choice. The Senator Ayotte, McCain, Graham road show is right to finally say we need government spending, but is pushing the only kind that doesn't help.
The vast majority of Americans want the war on Afghanistan ended, and this Sunday it will enter its 12th year. Some may be convinced that the 12th year is really going to be the charm. But President Obama wants to continue this war for over two more years beyond that, and then at a smaller scale for 10 years beyond that. Two years is longer than entire wars used to take, but Obama calls this the "winding down" process.
Of course the so-called surge ended, or so we were recently told. But let's remember what happened to troop levels in Afghanistan. Obama promised to escalate them if elected, and we elected him. So, early in 2009, selecting this as the promise he would keep, Obama sent 21,000 so-called combat troops and 13,000 support troops and at least 5,000 mercenaries, plus other contractors. There was no major media debate or Congressional debate. And the fact that this had happened was erased from all memory. Obama had sent the first 17,000 prior to holding his first meeting to try to develop any plan or purpose for them to serve. Sending the troops was an end in itself. It was war for war's sake. Not only did it go unquestioned, but it no longer exists in recent U.S. history. It's gone, vanished from all reporting.
Then, in the fall of 2009, there was a big media debate over whether Obama should escalate the war, as if he hadn't already done so. It was largely a public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who should probably have been dismissed for insubordination, as we are supposed to have civilian control over the military), but members of Congress popped up in cameo roles. In fact, it began to look like a Congressional vote on funding a so-called surge might not be easily passed. So, what happened?
Congress passed a standard massive military bill and put off the surge funding vote until 2010, while Obama went ahead with the surge unfunded, sending another 30,000 troops plus support troops plus mercenaries and contractors. Once Obama had more-or-less agreed with his generals, the media reporting and polling ended. The story was complete, the debate over.
The surge funding was relabeled war funding, and Congress -- now with the choice to fund or not fund something that had already happened -- passed it easily. Obama then continued to send more troops with less fanfare, raising troop levels from about 34,000 when he took over from Bush to about 100,000 plus an even larger number of contractors, etc. The so-called "surge" troops were the only ones that counted in the corporate media because they had been a news story.
So a week and a half ago, the media told us that the surge was finally over. There were then 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, or twice as many as when Obama had taken office, and somewhere around 100,000 contractors, who are rarely mentioned and about a quarter of whom are from the United States, plus of course that new favorite form of Washington warrior: drones. Drones fit nicely into a policy of never talking to people. Bush not only bothered to lie to Congress before his wars, but he negotiated an end to one of them. Iraq is still a disaster. Afghanistan is worse and could remain worse following the departure of the last U.S. helicopter from the roof. But it would look weak for our government to talk to Afghans or Iranians . . . or to Osama bin Laden in a court of law.
Yet they may have to talk to Afghans, and they may have to leave faster than planned, and there are events everywhere this weekend to demand it -- including in Boston.
Drones are taking war into new nations where we had no war before, killing large numbers of civilians, building hostility, creating chaos, and predictably enough resulting in ground troops being sent in as well. Did you know that drones have their own caucus in the U.S. Congress? Homeless people don't have a caucus, poor people, old people. No caucus. Why do Congress members gather together to discuss the needs of their robotic killer airplane constituents, and not the needs of the rest of us?
Thirty-two U.S. peace activists are in Pakistan right now meeting with elected officials, tribal leaders, and the family members of drone victims. Code Pink organized the trip. At a meeting with the U.S. ambassador, Veterans For Peace president Leah Bolger got him to promise not to attack their planned march, and then asked if spreading Americans across the region could get him to promise no attacks on Pakistanis at all. However there is not concern that the Taliban will attack the march. Bolger told me that there was no question the march would go ahead nonetheless.
Meanwhile the U.S. government claims there are no civilian victims, and does so without officially acknowledging that our drone wars exist at all. One reason is that it's really hard to explain how they're legal. This past May the Congressional Research Service wrote a 23 page paper in which they tried to guess at ways in which the White House might try to argue that killing people all over the world with drones could be considered legal, were the White House to bother. Think about that. The legislative branch of our government, the people created by the first and longest article of our Constitution, the men and women given most of the power in that Constitution, including exclusive power to make laws, have now been reduced to trying to concoct twisted convoluted explanations of how, as Richard Nixon might have put it, whatever a president does must be legal.
What our friends are doing in Pakistan right now, building friendship and understanding is immensely important. A number of us are hoping to travel to Iran soon to do the same. Finding ways in which Americans can come to know Iranians, and Russians, and Chinese as friends is one of the most valuable things we can do right now. Amy Goodman spoke in my town, Charlottesville, Va., last week and reminded us that Secretary of War Henry Stimson took Kyoto off the list of targets for nuclear bombs because he and his wife had been there. If only they had also visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Stimson was the same guy who four years earlier had met with President Roosevelt and top officials in the Oval Office, where Roosevelt predicted the Japanese attack might come on December 1st -- off by six days. "The question," Stimson wrote in his diary, "was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition."
I'd say it was more difficult for the sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor than it was for Stimson. Which brings us to the question of how things are looking for the people of Iran. A lobbyist in D.C. who favors war on Iran blurted out a whole string of open secrets recently, and did so on video, which is always helpful.
We know that in the past so-called "defensive" wars have been intentionally launched by fraud or provocation. We know that many in our government want a war with Iran. We know that several years ago then-Vice President Dick Cheney proposed disguising U.S. ships as Iranian and attacking other U.S. ships with them. We know that then-President George W. Bush proposed disguising a plane as belonging to the United Nations, flying it low, and trying to get Iraq to shoot at it. We know that there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, no evidence that Spain attacked the Maine, no doubt that the weapons and troops on board the Lusitania were public knowledge, no question that FDR worked hard to provoke an attack by Japan, no question that the U.S. invaded Mexico and not the reverse, and so on. And we know that Iran has not attacked another nation in centuries. So, it almost goes without saying that Washington warmongers are contemplating ways to get Iran to make the so-called "first move."
Assassinating scientists hasn't worked, blowing up buildings doesn't seem to do it, cyber-war isn't blossoming into real war, sanctions are not sanctioning armed resistance, and dubious accusations of Iranian terrorism aren't sticking. Exactly what do we have to do to get ourselves innocently attacked by the forces of evil?
The Israel Lobby to the rescue! Patrick Clawson, Director of Research at the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy, a group founded by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said this:
"Crisis initiation is really tough. And it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran. . . . The traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests. Some people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War II . . . . You may recall, we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War I. You may recall that he had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam. You may recall he had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn't go to war with Spain until the Maine exploded. And Mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call out the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack. So, if in fact the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war. . . . I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean, look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Someday one of them might not come up. Who would know why? [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] . . . . We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier."
This is serious advocacy for manufacturing a "defensive" and "humanitarian" war. This is not a war critic or a Yes Men prankster. The position of most elected officials in Washington, including the President, fits well with this. That position includes the ultimatum that Iran must cease doing what U.S. National Intelligence Estimates say it is not doing, namely building nuclear weapons. The goal at the bottom of all of this is war. The purpose of the war is not related to any of the excuses for it. The purpose is profit, control, domination, image, machismo, and the irrationality that continues to allow war to control people rather than the other way around.
Most war planners are not longing for a new long-term occupation with lots of deaths among that 5 percent of humanity they know they have to pretend to care about. But war is still in charge, not its planners. When you launch small-scale wars, they don't always stay that way. Even when you fund proxy wars or impose sanctions as collective punishment or engage in major naval exercises off the coast of a nation you're threatening, the result can be war beyond all control, even if not fully intended. Current U.S. backing of terrorists in Syria is certain to have blowback if it doesn't quickly develop into wider war.
As long as we keep war as an acceptable tool, and as long as we keep nuclear weapons and power plants, our future is likely fairly short. Survival requires not proper civilized war that complies with Geneva Conventions and serves humanitarian goals. Survival requires the elimination of war. If the danger is not immediate enough to make anti-war work as thrilling as war to young adventurers, well then try nonviolent activism. Madison - Tahrir Square - Madrid - Occupy: that's the moral superior to war, outdoing William James' search for a moral equivalent. My book "When the World Outlawed War" looks at the movement to abolish war that existed in this country in the 1920s and the huge steps forward that it made, some of which we take for granted. One lesson from the 1920s is that they did not tie peace to a political party, but made it such a powerful movement that all four, yes four, political parties came running to them.
This is what we need to do, even when there's an election soon. Vote for a good candidate or vote for your lesser evil choice. But before and after election day, work for peace and justice, educate, organize, mobilize, resist, change our entire culture, rather than making yourselves cheerleaders and apologists for one war-making party over another. Too many are not just apologists, but selective collectors of information. Some friends and I recently handed out information on Obama's kill list outside an Obama event. The kill list had been a big New York Times story and would have been the source of much outrage were Obama a Republican. His supporters did not defend it. They did not know about it. They are pouring their energies into cheering for a man who has claimed the power to murder anyone, and they've avoided knowing about it. I posted online an offer to help the Obama campaign find more voters if Obama supporters would join me in protesting wars this weekend. You join me in protesting these wars, and I'll canvas for your guy. That was my offer. That's how little I think it matters who I vote for and how much I think it matters whether we are building a movement around policy changes rather than personality changes. I got no takers.
I have two other books here today. One is actually the first test copy of a children's book I'll be publishing this month. I'll sign it for whoever gives New Hampshire Peace Action the most money for it. The other is a collection from many great writers called "The Military Industrial Complex at 50" and this is where I think we should focus, because I think Eisenhower was right. If civil liberties groups would turn against the military funding that produces the abuses, if environmental groups would turn against our top polluter, if groups favoring education and healthcare and housing would turn against the black hole that we're dumping all the money into, we could turn this thing around.
I actually like the motto "Live free or die," when spoken by those committed to nonviolence. Of course, you know it was plagiarized from a Virginian warmonger named Patrick Henry, but his words can also be put to better use. He said: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
I think however that both of those statements have been improved upon by the reggae singer/musician Jimmy Cliff, who said of those abusing this earth and its people, and this is for Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen:
"I'd rather be a free man in my grave.
"Than living as a puppet or a slave.
"The harder they come, the harder they'll fall one and all."
"And these words shall then become," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"Like Oppression's thundered doom
"Ringing through each heart and brain,
"Heard again - again - again -
"Rise like Lions after slumber
"In unvanquishable number -
"Shake your chains to earth like dew
"Which in sleep had fallen on you -
"Ye are many - they are few."

From The Anti-War Front



Because a sustainable future depends on the people willing to see the truth for what it is, and for those to stand up in unison in order to make a difference.
— Jake Edward Keli'i Eakin

Stop the Machine! Create a new World! October2011.org
October 2011
October marks the one year anniversary of the Occupation of Freedom Plaza! For those of you who were there the first weekend, you may remember the excitement and powerful emotions, the smiles, tears, hugs and dancing.

This year, the month of October is packed with actions across the nation and around the world. Occupy is part of a global movement that is bigger than Occupy. We are working in solidarity to end war and austerity and to create a peaceful, just and sustainable future as we learn to work with dignity, compassion and cooperation.

Many of us who organized the occupation of Freedom Plaza marked the anniversary by holding a
ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in New York City. The memorial park is in the heart of the financial district and after the arrest of veterans there as part of the May Day protests, the park is being closed at 10 pm. This closure is offensive to war veterans because they cannot ‘close’ their memories and with more soldiers dying of suicide than in combat, the veterans protested. A moving ceremony was held in the park and 25 people were arrested while reading the names of the dead and placing flowers. You will find photos and videos at StopTheseWars.org.

And some who organized Freedom Plaza traveled to Pakistan as citizen diplomats to stand with victims of our drone attacks.

October marks a
month of actions in Europe against austerity. Our friends in Spain surrounded their Congress starting on Sept 25 with demands that all legislators resign, and that there be new elections in 6 months and a new Constitution. Many were arrested and some were charged with treason. But the Spanish judge dismissed the charges saying that it was a legitimate protest given the lack of action by the government to address the people’s grievances.

There is a call for a
Global Day of Noise this Saturday, Oct. 13th. Bring out your pots and pans and march with your neighbors!

Walmart workers are striking from California to Maryland. Occupiers can join them, support them and boycott Walmart.

People are taking action to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from being built in Texas. This would mark a
transformational victory if the Keystone can be stopped! And the plutocrats know that, which is why they are doing whatever they can to stop the protests such as arresting media and using torture tactics on protesters. We urge you to support the Keystone XL protesters in any way you can.

Occupations celebrated their one year anniversary in
Austin, TX by raising a tent city for the homeless, in Los Angeles, CA and Portland, OR with marches and in Atlanta, GA by returning to their park.

And Occupy groups continue to support members of their community such as
defending activists who speak out and keeping people in their homes. Occupy marches with workers who are fighting for fair wages and worker rights!

There is a lot going on and much still to do, but remember that Occupy is making a difference by standing up and by joining in solidarity with others who stand up. We are all connected and we are all connected to this global movement for justice!

Please spread the word by forwarding this email to your friends and family.

In solidarity,
October2011.org/Occupy Washington, DC

Copyright © 2011 October 2011, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
October 2011
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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-The High White Note -2007

Markin comment:

The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.

Scene Eleven: Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- The High White Note-2007
 
The High White Note, The High White Western Night and The High White Wave Merged 

I am a driven man. I am a driven man, imprisoned, six by twelve room driven, but more by a mental six by twelve internal, eternal, infernal almost paternal quest, and that is the only word that fits for the elusive high white note, or the high white something, that I have spent a lifetime searching for. Certainly longer than that other search, that more physical search for the blue-pink great American West that disturbed my youth, and beyond, and pushed me through many a long, lonesome highway hitchhike mile. But you know that story already now that you have read the previous sketches.< br />

This one is more wistful, although I have caught a whisper of it here and there along the way. Now it looks like I’m stuck with it to the end, the quest that is. Here I sit, in any case, quarantined, in desolate, high, hard wind-swept, sunless-sea-ed, busted sand-duned, green sea-grass-blown, icy white-capped waved, Atlantic–oceaned, ragged, rugged, jagged Maine-coasted shack of a room getting ready to search, and search hard this time, for that white puff of a thing that keeps disturbing my rest.

I will, for the duration, put up with an ill-lit stove, half broken from generations of use by others, passing strangers, maybe seeking their own high white notes, or high white something. Or, maybe, just passing sweaty, drunken nights in some fore-doomed attempt to avoid oblivion. I will, moreover, put up with that high-pitched, annoying, buzzing refrigerator in back of me that means, at least, a touch of civilization. And the bubbly, perking, hard-hearted coffee-making machine, chipped plates, moldy-cushioned sofa, and this stuffy-aired place in order to make sense of what drove me here once again to place my shoulder against the wind, the whistling wind that signals that it is time to take note, and to seriously take note, of the demands of the quest.< br />

And I came here for a purpose, always a purpose, to leave home and sweet-loved, sweet love. And to get away, to clean a man’s mind from the humdrum, fairwayed, fresh-ponded, sun-walked, run-runned, walk-runned, city-maddened depths. Also while we are on the subject from the technological-driven, cell-phoned, personal computer-strapped like some third hand or second-brained, four-walled nightmare. Nightmare-evading Maine fits the bill just fine, although truth to tell Maine figures, Maine always figures in the white note fight, although it is hardly the only place. <br />

I can almost read your thoughts about my thoughts right now. It goes something like this- here he goes again, you say, on some incensed holy grail trip of the mind, or maybe he is for real, real time, real places but still a trip that would embarrass and shame any self-respecting errant knight of yore, searching for that perfect fair damsel in distress to bring home, or more likely, to carry off, kicking and screaming, to some cozy, stone-faced, thatched-roofed, smoke-filled, forested cottage for two. Or of old mad, maddened, maddening Captain Ahab and his foolish fish, or whatever woe begotten thing that he was really looking for in the Melville deep. Or, maybe, some fiendish, freakish, madman pioneer monkishly doing his own shouldering against the storms, against the snowstorms, against the storms of life of the white-peaked Western trek nights. Ah, the vision of the blue-pink Western sky. I wish you well pioneer brother, wherever you landed. <br />

No, it is not like that at all. This is not some half-baked, half-bright, half-thought out, interior dialogue that I usually get myself tangled up into. Tangled so bad I have to break it up for a while. No, none of that this time. No intellectual gymnastics, no mental tepidity, no squarey circles or circley squares. No this is purely, or almost purely, a memory trip and that seems about right, you know, if you really want to know it has been painful at times, but no way, no way at all, that it is one of those ill-digested whims that you are thinking of. No way. <br />

And, besides that, from the great American West night hitchhike road I have already gone through many pairs of worn-out, worn-soled, worn-heeled, down at the heel shoe leather (now thick-soled, thick-heeled, logo-addled running sneakers); worn-thumbed, back-pack-ladened, some forgotten town destination sign-waving, hitch-hiked mile (that means bumming free rides on the road, the wide American highway, for those too young, or too proper to the know the long gone, way long gone, exotic word that sustained many a hobo, tramp or bum in his (or her) search for the Great American night) through every nowhere, no-name, no wanna know the name, bus-depot-ed, stranger-unfriendly town from here to Mendocino. Moreover, here I have marks, and here you can call it intellectual or spiritual or whatever, from every diesel-trailed, oil-slicked, mud-flatted, white-lined, white-broken-lined, two-laned, no passing , hard-bitten, steam-fooded truck stop from here to Frisco as well. So don’t tell me I haven’t paid my dues.
 
Or it could have been some smoke-filled, nicotine-plastered walls in some long defunct coffee house (when smoking was <i>de rigueur</i>), or some gin-sweated, smoke-fogged Cambridge bar (in the days when smoking was allowed), listening to some local group trying to make it out of town, one way or another. Or it could have been being chained-smoked cigarette (ditto above) writing like crazy, every soul thing, every non-soul thing, every anti-soul thing after passing on the last call train out to the sticks at that old reliable, just don’t have the eggs scrambled Hayes-Bickford, where we all believed that if you just spent enough nights, enough hot, heavy-aired July nights, or enough snow-bound, frost-bitten January nights (this before Super Bowl suspense filled in January) maybe something major would come out, and maybe fame, big fame too, fame etched by the gods. <br />

Hey, did I tell you how I got here, got here to ocean-winded Maine, this time that is? Did I forget that in my frenzy to tell you what is? Yah, I guess I did forget reading back. Let me tell you of my dreams, or at least the story of my dreams to make it right, okay? One recent, sweat-drenched night I woke up, or was I woken up by one of the cats, in a start. I had a weird old dream, or maybe just a flash of a dream, where I saw, in living, livid color a big old beautiful high white note floating, free and easy, as you might guess on a very stormy high white wave. After than flash, if that is what it was, I could not get back to sleep and lay there, soaking a little and trying to soak off that soaking with an old bedraggled railroad man’s roaring red handkerchief. Or that is at least what I call them ever since I first saw a railroad guy walking down the line when I was a kid, carrying one in the left back pocket of his dirt-stained denims as he uncoupled one train from another, maybe sending it into the great western night. <br />

But we have already been into that great Western night, or what I think is my idea of the great Western night so I don't know how it figures in the meaning of this dream. It is really bothering me, and it should because, lately, I have been thinking and thinking hard about that very subject. The relationship between the two. No, it did not just come out of the blue, come on now, you guys know better than that. Ain’t you read Freud, or his acolytes or renegades, these things all have secret meanings of their own. But no surprise if you think about it. I have been thinking about the high white note for a while, ever since I read poor old, black, gay, exiled against his will, writer James Baldwin and his infernal short story, <i>Sonny’s Blues</i>. <br />

You know I really should make you read the whole thing and then you could come back and get an idea about my dream, or the thought of what my dream was all about. And then the great Western trek into the night, hell in the day time even, would make a great deal more sense. But I am going to let you off the hook this time and just tell you that old “Sonny” is a story about brothers, and I have been thinking about that too lately, although not in the friendly, gee I should get back in touch with my own brother sense, but about brothers who drifted back and forth in each other’s lives until one day the reality set in hard and hard was that Sonny, a high white note-seeking jazz pianist really got high on the white note. Busted, busted hard, busted back to clean but busted and his brother, would you know that it was his big brother, had to help him put back the pieces, even though the pieces were what made Sonny interesting and alive. That's me, living on old sweet, sweet dream of that white note, and, as well, Angelica-ish-driven memories of that old time blue-pink night before I go.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Leon Trotsky on “The Future of Man”

 
Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.

Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
***************


Workers Vanguard No. 1009
28 September 2012

Leon Trotsky on “The Future of Man”

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below the concluding remarks of exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky’s 1932 speech on the Russian Revolution, titled “In Defence of October,” delivered in Copenhagen, Denmark. This excerpt was published in the July-August 1947 issue of Fourth International, theoretical journal of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.

*   *   *

Between nature and the State stands economic life. Technical science liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a citizen with full power in the realm of thought.

But this is not yet the end of the road. No, it is only the beginning. Man calls himself the crown of creation. He has a right to that claim. But who has asserted that present-day man is the last and highest representative of the species Homo-sapiens? No, physically as well as spiritually he is very far from perfection, prematurely born biologically, with feeble thought and has not produced any new organic equilibrium.

It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of thought and action, who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain of mountains. The human race has a right to be proud of its Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Beethoven, Goethe, Marx, Edison, and Lenin. But why are they so rare? Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame. But also because the processes of creating, developing and educating a human being have been and remain essentially a matter of chance, not illuminated by theory and practice, not subjected to consciousness and will.

Anthropology, biology, physiology and psychology have accumulated mountains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks of perfecting and developing body and spirit. Psycho-analysis, with the inspired hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically called the “soul.” And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources, must shed light on the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will.

Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and the retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product. Socialism will mean a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom in this sense also, that the man of today, with all his contradictions and lack of harmony, will open the road for a new and happier race.



Workers Vanguard No. 1009 28 September 2012 Leon Trotsky on “The Future of Man” (Young Spartacus pages)