***Those Who Fought For Our Commuist Future Are Kindred Spirits - On Eugene Debs- For Free Speech-He Should Have Never Spent A Minute In Jail.

 

 

Click Below To Link To An Article By Anthony Lewis On American Socialist Party Leader Eugene V. Debs' Free Speech Fight Against The Wilson Administration During World War I And The Role Of United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes "Justice Holmes And The Splendid Prisoner" From The July 2, 2009 Issue Of "The New York Review Of Books".
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=22800
******
In the month of January as we honor the key revolutionary leaders of the early 20th century international labor movement Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg let's not forget the struggle of the American Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. We, in the end had a lot of political disagreements with Brother Debs, especially on the need to break with the reformists and form a revolutionary vanguard party, but we have learned from his mistakes. Needless to say we respect his courage and fortitude for standing up against the American war machine when others, including so-called socialists took at dive on the question.

The well-known perspective, at least in legal circles, of Mr. Lewis is that of a liberal advocate in defense of free speech (except, of course, when it is inconvenient to the interests of the "democratic" state) and one with a general admiration for Justice Holmes' turn on the question. Our point is simpler- Brother Debs should never have spent a minute in jail for his speech against American entry into World War I and the draft. Nor should have the many IWW, socialist and other labor militants rounded up in the governments dragnet of war oppositionists. Old Justice Holmes was a little behind the curve on this one, even on the constitutional question.

Two points always come to mind around Debs' struggle during World War I. One is, although we are now older and wiser about running for executive office in the bourgeois state, that I still always love that picture of him campaigning for President Of The United States from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. That may be the only honorable, if politically incorrect, way to campaign for such an office. Second, the Debs fight, as this Lewis article vividly points out, also brings home the point about the labor movement relying on the good offices of the courts. We use them, and rightly so, but we depend on our own organizations and mobilizations to win our battles.

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Oral Historian Margaret Randall on Che and the Cuban Revolution

Margaret Randall, Berkeley, California, March 23, 2011. Photo © Scott Braley.

Interview with Margaret Randall:
Feminist, poet, and oral historian of Che,
Fidel, and the Cuban revolution

"Che, even on his early motorcycle adventure through Latin America, was deeply affected by human misery and beginning to figure out what he felt could be done to alleviate it."

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2013

Margaret Randall, 77, lives today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her roots run as deep as they do in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua where she has also lived for extended periods of time.

In the 1980s she was a woman without a country -- or at least a woman without a legal passport. Born in New York in 1936, she dropped out of college, moved to Spain and then to Mexico where she married the poet, Sergio Mondragon, with whom she founded and edited the literary magazine, El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn).

In 1968, after a year of involvement with the Mexican student movement, she went underground and escaped to Cuba where she lived until 1980, interviewing Cuban women and serving as a judge for the Casas de las Americas poetry contest and raising a family. Then, after four years in Sandanista Nicaragua, she returned to the U.S. where she was greeted by family members and friends -- and declared persona non grata by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In 1969, when she had acquired Mexican citizenship she also simultaneously lost her American citizenship. Immigration officials stated that, in her writings, she had expressed views "against the good order and happiness of the United States." After a five-year legal battle, the Center for Constitutional Rights won Randall’s case and succeeded in having her U.S. citizenship reinstated.

The author of more than 120 books, she lives with painter and teacher Barbara Byers. In 1990, Randall was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers persecuted by political repression. In 2004, she was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

She has four children and10 grandchildren. Duke University Press has just published Che On My Mind, which Noam Chomsky calls “a compelling personal meditation.”

Randall with her husband, the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon.

Jonah Raskin: We’re close to the anniversary of Che’s death. He was murdered 46 years ago, on October 8, 1967. In some ways he might not recognize the world of 2013.

Margaret Randall: Would Che recognize the world of 2013? I'm inclined to think he would. One of the fascinating things about him is that he had a far-ranging analytical mind. He was curious about everything and knew a lot of political theory, revolutionary practice, medicine, anthropology, art, language, and more.

So, extrapolating from this I believe our world would not have surprised him. It would be more interesting to know how he might gotten from "there" to "here." We'll never know. With his murder those who feared him put an end to his astonishing capacity to see history and to process it. What we’re left with is a story made static by its unnatural end.

Your own life was intense in this period. Can you say something about it?

I was part of the Mexican student movement of 1968 that was brutally repressed; hundreds were shot and killed by the army. A year later, in 1969, we were preparing to honor those who had died. Two paramilitary guys forced there way into my house at gunpoint and stole my passport. I reported it stolen but the Mexican government refused to give me another. That’s when I went underground. I acquired fake papers, traveled to the U.S., then to Toronto and to Prague and from there then to Havana. My kids had gone on ahead of me and met me at the airport.

Was there an epiphany during the writing of the book?

The whole book was a kind of epiphany. Che had long fascinated me. I knew one of his sisters and a brother, too. I felt close to the family. I kept reading and rereading and than one day I just found myself writing. At first I thought it was going to be a short essay, then it turned into a book.

In Che On My Mind, you’re both critical of Che and at the same time empathetic. Did it take time for you to reach that vantage point where you saw his strengths and his flaws?

I’ve been ruminating on the man and his era -- which was also mine -- for almost half a century.

I imagine that if you had written a book about Che in, say, 1968, or even in 1975, it would have been a very different book. This book reflects who you are now in 2013 doesn’t it?

Absolutely. It’s a culmination of years of my own experience, losses, thinking and rethinking -- observing how Che’s persona has been reflected in and used by generations for whom he’s been a model in one way or another.

The photos of Che that you include say a lot about him and his personality. The photo with his mother seems to reveal their deep connection, while the photo of him from 1963 in Havana smoking a big cigar suggests a kind of arrogance -- at least to me. Do you have one favorite image of Che?

My favorite photograph of Che, or the image that haunts me most insistently, is the one taken on October 9, 1967, by Bolivian press photographer, Freddy Alborta, of the man lying dead in a schoolhouse in Bolivia. I reproduce it twice in my book, one full frame and again as a close-up of Che’s face. Although “lifeless” his features retain a mysterious quality -- something between terrible foreboding and infinite calm. The CIA and Bolivian Army staged this photo shoot in order to prove that the guerrilla leader was dead. This image proved just the opposite.

Your book reflects your own personal journey from North America to Latin America -- Mexico and Cuba and Nicaragua -- and back to North America. At one time you might have said that living here was living “in the Belly of the Beast.” Is there an image or a metaphor you would use today to describe the USA?

Che with Fidel, left, circa 1958 in the mountains during the guerrilla war against the Bautista dictatorship. Photos of Che Guevara from Che on My Mind by Margaret Randall, Duke University Press, 2013.

Living in the U.S. today is like living on the far side of Alice’s Looking Glass or, as Eduardo Galeano has said, in a world that is upside down. Official wisdom is really smug deception. Criminality passes itself off as benevolence, and the 1% continues to ignore all the warming signs in a world it’s destroying.

It’s definitely difficult for guerrillas from the mountains to morph into government officials in the capital. Che did that for a while when he was president of the Bank of Cuba. Che as banker doesn’t fit the popular mythology does it, but its part of the picture.

Che was one among many who pointed out that winning a military campaign and restructuring society are very different endeavors, and that the latter is far more complex and difficult than the former. I believe that Che had immense courage, some valuable ideas, and also made some painful mistakes in both contexts. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that had his ideas about a new society continued to be implemented after he left Cuba, more of the revolution would exist in that country today.

I like the selections from Che’s letters that you have included. In several of them he seems to romanticize violence as when he writes about “the staccato singing of the machine guns.” Machine guns probably don’t really sing do they?

No, they don’t sing; they kill.

Why did you return to the United States after years of living in what might be called “exile”? Did you feel that you took that part of your journey as far as you could take it?

I missed my language, my culture, the space and colors of my New Mexico desert, my aging parents: all the components that together define home. And I was tired after so many years away, often on the front lines of battles that were and were not my own. I was close to 50. It was time to come home.

What do you miss most about the Latin American world that you knew?

I miss its rich cultures, extraordinary creativity, and unfailing hope in the face of forces that continue to exploit and usurp. I miss good Mexican mole, Cuban yuca al mojo de ajo, Nicaraguan tamales. I miss César Vallejo’s voice and all the voices of young poets who exist because he did. I miss my children, three of whom opted to remain in Latin America; and of course I miss my grandchildren whose lives are unfolding in Mexico and Uruguay.

You’re also critical of Fidel and Cuba in your book -- including what you call “the stagnation.” Given the blockade and U.S. foreign policy on the one hand and the reliance on the Soviet Union for so long on the other hand, what choices did the Cubans really have?

I am critical of decisions I feel were paternalistic, didn’t display enough faith in the Cuban people themselves, discouraged healthy criticism, and further isolated a nation that is, after all, an island. Given the balance of power during the Cold War years, Cuba may not have had more viable options. Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. When the Cuban revolution has been most open and embracing I believe it has achieved its greatest successes. This said, every time I revisit the country I come away with a palpable sense of justice and possibility I don’t experience anywhere else.

Edward Boorstein, the American economist who wrote about Cuba, told me a story about how Che became head of the national bank. In his version, it was Fidel who asked if there was anyone in a room of guerrillas who was an economist. Che raised his hand. Later, when he wasn’t very effective at the bank, Fidel went to him and said, “I thought you told me you knew economics.” Che replied, “I thought you asked if anyone was a communist.” You point out that the story may be apocryphal. What does the story say to you? How do you interpret it?

Popular culture tends to pick up and focus in on moments that illustrate deep truths, and then incorporate them into legend. I’m sure there is at least a kernel of truth in this story. The Cubans have a marvelous capacity to laugh at their own idiosyncrasies. If this story didn’t happen exactly as it is told, what remains significant is that changing society requires superhuman effort, often by people who have no particular training for the job and must invent as they go along. Making the effort is always better than saying, “We can’t do this because we don’t know how.”

For me the most sobering moment in your book isn’t the death of Che in Bolivia but the suicide of Haydee Santamaria, perhaps the most prominent of the revolutionary leaders, in 1980 in Cuba. What can you tell us about her suicide? How did she take her life? Did she leave a suicide note? Was her death covered up?

Her death wasn’t covered up. But, as with many such major events, in Cuba and elsewhere, we know what those who control the information want us to know. As far as I’m aware, she didn’t leave a note. But she left a life. Like Che, Haydée Santamaría was an exceptional human being. To me, she represented the very best humanity has to offer. She definitely envisioned and worked to create a better world. It must have been unbearably painful for her to have to live in the one that exists.

The chapter about Che and Haydée is the one in my book that means the most to me, the one on which I worked the hardest, and the one I believe embodies most completely what I want to say about the Cuban revolution, its central figures, that whole extraordinary swatch of history.

Che in 1963 in his office in the Hotel Rivera in Havana. Photo by the French photographer Rene Burri, on assignment for Look magazine.

You seem to be positive about the Weather Underground. You say that the organization remained “the voice of a certain radical faction” when the New Left declined. Do you admire the organization more than any other in the USA from that time?

I admired it at the time. I admired all those who dared speak out, rise up, and fight the power of U.S. hegemony and imperialist abuse of other nations and our own. And I continue to feel that admiration. I was also living somewhere else, though, and therefore in no position to observe or judge the excesses, the lack of connection many radical groups had with the lives of ordinary working people, certain sectarian or authoritarian ideas that created dangerous divisions and doomed brilliantly creative projects.

The young Che Guevara seems like a young Jack Kerouac in some ways; he was in search of “adventures” and “fun” to use his own words. Che went on his motorcycle journey about the same time that Kerouac was traveling across the U.S.A. And he was extraordinarily poetic, too, as when he wrote that, “words turn to prisons inhibiting my feelings.” Do you think he and the Beats would have been comrades on the road if they had met in say, 1955?

I can see them as comrades on the road if they had met in 1955, though probably not in 1965. The Beats were motivated by a rejection of the social hypocrisy pervasive in the U.S. throughout the 1950s. But their solutions involved lighting up and dropping out. Che, even on his early motorcycle adventure through Latin America, was deeply affected by human misery and beginning to figure out what he felt could be done to alleviate it. Kerouac’s and Che’s roads diverged. But I definitely sense an underlying “brotherhood.”

Che was in New York in 1964 and 1965. He talked about sleeping in a hammock in Central Park -- the closest he could get to a jungle. What thoughts do you have about him in New York?

I wasn’t there. But I imagine he was lonely, enraged much of the time, deeply curious as he always was about places with which he was unfamiliar, perceptive, and perhaps a little bit in love.

If you had met him what might you have wanted to ask him?

At this point in my life all I can be sure of is that I would not, back then, have been able to ask the right questions -- of him or anyone else. It’s taken me a while to be able to formulate the questions I do ask in my book.

Though he used the Spanish word for “faggot” to describe homosexuals you don’t think he was homophobic?

I struggled with this in my book, and I am honest about the process of that struggle. Of course, there was a great deal of the macho in Guevara, and his use of the word “faggot” was disgusting, unforgivable. It was also an almost unthinking part of the popular culture at the time. I came to the conclusion, after looking closely at the role he played or did not play in the actual repression of homosexuals in Cuba, that he was not one of those for whom that egregious repression was personally important.

And looking at other ways in which he departed from the norm, I came to feel that -- like Fidel -- had he lived long enough to experience the call for gay rights, he would have endorsed them. Che was a man of his time, but deeply principled.

Your book might be described as a feminist reading of Che’s life and work. Do you see it that way?

Absolutely. Insofar as feminism is a framework for looking at power relations, I read everything from a feminist point of view. I also see this as a poet’s book, a poetic reading of a life.

[Jonah Raskin, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 10, 1930-1945

25 September 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 10, 1930-1945

Signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936. Image from Islam Project 2010.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 10: 1930-1945 period -- Anglo-Egyptian Treaty reaffirms Egypt's 'independence' though British domination continues.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

During the 1930s, “Egyptian communist activities...focused primarily on labor unions, continued to be suppressed” by the UK imperialist-backed Egyptian monarchical regime, according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

But in response to both the rise of fascism internationally and the growth within Egypt of Young Egypt, “a paramilitary organization which in the mid and latter 1930s demonstrated admiration for the accomplishments of fascist regimes” in Europe, “antifascist groups...proliferated in Egypt during the 1930s,” according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

In addition, by the late 1930s some “communist study circles” were again formed in Egypt “that evolved into several organizations and factions” by the 1940s, according to an article by Hossam El-Hamalawy that appeared in the MERIP magazine in 2007, titled “Comrades and Brothers.”

Yet in the 1930s Egyptian society was still “socially traditional,” “men and women were generally separated,” “marriages were still arranged” and “women were regarded as the legitimate possessions of men,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Although Islamic law “allowed a woman to own property, conduct business, and inherit a portion of her father’s estate equal to half her brother’s share, it put her at her husband’s mercy in matters concerning divorce and the family,” according to the same book. But despite the social conservatism of Egyptian society in the 1930s, some younger, less traditional Egyptian women did participate in the anti-fascist leftist Egyptian groups of the 1930s.

The UK and Egypt signed an Anglo-Egyptian Treaty on August 26, 1936, which again recognized Egypt as an independent and sovereign nation but “also stipulated...that Egypt must grant Britain...military facilities,” according to Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952. In 1937 the UK government finally “allowed Egypt to apply for membership in the League of Nations and to set up foreign embassies and consulates,” Botman wrote.

But Egyptian leftists in the 1930s considered the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty inadequately anti-imperialist “because British troops were to remain in Egypt for an additional 20 years and because...promises of unobstructed democracy and self-determination were absent,” according to the same book.

The 17-year-old King Farouk -- who inherited the Egyptian throne following the death of his father, King Fuad, in 1936 -- “soon displayed the same autocratic tendencies as his father,” although “the British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson...always referred to Farouk as `The Boy,’ even when the king was in his twenties,” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

After UK ambassador Lampson "surrounded the Abdin Palace with tanks” on February 4, 1942, and “ordered `The Boy’” to appoint as Egypt’s prime minister the particular Wafdist leader that the UK government alone had selected, “or abdicate,” according to A History of Egypt, this “coercion action confirmed that Egyptian independence was nothing more than a sham,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

So, not surprisingly, a new wave of anti-British street protests broke out in Egypt after leaders of the Egyptian student movement met in the summer of 1945 and “decided to call for the formation of national committees to participate in the national movement” of Egypt, according to The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Michael James : Free Speech at Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, Fall of 1964

01 October 2013

Michael James : Free Speech at Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, Fall of 1964

Gathering during Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, December 1964. At left, with mustache, is Jack Weinberg; center, in tie, is Michael Lerner; second from right, in glasses, is Marvin Garson. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Free speech, Sproul Plaza with Jesus,
and the Roseville Auction, Fall of '64

I am one of 773 arrested at Sproul Hall and hauled off to Santa Rita County Jail. One of many who goes limp, I am arrested with the added charge of resisting arrest, and dragged down the stairs. It will not be the only time I’ll get that charge.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I’m heading west to grad school at Berkeley in my “ragtop” (convertible) 1957 Ford. Mine has a ripped as well as ragged top. I’m on US Route 40 -- Victory Highway, the first federally funded highway. In1964 it was the main cross-continental route and I take it from St. Louis west.

It takes me through Salina, Kansas, smack dab in the middle of the country -- a fact I know from having read Hot Rod Magazine’s 1955 report, “Showdown in the Middle of the Nation.”

Temperatures on the prairie and the plains are hot -- real hot. Around twilight I stop for gas and a good meal at a gas station diner in western Kansas and shoot the shit with the young attendant. He has long blond hair and is wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and engineer boots, a la James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

Moving through the Great Plains I sense a moving on up, a gradual incline taking me higher and higher. The terrain changes, sagebrush rolls and tumbles, and I see dozens of black and white birds with long tail feathers on and along the road -- learned later they were Magpies.

I make it to California. It’s afternoon and I stop in Delano to visit the headquarters of the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers), founded in 1962 by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez. Heat, dust. I find myself in a single story building, where I enter a room and meet and speak with Mr. Chavez. I donate my Lake Forest College football letter jacket to their clothing drive.

In the mid-70’s, progressive organizations -- including Rising Up Angry -- will welcome a large contingent of UFW workers to Chicago during the grape boycott and ongoing picketing of Jewel supermarkets. And in the fall of 1986 Caesar will be eating at the Heartland Café, sharing his jazz love. In my studio office I will show him my record collection and he will ask me to make tapes from my vinyl, selecting a stack nearly two feet tall. Sadly, he passed away before I could honor his request.

After leaving Delano, I roll into Canyon, a hip little town on the eastern slope of the Berkeley Hills. Skip Richheimer and his wife Susan are living in a cool crib at the bottom of a canyon, surrounded by tall redwoods and oaks. It is dusk. The home scene is warm and comforting.

I met Skip through a mutual friend, Gloria Peterson, a Lake Forest College classmate of mine. He was a fellow Triumph motorcycle guy, part of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary Motorcycle Club at the University of Chicago. Once I was following him near the Museum of Science and Industry when he crashed, injuring both himself and his bike. We loaded it into my trunk, and then dropped him at the University of Chicago Hospital. An hour later I ditched the bike at his dad’s coffee roasting plant -- Richheimer Coffee, on Halsted near the Chicago River.

Calls to action: 'With Jesus' at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley..

In ’64 Skip is a Berkeley grad student in history and the only person I’m aware that I know at my new school. Soon I’ll run into some fellow Staples High students from Connecticut: Joy Kimball, Robert Roll, and Ginger Akin. I go on a date with Joy; Robert and Ginger are already conservatives and will soon work for the Rand Corporation think tank.

I enter the campus for the first time from Telegraph and Bancroft. Berkeley feels good -- exciting from the very get-go. I walk into events from which will grow the Free Speech Movement, soon to capture worldwide attention. There are people at many tables representing a smorgasbord of beliefs, organizations, movements, and causes. There is plenty of information and calls to action: left, right, Jesus, atheist, Zen, civil rights, socialist, peace -- you name it.

At Berkeley there is no shortage of people to talk with, to learn from. One is Al Plumber, a likeable old guy who had been involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He talks about earlier struggles -- government harassment and repression of organizations and activists. In the 50’s Al hid from the FBI, living up in Idaho with other Wobblies.

People are riled up about the University’s new rules that curtail advocating action and forbid fundraising for off-campus political activities. That strikes many of us -- including supporters of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Sumer voter registration drive and California farm workers -- as terrible.

The UC Berkeley policy is clearly out of sync with the student body -- and apparently with the times. The Bay Area -- with its long history of labor and civil rights activism -- had been the site of considerable protest and militant action. This included effective demonstrations against HUAC, the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This Federal committee blackened the nation’s eyes with its witch hunts, interrogations, and imprisonment of Communists and non-Communists alike, accusing them all of being “un-American.”

At a nighttime rally in front of Sproul Hall a large group of fraternity guys show up chanting in support of the University’s edict, but are rebuffed by the rest of the crowd. Two sociology professors I thought to be “radicals” in the field -- Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer -- try to defend the new policy. People boo them. I am taken aback, thinking these are supposed to be the good guys, part of the reason I selected Berkeley for grad school. I will learn to look beyond reputation and begin to understand revisionism.

At a meeting of graduate sociology students I meet Dave Wellman, who is the president of the Graduate Sociology Club. We become roommates and move into 5006 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland across from Vern’s Supermarket. There is a bar next-door where I meet singer Bill Withers ("Ain’t no Sunshine" and "Lean on Me") who is hanging out at the bar. And some blocks behind Vern’s I discover a blues club and spend two nights listening to one of my favorites, Little Junior Parker.

Davy is a red diaper baby. His dad and mom, Saul and Peggy Wellman, were members of the Michigan Communist Party. She was a labor organizer who had once been deported to Canada, when the U.S. government falsely claimed she had been born there. Saul was a commissar in the Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteer force that fought fascism in Spain in the 1930’s. President Roosevelt and Congress had turned a blind eye to the slaughter being carried out by dictator Franco, who was backed in the Spanish Civil War by Hitler and the Nazis.

Davy tells me about being a kid growing up in Detroit and being followed, questioned, and bullied by the FBI. I will learn a lot from him and be introduced to many interesting people and ideas. Our saddest day together is Sunday, February 21, 1965, when we are both home studying and learn of the assassination of Malcolm X.

On a weekend I take a ride north to Loomis, an agricultural town where Jack and Donna Traylor live. I know them from my 1962 motorcycle-trip-summer-of-study to Mexico City. They are schoolteachers and Jack makes music -- playing and performing. They have a daughter, Xochimilco (“garden of flowers”), who has just learned to walk and they live in a cabin in an Oak grove. I meet his mom -- an attractive blonde Oklahoma woman with her hair up in curlers. Walking back to Jack’s on a dusty road I meet his dad, who works for the state’s Department of Agriculture.

A visit to the Roseville Auction and Market in Roseville, California .

A highlight of my visit -- in addition to hearing Jack sing Woody Guthrie’s "Deportees" -- is a trip to the Roseville Auction. It’s a bit like Chicago’s Maxwell Street market -- all sorts of people, anything and everything for sale. I buy a second-hand cast iron frying pan I continue to use to this day.

At the Roseville Auction and Market livestock are for sale. I observe goats in a truck, where rams gang up on the ewe, forcing her into a corner. This catches my attention; anthropomorphizing, I find it somewhat disturbing and unfair.

On a weekend evening I end up at the San Francisco Mime Troup space. Later my sister Melody will be a member of that groundbreaking theater. On this particular night I meet SFMT founder R.G. Davis, and also Joe McDonald, the future Country Joe, mainstay of Country Joe and the Fish. And I meet the late filmmaker, writer, and Cuban documentarian Saul Landau, whom I knew by reading his articles in Studies on the Left.

On campus the protests over freedom of speech are heating up and on October 1, Jack Weinberg, working a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) table, refuses to give campus police his name. He is arrested and the local constabulary attempts to take him away. The police car is quickly surrounded and the FSM (Free Speech Movement) is born.

While sitting around the police car I find a leaflet on the ground. It has a picture of a black man selling apples and the slogan “Build the Interracial Movement of the Poor.” Put out by SDS’s ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project), it reverberates in my heart and mind.

I write SDS headquarters in Chicago: “I would like to be a part of building the interracial movement of the poor.” A return letter will tell me it is up to me to help build it. Soon that is exactly what I will try to do.

That fall the FSM is the main event. The rebellion grows and there are near-daily rallies and plenty of speakers and performers. State Senator (later San Francisco Mayor) Willie Brown fires up a crowd; so does Congressman Bill Burton. On November 20, Joan Baez performs for thousands while the California Board of Regents meets and takes a position to the right of the UC Berkeley Administration.

On December 2, the graduate students go on strike. The noon rally is huge. Our leader and FSM spokesman Mario Savio, who spent the summer doing voter registration in Mississippi, gives his great speech, a speech for the ages. He talks about universities' compliance with corporations and the educational and corporate machine’s dehumanizing process, which turns people into a compliant profit-serving workforce.

Rally at Lower Sproul Plaza, Berkeley.

Mario says:

There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.

And with that, over 1,500 of us march into Sproul Hall.

In the wee hours of the morning on December 4, 1964, the Sproul Hall bust is on. (Five years later -- to the day -- Chicago Police will assassinate Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in his bed.)

Some protesters leave before the arrests begin. I stay and am one of 773 arrested and hauled off to Santa Rita County Jail. One of many who goes limp, I am arrested with the added charge of resisting arrest, and dragged down the stairs. It will not be the only time I’ll get that charge.

We’re out of the slammer before sunrise December 5. Some of us reassemble on campus and attempt to block trucks from making their campus deliveries. We encourage Teamster drivers to honor our movement. They express their support, but we do not shut down the campus.

No, we don’t shut down the campus, but people around the world take note of these events. Nothing will ever be the same -- not for UC Berkeley and the university community, not for the members of the FSM, and not for me.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

***From The Pen Of The Late Radical Historian Howard Zinn- "A People's History Of The United States"

 I have remarked elsewhere on the poverty of information about the ‘making and doing’ of the non-ruling classes, their social concerns, and their hopes and aspirations in America in my own high school history classes in the early 1960s. Such locally important events as the creation of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (led by Robert Gould Shaw) during the American Civil War and the case of the executed anarchist martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, never got onto the radar. This despite the fact that I passed, at one point, the Saint-Gaudens memorial plague to the 54th in front of the State House 54th almost every day and grew up within a stone’s throw of where the major events in the Sacco and Vanzetti case took place. All that I know, or almost all that I know, about the micro-history of the American experience (and internationally, as well) came from painfully digging out the information from many scattered sources during my younger political days.

A lot of good things happened as a result of the social struggles in the 1960s, or at least well-intended things that we can proudly stand on, and the dramatically increased interest in getting the “people’s” story out was one of them. And that is where one of the best examples, the late Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, and his book under review, "A People's History Of The United States" comes in. In addition to his up-front radical political activist perspective on the political issues of the day Professor Zinn wrote a number of books, and many articles, about various aspects of the American experience that had been ignored or neglected by those earlier historians who concentrated on the movements of ruling elites, their predilections and their follies or on great events, minus the under classes that bore the brunt of, or carried out, those policies. The most important, of course, is "A People's History".

Under one roof, and in one place Professor Zinn’s “A People’s History" can act as a primer for those who are interested in the underside of history, and, like Zinn, doing something about it. Of course there is more investigation to do, but that is why I used that word primer. Professor Zinn and I were mainly political opponents within the left. However every young reader, every young searcher for the meaning of the American experience, and every just plain thoughtful budding historian owe the professor a debt of gratitude. Hats off to Professor Zinn.

Send The Following Message (Or Write Your Own) To The President In Support Of A Pardon For Private Manning

To: President Barack Obama

White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C.

The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge, Colonel Lind, on August 21, 2013 to Private Manning (Chelsea formerly known as Bradley) has outraged many citizens including me.

Under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution the President of the United States had the authority to grant pardons to those who fall under federal jurisdiction.

Some of the reasons for my request include:

*that Private Manning was held for nearly a year in abusive solitary confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, which the UN raconteur in his findings has called “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”

*that the media had been continually blocked from transcripts and documents related to the trial and that it has only been through the efforts of Private Manning’s supporters that any transcripts exist.

*that under the UCMJ a soldier has the right to a speedy trial and that it was unconscionable and unconstitutional to wait 3 years before starting the court martial.

*that absolutely no one was harmed by the release of documents that exposed war crimes, unnecessary secrecy and disturbing foreign policy.

*that Private Manning is a hero who did the right thing when she revealed truth about wars that had been based on lies.

I urge you to use your authority under the Constitution to right the wrongs done to Private Manning – Enough is enough!

Signature ___________________________________________________________

Print Name __________________________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________________________

City / Town/ State/Zip Code_________________________________________

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

 

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

 

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

 

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

 

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the

[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

 

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

 

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

 

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

 

• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

 

• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

 

• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

 

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

 

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

 

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

 

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

 

She has been:

 

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

 

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

 

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

 

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

 

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

 

FIRST & LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL & PHONE _____________________________________________________________

 

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

 

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

 

 

President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now!

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

The Struggle Continues …

Six Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Private Manning

*Call (202) 685-2900- Major General Jeffery S. Buchanan is the Convening Authority for Private Manning’s court- martial, which means that he has the authority to decrease the sentence imposed no matter what the judge handed down. Ask General Buchanan to use his authority to reduce the draconian 35 year sentence handed down by Judge Lind.

Please help us reach all these important contacts: Adrienne Combs, Deputy Officer Public Affairs (202) 685-2900 adrienne.m.combs.civ@mail.mil

Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, Public Affairs Officer (202) 685-4899 michelle.l.martinhing.mil@mail.mil The Public Affairs Office fax #: 202-685-0706

Try e-mailing Maj. Gen. Buchanan at jeffrey.s.buchanan@us.army.mil

The Public Affairs Office is required to report up the chain of command the number of calls they receive on a particular issue, so please help us flood the office with support for our heroic whistleblower today!

*Sign the public petition to President Obama – Sign online or print and share PDF petition Please sign the petition on the reverse side of this letter, “President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning,” and make copies to share with friends and family!

You can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.

*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns. Contact the Private Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips http://www.bradleymanning.org/

*Contribute to the Private Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/

*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Bradley E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304. You must use Bradley on the address envelope.

Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.

Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9, Veterans For Peace-President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now!

Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in her own words:

"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...

I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."


The Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Manning and her fight for freedom from her jailers, the American military.

Private Manning has paid the price for her acts with over three years of pre-trial confinement, including findings of torture during this period, and is now facing 35 years (essentially for her effective life) for simple acts of humanity. For letting the American people know what they perhaps did not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American soldiers, go to war some awful things can and do happen.

For more information about the Private Manning case and what you can do to help or to sign the online petition to President Obama for his release contact:

Private Manning Support Network: http://www.bradleymanning.org/ or the

Courage To Resist Website:http://www.couragetoresist.org/

Smedley Butler Brigade- Veterans for Peace Website: http://smedleyvfp.org/- on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/smedleyvfp -on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SmedleyVFP#

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now !

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

This person is not a spy. Private Manning (now, at her request, to be called Chelsea and the heroic soldier Wikileaks whistle-blower formerly known as Bradley) is not a criminal. Private Manning is a brave whistleblower who has exposed war crimes, government misdeeds, and corruption. Private Manning embarrassed the government, but her disclosures did not cause a single documented death. Private Manning released the following documents to WikiLeaks, now faces years up to 35 years in prison (minus the three plus years of pre-trial confinement already served and any "good time" to be accrued), and must be pardoned by President Obama.

*The Collateral Murder Video, which showed U.S. troops firing and killing unarmed
civilians, including a Reuters photographer, and firing on children in a van.

http://www.collateralmurder.com

*U.S. attempts to block investigations into CIA rendition of prisoners.

http://is.gd/poVGfc

*U.S. ignoring torture of Iraqi prisoners.

http://is.gd/2ftWlt

Documentation of many more civilian deaths than had been reported previously.

Documents exposing the corruption of the Tunisian government, which led to rebellion in Tunisia, and the Arab Spring.

http://is.gd/YBlxpS

A cable that proved that U.S. troops executed at least 10 civilians, including a woman
in her 70s and a 5 month old baby, in Ishaqi in 2006, and then called in an air strike to
cover it up. Soldiers involved did not serve a day in jail! This led to the Iraqi government refusing to allow U.S. troops to remain after 2011.

http://is.gd/cmzrtc

*Many more war crimes and revelations, including spying on diplomats at the U.N.

Contact the White House at 202-456-1414 and demand that Pres. Obama pardon Manning. Or
go to http://www.whitehouse.gov and leave your comments.

To send letters of solidarity and support the new address for sending letters to Manning; these must still be addressed to "Bradley" to be delivered:

Bradley E. Manning

89289

1300 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

66027-2304