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Friday, December 11, 2015
Honor John Brown and Harpers Ferry Uprising-From The Pen Of Frederick Douglass
Vindictive Retrial of Former Black Panther-Albert Woodfox Is Innocent—Free Him Now!
Frank Jackman comment:
Usually when I post
something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may
be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the
words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article
speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself without
further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all
I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and
the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in
solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
Workers Vanguard No. 1079 | 27 November 2015 |
Vindictive Retrial of Former Black Panther-Albert Woodfox Is Innocent—Free Him Now!
In June, after Woodfox was indicted a third time on the same trumped-up murder charge, District Court judge James Brady barred the state from retrying him. Brady cited the fact that Woodfox could not possibly receive a fair trial and ordered his immediate and unconditional release. Louisiana attorney general James Caldwell appealed that decision and now, in a two-to-one decision, the appeals panel has overturned Brady’s ruling and allowed for yet another bogus trial to go forward. The dissenting judge declared, “If ever a case justifiably could be considered to present ‘exceptional circumstance’ barring reprosecution, this is that case.”
It was 1971 when Woodfox was first sent to Angola prison, which fittingly sits on the site of a former slave plantation. There, he and fellow inmates Herman Wallace and Robert King started a Black Panther Party chapter and organized inmate work stoppages and protests. That put them in the crosshairs of their jailers. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were framed up for the fatal stabbing of prison guard Brent Miller. A year later, King was falsely convicted of killing a fellow inmate. The men, known as the Angola Three, fought their convictions for over four decades. Wallace was finally freed in 2013, only to die of liver cancer three days after his release. King, who was released in 2001, has since been prominent in the fight to free Woodfox. So transparent was the frame-up that Miller’s widow, Leontine Rogers, believes Woodfox to be innocent and has joined the calls to release him.
There has never been one shred of physical evidence implicating Woodfox in Miller’s killing. Only now will a bloody fingerprint found at the scene of the murder, which did not match any of the Angola Three, be tested against all of the inmates in Angola at that time—and only because Woodfox’s attorneys successfully fought for it. Likewise, DNA testing will now for the first time be performed on the knife allegedly used in the killing.
For this third trial of Woodfox, the state has already engaged in its usual frame-up machinations. Since all four supposed eyewitnesses to the murder have since died, a state judge ruled in September that their prior testimony will be read to the jury by stand-ins. Woodfox’s lawyers will thus be unable to cross-examine witnesses to challenge their credibility—a denial of the basic right of the accused to confront his accusers. That goes particularly for the government’s key witness, the late Hezekiah Brown, without whose testimony the state has admitted it would not even have a case. After the first trial, it came out that Brown’s testimony had been coerced by prison authorities, who threatened him with solitary confinement while dangling before him the promise of a pardon.
Woodfox should not spend another moment behind prison walls. In an August 25 letter to the Partisan Defense Committee, Woodfox evoked the 23-hour lockdowns that he was being forced to endure, declaring: “The persecution by the state of Louisiana goes on! But as ever, I remain strong and determined.... I will not break!”
We reiterate our call for Woodfox’s immediate freedom and encourage our supporters to take up his cause and write to Albert Woodfox #72148, West Feliciana Parish Detention Center, PO Box 2727, St. Francisville, LA 70775.
A View From The Left- Polish Judge Denies Extradition to U.S.-Defend Roman Polanski!
Workers Vanguard No. 1079
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27 November 2015
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Polish Judge Denies Extradition to U.S.-Defend Roman Polanski!
Describing the extradition request as “obviously unlawful,” Judge Dariusz Mazur asserted, “I do not find any logical, rational explanation as to why the U.S. is pursuing the extradition” (Warsaw Voice, 2 November). Mazur also took aim at the original proceedings, stating: “The judge (in California) had no reason to move back from the [plea bargain] agreement.” Even Polanski’s supposed victim, Samantha Geimer, praised the latest ruling: “I believe they did the right thing and made the right decision given all the facts,” she told NBC News (31 October).
Five years ago, a court in Switzerland likewise struck down a U.S. extradition request for Polanski, who has dual French and Polish citizenship. After his arrest in Zurich in late 2009, Polanski was held in prison for two months and subjected to further months of house arrest before a judge ruled against the deportation order. That arrest came on the heels of the 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which exposed the original frame-up, including revealing evidence of collusion between the judge and the prosecution.
As Marxists, we oppose the bourgeois state enforcing “decency” through the criminal code. Reactionary “age of consent” and “statutory rape” laws conflate consensual sex with the violent crime of rape. In determining whether an act is rape or not, the guiding principle should be effective consent—nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. Laws criminalizing consensual relationships aim to strengthen the bourgeois state’s regimentation of the population and to impose abstinence and guilt on youth while locking up adults who “deviate” from the sexual “norms” that the ruling class hypocritically tries to foist on the masses. We say: Government out of the bedroom!
Any notion that Polanski plied an innocent teen with champagne and Quaaludes during a photo shoot and then raped her was destroyed in court. It was shown that the 13-year-old Geimer, who was sexually experienced and had been “experimenting” with Quaaludes since the age of 10 or 11, was eager to consort with the director at a Hollywood photo shoot. Geimer subsequently acknowledged that she did not object to Polanski’s behavior at the time. In 2013 she wrote: “I ran into the two-headed monster of the California criminal justice system and its corrupt players, whose lust for publicity overwhelmed their concern with justice.”
In our 1978 article “Stop the Puritan Witchhunt Against Roman Polanski!” (WV No. 192, 10 February 1978) we wrote: “Sexual and social life in southern California, with its thriving drug culture and troupes of precocious and sexually active groupies hanging about the fringes of the entertainment industry, produces thousands of ‘aspiring actresses’...like the one Polanski had the misfortune to run into. Regardless of what one thinks of the scene as a whole, its all-too-obvious reality makes absurd [Judge] Rittenband’s attempts to force rigid morality of the Victorian era into L.A. freeways and bedrooms.”
Noting that “official repression and enforced standards of sexual activity have brought oppression and pain throughout history,” our article continued:
“All those laws which define ‘sex crimes’ in America today are fundamentally aimed at glorifying and propping up the obscene and repressive prison of the family, for centuries the main institution for the oppression of women and children....
“[Polanski’s] prosecution, like the furor over ‘kiddie porn,’ feeds into the sanctimonious ‘Save Our Children’ crusade epitomized by Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexual witchhunt—a reactionary offensive which hides behind the ‘innocence’ of children to enforce bourgeois morality through the vindictive persecution of ‘deviants’.”
What triggered the U.S. government’s latest attempt to have Polanski arrested was his appearance as an invited guest at the ceremonial opening in October 2014 of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. As a young boy in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow, Polanski survived Hitler’s Holocaust. Currently he is filming in Poland an account of the Dreyfus affair, the frame-up of a Jewish officer in the French army in the 1890s, which served as a litmus test for the socialist movement internationally at the time.
The U.S. vendetta against Polanski is likely not over. Los Angeles district attorney Jackie Lacey immediately vowed to continue pursuing him. The Polish prosecutor’s office has the right to appeal Mazur’s ruling. If they do so, they would find conditions favorable to the witchhunt. Only days before the court ruling, the anti-immigrant Catholic-clericalist Law and Justice Party came to power in Polish elections. Its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, an overt anti-Muslim and anti-Russian bigot, highlighted his support for Polanski’s extradition during the election campaign, while his new minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, ranted, “paedophilia is an evil that must be pursued.” Such statements are no surprise from this party which includes open anti-Jewish racists like Minister of Defense Antoni Macierewicz.
Lamentably, retrograde views are not a monopoly of the reactionary right. Down the years, we Spartacists have been the target of many leftists because of our defense of Polanski. When Stalinists are so engaged, they are just being consistent in bigotry, having, for example, traditionally decried homosexuals as deviants from the family-values norm. While that attitude is not so fashionable today, there are still Maoist sects like the Revolutionary Communist Party in the U.S. that campaign against pornography, in the name of protecting women, of course. But the vendetta against Polanski has brought together many social-democratic leftists who piously decry totalitarian Stalinism while similarly echoing the twisted social values of oppressive capitalist society and promoting interference of the capitalist state in people’s lives.
One example in Britain is the “libertarian communist” group associated with the website libcom.org, which has made it a point to go after the Spartacist League for our consistent defense of Polanski. Falsely describing him as a “convicted child rapist,” they accuse us of “sexist, pro-child abuse, rape-denying views” (libcom.org, 11 February 2014). It likewise denounces our defense of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) against puritanical persecution by the bourgeois state. In the eyes of the state and its amen corner in the left and gay rights milieus, NAMBLA’s crime is its advocacy of the sexual rights of youth, including in relationships with older men.
The fact that ostensibly anti-state “libertarian communists” champion the Victorian moral strictures of the church and sections of the capitalist ruling class speaks volumes. It is a measure of their proximity to bourgeois “family values” hypocrisy and their great distance from the class line, let alone from the remotest concept of real human freedom. Free love? Perhaps, but only if you’re over the age of 18 and it’s sanctioned by the state. In September a 14-year-old boy from the north of England was placed on a police “sex offenders” database, which is to haunt him for at least ten years, for sexting a nude photo of himself to a girl his age. Jeremy Forrest, a teacher, was recently released after serving two years in prison for having had a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old student (see “Britain: Teacher Jailed in Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” WV No. 1028, 9 August 2013). In a communist society, where the state and the family have withered away, young (and old) people will have the freedom to engage in whatever form of sexual relationship they want.
Our defense of Polanski is part of our struggle to forge a Leninist party that will act as a tribune of the people, able to react, as Lenin put it in What Is to Be Done?, “to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.” If the capitalist state can get away with railroading Polanski, all the easier for it to go after the nameless, faceless thousands who end up imprisoned or placed on a “sex offenders” list because they came up against the wrong side of bourgeois morality.
A View From The Left-Missouri and Beyond-Campus Racism Sparks Protests-For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Workers Vanguard No. 1079
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27 November 2015
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Missouri and Beyond-Campus Racism Sparks Protests-For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The current protests were sparked by students at the University of Missouri in Columbia, little more than 100 miles from Ferguson, where the police execution of Michael Brown ignited mass demonstrations last year. Protests at “Mizzou” began in September after black student Payton Head, president of the Missouri Students Association, described in a Facebook post how he had been terrorized by racists in a pickup truck screaming the “N” word. Spearheading the protests were a group of black students called Concerned Student 1950, referring to the year when black students were first admitted to the university. The University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe called out the campus cops to disperse demonstrators.
After it was reported that a swastika had been smeared in feces on the wall of a dorm bathroom in late October, a black graduate student began a hunger strike to demand that Wolfe be ousted. Many students, faculty and staff walked out in support, an action that was spurred by graduate student workers who had earlier fought back and won against the university’s attempt to cut off their health insurance. But it was the school’s black football players, supported by their white coach and teammates, who turned the tide with the threat that they would boycott the next home game if Wolfe didn’t resign. Cancellation of the game would have cost the school a million dollars. Wolfe resigned, as did the chancellor of the university.
The Mizzou football team’s threatened boycott underlines the power of the college athletes who generate billions for university administrations as well as major corporations such as broadcasting and video games manufacturers. As we wrote in our Young Spartacus article “College Sports Plantation” (WV No. 1054, 17 October 2014) supporting the fight by college athletes to unionize, strike and collectively bargain for wages, health and other benefits currently denied them: “While students in general have virtually no social power, if college athletes were to withdraw their labor and go on strike, it could have a significant impact.”
Such power all the more lies in the hands of the multiracial working class whose labor produces the wealth that is appropriated in the form of massive profits by the minuscule, and ruthless, capitalist class—the owners of the means of production. The sons and daughters of the working class, white as well as black and Latino, have increasingly been priced out of a college education or are buried under mountains of student debt. Here lies the potential for a class-struggle fight—allying the students with the power of labor—for free, quality, integrated education for all including open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all students. A central obstacle to the power of labor being brought to bear is the misleaders of the unions who are not even defending their own members, much less lifting a finger in defense of the embattled black population.
Given the long history of betrayals by the trade-union bureaucrats, it is not surprising that there is little to no appreciation of the social power of the working class. This has done much to condition a view that the only avenue of struggle is one of pressuring the rulers to act in the interests of those they viciously exploit and oppress. Just as the Black Lives Matter movement has looked to the Feds to rein in the killer cops, the student protesters overwhelmingly appeal to agents of capitalist class rule, e.g., the campus administration, to transform the universities into arenas of racial diversity and inclusion. The idea that the campuses can be transformed into oases of racial equality under capitalism is a pipe dream. Life in the “ivory tower” is but a reflection of the reality of American capitalism, whose entire existence has been rooted in black oppression.
Liberal Nostrums and Racist Reaction
There was, understandably, much celebration when Wolfe resigned, especially given the racist arrogance with which he had dismissed the demands of black students. But replacing the university president will not change the role of the campus administration, whose job is to run the university in the interests of society’s capitalist rulers. Fundamentally, universities under capitalism exist to educate and train administrators, technicians and intellectuals, as well as the next generation of war criminals, union-busting lawyers and murderous spies needed to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism against the working class and dark-skinned people at home and abroad. The affirmative action programs in education, which we defended, were won through the massive civil rights movement protests of the 1960s but were intended to defuse social struggle. These gains, albeit largely token, were granted with the aim of co-opting a thin layer of the black population, the so-called “talented tenth,” some of whom would go on to serve America’s rulers as mayors, police chiefs, military officers, etc.
Wolfe has been replaced, at least temporarily, by Mike Middleton. The retired deputy chancellor and one of the first black law graduates from the university, Middleton was himself involved in the black student protests at Mizzou in 1969. Will that make any real difference? For the past eight years, this country has been ruled by a black president, Barack Obama. His presence in the White House has done nothing to stem the vicious racial oppression of black people. The ghetto poor are little more than targets for the trigger-happy racist cops. Similarly, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria continue to be maimed and killed by U.S. drones and airstrikes.
For the racist rulers of America, Obama’s election provided a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism. The image of a black man in the highest office of the land provided a thin gloss on murderous capitalist class rule. A black student protester at Yale expressed the disillusion that is now widespread: “It really is hard to believe because we want to believe that we’re a postracial society, but it’s just not true” (New York Times, 11 November). Nor will it ever be true short of a successful proletarian socialist revolution that shatters this entire system of racial oppression and class exploitation. In the absence of any such perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement, like so many other movements before it, is rapidly being sucked into the Democratic Party electoral machine in the interminable 2016 presidential campaign.
Many anti-racist activists have appealed for “speech codes” and “codes of conduct” in an attempt to transform the campuses into so-called “safe spaces.” Such appeals disarm the victims of racist attacks on colleges by fostering illusions in the supposed “neutrality” of the university administration, itself an extension of the capitalist state. Among the demands at Amherst College are that the university president discipline “racially insensitive” students as well as that the campus cops issue a statement of “protection and defense” of the protesters against any retaliation. The notion that the police would protect protesters is a suicidal illusion. Anything that gives the campus administration and its cops greater authority allows them freer rein to crack down on political dissent by leftists, black students and other minorities. It also plays into the hands of right-wingers who, while whining about “free speech,” aim to purge and silence all opposition to the status quo.
For a Class-Struggle Fight for Black Freedom!
Amid the all-sided offensive against black people in this country, it is hardly surprising that any notion of social equality seems a distant prospect. In this context, the limited and symbolic demands of the black students and other minorities are both an understandable reaction to the very real racist bigotry permeating the campuses and an accommodation to it. After a recent visit to the Mizzou campus, a WV sales team reported that few of the students they spoke to looked beyond raising awareness and breaking down racist stereotypes. This perspective reflects the mistaken belief that racial oppression is the result of “bad ideas” that can supposedly be overcome through “sensitivity training.” On the contrary, black oppression is deeply rooted in this country that was built on the backs of black slaves. Today, the majority of the black population remains forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, subject to desperate poverty and police terror, while the rulers wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the working class.
Unlike liberals and others who seek to sanitize the racist status quo, our purpose as Marxists is to change that reality by fighting to mobilize the power of the multiracial working class behind a series of demands that address the felt needs of the working and oppressed masses, including free, quality, integrated education for all. This requires breaking the grip of the Democratic Party on both the unions and the black population. The working class needs its own party, a revolutionary workers party that champions the cause of all of the oppressed. We seek to win a new generation, both on the campuses and elsewhere, to the perspective of socialist revolution, which will lay the basis for the genuine liberation of black people and the freedom of humanity.
A View From The Left- Down With Anti-Muslim Repression!-U.S., France Out of the Near East!
Frank Jackman comment:
Usually when I post
something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may
be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the
words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article
speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself without
further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all
I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and
the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in
solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
Workers Vanguard No. 1079 | 27 November 2015 |
Down With Anti-Muslim Repression!-U.S., France Out of the Near East!
NOVEMBER 23—The attacks in Paris on November 13, responsibility for which was claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS), were a criminal act of indiscriminate mass terror, in which 130 innocent civilians were killed. The capitalist rulers use revulsion at such attacks to bolster national unity and jingoism, further binding the working masses to their exploiters and oppressors. Just as they did after the September 11 attacks, the imperialists have seized on this atrocity to beat the drums for war abroad and for more state repression at home.
The state repression is in the first instance targeting mainly Muslims, who are all deemed responsible for the crimes of reactionary fanatics. But the ultimate target of this repression will be the proletariat, the only class with both the social power and objective interest to do away with the barbaric capitalist system through socialist revolution. It is vital for working people throughout the world, not least in the U.S. and France, to oppose every attempt by the ruling capitalist powers to use such atrocities as took place in Paris to augment the repressive power of the capitalist state at home and carry out more imperialist slaughter abroad. U.S. military aggression after 9/11 led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the devastation of the region and rise of murderous outfits like ISIS. Increasing airstrikes in the Near East will only add to the ever-mounting death toll. Unlike those killed in the Paris attacks, the names, faces and stories of these victims of imperialist terror are almost never told.
The drive to expand the bombing war against ISIS has received virtually unanimous approval from both Republicans and Democrats. President Barack Obama has stepped up airstrikes, and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has urged even more, calling for a no-fly zone over Syria and the deployment of more special forces to the region. Her main rival, Bernie Sanders, a darling of much of the reformist left, has echoed Clinton’s call for a “broad coalition” centered on countries in the Near East as vital to “destroying ISIS.” Both agree on “regime change” in Syria—the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
French Socialist Party president François Hollande declared that France is now “at war” with ISIS and intensified French airstrikes against the Syrian city of Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold. There, at least 200,000 civilians are caught between ISIS on the one hand and the far more powerful and deadly imperialist butchers on the other. According to the bourgeois media, the bombing of Raqqa is retaliation for the murder of innocent civilians in Paris. In reality, France has been bombing ISIS since late September.
The French imperialists are no strangers to the slaughter of Arab civilians. In October 1925, as part of crushing an anti-colonial rebellion in Syria, the French army unleashed a massive bombardment of Damascus, slaughtering nearly 1,500 people, including more than 330 women and children. Contrary to assertions that the Paris attacks were the deadliest in France since World War II, on 17 October 1961 Paris police massacred over 150 Algerians who were protesting France’s savage colonial war against Algerian independence. The bodies of many of those killed were then dumped into the River Seine.
Now, the French government has used the November 13 attacks to suspend civil liberties, including by instituting a state of emergency. In a November 14 statement (see front page), our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France declared: “We protest in advance the use of these crimes by Hollande’s capitalist government to justify increasingly repressive measures against Muslims and dark-skinned people as well as to strengthen sweeping surveillance measures against the entire population.”
Under the state of emergency, now extended for three months, public places can be closed with a simple administrative decision, and any association with a religious, social, national or political purpose can be arbitrarily shut down. Any person deemed by the police to be “a threat to safety and public order” can be put under house arrest or detained in a place specified by the cops. Now, Hollande wants to expand the right to strip dual citizens of their French citizenship if convicted of “harming the nation’s core interests,” a description so broad it could potentially be applied to any opponent of government policy. Even before the Paris attacks, six people had already been stripped of their citizenship under his regime.
Such repression poses a threat to all working people in France. After public demonstrations were banned, a planned November 19 union protest in defense of victimized Air France workers was called off. At the same time, a strike by Paris bus drivers did go ahead on November 18, an encouraging sign that the workers are not just going to accept a new round of attacks by the government and bosses.
Down With Anti-Muslim Reaction!
The state of emergency has hit hardest at France’s Muslim minority, already in the sights of the French state under its longstanding Vigipirate program, a police/military “anti-terrorism” mobilization. Muslim neighborhoods are swarming with cops raiding people’s homes. Playing off the anti-Muslim hysteria, a leading right-wing politician has called for the creation of concentration camps for the 10,000 people whose government files are marked with an “S” (those the government considers suspicious, but who have not been arrested for any crime), while the fascists of the National Front (FN) call for their deportation. For his part, Hollande is considering putting such people under house arrest, a “soft” internment, and has adopted a number of the FN’s “anti-terror” demands in the wake of the Paris attacks. All polls indicate that the FN will score big wins in the December regional elections. As an FN leader bragged to Le Monde (18 November), “All this can only be positive for us. We have a Socialist president of the republic who promotes solutions put forward by the National Front.”
The growth of the FN is a deadly danger not only to Muslims, but to all working people in France. This danger underscores the vital necessity for the French workers to oppose the anti-Muslim witchhunt and any moves to strengthen bourgeois repression. Such struggle is necessary for the unity and integrity of the French working class, of which North African-derived workers form a crucial component.
Predictably, the portrayal of Muslims as a fifth column has resulted in increasing attacks against Muslim people and mosques—as well as anti-Jewish reaction by some Muslims in France. Anti-Muslim attacks have also been reported in the U.S., including in Connecticut and Florida. In Dearborn, Michigan, where a third of the population is of Arab background, a Muslim woman received a threatening letter from a neighbor calling her a “sand n----r.” Another letter she received declared, “Go back to your Middle Eastern country. We HATE you more than n----rs.” Feeding such vile reaction are bourgeois politicians and their kept media. In one example, CNN anchormen John Vause and Isha Sesay berated French civil liberties activist Yasser Louati, a Muslim man, for the supposed failure of the Muslim community to take “responsibility” for the attacks.
Contrary to what the bourgeois media would have us believe, fundamentalist Islam holds no monopoly on terrorism. In the U.S., countless bombings, arson attacks and assaults against abortion clinics, including the assassination of eight people since the early 1990s, have been carried out in the name of biblical injunction. But in a country where Christian fundamentalists wield substantial political influence, this anti-woman violence is rarely labeled the terrorism that it is.
Following the Paris attacks, Republican front-runner and racist blowhard Donald Trump called for the creation of a database to track all Muslims in the U.S., while Ben Carson compared refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria to “rabid dogs.” Jeb Bush, a supposed moderate, declared that only Syrian Christians who can “prove” their religion should be allowed into the U.S. On November 19, a bill passed the House of Representatives, with virtually all Republicans and a substantial number of Democrats voting in favor, that would, in effect, put a halt to any Syrian refugees entering the U.S.
Obama may denounce talk of a Muslim database, but he and his former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have implemented some of the most aggressive mass surveillance of Americans ever, with untold millions on one or another government database. In the service of even more surveillance, government officials are again demanding that companies like Apple and Google remove encryption from their electronic devices. Meanwhile, CIA director John Brennan claimed that revelations of wholesale spying have made it “more challenging” to track potential terrorists, while former CIA director James Woolsey grotesquely declared that courageous whistle-blower Edward Snowden “has blood on his hands” for the carnage in Paris and deserves to be “hanged by the neck.”
It is the U.S., French and other imperialists whose hands drip with the blood of countless tens of millions around the globe. The many gruesome crimes of outfits like ISIS, whether in a European city or far more often in the Near East and Africa, pale in comparison to the daily and historic devastation meted out by imperialist “Great Powers” upon the masses of the semicolonial world. Carnage like that in Paris is a daily occurrence on the streets of Iraq, Syria and elsewhere—carried out by the imperialists, local capitalist rulers, Islamic fanatics and sundry other reactionary forces.
The creation of inherently unstable states in the Near East, such as Iraq and Syria, was the product of the carving up of the region, centrally under the 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty between Britain and France, following the collapse of the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. When it suited their interests, the imperialists forced together mutually hostile populations or separated those who wanted to live together.
More recently, the existence of ISIS is a direct product of U.S. and other imperialist policies in the Near East. As journalist John Pilger noted: “ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity” (counterpunch.org, 17 November). The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq pulverized that society, killing nearly one million people and sparking a brutal civil war centrally between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Since 2011, the U.S., France and their regional allies—such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates—have fed the fires of the Syrian civil war pitting the Sunni majority against the ruling Alawite minority represented by the Assad regime. This has included direct financing and arming of Sunni fundamentalist groups. It is in the context of such imperialist-created and -fomented devastation that ISIS has been able to grow, feeding off Sunni grievances.
Following the Paris attacks, four former U.S. Air Force drone operators and technicians wrote an open letter to Obama denouncing the drone program: “We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.” In coming forward, these men risk being targeted by an administration that has gone after whistle-blowers to an unprecedented degree. Indeed, their letter concludes: “We request that you consider our perspective, though perhaps that request is in vain given the unprecedented prosecution of truth-tellers who came before us like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.”
Defeat Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!
The multiracial U.S. working class must be won to the understanding that its enemy is its “own” ruling class and that it needs to oppose imperialist aggression abroad. The handmaidens to such wars are always domestic repression and the further immiseration of the working class. It is not ISIS, Al Qaeda or some other Islamic reactionary force that has taken income inequality in this country to virtually unprecedented heights. It is the U.S. capitalist rulers who have squeezed the working people of America and devastated their livelihoods. Likewise, it is the French capitalist rulers who have ravaged the proletariat and oppressed of France. Muslim youth there have such little prospect for a future that some are driven into the arms of Islamic reaction.
Every victory the imperialists gain abroad means more misery for the working masses and oppressed at home. By the same token, every setback suffered by the imperialist military forces is in the interests of the international working class. We have no side in the Syrian civil war, which is reactionary on all sides. But we do have a side against the U.S., French and other imperialists. As the imperialists step up their military campaign against ISIS in the Near East, we reiterate that we take a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and forces acting as their proxies—i.e., the Iraqi government, Shi’ite militias and the Kurdish nationalist forces in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, we are die-hard opponents of everything the reactionary cutthroats of ISIS stand for.
While our main opposition is to the imperialists, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in the Syrian civil war—including Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey—and call for them to leave. In recent days, Russia has intensified its airstrikes in Syria after ISIS claimed responsibility for the criminal downing of a Russian passenger jet in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 on board.
The precursors of ISIS include those who cut their teeth as mujahedin in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. For all the talk by U.S., French and other bourgeois politicians on how to “defeat” ISIS, it was the imperialists who armed and financed these Islamists, praising them as “freedom fighters” while they butchered Soviet soldiers and those who were teaching Afghan girls to read and write. The Soviet Union intervened in 1979 in Afghanistan, at the behest of the modernizing nationalist regime there. This intervention posed the possibility of a radical social transformation for the benighted Afghan peoples. We Trotskyists uniquely declared, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of October Revolution to Afghan peoples!”
The USSR could have defeated the Islamic reactionaries. Instead, the Stalinist misrulers scaled back and, in 1989, pulled out their forces in a futile effort to appease the imperialists. This betrayal opened the door for capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state itself in 1991-92. Nurtured and financed by the U.S., Saudis and others, Islamic fundamentalist forces have since grown massively.
The cycle of imperialist wars and occupations is a glaring demonstration of the barbarity of the decaying capitalist world order in which the U.S. rulers predominate. The goal of Marxists in the belly of the imperialist beast is to instill in the U.S. proletariat the understanding that it has the social power and historic interest to destroy capitalist-imperialist rule from within, through socialist revolution. To realize this task requires forging a revolutionary workers party, U.S. section of a reforged Fourth International committed to the struggle for workers rule over the entire planet.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time
When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soulmate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat. July when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes not being a period to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes the only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby Crane Castle to get away from the buggers as the well-to-do have been doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various incantations of the mansion.
Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge they had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth. One of the things that brought them together early on was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply and which Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten second-hand through records and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.
One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs in his style something fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over when he moved on but who has actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age.”
He continued when Laura said she was not sure about the connection, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the “new wave” post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”
Laura said she knew all of that although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. Us, but also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mind, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”
“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who we have heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”
“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers wo ran for cover to “protect” there precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-ip market. Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”
“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1970s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge. Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that same club then played for the “basket.” You know the “passed hat” which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the “Dutch treat” thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something. And so the roots of New York City folk according to the “father.”
Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And asked about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the “skinny.” Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnote. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”
Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.
“As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”
Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that day.”
They both laughed.
Laura then mentioned the various times that had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before. Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-“when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.
As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston Saturday December 19th
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston Saturday December 19th
Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama- Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston Saturday December 19th
In honor of Chelsea Manning’s 28th birthday (December 17th) this December 19th 2015, responding to a call from the Chelsea Manning Support Network, Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike, long-time supporters of freedom for Chelsea Manning from the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Veterans For Peace, the Committee for International Labor Defense along with the weekly Saturday vigil at Park Street organized by the Committee for Peace and Human Rights will celebrate Chelsea’s birthday. We invite you to join us. Currently actions are planned for London and other cities.
1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 19
Park Street Station Entrance on the Boston Common
Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama- Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston Saturday December 19th
Supporters are encouraged to also organize an event in their area, and The Chelsea Manning Support Network and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike will publicize it. Write to http://www.chelseamanning.org/ or payday@paydaynet.org for more information and to share details of your event.
Boston vigil details:
1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 19
Park Street Station Entrance on the Boston Common
Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013 for releasing many military secrets about US crimes in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other things. If this stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen- we have to get her out! We will not leave our sister behind. Join us and encourage others to attend and sign the petition for a presidential pardon from Barack Obama in this important show of support to Chelsea Manning
Free Chelsea Manning Now-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind
The following short remarks were addressed to group of fellow veterans and other peace and social activists at a Boston Armistice Day commemoration by Frank Jackman.
I am proud today as a member of Veterans for Peace to be giving this update on the situation of heroic Wiki-leaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning now serving a thirty-five years sentence out in the prairies of Kansas at Fort Leavenworth for telling the American people the truth about the atrocities and other nefarious actions of the military and of the government. Today, we should take a moment to speak for the anti-war resisters as well as the fallen in battle. Speak out in support of the resisters in this the 100th anniversary year of the beginning of the organized anti-war movement to World War I when a few brave people told their respective leaders to take their wars and go to hell. Add the name Chelsea Manning into that mix these days.
Last year when I updated Chelsea’s case on this occasion I noted that once all the hoopla of the trial and sentencing was over the case would fall under the radar as the appellate process and other legal actions ran their long courses. That continues to be the case. I have to report this year that her appellate counsel are still diligently working on reading the transcripts, the trial if you will recall was the longest and produced the most paperwork in Army history, and developing the issues to present to the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals the first crucial step in the long appeals process that may very well wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course appeals like every other aspect of the justice system cost money, and plenty of it. This year when things were financially dicey an appeal went out which raised the two hundred thousand dollars necessary for the attorneys to go forward. Thanks to all who helped out with this aid.
As for Chelsea’s personal situation as a woman in a man’s prison according to Jeff Patterson from Courage to Resist, the organization which has been the central organizer of the political and legal efforts on Chelsea’s behalf, she is doing well, has friends out in Fort Leavenworth and has after a successful ACLU suit been given her hormonal treatments. Thus far however her request to wear her hair at Army style woman’s length has been denied.
Reflecting the marvels of modern communication and publication Chelsea Manning has not been left without resources even in prison. She is a contributor to the Guardian on-line and writes a blog for Medium. She also has a Twitter account which you can access from the Chelsea Manning Support Network site. Recently she wrote up a proposal to reform the FISA courts, not an easy task to either write about or an organization to reform.
Locally over the past year we commemorated Chelsea’s fifth year in the government’s dungeons in May and her birthday last December and will do so again this coming December at one of the Park Street weekly vigils. We have also taken every occasion like this one to keep her case before the public as well as by marching in events like the Pride parade in June with a banner as well as urging all to sign the Amnesty International/Courage to Resist on-line petition for President Obama to pardon Chelsea before he leaves office. We will continue to support freedom for Chelsea until she is released- we will not leave our sister behind. Free Chelsea Manning Now!
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