Sunday, June 26, 2016

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind


























 





From The Pen Of Frank Jackman







Updated-September 2015  


A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   


At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming (expected in the Winter, 2016) . A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 
On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27th birthday in December with a rally (as we did this past December for her 28th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

 

 
 


****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea  were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”         

 

Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)      

 

All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.

 

The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.

 

In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.

 

While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.              

*****The Big Sur CafĂ©- With The “King Of The Beats” Jeanbon Kerouac In Mind

*****The Big Sur CafĂ©- With The “King Of The Beats” Jeanbon Kerouac In Mind  




From The Pen Of Zack James

Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston. On arrival there then from there up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too, thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin roe to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he would pass on the way up.

This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processing at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.

But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.

That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.        

Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.

Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).

Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist”  writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the bests-seller Thrill  were asking about. So Mac would bring out wirey, wiley old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.

Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.

Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).            

Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting out sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.

The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.      

As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.

He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.

In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard. 

About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.

But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.

See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).          

Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.

Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and shoes to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too long. 

Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.                          

Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be bothered  so everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.

Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.

After an afternoon of such memories Josh was ready to head back having done what he had set out to which was to come and dream about the old days when he thought about the reasons for why he had gone to Big Sur later that evening back at the hotel. He was feeling a little hungry and after again traversing that narrow rutted dirt road going back up the canyon he decided if he didn’t stop here the nearest place would be around Carmel about twenty-five miles away. So he stopped at Henry’s CafĂ©. The cafĂ© next to the Chevron gas station and the Big Sur library heading back toward Carmel (he had to laugh given all the literary figures who had passed through this town that the library was no bigger than the one he would read at on hot summer days in elementary school with maybe fewer books in stock). Of course the place no longer was named Henry’s since he had died long ago but except for a few coats of paint on the walls and a few paintings of the cabins out back that were still being rented out the place was the same. Henry’s had prided itself on the best hamburgers in Big Sur and that was still true as Josh found out.

But good hamburgers (and excellent potato soup not too watery) are not what Josh will remember about the cafĂ© or about Big Sur that day. It will be the person, the young woman about thirty who was serving them off the arm, was the wait person at the joint. As he entered she was talking on a mile a minute in a slang he recognized, the language of his 1960s, you know, “right on,” “cool,” “no hassle,” “wasted,” the language of the laid-back hippie life. When she came to take his order he was curious, what was her name and how did she pick up that lingo which outside of Big Sur and except among the, well, now elderly, in places like Soho, Frisco, Harvard Square, is like a dead language, like Latin or Greek.

She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.

Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to it though.               

From The Communist Archives-Near East-History of Bloody French Colonialism

Workers Vanguard No. 1091
3 June 2016
 
Near East-History of Bloody French Colonialism

The following presentation, excerpted for Workers Vanguard to focus on French imperialism’s role in the Levant (Syria and Lebanon), was given at a 7 November 2013 forum in Paris of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The full presentation originally appeared in the LTF’s publication, Le BolchĂ©vik No. 206, December 2013.

Our December 2012 article “Syrian Civil War: Legacy of Imperialist Divide-and-Rule” [translated from WV No. 1009, 28 September 2012] discussed the Sykes-Picot agreement. Signed secretly in 1916, the pact was between the French imperialists, represented by [François] Georges-Picot, and the British imperialists, represented by [Mark] Sykes. The two parties agreed on a plan to dismember the Near East for their mutual benefit. All of it was promptly whitewashed with humanitarian phrases and a mandate from the League of Nations, which today would be called a United Nations Security Council resolution.
French imperialism was originally supposed to get not just Lebanon and Syria, but also the oil-rich area of Mosul, which today is in Iraq, as well as an equal share in the international administration of Palestine. In the end, France only got Lebanon and Syria. What actually happened was that British troops invaded the region in 1918. Great Britain thus reinterpreted the Sykes-Picot agreement in a way that more closely corresponded to the military reality on the ground. If the British continued to negotiate with the French, it was because they were facing nationalist unrest in Ireland, Egypt and India, and because they didn’t have the means, after World War I, to open a fourth major front. So French imperialism gave up Mosul as well as its share of Palestine, but in return it got 23.75 percent of Iraq’s oil. That was the beginning of the Compagnie Française des PĂ©troles, which today is more widely known by the name of Total. And French imperialism became master of Syria. France was supposed to get a piece of what is now Turkey, roughly corresponding to the southwestern part of the Kurdish area, but because of the consolidation of Kemal AtatĂĽrk’s regime in Turkey, it was forced to abandon that plan.
As we have emphasized numerous times, it was the Bolsheviks who, after the victory of the revolution in Russia, published all these secret treaties. This action contributed to strengthening national liberation movements against the imperialist powers. We do not know what we will find in the safes of Quai d’Orsay [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] and the ElysĂ©e Presidential Palace when the French workers take power, but we too will publish the infamous secret machinations that the Hollande government is conducting right now, and those of his predecessors.
The French occupation of Syria in 1920 was no walk in the park. Arab nationalism in Syria had already taken hold toward the end of the Ottoman rule. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, one of the sons of the Hashemite dynasty, Faisal, proclaimed himself king of Syria and a congress met in March 1920 to proclaim the country’s independence. The French launched a military expedition that chased out Faisal and the independent government. In 1921, the French had 70,000 soldiers in the Levant (Syria-Lebanon), later reduced to 15,000. The “pacification” of Syria between 1920 and 1925 would leave 6,000 dead on the side of the colonial troops, and a number far higher on the Syrian side. There was especially strong resistance in the territory dominated by the Alawite religious sect, with support from the Kemalists. This resistance was not crushed until 1921, after a Franco-Turkish agreement in which France renounced its claim to Cilicia (in southeastern Turkey).
The French imperialists, from the beginning, pursued a divide-and-rule policy that has marked Syria to this day. They split off Lebanon, combining it with a Sunni community large enough that the Maronite Christians would be eternally dependent on the imperialists for their security. They separated the Druze territory from that of the Alawites, and they granted a special status to the Alexandretta administrative district, which was 40 percent Turkish. They ended up ceding this territory to Turkey in 1939.
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin explained that “an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony.” The history of the French Mandate is thus also, in a fundamental way, that of the rivalry between French and British imperialism. In fact the French imperialists were quite obsessed with “perfidious Albion,” whose hand they saw in all their troubles in the Levant, especially during the great revolt of 1925. These two imperialist powers could only form an alliance to prevent a third thief from muscling in on their territory or to undercut Arab nationalism, which threatened them both.
The Great Druze Revolt of 1925
Even after years of “pacification,” French imperialism was far from having permanently subdued its colonial subjects. In 1925, a great revolt broke out in the Jabal al-Druze, or Druze Mountain, in the south of the country, which won the enthusiastic support of Syrian nationalists. What must be noted here is that the French colonial abuse, which was the last straw and provoked the revolt, took place under the banner of the Cartel des Gauches [left-wing coalition] that ruled France at that time. It was a government of the bourgeois Radical Party supported by the SFIO (Socialist Party). The new high commissioner to the Levant, General Sarrail, was not a far-right nut, but rather a “progressive,” typical of the Third Republic. He was a Radical Party member and a Freemason, an anti-clericalist who aroused the hostility of the Lebanese Maronite Christian clergy.
The revolt was provoked by the heavy-handed policies of a local representative of France, a certain Captain Carbillet. He began to build roads to open up the Druze Mountain, but at that time the overwhelming majority of the population did not have vehicles. There were presumably military reasons for this sort of operation: to facilitate access for tanks and military convoys. The fact that Carbillet accomplished such tasks by resorting to forced labor, as was typical in the French colonial empire until at least 1946, did not make him a hero of modernity in the eyes of the peasants. Colonial violence against the Druze increased, but the last straw was the fact that he proclaimed himself governor of the Druze country by taking advantage of a quarrel among the leaders of a Druze clan. Sarrail, the left-winger, imprisoned the Druze dignitaries who had approached him to complain about Carbillet’s behavior.
The revolt began in July 1925 on the Druze Mountain over local claims but then spread well beyond. Circassian colonial troops committed abuses under the direction of Captain Collet, of whom I will speak later. When insurrection broke out in Damascus, French troops savagely bombarded the city in October. On 17 November 1925, L’HumanitĂ©, newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), reported more than 1,400 killed, including 336 women and children.
The PCF and Repression in the Levant
It is nice to read what L’HumanitĂ© wrote at that time, especially when one compares it to today, with the PCF now a mere social-democratic shadow of its former self. Despite an information blackout in the French bourgeois media, the PCF ran articles starting in early August on “the revolt, 100 times justified, of the oppressed masses of Syria” (L’HumanitĂ©, 3 August 1925). It strongly condemned French colonial terrorism and demanded the end of the French Mandate, continually comparing it to the colonial Rif War (in northern Morocco), which was going on at practically the same time in the summer of 1925. [PCF leader] Gabriel PĂ©ri called for “mass fraternization with the oppressed in revolt” (L’HumanitĂ©, 9 August 1925). The next day, L’HumanitĂ© reported 200 French soldiers killed at SoueĂŻda and declared:
“It is the duty of the French proletariat to use all its power to help the indigenous masses in the colonies to shake off the yoke of French imperialism. It is their duty and it is in their immediate interest, as it will spare the proletariat the blood sacrifices that capitalist society will demand.
“Just as the Syrian and Malagasy troops refused to fight their brothers from Druze Mountain on August 4 and 5, so the French soldiers, sons of workers and peasants who are or will be sent to Morocco, to Syria, and perhaps to Indochina, should refuse to fight for the imperialist enemy and should extend a fraternal hand to the oppressed of the colonies! True peace will be the result of the defeat of our imperialism.”
A lot of colonial troops were in fact used at that time. It is clear in L’HumanitĂ©’s coverage that the struggles against colonial plundering in Morocco and Syria were part of the same picture. We often cite an exemplary action by the dock workers in Marseille, who took the loads of arms they were supposed to ship to Morocco and dumped them in the sea. This heroic gesture of internationalist solidarity is a concrete example of what it means when we call for taking up the defense of a neocolonial country against imperialist intervention. The proletariat must really be mobilized for class struggle actions that can have an impact on military operations.
On the other hand, L’HumanitĂ© on 10 August 1925 polemicized against the socialists of the SFIO, who at best demanded that the French government defer to the League of Nations. As the PCF pointed out, the League of Nations would not fail to entrust France with a mandate to re-establish capitalist order.
In 1925, the fraternization that L’HumanitĂ© called for did happen, at least in a few cases. For instance, in an issue dated 25 August 1925 the newspaper salutes the “magnificent” behavior of colonial Algerian troops in Beirut. Another article (1 February 1926) reports:
“During a four-day battle in which 1,330 Druze fought against 3,800 French (Spahis [colonial cavalry] and Armenian volunteers), the battalion entrusted with defense of the Rashaya Fortress refused to continue a fratricidal struggle.
“A second battalion, sent in great haste from Riyaq, joined the first, threw down their weapons and fraternized with the Syrians.
“After three days, thanks to the landing of fresh reinforcements at Beirut, the French command finally managed to bomb the Rashaya neighborhoods, with the help of asphyxiant gas.
“These are the brutal facts, without embellishment.
“‘Fraternization’ is an idea that has come a long way; it is now becoming reality.
“The example shown by two battalions in Rashaya, refusing to fight against their oppressed brothers, will be understood.
“Now more than ever, fraternization must become one of the most effective means to stop fratricidal struggle between French proletarians and Syrian peasants!”
Undoubtedly to stamp out this sort of fraternization, French officers encouraged soldiers to loot when they didn’t do it on their own (L’HumanitĂ©, 17 November 1925 and 17 November 1926).
According to L’HumanitĂ© (20 September 1925), two million French workers (probably an exaggerated figure, but even so) declared themselves against the war in Morocco and Syria, and the PCF talked about preparing a 24-hour general strike. In fact, on October 12, a large strike took place in France against the war in Morocco, during which a worker was killed (L’HumanitĂ©, 17 October 1925).
Thus far, we have not managed to find many documents on the PCF’s work regarding the Syrian insurrection. The historian Charles-Robert Ageron wrote in one of his books that the PCF had kept a low profile around Syria compared to the Rif War, but Ageron does not provide any evidence that the PCF’s Syrian work was any different than what it did around the Rif War. A report by the PCF’s 1926 Colonial Commission indicates that it had worked very successfully within an Armenian regiment (French imperialism used a lot of Armenian and Circassian troops against the insurrection in Syria). However, after the dissolution of the regiment the PCF was unable to carry out any other work. It had established relationships with representatives of the insurrection and sought to create a legal union movement. It had relatively limited means and thought one of the main things it could do was to establish a bimonthly newspaper and distribute propaganda among the French troops.
Thus we have a leaflet in French and Arabic calling on French soldiers to fraternize and help the insurgents liberate themselves. The leaflet also addresses the colonial troops, reminding the Moroccans, Tunisians and others of their own colonial oppression in their home countries. In early 1927, a report from the Colonial Commission, I assume a report to the Communist International (CI), also indicates that the PCF was not in a position to offer material assistance to the insurgents, nor even to send a party member to serve as a liaison with the Palestinian communists. Nonetheless, this shows that they considered these questions.
The PCF’s local connections were tenuous. The Communists had to overcome the reluctance of Armenian and Arab militants to fuse into one organization and struggle against repression (18 of their comrades had been arrested, and in fact at that point the Syrian and Lebanese Communist Party had been shut down by the colonial police). Just a few words about the Syrian Communist Party. The ground was prepared for founding the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon in October 1924, when a Jewish militant from Palestine, Joseph Berger, met some young militants in Beirut. The group initially had a strong Arab Christian component, and in 1925 it fused with an Armenian youth group, the Spartak Youth, led by Artin Madoyan, who remained an important leader of the party for at least 30 years. In January 1926, the Communist Party was shut down by the colonial police and did not begin to reconstitute itself until after the amnesty in 1928.
The actions of the PCF at the time were in many respects heroic, even if they were not without political problems—for example, their perspective of a “democratic republic in all the Arab countries.” In fact, it was around this time that the Stalinists concretized their position that before struggling for socialism, it was necessary to achieve the bourgeois stage of national liberation.
By 1928 Trotsky would generalize the theory of permanent revolution, which had proven its correctness in Russia in 1917, to all countries of belated capitalist development. He emphasized that for these countries it was an illusion to seek a stage of real national liberation under capitalism. The local bourgeoisie was too weak to accomplish the tasks historically linked to classic bourgeois revolutions like the French Revolution: it would find itself squeezed between its imperialist bosses and a rising proletariat. Only the proletariat has the historic interest and the social power to take power in its own name and resolve the unresolved tasks by expropriating the bourgeoisie and struggling for the international extension of the revolution.
The 1936 General Strike and the Popular Front
I do not have time this evening to give a detailed history of all the crimes committed by French imperialism in Syria during the bloody period of the French Mandate, but I would like to talk about an important period around 1936. In response to a period marked by particularly murderous imperialist plunder, a general strike shook the country for more than a month, from 20 January to 6 March 1936. Martial law was declared and the repression was ruthless (more than 3,000 were arrested), but French imperialism was finally forced to retreat by the determination of the Syrian masses. The nationalist leaders were freed and the French began negotiations with the nationalists of the National Bloc, which would eventually lead to signing a treaty with France in the fall.
The Popular Front was elected in France in May 1936. Though the French negotiator understood that it was in France’s interest to make some concessions, the Popular Front government led by LĂ©on Blum remained intransigent. In particular, it refused to replace the high commissioner, de Martel. Finally a Syrian delegation to Paris put together a draft treaty with the French in mid September 1936. The treaty included a clause for the protection of religious minorities, which had been the cover for French aggression in the Levant since 1860. The French also got to keep some troops in place, within a certain framework. The nationalists prevailed, but in fact the French were stirring up trouble in the Druze and Alawite areas against the formation of an independent government in Damascus which was inevitably predominantly Sunni. Furthermore, the treaty was subject to a probationary period of three years. The French soon obtained exorbitant supplementary concessions, which were refused by the Syrian parliament, and the treaty remained a dead letter.
What is important in this story is that there are reports that the Syrian Communist Party, which had been founded more than ten years previously, supported the treaty. The PCF, and above all the Communist International, had told it to do so because in 1936 Stalin favored an alliance with the French imperialists against Hitler, even if it meant sacrificing revolution in France and the Communist parties of the colonial countries.
The striking contrast here is with the PCF’s determined struggle ten years earlier for the independence of Syria and Morocco and for the unconditional withdrawal of French troops. This change was the result of internal pressures within the PCF to become nothing more than a reformist party, and of the degeneration of the CI. In Lenin and Trotsky’s time, the CI had led the fight against the pro-colonialist positions among French Socialists. But the isolation of the Soviet Union, aggravated by the defeat of the German revolution in 1923, made it possible for a parasitic clique led by Stalin to usurp political power in the Soviet Union.
The CI was transformed little by little into an appendage of Stalinist foreign policy. After Hitler took power in 1933 without a single shot being fired, none of the CI’s parties called into question the Stalinists’ catastrophic policies in Germany. The CI’s degeneration was complete. The CI adopted the line of the popular front, which meant rejecting the independence of the working class from the capitalists by allying with bourgeois “anti-fascists.” In France, this meant uniting with the Radical Party, the historic party of the colonialist Third Republic. The PCF thus betrayed the possibility of a socialist revolution in France in 1936, and at the same time abandoned the cause of independence for Syria and for Lebanon.
The head of the Syrian CP, Khalid Bakdash, was even part of the wheeling and dealing as an advisor to the Syrian delegation that negotiated the neocolonial treaty in 1936. The most radical fringe of the nationalist movement opposed the neocolonial treaty. As a result, the Ba’ath Party emerged from this milieu little by little and became dominant among radicalized youth, with the Communist Party tailing behind. In a sense, the 1936 treachery of the PCF, which pushed for a liberal neocolonial solution to the Syrian question, prepared the rise of the Ba’ath Party and the dictatorship of the Assads, father and son.
Independence at Last
The struggle in Syria continued for several more years before independence could be wrung from the French. During World War II, the French administration in the Levant remained loyal to Vichy [the Nazi-collaborationist French regime]. The British ended up intervening militarily in the summer of 1941 to drive out the Vichy regime when their interests in Iraq were threatened by German imperialism, which was gaining strength in the region. Some of [Charles] de Gaulle’s troops were involved; this was in fact one of the only cases in which Gaullists physically fought against troops from Vichy. But, as in 1918, it was the British who had military supremacy in the Levant, and they seized the opportunity to marginalize the French.
De Gaulle, with the PCF in his pocket, fought like a lion, including against the British, to preserve French imperialism’s foothold in the Levant. To underline Gaullist intentions, Colonel Collet, the butcher of the Druze in 1925, was named representative of “Free France” in Damascus. De Gaulle had to accept more or less free elections in 1943, which resulted in pro-independence governments in Beirut and Damascus. The French high commissioner, Jean Helleu, had witnessed the crushing of the Moroccan nationalists at Meknes in May, 1934. When the Lebanese parliament ratified independence, he simply had the government imprisoned! This provoked an outcry, and the French backed down after fierce pressure from the British, who feared that the anti-colonialist upheavals might extend into their own area of influence and/or that a third thief, U.S. imperialism, would seize the opportunity to supplant them.
But the French government still kept troops in the Levant. This led to a new massacre, with Damascus once again bombarded by France in May 1945, although the war was officially over in Europe. And, just like the French massacres in SĂ©tif and Guelma in Algeria a few weeks earlier, these massacres were committed with the complicity of the PCF, which was part of de Gaulle’s government. Independence did not go into effect until 1946, with the withdrawal of French and British troops. Syria was the first country to have successfully achieved its independence from French imperialism. Obviously the imperialist shenanigans did not stop after independence, but that is a story for another day.
The Results of the French Mandate
The Mandate did not result in capitalist development in the Levant. On the contrary, it led to a constriction of economic development in the region occupied by France. Syria had been one of the most advanced regions in the Arab world and it was a cradle of nationalism. But in multiple ways, it regressed under French occupation.
At the economic level, this occupation led to the establishment of multiple customs barriers in areas where merchandise previously circulated freely, from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Sarajevo in the Balkans. Aleppo, which is the biggest city in Syria, followed by Damascus, stagnated for many years because it had been cut off from its economic hinterland, Anatolia, which had become Turkish (and with which it had historically closer relations than with Damascus). These customs barriers worked in favor of the importation of French products and ruined local semi-artisanal production. In 1913 the production of merchandise in the traditional (preindustrial) sector employed more than 300,000 people. By 1937, there were no more than 170,000. Meanwhile, only 30,000 industrial jobs had been created.
The country was crushed by taxes whose essential function was not to build schools but to finance the occupation and colonial apparatus. Moreover, the objective was explicitly for the operation to be self-financing, which is to say that the expenses incurred by French imperialism would be levied from the occupied country itself. In 1931, after more than ten years under the Mandate, only 28 percent of the population in Syria was literate and only four percent had received a secondary education. In 1932, 82 percent of women in Lebanon were illiterate.
Initially the colonialists expressed hostility to the families of large absentee landlords who comprised the core of the nationalist movement. The colonialists declared that they would carry out an agrarian reform that would make Syria into a nation of conservative small property owners in the image of France. This was a common perspective of the French Radical Party. But the reality was completely different. The banks, which were in large part financed by French capital, quickly found it safer and more profitable to lend to the large landowners, who in turn would then make loans at usurious rates to small peasant farmers. Thus, the expropriation of small peasant farmers for the profit of the large landowners quickly accelerated, contrary to the official Radical ideology. The retardation of industrial development meant that job prospects were few indeed for the exodus of people from the country to the cities.
In Algeria, the colonial regime rested on a large European community and had, at least initially, the intention of exterminating part of the Arab and Berber population. But in Syria, as in Morocco, colonial rule depended partly on relationships with prominent locals instead of an administration that was French from top to bottom. (Of course the real power in Syria also remained in the hands of the French.) This implied an alliance with some of the large Sunni property owners and the more backward rural elite, instead of the urban and educated elite.
Last but not least, there was the policy of divide and rule, which I mentioned previously, and whose effects are still being felt today. The intended purpose of this division and the protection of regional privileges was to weaken pan-Syrian nationalism as well as pan-Arab nationalism, which was potentially threatening to the French strongholds in the Maghreb.
We are unconditionally opposed to French imperialism’s neocolonial adventures, regardless of the pretext, humanitarian or otherwise, that may be invoked. Capitalism cannot be managed in any way except against the workers and the oppressed, and against the peoples of the neocolonial countries. It is not a question of electing a better president or taking to the streets to pressure the current president and the state, but rather of sweeping away the capitalist state through workers revolution. The proletariat in power, having expropriated the bourgeoisie, will struggle to extend this revolution internationally and reconstruct the world economy on the basis of rational planning. This will include particular efforts to redress the crimes of imperialism and accelerate development in the countries that until now have been retarded by the imperialist domination of the world.
I will end with a few words published in L’HumanitĂ© during the Rif War and the great Druze revolt (5 November 1925):
“Alongside the liberation movement of the colonial masses, the mass movement for the liberation of workers and peasants in France must be pursued, implacably and mercilessly, until the day when proletarians from the colonial world and proletarians from the imperialist centers exercise all their strength to form one and only one government: the government of the workers and peasants of the whole world!”

Lucy In The Sky-With The Ivory-Merchant Production of E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View In Mind


Lucy In The Sky-With The Ivory-Merchant Production of E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View In Mind




DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

A Room With A View, starring Helen Bonham Carter, Judi Dench, and of course Maggie Smith, directed and produced by Ivory and Merchant fromthe1908 novel by E.M. Forster, 1985 

 

No question for Europe and to the extent that Britain was part of Europe (and is, note the Brexit vote recently) World War I was a watershed between the old ideas of civil society and the new the old represented in Britain by the cultural term “Victorian era,” reflecting certain strait is the gate social norms and tons of sexual repression at least in public. And at least in the public prints, and in public entertainments as well. But right at the end of the era, right around the turn of the century, the turn of the 20th century little cracks began to appear and the younger generation, the younger generation whose male component would join the rest of the flower of European manhood which would lay its head down in some foreboding fields of France, led the way. Not too much however should be made, or rather over-made, of those cracks witness the fate of poor Oscar Wilde who despite his sardonic and witty jabs at late Victorian (and we will not forget when the old biddy Victoria died the changeover to Edwardian era) wound up in Reading Gaol for acts one could not speak of, for the love that dare not speak its name. Those small cracks though are what E.M. Forster looked at in his 1908 novel A Room With A View of which the 1985 film adaptation by the famous team of Ivory and Merchant being reviewed here is based on.      

Of course the “room with the view” idea is both a concrete expression of a physical location in arty Florence where the main characters mix and match in a modest boarding house, a place where a coterie of British citizens are taking a middle class version of the old Grand Tour and attempting to get a room with a view of the famous and quite beautiful city and a more idealistic concept of freedom, of breaking away from the past of stuffy convention and routine. That tension between tradition, custom, the old ways and the “jail break-out” of that late Victorian generation, or part of it drives the film (and the book as well since Ivory-Merchant at least in regard to Forster’s work are pretty faithful to the author’s storyline).     

Here is how the small jail-break played out in this one. Lucy, Lucy of the review headline, played rather nicely by a young and precocious Helen Bonham Carter along with her strait is the gate sexually repressed older cousin Charlotte as chaperone, played, inevitably played, by the great character actor Maggie Smith, are among the guests at that boarding house in Florence mentioned earlier. They, despite their fervent request, have been given a room without a view, and seemed destined to have to put up with that condition until two male fellow boarders, the Emersons, father and son, switch rooms with them. Not only switch rooms with them but are the antithesis of gentile society with some pretty advanced free-thinking ideas that old Emerson has passed on to his son, George. His beautiful son George, played by Julian Sloan, which set up the tormented love interest that drives the film as Lucy struggles with her allegiances to the past and her desire to be a thoroughly modern Millie. Needless to say in Florence no good can come of the budding romance, and nothing does except that George makes his first rebuffed attempt at smitten-hood (translation: He tried to kiss Lucy in an elysian field).             

Fast forward, well, maybe not fast forward but forward with Lucy back in England (you know Britain without Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in those days) at her family’s country estate where she had after several earlier refusals decided that she would marry an ardent suitor, the bookish snobbish Cecil (played by a young Daniel Day-Lewis). Well if that is what she wants then okay. But Cecil is strictly a bookworm, an intellectual looking to add Lucy to his collection of books or something,   strictly a character in old-fashioned Victorian tradition (hell he doesn’t even play tennis then the rage among the younger set). The beautiful part though is when George, who along with his father has very conveniently taken a small mansion in the neighborhood, puts serious doubts in Lucy’s mind about her future with a bookworm, with a guy who won’t even look up at the sky but keeps his nose in a book quoting odd-ball writers out of hand.

Eventually she gives Cecil his well-deserved walking papers but even after that freedom break something is amiss, something is still stirring in her suppressed passionate heart. Against all odd though and this is the ending every ladies’ reading circle would be looking for is this kind of novel and in a film plotline after speaking with old Emerson it turned out that she loved, madly loved, George. Of course George and Lucy had to sneak off to Florence to elope since breaking off one’s engagement to a well-established figure and taking up with a free-spirit would not do, would just not do in high society. What do you want to bet though they have a room with a view in that boarding house they were staying at in Florence? A room with a view if they ever get up from the downy billows.             

*A Comment On Bob Dylan's Place As THE Voice Of The Generation Of 1968-

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Bob Dylan's 1964 Philharmonic Concert Where He Performs "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues". As mentioned below this is about as specifically political as Brother Dylan got back in those days, an even this is more of a folk parody than serious political banter.




Comment

In reviewing a Bob Dylan DVD "Bob Dylan: 1966-1978: After The Crash, Chrome Dreams, 2006" to be posted on this site as a later date I mentioned the following in response to the question that I posed about Bob Dylan's role as THE voice of my generation, the Generation of '68 after he seemingly 'disappeared' from the scene after 1966.

"...To finish up, I want make a comment on Dylan’s place in the music and cultural pantheon of the late 20th century. Much is made in this film, and elsewhere in other commentaries about the shifts in Dylan’s work, about his seeming hatred for the role of folk oracle/leader/messiah of what we were trying accomplish in the 1960’s. No question the folk troubadour Bob Dylan of the early 1960’s, the one who told us “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, that the answer was “Blowin’ In The Wind” and that we were “Like A Rolling Stone” has something to say , and something that we wanted, in some cases desperately, to hear about. That voice carried us through, rather nicely, the civil rights period and the period of questioning where we wanted to see American power and culture go.

However, when the deal went down and the American government and its various security agencies ratcheted up the heat on us during the anti-Vietnam period of the late 1960’s and Dylan was nowhere to found we did not fall apart in dismay or disorder. We heard other, more directly political voices, all the way from Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and then on to Karx Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao and Leon Trotsky to name a few. Frankly, at least in the circles that I ran in, we did not miss Dylan even if we wondered, off-handedly, where the hell he was. But each man to his calling- “Tangled Up In Blue”, "Idiot Wind”, "Shelter From The Storm” and many other songs from this period still stand the test of musical time. In the end that is what he wanted to do, and that will endure."

Having just recently re-listened to the bootleg 1964 "Bob Dylan At The Philharmonic" CD reviewed on this date I feel even stronger about those remarks. Listening carefully to the stage talk and his interaction with the audience at that early point in his career two things are apparent. One his on-stage demeanor was one hundred times better then when he was young and hungry. He actually made jokes with the audience. Compare that with the off-handedness of his comments on later performances and his essentially non-answers on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" which was suppose to be a bouquet to him by Scorsese. Secondly, in 1964, if not earlier, it is obvious that here is a man who wants to have fun making music, performing before an audience and making it to the music pantheon. While Dylan might be regarded as a man of the left as suggested by some of his lyrics it is painfully clear that he wants no part of the political struggle. Those who thought otherwise at the time (including a little, me) were "smoking" something. Bob Dylan did not betray our dreams-there was nothing of him to betray. We will have to look elsewhere for scapegoats for what went wrong with our "sixties" dreams.

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Mohamman Geuka Koti


*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Mohamman Geuka Koti

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)


In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!