This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Dear UJP Peace Supporter, I want to let you know about the exciting new “Peace Pledge” campaign that United for Peace and Justice is launching.The pledge is a commitment to take action for peace and justice up to and beyond the 2016 U.S. elections and it's ready for you to sign right now.
As the mother of a young adult daughter, I fear for the future – for my own child and for all young people who are inheriting a legacy of war and chaos that I fear is spinning out of control.
This election cycle, with its abysmal political dialogue, is one of the most troubling I have witnessed. The world and indeed our planet are facing a deep and challenging emergency, with perpetual wars, 65 million refugees of war and violence, the growing climate crisis, economic inequality and continuing social and racial injustice.
I know that I want to do all I can for peace, for the planet and for people. I hope that you will join me by signing the UFPJ Peace Pledge!
For peace and planet, Thea Paneth
Thea Paneth at the People’s History Teach-In at MIT. Thea is an active Coordinating Committee member of United for Peace and Justice and a member of Arlington United for Justice with Peace, a community peace group that she helped to organize in March of 2002.
When: Saturday, October 29, 2016, 10:00 am to 1:00 pm
Where: Central Square Library • 45 Pearl St • Cambridge
Economic boycott is a time-honored tactic for social change, one used to protest unethical labor practices, racial segregation, military activity and oppressive governments. Today, across the country, state and federal lawmakers––at the urging of the Israel lobby––are attempting to suppress the Palestinian-led campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a non-violent movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
Come learn how advocates for human rights and free speech are fighting back against the crackdown on human rights activism.
Coffee and Sign-in at 10:00 a.m. Program begins at 10:30 a.m.
Speakers:
Nadia Ben-Youssef is a lawyer and human rights advocate serving as Adalah’s first USA Representative. After four years leading Adalah’s international advocacy efforts on behalf of the indigenous Palestinian Bedouin community in the Naqab (Negev), she is now developing the organization’s US advocacy strategy to influence American policy and practice in Israel/Palestine. Much of her work in the United States has focused on building a transnational movement against supremacy and state-sanctioned violence. Nadia is a member of the New York State Bar, and holds a BA in Sociology from Princeton University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. Tamar Ghabin is a Palestinian-American organizer who currently works for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation as the government affairs associate. Additionally, she is currently the head of distribution for the Arab Studies Institute’s new pedagogical project, Gaza in Context. Tamar received her BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University in 2015. As an undergrad, she was very active in Students for Justice in Palestine, and continues to be connected to SJP as an alumna.
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine and the MA Freedom to Boycott Coalition.
In 2014, cellphone video of the New York police choking Eric Garner to death sparked protests nationwide. His dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for tens of thousands, symbolic of life for black people in America seeking to survive in a racist, segregated society rigged against them at every turn, and under constant threat of cop violence. The NYPD, outraged at being exposed for its killing of Garner, never forgave Ramsey Orta, the man who caught it on video. In the years since, he has been targeted for reprisals, repeatedly arrested, harassed and threatened by the cops. On October 3, he was sentenced to four years in prison on drug and gun charges resulting from this vindictive campaign. Free Ramsey Orta!
Orta is not the only person who has been victimized by police for filming their atrocities. Chris LeDay, who posted video of the killing of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police this July, was arrested at his workplace the next evening on accusations of assault and battery. Unable to make the bogus charges stick, the police then jailed him overnight for unpaid traffic fines. Abdullah Muflahi, the owner of the convenience store outside which Sterling was shot, also filmed the killing on his cellphone. He was detained for six hours—four in the back of a hot police car—and his store’s CCTV system, including camera and video footage, as well as his cellphone were all confiscated. Kevin Moore—who filmed Baltimore cops tackling Freddie Gray and throwing him into the police van in which he was given his fatal “rough ride” in 2015—was also arrested and then released without charge. He has described his experience of cop harassment: “They ride past me taunting me with their phones up.”
The thugs in blue not only engage in reprisals against those filming them, but also seek to confiscate the videos before they can be circulated. Diamond Reynolds heroically filmed and streamed the aftermath of the cop shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castile. She was then handcuffed and detained until 5 a.m. The police have even collaborated with social media companies to shut down livestreaming of their deadly actions. In August, Baltimore County police attempted to serve a warrant on Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, at her home. Seeking to document their treatment of her, she livestreamed the ensuing stand-off to Facebook. At the cops’ request, Facebook shut off her account and deactivated the stream. Having ensured there would be no video evidence, the cops then shot Gaines dead, while she was holding her five-year-old son.
Repression against those who film the police is an expression of the cops’ desire to cover up their crimes and intimidate any who would seek to document them. Every video of police brutality and harassment gives lie to the myth that they “serve and protect” anything but the property and domination of America’s racist capitalist ruling class. More broadly, state forces seek to hide the evidence of their repressive role.
While most courts have ruled that people have a First Amendment right to film the police, a federal court in Pennsylvania ruled in February that, in general, there is no right to do so; the ACLU is appealing this decision. But, court rulings favorable to the oppressed are no guarantee that the cops won’t violate people’s democratic rights. Moreover, they do not alter the fundamental role of the police—violent repression of workers, black people and immigrants.
State murder across the U.S., especially of black people, is nothing new. It is an extreme expression of the forcible segregation of the mass of black people at the bottom of society, a legacy of slavery. What is new is merely the degree to which, with the proliferation of smartphones, everyone can now document the harsh realities of this barbaric system. Years of protests, years of videos, years of preachers and prayers and pious promises by cynical Democratic Party hacks have not dented these harsh realities one bit. A week doesn’t go by without the racist police executing another person, whose life is memorialized by another hashtag.
The righteous anger against the thuggish police must be transformed into a struggle against the social order they defend, a struggle to make the working class the rulers of a new society. What is necessary is to uproot entirely the capitalist state and the system it defends—one where the capitalist exploiters idle in luxury while the mass of society is condemned to a life of toil, should they be lucky enough to find a job at all. The fight for a socialist future begins with unlocking the power of the integrated working class. The key is forging a multiracial revolutionary workers party committed to the fight for a workers government.
When Buddha Swings-With Max Daddy Dizzy Gillespie In
Mind
By Seth Garth
No question Fritz Taylor was crazy for jazz, crazy for that
swing music from the likes of Duke and Benny, crazy for the Dizzy and Charlie cool
breeze be-bop daddy jazz blowing out that high white note to the China seas off
some swag club in Frisco town although the more modern, techno-jazz left him
somewhat cold. The jazz craze of Fritz got a workout, got a talk workout every
time somebody mentioned a jazz name or hummed some be-bop beat and that would
start a fire in his head, a good fire unlike the others fires which disturbed
his peace, the fires of his anxious passions from which he had to run.
One night, to give an example of how quickly Fritz could
pick up the slightest thread if push can to shove, he had been sitting at a
table in a church basement getting ready to have a dinner being prepared by the
good folks of the Catholic Worker movement up in York, up in Maine seashore
country, along the coast. These good folk had volunteered to feed Fritz and his
companions. (Although this screed is not about Fritz’s history with the
Catholic Worker movement just let it be said that he had a long association
going all the way back to his Grandmother Riley who was a Catholic Worker
supporter even though he himself had long ago given up the tenets of the
Church.) Sitting at the table was a distinguished looking man about his age,
maybe a bit younger who casually asked probably in the interest of table-talk
if anybody liked jazz, liked the be-bop sounds of the likes of Dizzy Gillespie.
That was all Fritz needed, all he needed almost before that
gentleman finished his sentence. Fritz yelled across the table (there was a lot
of noise from other conversations at other tables as people waited on dinner),
“You mean the be-bop max daddy of cool breeze jazz? Sure I do although I didn’t
get around to digging Dizzy, digging jazz until about ten or fifteen years
ago.” The man nodded probably assuming that would be the end of it.
No so lucky, although as it turned out after Fritz laid down
his screed that man and he continued comparing notes about likes and who they
had heard in person or on vinyl (Fritz mainly on vinyl or discs really since he
was a late starter). But not before this:
“Hey I, like a lot of you if I am not mistaken about ages
here, was a child of rock and roll, of the original rock and roll what they now
call the classic age of rock, you know Elvis, Bill Haley, Bo Diddley, Wanda
Jackson, Jerry Lee, Carl, those guys who helped bring us off that soft-sell
stuff our parents liked and expected us to like. So I had no time, no rebellion
against time to listen to some of that jazz stuff that would have saxs once I
got hip that made the rock sax players look sick, except maybe Bill Haley’s sax
player.
“I also went through the folk minute of the early 1960s you
all know that with Dylan calling the tune for us about a new day coming and
others calling on us to chuck the old ways, like Joan Baez and Phil Ochs,
people like that who made us think. As part of that folk minute I got into
blues, first country blues with Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell
[a couple of people nodded in recognition] and then the wild men like Muddy
Waters and Howlin’ Wolf who amped the music up with electricity [more nods of
recognition]. Funny how that blues stuff once I got into jazz had a lot of what
jazz had to offer especially with guys like the Duke and the Count but I never
made the connection then.
“Like a lot of people, maybe most people as far as music
goes, I basically stayed with the music of my youth, mostly stopped looking for
new sounds except for a quick stop at some outlaw country music and a little
Cajun stuff. Then in 1999, and that year isimportant to note, I was listening as I usually do to NPR, to a talk
radio show I think when I heard this music, music that turned out to be Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington. See the
show was featuring Duke’s work both because the radio host was into jazz and
because that year was the centennial of Duke’s birth. Naturally once I got that
beat in my head like has happened before when music “spoke” to me I continued to
listen and was floored by the man’s work.
“Like a lot of things that I really like when I get the bug the
next day I went out a grabbed a bunch of Duke’s stuff at a record shop in
Harvard Square (really a CD shop at that point) and played them for the rest of
the day. That was the start. Then I pushed on to guys like Benny Goodman, the Count,
Big Early, Sweet Baby James, you know the big band stuff. Eventually to the
be-bop daddies like Dizzy, Charlie, Fatha Hines, the cool breeze stuff that
broke from the big band sound and got a lot more into improvisation, although not
just random blowing but picking up from where another guy left off, picking up
a chord change and running with it. The search for the high white note that blew
right out the door and changed the climate. Funny about be-bop though I should
have “dug” it a lot earlier if I thought about it since I was crazy for the “beats,”
for the mostly white hipsters like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso,
of the 1950s who were searching for their own rebellions because the music that
defined them was be-bop jazz, that cool stuff that got played in the background
at the coffeehouses and clubs where they read their poems and writings.
“Funny too because from way back when I was seriously interested
in Billie Holiday although I never really associated her with jazz but with the
low-down blues, with getting me well from listening to her pain alleviate my
own. One day I looked up who was backing her up and lo and behold there were
Lester Young, the Prez, and Johnny Hodges blowing sexy sax to high heaven
behind her. Who would have guessed.
With that Fritz had finished his rant. Then that distinguished
man who started Fritz’s avalanche started talking about all the great he had
seen back in the day before they passed away, Dizzy, John Coltrane, the Duke,
Thelonious Monk, and a million other be-bop cats. Also had a ton of anecdotes
about jazz that put Fritz’s own knowledge to shame (and looks of sincere
admiration from the others at the table whose knowledge was somewhat less
robust than his or Fritz’s)
Here is the wild part. That place, that church basement
where the group Fritz and the jazz man were talking their talk while waiting for
their supper was the place where a local group of Catholic Workers in York were
hosting a group of walkers, Fritz and the jazz man included, who were walking
in the 5th Annual Maine Walk for Peace whose theme for the year was
to “Stop the Wars Against Mother Earth.” The Walk had started up in Penobscot Nation
over one hundred miles to north and would finish the next day with a vigil at
the Portsmouth Naval Base in Kittery at river’s edge. Fritz had picked the Walk
up in Lewiston ninety miles up a few days before. The distinguished jazz man had started from
day one at Penobscot Nation. See that man was not only a jazz aficionado but a
Buddhist monk from Japan (now residing in a Buddhist monastery outside Seattle)
who was leading the group of several Buddhist monks and nuns chanting and beating
their drums who were leading the other Veterans for Peace and social activists who
were co-sponsoring the event. He had “gotten religion” about jazz when a lot of
the jazz greats he was knowledgeable about had hit Japan where they were
treated like royalty at a time when they could hardly get a hearing in the United
States, the quintessential homeland of jazz.
