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
*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind
A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical and electrified work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, the going was tough which to say the least most of these efforts were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works, reflected that long curve decline in the genetically-based illnesses that laid him low by the end.
After some thought, and some prodding by an old-time classmate who had stayed in town and who had been in the class with me, I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called "Dasher the Flasher" just for rhyming purposes when being a rhyming simon was the cat's meow and was the subject of many strange rhyme schemes, some not publishable even today, but which also with today’s sensibilities in mind about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.
Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female we could get our hands on at Chip's Record Shop downtown or on the jukebox at the Dew Drop Diner where we corralled ourselves on many an after school afternoon. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that particular Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.
In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of import is when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being played in the fall of 1962 on the Boston sell-out rock stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned outto be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming as he walked down from the mountaintop). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine on WBNC at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.
After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short but all speaking to a low-down guy trying to get back with his sweetie come hell or high water). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well on that path until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare "reds under every bed" brush.
Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with father and son Lomaxesdid so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie treated like the bible-and stole like crazy from like Dylan did with Rabbit Allen's James Alley Blues, I think that).
Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday night illegal homemade jug and head to the electricity-less juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the self-same illegal and homemade jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle as the mist rolled in from the damps.
Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles.
Memories Of Victor
Lazlo-With The Anniversary Of Ingrid Bergman And Humphrey
Bogart’s “Casablanca” In Mind
By Bradley Davis
[For those in America
who do not know, or have forgotten, the name Victor Lazlo who died on January
20, 1989 he was a living legend during World War II as the key leader of the
armed civilian resistance to the Nazi juggernaut that tried to permanently roll
over Europe. First in his native Czechoslovakia where he stood in the main
square attempting to rally Czech resistance as the Germans crossed the border
to “claim” what they saw as their historic hinterlands. Hardly the first crew
to run that argument to the ground before the wrath of the risen people put
paid to that notion. Later after the Germans had captured Lazlo and put him in
concentration camps he became one of the last hopes in those dark days for the
average occupied European when he repeatedly escaped from the Nazi barbed wire
enclaves to fight another day. That despite repeated German High Command
announcements complete with photographs that the brave man was dead. Only to
appear again and again until even the Germans saw it was useless to make an
example of Lazlo once he made his way to Casablanca along with a very much
younger woman companion, Ilsa, to forge a working resistance underground
network to jam up the Germans as best they could.
Strangely Lazlo came
from a very well-to- do family who had done well in the munitions business
(which the Nazis took over with every hand once they crushed benighted
Czechoslovakia) and could have easily gotten out of Prague and into London or
Paris before all hell broke loose. But the times demanded “no heads in the
sand” and so some layers of society whom one would not expect to dirty their
hands with the work usually left to the plebian masses found a calling. For a
short time after World War II there were several statues dedicated to Lazlo’s
service in Prague and other Czech towns, a few in other grateful liberated
countries too, which were taken down during the Soviet period. They were
eventually restored well after 1989 too late for Lazlo to bask in his
well-deserved accolades.
Lazlo’s death prompted
some of those of his comrades still alive, a dwindling number as the actuarial
tables grind away, to write about their heroic leader. One whose article I had
seen in the New York Gazette I
contacted at the time through a friend who worked at the paper. His name
Christian Berger, Danish by birth and subsequently a naturalized American
citizen. He had been part of Lazlo’s underground operation and had actually
helped get Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca to continue his work without having
to look over his shoulder every minute for some dastardly pro-Nazi assassin
looking to get a name for himself.
This Casablanca period
in Lazlo’s exploits has been the subject of some differences among those who
have written extensively about the armed civilian resistance during the war.
About those who fought the Nazis and their various national indigenous allies
as best they could. The main bone of contention in the matter is who actually
set the wheels in motion to get Lazlo out of Casablanca. During the war it was
always, correctly it seems, assumed that the local branch of Lazlo’s
operation-the Knights Templar- got him out.
Immediately after the
war though an American ex-patriate, Rick Blaine, who during the war and for
many years after ran a gin joint in the Casbah, Rick’s Café Americian, claimed
that as a gesture of love for Ilsa, who was actually Lazlo’s wife which they
were keeping quiet for security reasons and to protect Ilsa if the Germans
found out their real relationship, gave the couple a pair of “letters of
transit” to get on the nightly midnight plane to neutral Lisbon. No such
documents were ever found in any archive or file. The failure to not find the
missing documents would not have been conclusive since in wartime all kinds of
regular business are churned up and lost in movements and withdrawals but would
have helped Blaine’s case immensely. For years after the war Lazlo, long after
Ilsa had left him for an English nobleman and a country estate and not having
seen Rick since 1941, insisted that there were no letters of transit and while
not calling Rick Blaine a liar he always claimed the local Knight Templars were
the agents through which he escaped.
Since Lazlo’s death the
Rick allegations have resurfaced and have had some champions, romantic fools
mostly, who have bought into that long ago gesture of love business. The
following is Christian Berger’s take on the matter from his perspective as the
leader of the local ex-pat resistance which found itself stranded in Casablanca
during those troubled times. Bradley Davis]
*******
Sure I knew Victor
Lazlo, the great Czech World War II anti-fascist liberation leader, who passed
away the other day at 91, the day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as President of
the United States here in America. I first met him in Casablanca, down in
Morocco, the part that the French, the Vichy French, had control of not the
Spanish part. In those days, the days when one scourge Adolph Hitler, his
minions, and his tanks were making mincemeat of Europe I, Christian Berger,
having barely escaped with my life from my native Denmark got to Casablanca
through the underground network that Victor Lazlo was the key man setting up
once the night of the long knives set in over the benighted continent.
I have been a life-long
working man, a dock-worker, a union man with the ILA in Copenhagen and Newark,
New Jersey here in America who had been then a part of a small socialist
resistance unit who had as the Nazis came waltzing into Denmark blown up as
many tunnels and other impediments as possible to slow down their inevitable
march. My, our, escape was a close thing since I, we, had to get through
France, the southern part that was controlled by Vichy, by those damned French
collaborators with the Nazi Germany regime which had set itself up in fallen
Paris with papers that were not too good. Papers that claimed I was from the
Ukraine since Russia was in some kind of devil’s pact with Hitler at the time.
The customs officers at Marseilles had a hard time believing I was a Slav what
with me looking like the map of Copenhagen and talking like some Nordic skier
seen in the movies in one of those sports films in the mountains which dealt
mainly with love interests back in the 1930s. I got through okay, took a
derelict freighter across the Mediterranean through Algiers (again with papers
problems but since I had been stamped by French officials in Marseilles less
so) and down to Casablanca where I was to await orders to either head to
America via the midnight plane to Lisbon, the only safe neutral spot at that
point,and then across the Atlantic to
raise funds from among the Scandinavians sprouted throughout the Midwest or
head back to Vichy France with some others stranded in Casablanca and join the
French resistance which was beginning to be organized (mainly then by loosely
affiliated individuals and later by the Communists after Hitler turned the
tables on “Uncle Joe” Stalin and did a massive invasion of Russia).
My
cover strange as it seemed given my real background in Casablanca was as a
jeweler since we needed to be able to move money without having the fucking
French, fucking Louie the corrupt Captain of the [A1][A2][A3][A4][A5]coppers
looking over our shoulders every minute. An out of the suitcase seller was my
cover but mostly I was a buyer of high-priced gems at a fraction of the price
since anybody who made it to that sullen town needed plenty of dough to not be
condemned to die in the damn place. I was looked at as either a bastard for
robbing the unfortunates who wound up there or a savior for giving that last
bit of money they needed to make arrangements to get out of that hellhole. That
made me look like the real thing as people either enjoyed my company or avoided
me like some dreaded medieval plague.
I
was in those days just hanging out in Casablanca awaiting orders about which
way I was heading, hanging out mostly at Rick’s Café Americian where every
transient exile went to do any kind of transaction, legal or illegal, or just
to get the sand out of their mouths with some of Rick’s high-end liquor which
he obtained on the international black market which had its heyday then for
quality goods. I did a little work in that market as well to strengthen my
cover and met some strange guys, a guy like Santo Diaz who would have stolen
the shirt off your back and sold it back to you for twice what you paid for if
the weather was too hot or too cold to go bare-chested but who had so many
connections that I would have paid the price if he had taken my shirt. Some of
the more bewildered and younger transients came just to dance and listen to a
guy, a black guy everybody called Sam but whose real name was Dooley something,
sorry I forgot his last name, play all the current Tin Pan Alley tunes on his
piano (accompanied by a pretty good back-up band). Everybody went crazy over
his rendition of If I Didn’t Care
although Rick would make sure he played I’ll
Get By every set although he once told me he hated the damn song thought it
was pretty corny and not well-written ne but Rick was the boss and so the damn
thing got played every set (the customers apparently once they got a load on
didn’t know he played the song three times a night. As least I never heard
anybody complain on the matter).
I
will mention this Rick, Rick Blaine, originally from New York City in America I
believe he said when I asked one time when he offered to buy me a drink after
buying some jewels from one of his lady friends, Rita, a luscious redhead, whom
he had picked up in Senor Ferrara’s whorehouse in the Casbah where he stocked
plenty of loose European women for the local wealthy trade who seemed to have
tired of their own kind andwhom he
wished to get rid of on the next flight to Lisbon. (Thejewels which he had bought from me in the
first place when his love was in fresh bloom as he expressed it to me upon
purchase and which I had gotten on the black market and given him a good price
on to help establish myself as a regular at Ricks’. Tiring of redhead and
blondes, brunettes too was a luxury that Rick could afford with the proceeds
from his gambling racket and letting his place be used by a guy named Frenchie for
his pimping transactions. Yeah, Rick was that kind of guy even then.)
Right now though I want
to mention the first news I had heard that made me think we might win against
that bastard Hitler and his henchmen like General Petain who was running Vichy
France. Like I said I belonged to the same resistance organization that Victor
Lazlo had set up after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia-The Knight Templars
was our code name and an old time Celtic cross our means of identifying each
other. Mine I had placed in a ring that I would take out occasionally and look
at as my own possession, so people, so the local Vichy cops, the swine, would
not think to look there. Lazlo was so much the public face of the organization
that when the Germans captured him the morale of the organization sank like a
stone. Then we would hear that he had escaped, usually with the help of local
Knights Templars.
A few times the Germans
claimed they had killed him and then he would be sighted again. A real old-time
romantic revolutionary, old school no question even though he had been brought
up in a very upper middle class bourgeois family. The last time we heard he was
killed we thought that really was the end. Then one day out of the blue we got
news that Lazlo was not only not dead but had escaped again and was heading to
Casablanca. Elated we prepared for his arrival. That meant that the local
organization that I had put together would have to insure that Victor Lazlo was
able to get out of Casablanca and get to Lisbon and head to London or New York
depending on what we could do for him.
One night bold as we
figured him to be Lazlo walked into Rick’s, walked in with the Nordic goddess,
a Swede from her looks, a woman who I would later find out whose name was Ilsa,
Ilsa Lund, whom he was either married to (privately) or was shacked up with. In
any case a good looking dame although quite a bit younger that Lazlo. Lazlo by
the way was a tall, kind of thin good-looking guy who always dressed like he
had just come out of a men’s magazine. Everything about him spoke of coolness
under pressure and strong nerves. I would not say that he was a lady’s man,
more of a man’s man but not a few femmes in Casablanca threw glances his way so
he must have appealed to a certain kind of woman. Frankly this Ilsa didn’t seem
his type but she must have had her charms and some kind of unknown back story
to be attached to his arm coming half way across Europe hunted in every
quarter.
Now Rick’s was not only
the favorite of the transients looking for something but also the favorite
watering hole of the Germans assigned to watch over the local Vichy government
and the Vichy cops and bureaucrats, especially Louie, everybody called him
Louie except his men, the Captain of the cops. Cool as a cucumber Lazlo walked
in, sat at a ringside table ordered a couple of drinks, martinis I think, for
himself and his lady friend and checked things out. I knew at once he was
looking for me. Although we had never met I knew he would have known that the
local organization existed and that somebody would contact him once he was
safely in Casablanca. Once I spotted him I went over and showed him my ring. We
were in business, the business of getting him to Lisbon and whatever future
work would come his way. Our relationship for the short time we were together
then was cordial and he displayed no class superiority like some of the
unattached intellectual French resistance fighters did. (Lazlo and I met a few
times after the war when he came to America after Ilsa had left him from that
British title and estate and after the fall of Czechoslovakia to pro-Soviet
elements who had given him the options-exile or jail.)
I have read different
stories over time about how some so-called letters of transit were what got
Lazlo and his Ilsa out of Casablanca in a nick of time. I have heard that Rick,
Rick Blaine, a guy who stuck his neck out for nobody somehow was holding them
for a little two-bit con man named Peter Lorre who got caught and Rick was
going to use them himself but gave them to Lazlo for him and Ilsa to get out of
town as a gesture to love. Bullshit, excuse my Danish-etched English. Never
happened, somebody must have been at the hashish pipe too long. But the story,
stories, have persisted to this day and even the New York Times in its obituary for Lazlo mentioned that hoary tale
as if it was the real deal. So it is worth going into before I tell what really
got Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca and allowed him to lead the freedom
fighters of Europe against the night-takers.
According to the
stories, I will use the story the Times
used since in its particulars it gives most of the current view that has been
going around forever. Rick, who passed away in the mid-1970s still stuck in
Casablanca selling hashish to the locals in collaboration with a couple of
unsavory characters in the Casbah when Rick’s Café went to seed after the war,
knew this Ilsa, this Ilsa Lund who was travelling with Lazlo, in Paris before
the war started. The stories mainly agree that they had some kind of torrent
affair, some serious time under the sheets after Rick had escaped from Spain
once Madrid fell in 1939.
Supposedly Rick had been
at one time in the International Brigades helping the Loyalists defend the
Republic against the military machine of General Franco who was aided in no
small way by the Germans. Later when the Brigades were withdrawn he stayed on
as a free agent until Madrid fell.I had
a chance later after the war to check out what Rick had done exactly in Spain,
or if he had even been there with some guys I met from the Abraham Lincoln
Battalion of the 15th Brigade, the American section. I could never
get anything to prove he was, or was not, there but since everybody used
aliases anyway I let it ride. I will say that Rick never let anybody believe
otherwise than that he had been with the good guys but he didn’t talk about it
much one way or the other. Ran his saloon business he called it and never let
on about this torrid affair with Ilsa as the cause of his brooding many nights
from what his head waiter, Charles, told me. Drank by himself stupid alone or
with some whore or princess who needed dough to flee to Lisbon. Always
discarded them or shipped them off to Louie when he was done with them.
Everything changed when
Ilsa came walking in hand and hand with Lazlo. You could feel the tension in
the air when Rick spotted her after being told Lazlo was in the café. Even
sitting at the bar later waiting for Lazlo to come and get the low-down on the
local situation from me I could see that Ilsa and Rick had had a big thing in
Paris. Could see too that it was not Rick who walked away from her. But I could
also see, knowing Scandinavian women a little that Ilsa would not be found
wanting for company, would always find a safe haven even hanging around with a
guy like Victor Lazlo. I won’t say she was a whore, although in a tight spot
she might have been a high class call girl to make ends meet. But that look,
that pasted innocent look which certain jaded women can put on or take off like
their daily make-up told of a few dark secrets that somebody less worldly than
Lazlo (or Rick for that matter) would have gone screaming into the night over.
But all of that is sheer speculation on my part about her past and it may have
all come to being nothing like that. She didn’t need that, need to play the
virgin whore since guys would be more than happy to give her whatever she
wanted for a little attention, maybe a little loyalty too. But I insist to this
day her rose-petal pure and simple young woman was a façade, was a game she
played to insure her own future. Whatever had broken up her and Rick in Paris
didn’t seem to have touched her at all. Just another affair and move on. That’s
the best way that I can explain it.
You would have had to
have been there to see her effect on men, tough men like Rick and Lazlo to get
a real feel for what was driving everybody crazy. (I will admit that one time
when she was waiting at the bar for Lazlo to show after a meeting and I was
sitting a few seats down that her wayward smile my way and that scent she wore,
gardenia, something like that had me going too since I had left my Danja back
in Denmark and had not been with a woman for a while.) All I know for sure was
that she was not leaving Casablanca alone and without resources.
That part was real
enough. What was not real and nobody ever to my knowledge ever produced any
documents which would pass muster, would not fool even a gullible U.S. customs
inspector were those so-called letters of transit. Of course if they had
existed then many things would have made sense, or more sense. You have to
understand how desperate people were who were able to get to Casablanca in
those days and who either by lack of resources or no luck looked like they were
never going to get out of there, were going to as Rick once said to Charles as
I overheard a conversation between them “die” there. (There is a certain irony
in the fact that he did die there pretty wealthy from what I heard about his
take on the drug trade and a little off-hand pimping of the local Casbah
girls). To hear about “no hassle” just sign your name documents fired many an
imagination. Made people believe in what was nothing but thin air.
The whole thing was a
concoction made up by this Peter Lorre, a two-bit con man, a German ex-pat of
some sort, probably saw no benefit to himself to stay in Germany after 1933
since while Hitler had an assortment of hangers-on, flaks, devotees, and
bone-crushers two-bit non-ideological con men were being run out of town and
fast.Hell he could hardly pay his bar
tab never mind his rent. Borrowed money off of me (with interest which I never
got as it turned out nor payment one on the loan) to get some stuff out of
hock. He took advantage of the news, the real news, that two German officers
had been killed on their way to Casablanca and figured that he could make a
“killing” maybe several, by getting money upfront from those desperate people stranded
and running out of hope by saying he had some fool-proof documents which real
letters of transit would be no question about that. Of course this idea fizzled
when Louie to impress the German officers watching the henhouse decided that
Lorre was the perfect guy to take the fall for the killing of the two Germans.
He staged a big raid at Rick’s one night for just that purpose, just to impress
this bigwig Major Strasser nothing but a strutting fool if you asked me. They
found Lorre out in the sand about twenty kilometers from the Casbah a few weeks
later with two slugs to the head.
Funny Lorre just before
the end in the café had passed a couple of crude documents that he called the
letters of transit to Rick from what I heard for safekeeping. Those documents
were of the crudest sort that even a half-wit would have been able to see that
they were nothing but forgeries and bad ones at that. Would make the possessor
who tried to use them prime bait for the concentration camps the Germans were
setting up all over occupied Europe.
Rick was slick though,
or maybe better love sick since he never let on at the time that Lorre had
conveyed the “documents” to him or that he knew that they were crudely forged
documents. So as far as anybody in Casablanca knew, or wanted to know, like I
said they were still around town. Somehow Lazlo found out that Rick had these
documents, or some documents and tried to bargain Ilsa, or rather Ilsa’s safe
passage out of Casablanca for some sum of dough to be forwarded later. No sale
even though while they were discussing the matter Rick let on about the torrid
affair in Paris and Lazlo, eternally a European sophisticate, brushed it off as
so much collateral damage of war. Lazlo probably knew better than anybody the
slightly sluttish side of Ilsa when she wanted something so he probably went to
Rick first before she made her charge at the love sick guy.
Which came the next
night while Victor and seemingly half the foreigners in town, including me were
at a meeting to plan his escape and our tasks after he left. (I was to go to
Europe to join the resistance and did not get to America until a few years
after the war when I married an American citizen whom I met in Paris right
after Liberation day. I never saw Danja again after I fled Denmark and so do
not know what happened to her after the fall).
Ilsa must have really
given Rick the business, the whole pitch since when she left his room all
disheveled she had made a promise to go away with Rick and forget about Lazlo. Yes,
I think I was right that she knew all the arts, probably gave him a blow job to
seal the deal since most guys will buckle under if they have some gal “play the
flute” for them. Since he had nothing to get out of Casablanca with Rick
stalled her as long as he could until the Germans, using Louie as a front man,
were ready to grab Lazlo. It was a close thing. When Rick came up empty he
would wind up spending many lonely nights thinking about Paris and that last
night up in his room with her because Ilsa was back in Victor’s fold when
things were getting dicey. So much for the Rick legend which he pursued
mercilessly I understand after the war when he claimed that that without him and
those so-called letters of transit Lazlo would have been a goner, and by
implication that Europe would still be under the Nazi boot heel.
The real story which I
can tell now that Victor Lazlo is in his honored grave, Rick is long gone to
his rather shabby grave and Ilsa ever since a couple of years after the war is
the Countess of Kent and not bothered by anything these days since she suffers
from a series of mysterious diseases. The long and short of it was when that
bastard Major Strasser ordered Louie to round up Lazlo with or without Ilsa we,
the local branch of the Knights Templar, kidnapped the Major and executed him
out in the desert not far from where Lorre had been found earlier. We then held
Louie at gunpoint while we ordered him to clear the airport and allow Lazlo and
Ilsa to board the late night plane to Lisbon. No big mystery just what
freedom-fighters did when they had to face the facts of life at any given
moment. The rest is so much thin air. RIP, Victor Lazlo, RIP.
This
is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover”
the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies
which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian
revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees
with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist,
ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings
and individual pro-socialist proponents. Some,
maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for
struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist
monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of
making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts
either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably
Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to
make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish
Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition,
most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's
(POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there,
especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for
every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the
memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of
militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by
the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those
present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s
(and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary
times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes. Finally,
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical
public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have
mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for
the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by
the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal
in which they have post hoc
attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most
notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg
German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution
is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more
just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
worthwhile from the chaff.
This past summer, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunnand former Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov were two of the signers of a letter to presidents Trump and Putin. In it they recommended these four steps:
1) "A new Presidential Joint Declaration by the United States and the Russian Federation declaring that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."
2) "Increase military-to-military communication through a new NATO-Russia Military Crisis Management Group."
3) Collaborate to secure "nuclear and radiological materials" so that they do not fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
4) Create "informal understandings on cyber dangers related to interference in strategic warning systems . . . to prevent war by mistake."
The following organizations are partnering on this effort: RootsAction.org, World Beyond War, United for Peace and Justice, Just Foreign Policy, and The Nation.
Daniel Ellsberg has endorsed this petition campaign.
After doing this action, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.
-- The RootsAction.org Team
P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.
Trump Orders Military Parade Because Everything Else Is Going So Well He Thought He’d Treat Himself
By ELLIOT HANNON
Donald Trump wants a parade. Real bad. And not just any parade, a big military one just like he’s seen on TV from far off lands where usually the size of the tanks is compensating for other, more significant shortcomings. It makes sense a parade, unconvoluted in its messaging, would appeal to Trump’s pervasive sense of nostalgia for a time when orchestrated displays of bravado weren’t considered crass, but quaint. In fact, Trump’s mused publicly about just such a military exhibition. Then, last month, the president’s brain asked his mouth to make it happen.
[A] Jan. 18 meeting between Trump and top generals in the Pentagon’s tank —a room reserved for top-secret discussions—marked a tipping point, according to two officials briefed on the planning… Trump’s seemingly abstract desire for a parade was suddenly heard as a presidential directive, the officia…
There are questions of cost, the Post points out, but a White House official assures the news outlet all that’s been completed is “brainstorming,” nothing is set in stone. The bigger question is: why is the president brainstorming about this? Doesn’t he have tweets to send? Under normal circumstances, this doesn’t seem like something that would rise to the level of the president, but Trump needs projects to keep him occupied. The tradition of military hardware inching down capital streets might ring a wee bit totalitarian to the average American that’s not on Snapchat, but Trump is, of course, the Godzilla of democracy.
The impetus behind Trump’s move to stage a military parade is that he saw one that he liked and now he wants one too. Last year, during a Bastille Day celebration in France, the Post describes Trump reacting to the military parade that day much like a 7-year-old. “Trump was awestruck by the tableau of uniformed French troops marching down Avenue des Champs-Elysees with military tanks, armored vehicles, gun trucks and carriers—complete with fighter jets flying over the Arc de Triomphe and painting the sky with streaks of blue, white and red smoke for the colors of the French flag,” the Post recalls. Flags! Colored smoke! Guns and tanks! Gimme, I want one. “It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters. “It was two hours on the button, and it was military might, and I think a tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.” “We’re going to have to try to top it,” Trump added.
It’s not totally clear when or where the hypothetical parade will take place. “Trump officials had discussed Memorial Day on May 28, and July 4, but the Pentagon prefers Veterans Day on Nov. 11—in part because it would coincide with 100th anniversary of the victorious end of World War I and therefore be less associated with the president and politics,” according to the Post. “It is unclear what role Trump would play, whether he may perhaps serve as a grand marshal or observe the spectacle from a reviewing stand.” Those are just two options though. A third possible role for Trump would be tank driver.
Poet's Corner- Claude Mckay's "America"-February Is Black History Month
America by Claude McKay Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. Claude McKay, "America" from Liberator (December 1921). Courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schombourg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tildeen Foundations. Source: Liberator (The Library of America, 1921)
ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY The African Blood Brotherhood (...for African Liberation and Redemption) was a radical black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party. The group was the brainchild of Cyril Briggs, a West Indian-born radical of mixed racial parentage living in New York. Briggs was a staunch exponent of the theory of racial separatism who, after feeling his work had been censored at The Amsterdam New, quit and launched his own monthly magazine The Crusader in November 1918. The African Blood Brotherhood was launched shortly thereafter, early in 1919, beginning with about a score of activists in Harlem and gradually adding membership through the recruiting clout of the magazine, which had a peak circulation of 36,000. The ABB was a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret fraternity, organized in "posts" with a centralized national organization based in New York City. The group's size has been variously estimated between 1,000 to Briggs' claim of "less than 3,000" members at its peak. In the words of historian Mark Solomon, Briggs' ABB "sought to draw together the themes of race patriotism, anticapitalism, anticolonialism, and organized defense against racist assault. The organization projected fraternity and benevolence, and even offered a program of calisthenics." [pp. 9-10] The early ABB was an independent radical organization -- not an auxiliary of the Communist Party. That situation changed only in 1921, when Briggs was convinced by Rose Pastor Stokes tojoin the underground CPA, becoming the 3rd black member of that organization. The party sought to make the ABB into a vehicle for mass work among the black working class. In June of 1921 The Crusader formally announced that it had become the official organ of the African Blood Brotherhood. With Communist Party funds tight in 1922 and Briggs' own financial situation no better, The Crusader was not long for the world, however; publication was terminated in February 1922. In the aftermath Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press. Briggs later asserted that central to this decision was a desire to fight the ideology of Marcus Garvey and his "back to Africa" movement, which Briggs believed to be bourgeois. Sometime during the early 1920s the African Black Brotherhood was dissolved, with many of its members merged into the regular Workers Party of America and later into the National Negro Labor College. [fn. Barbara Bair, "The Crusader" in Buhle et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of the American Left, First Edition, pp. 170-171; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Afrioan Americans, 1917-1936, chapters 1&2, passim.; Cyril Briggs, letter to Theodore Draper, Draper Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 38.]
The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForTodayIn Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International From The Archives Of The Black Liberation Struggle-The African Blood Brotherhood (1919-1925)-Report On The Negro Question To The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International By Claude McKay (1922)
ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY The African Blood Brotherhood (...for African Liberation and Redemption) was a radical black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party. The group was the brainchild of Cyril Briggs, a West Indian-born radical of mixed racial parentage living in New York. Briggs was a staunch exponent of the theory of racial separatism who, after feeling his work had been censored at The Amsterdam New, quit and launched his own monthly magazine The Crusader in November 1918. The African Blood Brotherhood was launched shortly thereafter, early in 1919, beginning with about a score of activists in Harlem and gradually adding membership through the recruiting clout of the magazine, which had a peak circulation of 36,000. The ABB was a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret fraternity, organized in "posts" with a centralized national organization based in New York City. The group's size has been variously estimated between 1,000 to Briggs' claim of "less than 3,000" members at its peak. In the words of historian Mark Solomon, Briggs' ABB "sought to draw together the themes of race patriotism, anticapitalism, anticolonialism, and organized defense against racist assault. The organization projected fraternity and benevolence, and even offered a program of calisthenics." [pp. 9-10] The early ABB was an independent radical organization -- not an auxiliary of the Communist Party. That situation changed only in 1921, when Briggs was convinced by Rose Pastor Stokes tojoin the underground CPA, becoming the 3rd black member of that organization. The party sought to make the ABB into a vehicle for mass work among the black working class. In June of 1921 The Crusader formally announced that it had become the official organ of the African Blood Brotherhood. With Communist Party funds tight in 1922 and Briggs' own financial situation no better, The Crusader was not long for the world, however; publication was terminated in February 1922. In the aftermath Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press. Briggs later asserted that central to this decision was a desire to fight the ideology of Marcus Garvey and his "back to Africa" movement, which Briggs believed to be bourgeois. Sometime during the early 1920s the African Black Brotherhood was dissolved, with many of its members merged into the regular Workers Party of America and later into the National Negro Labor College. [fn. Barbara Bair, "The Crusader" in Buhle et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of the American Left, First Edition, pp. 170-171; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Afrioan Americans, 1917-1936, chapters 1&2, passim.; Cyril Briggs, letter to Theodore Draper, Draper Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 38.]
