A View From The Left -Trump Invokes Racist “States’ Rights” Defend Rights of Transgender People!

Workers Vanguard No. 1107	10 March 2017

Trump Invokes Racist “States’ Rights”

Defend Rights of Transgender People!

The bigots in the White House have added transgender people to their hit list targeting Muslims, immigrants, black people and women. In February, President Donald Trump dumped anti-discrimination guidelines issued by Obama in May 2016, which had instructed public schools to allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. A Texas judge had already blocked Obama’s directive last August after 13 states challenged the expansion of restroom access for transgender students. This rollback of protections for transgender students is yet another boost to the religious right, who believe that people are born into the gender God chose for them. But it will also be used as a weapon in the reactionary arsenal aimed more broadly against all the oppressed and working people.

Insisting that the matter of restroom access should be left to states and localities, the Trump administration invoked “states’ rights”—which has long been wielded to enforce the segregation of black people in America. Not surprisingly, the instigator of the ruling was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a notorious racist who thinks that separation of church and state has gone too far and voted to ban same-sex marriage. His very name conjures up the battle cry of the slavocracy in the Civil War: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, in homage to the Confederacy’s president Jefferson Davis and General P.G.T. Beauregard. Co-issuing the ruling was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is dedicated to ending public education and promoting charter schools and vouchers for religious schools as a means to “advance God’s kingdom.”

The revocation of even minimal school protections for transgender and gender non-conforming youth—those whose appearance, dress or behavior doesn’t comply with what capitalist society deems to be the norm—is an ominous threat. It will likely fuel further attacks against this already marginalized group facing high rates of harassment, discrimination and suicide. In light of Trump’s edict, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of transgender teen Gavin Grimm, who courageously sued his Virginia school board in order to use the male restroom. Grimm’s case, which is now kicked to a lower court, could set a precedent for a number of other “bathroom” cases as to whether Title IX’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex extends to gender identity.

Everyone—regardless of the signage on restroom doors—should be allowed to go about their business without interference from busybodies, bigots or bosses. As we stated in a previous article on bigotry over “bathroom bills” (see “Full Democratic Rights for Transgender People!” WV No. 1081, 15 January 2016):

“While sexuality and gender identity are complex, they are essentially personal and private matters. We vehemently oppose any government intrusion into private life and consensual sexual activity. Since our inception, the Spartacist League has called for full democratic rights for gays—and the same goes for others targeted for their sexual practices or gender expression. Down with discriminatory laws against transgender people!”

For right-wing bigots, the idea that students can express their gender identity as they please provokes fury because it cuts against the oppression of youth within the family and in society in general. Anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry are not simply by-products of ignorance, but are conditioned and bolstered by rigid gender roles in the monogamous, patriarchal family. The institution of the family, the main source of the oppression of women and youth under capitalism, instills bourgeois codes of morality, obedience and social conformity. Religious ideology further reinforces the straitjackets of “manhood” and “womanhood.”

The real estate mogul Trump, known more for his “New York values” than for his piety, intoned during the Republican National Convention last year that he would “protect our LGBTQ citizens.” He added the qualifier, “from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” a statement intended to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria in the wake of the terror attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. In fact, Trump was the candidate of choice for those promoting homegrown “hateful ideology,” white Christian evangelicals, 81 percent of whom cast their votes for him. An array of bible-thumping conservatives occupies senior posts in the Trump administration. Freshly grooving on the resurrection of the Christian right in Washington are organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the legal powerhouse dedicated to criminalizing the “homosexual agenda,” and which is behind much of the anti-transgender school legislation.

The Obama-era guidelines revoked by Trump were introduced last year in response to North Carolina’s passage of House Bill 2 (HB2), which bars transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity. Former Republican governor Pat McCrory’s reactionary legislation has been met with sustained opposition and protest. Several sports organizations, including the NBA, shifted events away from North Carolina, and hundreds of celebrities and companies have demanded the law’s repeal. HB2 is not just a “bathroom bill” but a package of draconian legislation targeting the working class, women and minorities. The law also eliminates protections for employees fired on the basis of race, religion, sex or age; prevents cities and counties from setting minimum-wage standards; and overturns laws requiring paid leave for family and medical matters.

These vicious moves pioneered by the Republicans allow the Democrats to hypocritically posture as defenders of the oppressed. Yet for decades the Democratic Party has groveled before the very forces spearheading the attacks on women’s and gay rights, science in schools and secularism in general. The Democrats under Obama, as well as under Bill Clinton, continually pandered to religious reaction, imbibing the “family values” moralism that helped pave the way for the onslaught on abortion and attacks on birth control. The 2014 landmark Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling used Clinton’s 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act to allow companies to deny insurance coverage for contraceptives on religious grounds, thus turning the separation of church and state on its head.

Obama managed to walk off the presidential stage with something of a reputation for defending transgender rights. One of his final acts was the commutation of all but a few months of the remaining prison time for Chelsea Manning, the heroic transgender whistle-blower sentenced to 35 years for exposing U.S. war crimes. The Obama administration tortured Manning for seven years, forced her to fight relentlessly for treatment in the process of gender transitioning and drove her to two suicide attempts while in prison. Clemency for Manning gave Obama a cheap way to cloak his true “legacy”—that of persecuting whistle-blowers, expanding drone strikes and ramping up mass surveillance.

Any illusion that the capitalist Democrats will do anything other than uphold the capitalist system of wage exploitation and racial and sexual oppression that they oversee is a cruel hoax. In the U.S., the deep-seated racism of a society founded on the oppression of black people also finds expression in anti-transgender bigotry. On top of discrimination in employment, lack of access to health care and undue harassment by the cops, transgender people face horrendous levels of sexual assault and violence. Black transgender women are particular targets, making up a majority of the 27 reported anti-trans homicides in 2016. This year, in February alone, five black transgender women were murdered, three in the Southern state of Louisiana.

Today’s arguments against transgender people’s access to restrooms echo claims from the Jim Crow South defending separate facilities for black people. Racists railed against integrated restrooms as allegedly dangerous to white women, who would ostensibly become prey to black men if public amenities were not strictly race- and sex-segregated. The myth of the black male sexual predator has long been used to mobilize lynch mob terror. Now, reactionaries rehash this bigotry by invoking unfounded fears that young girls will be raped if “men”—by which they mean trans women—are allowed to use the same toilet. Undeniably, if anyone is in danger in public spaces, it’s trans people who face abuse no matter which restroom they enter.

The revolting stereotype of trans women as rapist interlopers invading women’s spaces was not invented by religious fundamentalists; rather, it has long been common parlance for a brand of petty-bourgeois feminists. While the ubiquitous LGBT acronym implies common unity, in fact transgender people were excluded and defamed by many of their gay and lesbian supposed “allies.” The historic 1969 Stonewall rebellion in NYC’s Greenwich Village was led by a multiracial and mainly poor group of drag queens and transgender people. Yet these activists—many of whom considered themselves part of a broader liberation movement—were soon ostracized from a gay milieu that was increasingly focused on bourgeois respectability, as seen today in the conservative fixation on marriage equality.

As Marxists, we defend any legal advances that gays, lesbians and transgender people can obtain, including the right of marriage and divorce, and we oppose discrimination in housing, employment and education. At the same time, we recognize that, particularly in the absence of social struggle, the capitalist rulers will always seek to reverse any gains that have been won. While trans people have become more visible in the media and on campuses, it will take a fundamental social and economic transformation to change the institutions that are the source of deeply rooted attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality. Any genuine fight for the liberation of women, gays, black people and all of the oppressed must be directed to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. We seek to imbue in the multiracial working class its historic mission as fighters for the socialist liberation of all humanity.

Suddenly Is Right-Frank Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review

Suddenly Is Right-Frank Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra, sterling Hayden, 1954, based on a 1943 story Active Duty by Richard Sales who wrote the screenplay, 1954      

For my generation, the generation of ‘68 as one political pundit who I read occasionally called those of us who were involved in the great counter-cultural wave of the mid to late 1960s, November 22, 1963 the day President Kennedy was assassinated by an ex-military man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a touchstone in our lives, as December 7, 1941 was for an earlier generation and 9/11 for a later one. Thus the subject matter of the 1954 film under review, Suddenly, an assassination attempt on the President of the United States as he passed through by train the Podunk fictional town of Suddenly out in California was a little shocking. If I had seen the film in 1954 at a time when I knee-deep, as were many of my fellow film critics, in attending Saturday afternoon matinee double features I probably would have passed it off as another great B-film noir effort. And at some level that was my reaction recently as well but the film brought to the surface more questions than I would have expected for such an old time film.              

The plot-line was like this if it helps the reader understand my perplexity. In advance of the unnamed President (although if you go by the original 1943 story the film is based on Active Duty by the screenwriter here Richard Sales hard it would have been Franklin Delano Roosevelt but by the film’s release Dwight Eisenhower) heading to some Western mountain retreat the town of Suddenly was suddenly (I couldn’t resist that, sorry) infested with all kinds of cops, feds, Secret Service, naturally, state and local cops. The important one of the latter here is Sheriff Shaw played by gruff he-man type Sterling Hayden. With all this police action it was fairly easy for a bunch of guys led by John Baron, played by Frank Sinatra, to pose as FBI agents and gain access to a primo location at a house across from the railroad station where the President was expected to stop. That house also just happened to be the home of Sheriff Shaw’s hoped for paramour, a war widow, her son, and her ex-Secret Service father.    

After a series of ruses Baron and his boys set up for the ambush in a position in the house and with a rifle that reminded me of what the situation was like at that 1963 Texas School Depository. But remember this is 1954 and fiction so that you know that this plot like many others before and since would be foiled before the dastardly deed was consummated. Foiled one way or another although not before a senior Secret Service agent was killed and Sheriff Shaw was wounded and taken hostage along with his sweetie and her family. The long and short of it was that the plot was foiled by the heroic action of that son, that paramour, her father and even the Sheriff. So you can see the film to get the skinny on the how of that. 

What is of interest, beyond the excellent job that Frank Sinatra did of playing an ex-soldier who learned to love to kill, who gained self-respect and dignity during World War II when he could freely shoot on sight anything that moved and nobody thought anything of it and the good job Sterling Hayden did as the Sheriff also an ex-soldier trying to figure out Baron’s motivation for shooting the President. Baron was nothing but a flat-out psychopath who had no more feeling about what he doing and who he was doing it to than the Germans he wasted in the war. I have seen guys like that, saw them during my own military service, saw them at the VA hospitals too when they completely broke down. With this caveat in Baron’s case he was a hired killer, was being paid big money, half a million, no mean sum back then, by unnamed sources to perform his task and blow the country. Who was behind it and their motivation didn’t interest him.  

In light of all the controversy surrounding the Kennedy murder by an ex-Marine soldier of unknown psychological stability and a million theories about whether he acted alone or as part of greater conspiracy that got me thinking about who might have hired Baron to do the dastardly deed. That was a matter of some speculation among the hostages in that ambush house and since it was the post-World War II 1950s and the heart of the red scare Cold War night  the obvious possibility was the “commies” (although not the Cuban variety since their revolution was several years away). But that did not end the possibilities. It could have been some nefarious criminals, the mob, unhappy about their exposure to public scrutiny. It might have been the military-industrial complex unhappy about their contracts, or lack of them. It could not have been Lyndon Johnson since he was not Vice President then but it could have been the sitting Vice President. You know who I mean in 1954 if you are old enough. Yeah, Richard Milhous Nixon, later to be a President and a known felon. Don’t tell me he wasn’t mean and craven enough to order that hit. Don’t be naïve. Watch this film and develop your own conspiracy theory.         

Mississippi Noir- William Faulkner's "Sanctuary"-A Book Review

Mississippi Noir- William Faulkner's "Sanctuary"-A Book Review

BOOK REVIEW

Sanctuary, William Faulkner, Vintage Books, New York, 1931

I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee. My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon. Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism. Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that.

So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930’s Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it.

The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis. Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'. Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks. Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect. Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way.

That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him. As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do). Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one. The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge’s daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity. All others watch out. Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi. Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon? Based on this effort I think not.

In Honor Of The 147th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-On The Barricades- The Last Days-Long Live The Memory Of The Communards

In Honor Of The 147th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-On The Barricades- The Last Days-Long Live The Memory Of The Communards

Henri Languet, Jacques Monet, and Louis Dubois, three young proletariat stalwarts who were apprentices at Jean-Paul Balin’s saddle shop (and hence of stocky muscular builds to tackle the work and mild- mannered dispositions as befits future saddlers dealing with picky owners and recalcitrant horses) sworn an oath, a blood brotherhood oath (a workers’ brotherhood oath not uncommonly clinched in blood  then) that they would be the last defenders, if possible, on the barricade Rue Marat (re-named from Rue Louis XIV with the establishment of the Commune to honor a fallen hero of ’89) which they had helped  build back in those heady March days. March days when after Thiers  and his bloody troops had fled to Versailles all things seemed possible and they had constructed the barricade seemingly with their bare hands, grit and determinations to defend their project. Had taken a runty make-shift jumble of logs, wire, paving stones, bricks, old furniture and anything else they could scrabble for and turned it into a secure, covered and homey little guardhouse. Guarding as always in the first days against the perfidious Prussians who encircled the city and those damn savage Theirs mercenaries still on the loose.

But that was past and now in mid-May the three lads, lads who thought they would grow old in the splendor of their collective efforts and the efforts of others among the revolutionary working classes of Paris, were faced with the daunting and seemingly utopian task of fending off the counter-revolution brought forth by those same Theirs troops under the blood-thirsty General Gallifit. Still they had made their oath and the grimly determined look on their faces as they mounted the newly constructed parapet to take their turns at guard duty, arms in hand, to face the ever approaching boom of cannon and sound of rifle fire spoke of young men who were at peace with themselves.       

The reports from the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Hotel de Ville were not good. The Prussians, in effect, had taken Thiers side (although the details of that collusion would not become known, known to them, anyway) and were letting his troops into the city through their lines. Most of the northern and eastern barricades had been smashed with heavy loss of life and serious recriminations. Summary executions and mass graves were already being reported throughout those sections of the city. Other acts of barbarity and atrocious behavior by Thiers mercenaries had also had an effect on morale and there had been some desertions and fleeing. Worse, ammunition and food supplies, always a problem from day one, were dwindling with no hope of replacements. Moreover there were signs that some leaders in military headquarters and some among the political leaders were panicking. Those reports, some true, some false, some just the normal fog of war had had small effect on the Rue Marat defenders, including our three stalwarts, since this section was the heart of the working- class where the heroic if tragic traditions of ’89 and ’48 were living memories, especially the latter and so there would be few defections, and less grumbling, grumbling about their fates here.

A couple of days after the solemn blood oath had been taken by the lads the roar of the cannons sent a shell with fifty meters of the barricade. Jean, on guard duty at the time, had seen the shell land and seen its effect blasting a huge hole in the lower floors of an apartment building nearby. That close cannon blast followed by the distant but audible tramp of marching feet meant only one thing, the defense at Rue Moulin had been breached and Theirs troops were headed to Rue Marat. They probably would be in front of the barricade, barring any guerilla skirmishes to hold them up, within an hour or two. The three young men and the approximately fifty other defenders, including some women, were all ordered to the barricade by Comrade Leclerc. Leclerc, who had shown himself to be recklessly brave in the past, in this case steadied his troops to the hopeless task in front of them. The tramping feet came closer.

In the event, true to their traditions of ’89 and ’48, the defenders of Rue Marat fought savagely to defend each inch of their precious barricade. We know now to no avail, we know maybe without even having to read about it, since we know how very few defenses by the oppressed of the world since Pharaoh’s times, maybe before, have been victorious. We know too that our three valiants fought savagely too, fought to the last paving stone. To no avail. The three, Jean grievously wounded, were captured by Thiers thugs, and marched about fifty paces from their beloved “home” and summarily executed. But note this-the three, knowing their fates were already sealed, defiantly shouted out Long Live The Paris Commune before the shots rang out. Yes, with the memory echo of such stout defenders in mind-Long Live The Paris Commune.

As We Approach The 80th Anniversary Of The Barcelona May Days In The Spanish Civil War- Another Look By Ernest Hemingway At The Spanish Civil War.

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry on the Barcelona May Days of 1937 in the Spanish Civil War (as usual with political events, past and present, be careful using this source).

Book Review

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND 49 OTHER STORIES, ERNEST HEMNGWAY, P.F. COLLIER&SON, NEW YORK, 1950


I have written reviews of many of Ernest Hemingway’s major novels elsewhere in this space. I have reviewed his major novel on the Spanish Civil War For Whom the Bells Toll, as well. Here I review a short play of his concerning that same event. This play is the main item of interest for me in an anthology that also includes his first 49 short stories. I will make a few minor comments on them at the end. However, here I wish to address the main issue that drives the play, The Fifth Column. I believe that this is fitting in the year of the 75th anniversary of the Barcelona May Days-the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution.

The main action here concerns the actions, manners, and love life of a seemingly irresolute character, Phillip, in reality is a committed communist who has found himself wrapped up intensely in the struggle to fight against Franco’s counter-revolution. His role is to ferret out the fifth columnists that have infiltrated into Madrid for intelligence/sabotage purposes on behalf of the Franco forces in the bloody civil war that was shaking Republican Spain. The term “fifth column” comes from the notion that not only the traditional four columns of the military are at work but a fifth column of sympathizers who are trying to destabilize the Republic. What to do about them is the central question of this, or any, civil war.

At the time there was some controversy that swirled around Hemingway for presenting the solution of summary executions of these agents as the correct way of dealing with this menace. I have questioned some of Hemingway’s political judgments on Spain elsewhere, particularly concerning the role of the International Brigades, but he is right on here. Needless to say, as almost always with Hemingway, a little love interest is thrown into the mix to spice things up. However, in the end, despite the criminal Stalinist takeover of the Spanish security apparatus and its counter-revolutionary role in gutting the revolutionary promise there this play presents a question all militants today need to be aware of.

49 short stories

I recently reviewed this same compilation of short stories in an edition that included the short play The Fifth Column that I was interested in discussing concerning the problem of spies and infiltrators from the Franco-led Nationalist side-and what to do about them- in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. This edition does not contain that play and therefore I can discuss the short stories on their own terms. Although Hemingway wrote many novels, most of which I have read at one time or another, I believe that his style and sparseness of language was more suitable to the short story. This compilation of his first forty-nine although somewhat uneven in quality, as is always the case with any writer, I think makes my point. In any case they contain not only some of his most famous short stories but also some of the best.

The range of subjects that interested Hemingway is reflected here, especially those that defined masculinity in his era. Included here are classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro about the big game hunt, The Killers- a short and pungent gangster tale that was made into a much longer movie much in the matter of his novel To Have Or Have Not, many of the youthful Nick Adams stories tracing his adventures from puberty to his time of service in World War I, stories on bullfighting- probably more than you will ever want to know about that subject but reflecting an aficionado’s appreciation of the art form, a few on the never-ending problems of love and its heartbreaks including a metaphorical one, reflecting the censorious nature of the times, on the impact of abortion on a couple’s relationship, and some sketches that were included in A Farewell to Arms. Well worth your time. As always Hemingway masterly wields his sparse and functional language to make his points. Again, as always read this man. This work is part of our world literary heritage.

The Mad Monks Of The Pre-War (World War I If Anybody Is Asking) Germanic Art- Klimt And Schiele At The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts

The Mad Monks Of The Pre-War (World War I If Anybody Is Asking) Germanic Art- Klimt And Schiele At The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts    

Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s Twisted Fates in Paint

Cardinal and Nun (Caress), 1912, Egon Schiele.

Kneeling forms against an indeterminate background, two figures interlocked as one… perhaps this painting looks familiar? The work is a tongue-in-cheek play by Egon Schiele and a slightly sacrilegious homage to his master, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Rather than love and passion, these religious figures are caught in the act, stiff against religious vow.

The Kiss (Lovers), 1907-1908, Gustav Klimt.

The Mentor and His Star Pupil

With a nearly 30 year age difference, Schiele and Klimt had a mentor-student relationship that lasted throughout their artistic careers. From copycat styling to love triangle rumors, this twisted story is told in their paintings.

In 1907 a then-teenaged Schiele saw Klimt as an idol and sought him out. The two fostered an artistic friendship and elements of Klimt’s avant-garde style can be found in many of Schiele’s early works and drawings, including these:

Left: Portrait of Gerti Schiele. Right: Standing Girl in a Plaid Garment. Both by Egon Schiele, 1909.

The Love Triangle with Wally Neuzil

Klimt’s influence was never far away. He introduced Schiele to many gallerists, fellow artists, and models, including the perhaps infamous Valerie (Wally) Neuzil. Neuzil had previously modeled for Klimt, and is rumored to have been his mistress. In 1911 she moved with Schiele to Krumau in the Czech Republic and thus began a four-year affair with him. In 1916 she returned to her old lover, posing again for Klimt.

The Hermits, Egon Schiele, 1912.

Left: Portrait of Wally, Gustav Klimt, 1916. Right: Woman in black stockings (Valerie Neuzil), Egon Schiele, 1913.

In fact, Schiele slyly alludes to this shared love in his 1912 painting The Hermits. The artist depicts two male figures in a Klimt-esque embrace, who on second take appear to be the mentor (on the left) and student (on the right) themselves. Dressed in all black, these two “hermits” are one mass but two thin white lines in the background connect the couple to a wilting rose, red like the color of Neuzil’s fiery hair.

Muse Shared, Again?

Klimt and Schiele portraits also reveal another shared subject: Viennese society woman Friederike Maria Beer-Monti. She rang Klimt’s doorbell in 1915 and asked if she could pose for his artworks. The process took six months and, in that time, she is rumored to have been one of his many flames. Just one year earlier, she had been the subject of a work by Klimt’s mentee.

Left: Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer-Monti, Egon Schiele, 1914; Right: Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer-Monti, Gustav Klimt, 1916

Both artists were notorious for their affairs with women. Klimt, who never married, is said to have fathered 17 children with his muses. Schiele often found himself in hot water with the authorities for his choice of studio visitors, children and adult, who posed nude.

Breaking Conventions in Art, Too

As personal relationships grew more interconnected so did their artistic styles. The bright colors and elongated bodies in Klimt’s unfinished The Bride and the more jagged lines and gestural coloring in Schiele’s Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff would lead their contemporaries to a new – and more personal – way of thinking about color and form in art.

Left: The Bride, Klimt, 1917; Right: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, Schiele, 1910.

With a relationship based on mutual respect, Klimt and Schiele continued to support and guide each other through the art world. There was an obvious amount of humor between the two; only a prized pupil could have gotten away with such sheer parodies of his mentor.

And, by the way, here’s a more banal portrait of Wally that her artists’ paintings didn’t show:

Schiele and Neuzil in Krumau, Czech Republic, 1913. Image via Leopold Museum.

Gustav Klimt is currently abuzz in the pop culture world. Actress Dame Helen Mirren is starring in The Woman in Gold, a movie about Klimt’s painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJeX6iIlO0

Learn more about Klimt’s life and career here: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-klimt-gustav.htm

For more on Egon Schiele’s romantic muses: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8507783/A-legend-laid-bare-Egon-Schiele-exhibition.html

Learn more about Schiele’s life and career here: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-schiele-egon.htm

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From The 1930s-1940s Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Rosalind Russell’s My Sister Eileen” (1942)- A Film Review

From The 1930s-1940s Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Rosalind Russell’s My Sister Eileen” (1942)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

My Sister Eileen, starring Rosalind Russell, Janet Blair, 1942

I like to listen to my own drummer when I am thinking through “the hook” for any film review I do (probably with any piece of public writing come to think of it). But once in a while some advice my long-time companion and now occasional writer since his retirement in this publication Sam Lowell filters through. Sam who over a long career made something of a specialty out of reviewing black and white films from the 1930s and 1940s (as a result of a youth spent watching this fare in a local retrospective theater in his hometown on angry Saturday afternoons) has always worked under the principal that even the flimsiest production from this era can produce at least a “slice of life” highlighting the times angle when all else fails. Good advice even for the better productions as here with this film under review directed by Alexander Hall and starring Rosalind Russell as Ruth one of the two leading characters in this classic golden age screwball comedy My Sister Eileen.     

So here’s the slice of life of the times angle. Two sisters, the aforementioned Ruth and the Eileen of the title, played by Janet Blair, are for their own reasons ready to break out of some Podunk small town a too small for big dreams town out in the heartland, out in Ohio. The first “hook” is that we are dealing with two women seeking professional careers the former as a writer the later as stage actress. That in itself is worthy of comment in marriage and little white house with picket fence women big dreams times (and maybe a fair part of the female audiences which Sam told me one time made up the majority of the movie population especially during World War II).

The more interesting part though is a look at the dynamics between the two sisters, especially how they will navigate in the world. Ruth, although hardly an ugly duckling is the serious intellectual type (if ironically funny as befits a screwball comedy) is not the kind of gal a whole bunch of guys then, maybe now too, would do a double take over. Eileen is the flirtatious, naïve, beauty of the family who guys will trip over themselves to check out and give it a shot. My wonder is off of this form beyond the entertainment value of the screwball comedy aspect whether such a film could be produced with that stark contrast and feminine competition in mind.

The two sisters in any case see eye to eye that they need to blow that small town and head well where else would budding writers and actresses head but New York City then and still the cultural heart and soul of America. While Ruth may be a step-up over Sis in the naïveté contest and more of a pure go-getting on the merits of her skills she has plenty of hayseed around the edges. The whole caper depends on the place in the big city given their cash flow where they land an apartment, which turns out to be a basement apartment which today might be seen as a golden dream but then was strictly from nowhere which a holy goof of a landlord cons them into renting (“holy goof” Frank Jackman’s term via Jack Kerouac which I feel free to steal every once in a while where it applies). The place winds up being a waystation for a rogue’s gallery of guys and other strays (the guys mostly courtesy of Eileen and her beauty/gullibility) with a whole rafter of slapstick some of it still funny but the rest a relic of the period.

Not to worry, remember this is a comedy, a slightly romantic comedy where even Ruth catches a guy, a magazine editor to boot, as the pair of sisters go through their paces adjusting to New York and working their ways up their respective food chains. But the whole caper was a close thing since their father rushing to the city to save his woe begotten daughters almost forces them to go back to small dream Ohio. The saving grace is that Ruth gets her short stories published in that magazine the editor works for and Eileen well she will work her charms with the publisher of that magazine who has a ton of contacts on old Broadway. Yeah, now that I think about it they couldn’t make one like this now but that’s my “hook” anyway.      

  

A View From The Left- All U.S. Forces Out of the Near East Now! Imperialist Bloodbath in Mosul

Workers Vanguard No. 1107	10 March 2017

All U.S. Forces Out of the Near East Now!

Imperialist Bloodbath in Mosul

In October, Iraqi government troops, “advised” by the U.S. military and supported by American artillery and aerial bombardment, launched their assault to “liberate” Mosul, the largest city in the north of the country, from the reactionary Sunni fundamentalist Islamic State (ISIS). Iranian-backed Shia militias as well as Kurdish pesh merga forces joined in besieging the city. They were met with stiff resistance, and only depopulated villages and the eastern part of Mosul had been taken by January.

Last year, the American bourgeois media ran lurid, daily headlines denouncing the siege of Aleppo by Syrian government forces and their Russian allies, which were fighting the largely Islamist opposition forces that then controlled that city. In contrast, the barbarity of the U.S.-led siege of Mosul has been systematically covered up. By early January, at least 130,000 civilians had been displaced from Mosul to nearby refugee camps. In that month alone, U.S.-led forces killed at least 200 civilians. But these figures are merely the tip of the iceberg.

The UN mission in Iraq has stopped releasing even heavily doctored casualty reports and those issued by the Pentagon are pure fiction, but some of the truth about ongoing U.S. atrocities has nonetheless filtered through. On December 7, an American airstrike hit the Al Salem hospital complex in east Mosul. Three weeks later, an imperialist warplane struck the Ibn al-Athir hospital compound, killing up to 16 civilians. Another 22 civilians were killed in a January 3 airstrike, while up to 30 more were slaughtered on January 12.

The U.S. has since greatly stepped up its military support to the Shia regime in Baghdad, with some 50 airstrikes a day. The Iraqi government’s armed forces are now moving in on densely populated west Mosul with its 750,000 overwhelmingly Sunni inhabitants, setting the stage for a massive bloodbath. Already, some 45,000 people have been driven out of the city since this offensive began on February 19. This was one day before U.S. secretary of defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis arrived in Iraq to meet with the prime minister and defense minister. In 2004, Mattis, then a Marine Corps general, commanded the U.S. assault on Falluja, which led to the slaughter of at least 600 civilians and reduced much of the city to rubble. During that attack, U.S. soldiers shot down civilians holding white flags of surrender and targeted ambulances trying to carry the wounded and dying to the few medical facilities not destroyed by U.S. bombs.

U.S. forces in Falluja also used white phosphorus, a chemical weapon that burns deep into muscle and bone. Last fall, the Washington Post (23 September 2016) reported that the U.S. was again using white phosphorus during military operations east of Mosul. The depravity of the American imperialists, who rail against ISIS (and the Syrian regime) for the purported use of chemical weapons, is matched only by their hypocrisy.

Iraq has been turned into a killing field under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. The UN sanctions introduced under the first Bush administration in 1990 continued throughout Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party administration, which also carried out numerous airstrikes against the country. The sanctions led to the deaths of some 1.5 million Iraqis through preventable disease and starvation. The 2003 U.S. invasion was launched by another Republican president, Bush Jr., and the occupation continued apace under the Democrat Barack Obama. Now Donald Trump’s viscerally anti-Muslim regime is further pulverizing Iraq. The two capitalist parties share a common interest in maintaining American supremacy in this strategic, oil-rich region.

The U.S. currently has more than 5,000 troops in Iraq and at least another 500 special forces operating in neighboring Syria. They are backed by thousands of private military contractors while other armed forces units rotate in and out. As journalist Patrick Cockburn noted in the London Independent (28 February): “Aside from closer involvement of US troops in the fighting, the Trump administration has so far changed very little in operations against Isis initiated under President Obama.”

As it again escalates its involvement in Iraq, the U.S. has also stepped up its attacks in Yemen. American fighter jets pounded alleged Al Qaeda targets in the country in early March. These attacks came several weeks after a widely publicized Navy SEAL raid that killed some 30 civilians, including nine children. At the same time, the U.S. is militarily backing Saudi Arabia—a theocratic monarchy whose social strictures are similar to those of ISIS—in its murderous war against the Houthis in Yemen. U.S. out of the Near East now!

Down With U.S. Imperialism!

The escalation of U.S. intervention in the Near East underscores the need for class-conscious workers in the U.S. to oppose the wars, occupations and depredations carried out by their “own” imperialist rulers. As we noted in “Syria Quagmire” (WV No. 1091, 3 June 2016): “It is not ISIS or some other Islamist force that has taken income inequality in the U.S. to virtually unprecedented heights. The same U.S. capitalist ruling class that wreaks death and destruction abroad gorges itself on profits while the workers it exploits have their jobs axed and their health and pension benefits torn up. This same ruling class unleashes its cops to kill black youth on the streets, holds nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population in its dungeons and rounds up desperate immigrants for deportation.”

ISIS is itself the imperialists’ creation. Its precursors include those who cut their teeth as mujahedin (“holy warriors”) in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In Iraq, it emerged out of the intercommunal slaughter triggered by the 2003 U.S. invasion, which ripped the country’s social fabric to shreds, killing hundreds of thousands. Having overthrown the regime of Saddam Hussein, whose bonapartist rule was based on the Sunni minority, the U.S. put in place a government based on the Shia majority. From unleashing Shia death squads to rounding up Sunnis associated with the previous regime, the Baghdad government poured gas on the exploding sectarian powder keg. Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of which later morphed into ISIS, gained support from many aggrieved Sunnis amid the communal warfare. ISIS expanded its operations into Syria and captured Mosul in 2014 as Iraqi army troops fled.

Since then, predominantly Sunni cities and towns up and down the country have been razed to the ground by government counteroffensives. As Patrick Cockburn wrote in the Independent (15 February): “Some 70 per cent of the houses in Ramadi, the capital of the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province are in ruins or are badly damaged. Even where many houses are still standing, as in Fallujah 40 miles west of Baghdad, the people who come back to them have to live without electricity, water, jobs or medical care. In practice, the Shia-dominated Iraqi government wants to break the back of Sunni resistance to its rule so it will never be capable of rising again.”

Marxists are hostile to all forces in the intercommunal conflict in Iraq, and in Syria’s squalid civil war between the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad and various Islamist-dominated rebels. But we do have a side against the U.S. and the other imperialist powers involved in the region, including Britain and France. A military setback for Washington in the Near East could also stimulate domestic opposition to U.S. capitalism among a populace that has been ground down by years of frontal attacks on wages, jobs and working conditions. We aim to turn disillusionment and anger among working people in the U.S. into class struggle against the capitalist rulers.

Marxists are implacable opponents of everything the ISIS cutthroats stand for, including their slaughter and forcible expulsion of Shias, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians and others. But we recognize that when they carry out military strikes against the U.S. occupiers and their proxies—the Iraqi army, Shia militias and Kurdish armed forces in Iraq and Syria—such acts coincide with the interests of the international working class, including in the U.S. At the same time, we do not imbue these repugnant forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials.

It is in the nature of imperialism to subjugate, oppress and exploit the world’s toiling masses, and the U.S. imperialists are the greatest enemy of the workers and oppressed worldwide. While our main opposition is to the American and other imperialists, we also oppose the other capitalist regional powers (Russia, Iran, Turkey) that have become involved in the conflict and demand that they, too, get out.

For a United, Independent Kurdistan!

The machinations of U.S. imperialism have set the stage for a bloody unraveling of the region, in particular by sharply intensifying the conflict between Shia Iran and the Sunni Persian Gulf states (especially Saudi Arabia) as well as Turkey. Iranian-funded militias are operating to the west of Mosul, while Turkey has 2,000 military personnel on a base to the northeast, where it has been training Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga and Sunni opponents of ISIS. After the Iraqi prime minister protested the presence of Turkish troops, Turkey’s strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned him to “know your place!” Earlier this month, Turkish-allied Kurdish forces engaged in armed clashes with ethnically Kurdish Yazidi militias linked to the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party, which Turkey and the U.S. label a “terrorist” organization.

The Kurdish people, whose homeland is in the mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, are the largest nation in the Near East without a state. We call for a united, independent Kurdistan. This is part of the fight for a socialist republic of united Kurdistan in a socialist federation of the Near East. We also support Kurdish independence from individual capitalist states—e.g., the right of Kurds in Turkey to secede. However, in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalists have currently subordinated the just fight for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism.

Such betrayals by Kurdish nationalist leaders are not new. During the 2003 invasion, Iraqi Kurdish forces actively collaborated with U.S. forces and then provided military auxiliaries for the occupation. A year later, Kurdish pesh merga were mobilized alongside the U.S. troops in the assault on Falluja. More recently, Kurdish forces acting in concert with Washington and the Baghdad government have ethnically cleansed Arab villages, including near Mosul. Kurdish militias also played a major role in the initial offensive, but have agreed not to enter the city of Mosul itself at the behest of the Iraqi government forces, who are determined to take control over the city through even more systematic sectarian atrocities.

By selling their souls to the imperialists and various regional bourgeois regimes, the Kurdish leaders have helped to perpetuate the divide-and-rule stratagems that inflame communal, national and religious tensions and reinforce the oppression of the Kurdish masses. Their crimes will redound against the long-oppressed Kurdish people.

Imperialist Atrocities Shatter Near East

“I think west Mosul will be destroyed,” Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurdish leader and Iraq’s former foreign and finance minister, told the Independent in a February 15 interview. An article by Turkey-based reporter Adnan R. Khan described the grim situation:

“Liberating Mosul now has little to do with reclaiming Iraqi territory from a brutal interloper; it is a matter of revenge.

“The grotesque signs of payback are rapidly emerging in east Mosul: mutilated bodies left to rot on the rubble heaps of the city, men with hands bound behind their backs, legs lashed together, faces half blown off....

“Mixed in with the incoming soldiers, according to reports gleaned from Iraqi officials, are members of the Popular Mobilisation Units, a paramilitary force made up of Shia militias, some of whom harbour apocalyptic visions of an imminent, world-ending battle between Shia and Sunnis. In their eyes, everyone in Mosul is an ISIS sympathizer.”

— “What Went Wrong in Mosul,” macleans.ca, 23 February

The historical backdrop to the current communal carnage is the carve-up of the Near East by the British and French imperialists, who seized the region from the collapsing Ottoman Empire following World War I. The imperialists amalgamated different peoples in artificial colonial or semicolonial states, forcing together those who wished to live apart while dividing those who sought to be united. This fragile system of capitalist rule could only be maintained through naked brutality, whether under direct imperialist control or through a local strongman such as Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad.

Given the all-sided devastation of Iraq as well as Syria today, the future of the masses there hinges on working-class struggle in nearby countries with strategic concentrations of proletarian power—centrally Egypt, Turkey and Iran. What is vital is the forging of Marxist workers parties committed to the struggle for a socialist federation of the Near East. We have no illusions that it will be an easy task to win the workers of the region, ground down by their capitalist rulers and imperial overlords and under all manner of reactionary ideology, to the program of proletarian revolution. But there will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no freedom from imperialist subjugation, no emancipation of women and no end to the exploitation of working people short of overthrowing the capitalist order. This perspective must be linked to the fight for working-class revolutions in the imperialist centers.

The cycle of imperialist wars and occupations underscores the barbarity of the global capitalist order. The task of Marxists here in the U.S. is to instill in the working class the understanding that it has the social power and historic interest to destroy capitalist-imperialist rule from within, through socialist revolution. To realize this task requires forging a revolutionary workers party, U.S. section of a reforged Fourth International committed to the fight for workers rule over the entire planet. As we wrote in “Imperialist Rape of Iraq” (WV No. 800, 28 March 2003):

“Mass slaughter is the concentrated expression and ultimate logic of the ‘normal’ brutal workings of the capitalist system, which daily condemns countless numbers around the world to death by malnutrition, lack of medical care and industrial murder.

“If there is to be a choice for coming generations of working-class and minority youth other than one of grinding exploitation, joblessness, mass imprisonment or military servitude, if the impoverished masses of the world are to have a future other than starvation and slaughter, this whole system must be torn up by its roots through a socialist revolution and replaced by a rational, planned economy internationally.”