Saturday, October 16, 2021

In Honor of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry -1859

In Honor of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry -1859 


Workers Vanguard No. 1139




 September 2018
 

In Honor of John Brown
Part One



We print below the first part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander at a February 24 Black History Month forum in New York City.

I was just handed a piece of paper with a quote by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, that I want to start with. It’s from his speech on the way to prison in 1943, when 18 Trotskyist and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders were jailed for opposing imperialist World War II. Cannon said, “The grandest figure in the whole history of America was John Brown” (printed in Speeches for Socialism [1971]). Over the years, a number of comrades have paid tribute to John Brown in North Elba, New York, where he is buried, and have given talks on different aspects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We raise the slogans “Finish the Civil War!” and “For black liberation through socialist revolution!” to express the historic tasks that fall to the revolutionary party. Acting as the tribune of the people, a revolutionary workers party will fight for the interests of all the oppressed—black people, Latinos, women, Asians, immigrants and others. It will lead the working class to carry out a third American revolution, a proletarian revolution, the only road to the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.

The existence of black chattel slavery in the United States had a peculiar character. “Chattel” means personal property; it meant to own people like cattle to trade or kill. Comrades and friends will recall that veteran Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser underscored in his writings some 60 years ago how the concept of race was central to the development of American capitalism. He outlined how the material basis of black oppression drew upon a precapitalist system of production. Slavery played an important role in the development of British industrial capitalism and U.S. capitalism. British textile owners received Southern cotton, which was shipped by powerful New York merchants. New York merchants used some of this money to send manufactured goods to the South. Although slavery and capitalism were intertwined, they were different economic systems. There is an excellent presentation by comrade Jacob Zorn called “Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism” (printed in WV Nos. 942, 943 and 944, 11 and 25 September and 9 October 2009).

I will add that the conflation of slaves with skin color didn’t exist in ancient slavery. But with regard to the U.S., the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it well: “We are then a persecuted people not because we are colored, but simply because this color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude.” Black people constitute a race-color caste, with their color defining their so-called inferior status. In the majority, black people are forcibly segregated at the bottom of this racist, capitalist system, deemed pariahs and outcasts. Anti-black racism is ruthlessly promoted by the ruling class to keep the working class divided and to conceal the common class interests of working people against their exploiters.

Today, the filthy rich capitalists’ huge profits rest upon the backs of working people—black, immigrant and white. The rulers’ system of “checks and balances” has been and always will be that they get the checks while they balance their bone-crushing, anti-worker, anti-poor budgets on our backs! The multiracial working class, with a strategic black component, has the social power and the interest to champion the fight not only for black freedom, but of all the oppressed and to break the chains of wage slavery. Whether or not this is understood at the moment, the fight for black freedom is an inseparable part of the struggle for the emancipation of the entire working class from capitalist exploitation. The working class cannot take power without confronting and defeating centuries of black oppression. We say that those who labor must rule!

The Road to Harpers Ferry

In reflecting on John Brown, fellow abolitionist Harriet Tubman once said: We didn’t call him John Brown, we called him our “savior” because he died for our people. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, military veteran Robert F. Williams, who organized armed self-defense against the Klan and was driven out of the country on trumped-up kidnapping charges, carried around with him a copy of A Plea for Captain John Brown, an 1859 speech in defense of Brown by Henry David Thoreau. Malcolm X also praised John Brown.

The notion that John Brown was crazy, an insane mass murderer and a fanatic, is still peddled in bourgeois academia and cinema. The truth is that John Brown was a revolutionary who saw deeper than any other abolitionist that it would take a revolution, a bloody war to uproot slavery. John Brown did not dread that war. He did not deprecate it. He did not seek to avert it. And that is one reason why the bourgeoisie still looks at him with disdain and hatred.

Along with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, John Brown was part of the revolutionary wing of the abolitionist movement who saw the outlines of what was coming in the struggle to destroy chattel slavery. Abraham Lincoln was a good leader during the Civil War who, under pressure, did eventually make it an official war against slavery. John Brown’s final push against slavery had been to lead a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. For this, he and several of his followers were publicly executed by the State of Virginia in December 1859.

Summing up for the world his last thoughts before his hanging, John Brown hurled a bolt of lightning toward his captors and executioners, proclaiming that this land must be purged with blood—there needed to be revolution. He was almost 60 years old, which is quite amazing. How did John Brown become a revolutionary abolitionist dedicated to the destruction of slavery through force? From where did he think he would get the forces to accomplish his goals? What is the significance today of his struggle for black freedom?

John Brown was born in 1800. He was a generation removed from the first American Revolution which, while getting rid of British colonial oppression, left slavery intact and in most states gave suffrage only to propertied white males. He was deeply religious and raised by parents who hated slavery. His father Owen Brown, who had a significant influence on John, was a pacifist and a Calvinist as well as an active abolitionist, a stationmaster and conductor on the Underground Railroad. Fueled by Protestant beliefs, his family was tough and resourceful.

Owen subscribed to abolitionist papers like The Liberator, which John grew up reading. John Brown worked with his father on the Underground Railroad, gaining valuable experience for his future revolutionary activities. While herding cattle when he was 12 years old, John witnessed a young slave boy being pummeled mercilessly by a slaveholder with an iron shovel. This incident shook him to the core. John picked up on the fact that in contrast to the slave boy, he himself was treated very well by the slaveowner. This only infuriated John more. He knew that the slave boy was horribly oppressed and had nothing, not a mother and not a father. From that point on, John Brown declared eternal war on slavery.

Brown fervently believed in the “divine authenticity of the Bible.” His prayers were combined with a call to deliver the slaves from bondage. But he was not sitting back and waiting for his pie in the sky. As black historian Benjamin Quarles put it in Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974): “Prayer to Brown was a prelude to action, not a release from further involvement.” In his last days, he cursed hypocritical preachers and their offers of consolation, saying they should be praying for themselves.

John Brown and Abolitionism

I would like to briefly touch on the abolitionist movement. The U.S. abolitionist movement was part of the broader bourgeois radicalism in the 19th century, developing from radical elements of the Protestant Reformation and the 18th-century Enlightenment. It was also a product of the limitations of the first American Revolution, which continued the enslavement of half a million people. By John Brown’s time, the number of slaves had grown to four million.

In the beginning of his political awakening, John Brown admired the anti-slavery Quakers and also closely read The Liberator, which was put out by the most famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison of Boston. Some of the first abolitionists like Garrison had belonged to the American Colonization Society that formed in 1816. The Colonization Society was a racist alliance between abolitionists and slaveholders promoting the settlement of black Americans in Africa. The underlying purpose of the colonization scheme was to drive free blacks out of the country. Free blacks were viewed with suspicion that they might stir up slave rebellions. Black abolitionists, who saw the organization as anathema, bitterly and vigorously resisted colonization because it told black people that they should leave the land of their birth.

Starting in 1817, a series of black abolitionist conventions was organized in various cities in order to defeat this racist program, in what came to be known as the Negro Convention Movement. After attending the 1831 National Negro Convention, William Lloyd Garrison became radicalized and eventually sharply repudiated colonization. This gained him respect, admiration and support among abolitionists—especially black abolitionists.

There was considerable racism in the abolitionist movement. However, radical abolitionists had a wider vision for human emancipation. As we stated in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5 (February 1988): “Although slavery was their preeminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers’ rights.” The women’s suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. Women’s rights leaders such as Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah, who came from a slaveholding family, were staunch fighters for black freedom. They were clear on the connection between black and women’s oppression. Angelina said: “I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” The radical egalitarianism embodied in this principled position also animated John Brown’s hatred of all oppression.

The beginning of the formation of white abolitionist organizations was the establishment of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Formed in 1832, it was galvanized by Nat Turner’s slave revolt a year prior, which killed some 60 white people. The revolt was followed by the execution of Nat Turner and his followers, and the massacre of a considerable number of black people.

William Lloyd Garrison represented the “moral suasion” wing of the abolitionists. Garrison also thought that the North should secede from the South, which objectively meant leaving the slaves helpless and defenseless. Although he sincerely hated slavery and wanted to see it destroyed, he stood for passive resistance. He rejected political action and instead put forward a futile program to appeal to the conscience of slaveowners to liberate their slaves. Garrison’s slogan of “No Union with Slaveholders” placed the struggle against slavery on the level of particular evils of individual slaveholders.

Frederick Douglass, who started out as a Garrisonian, strenuously objected to this slogan, recognizing that behind it was a defeatist strategy. He counterposed an aggressive fight against slavery. He instead raised in its place the slogan, “No Union with Slaveholding.” This was not a word play, but a different program and outlook. Douglass understood that the slaveholding system had to be destroyed, mainly through political means.

John Brown followed the debates and struggles of the abolitionists closely, especially those of the militant black abolitionists such as the young minister Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker, who advocated that the slaves rise up against their hated oppressors. According to social historian Robert Allen in his book Reluctant Reformers (1975), David Walker “was a free black who operated a small business in Boston, and in his spare time acted as a local agent for Freedom’s Journal, a black anti-slavery newspaper.” Walker argued that a “God of justice and armies” would destroy the whole system. His pamphlet, the Appeal, called for the immediate abolition of slavery.

But Walker was contradictory. He combined a militant stance of resistance to slaveholders with a call for the masters to repent and to voluntarily relinquish the slave system. He had explicit instructions on what the slaves must do when they rose up for their freedom: “Make sure work—do not trifle, for they will not trifle with you—they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us in order to subject us to that wretched condition—therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed.” The Southern planters wanted him captured dead or alive and enacted state bans on anti-slavery literature. Reportedly, both Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s address to the 1843 National Negro Convention appeared together in a pamphlet that John Brown paid to produce. Brown would incorporate the spirit of Walker’s Appeal in his attempt to win black people to his revolutionary plans.

Transforming into a Revolutionary

As I mentioned earlier, as a young man, John Brown was an Underground Railroad operator. The Underground Railroad was bringing to the fore the most conscious elements of anti-slavery black radicalism. The great significance of the Underground Railroad, an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk their lives, was not the number of slaves it freed—which was perhaps 1,000 slaves per year out of a population of four million slaves. Its importance in the long run was that it crystallized a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote, it “more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic.”

In pursuing his growing commitment to black freedom, at age 34, John Brown wrote a letter to his brother about his aspiration to establish a school for black people. He understood the revolutionary implications of this: “If the young blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in rock, and all the slaveholders know it well.”

In the 1830s and ’40s, John Brown moved around a lot to earn a living and support his family. He went to Springfield, Massachusetts, and became more familiar with the lives and struggles of black people. Brown moved to North Elba in upstate New York, where well-known and wealthy radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith had donated land to be used by black people for farming. Brown forged ties with Smith as well as with radical black New York abolitionists like James McCune Smith and the Gloucester family of Brooklyn. He had many unsuccessful business pursuits, as a tanner, a land surveyor, a wool merchant. His travels while doing business enabled him to gain indispensable knowledge of the different strands of abolitionism in the Midwest and Northeast. From what he observed, he wasn’t impressed with the talkathons of abolitionist meetings. He never joined them because he disdained mere talk.

Brown was never able to set up a school, but he pressed on with teaching black people history and how to farm and carry out self-defense against slave catchers. His belief in social equality was clear. He shocked one white visitor to his home, who observed that black people were eating at the same table with the Brown family. The Browns showed respect to the black people there by addressing them as Mister and Missus.

John Brown kept his ear close to the ground, the better to follow and assimilate the thoughts of free and fugitive black people. Under the guise of a black writer, he wrote to a black abolitionist paper, the Ram’s Horn, to offer his frank opinions on how best to push forward black self-improvement. He didn’t hide his observations or criticisms of what he considered to be negative behaviors of some black people, ranging from flashy dressing to smoking—surely in accordance with his strict Calvinist morality. At the same time, he struggled to win them to the understanding that they should not meekly bow down to white racist aggression, but should resist it.

There was one major development that accelerated his transformation into a professional revolutionary. It was the 1837 violent killing of Elijah Lovejoy, the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy was attacked by a pro-slavery mob, which also hurled his printing press into the river. His murder shocked the abolitionist movement. Lovejoy was the first abolitionist martyr—and it could happen to any of them.

John Brown’s developing revolutionary social consciousness cost him some racist “anti-slavery” friends. As the biographer Tony Horwitz noted: “The Browns believed in full equality for blacks and were determined to fight for it” (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War [2011]). The family’s resistance to segregation came to a head when they fought for integration in a Congregational church they attended. During a revival meeting, black people in attendance were seated in the rear of the church. At the next church service, Brown and his family gave up their seats and led the black worshippers to sit in theirs, located in the family pew. The deacons of the church were outraged and later wrote to them that they should find somewhere else to worship. This vile racism led John to distance himself from the institution of the church.

Preparing for Battle

Consciously wanting to link up with militant black abolitionists, John Brown put Frederick Douglass high on his list. Douglass and Brown had their first meeting in 1847 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Brown had avidly read Douglass’s abolitionist paper, The North Star (later Frederick DouglassPaper), and went on to share his developing plans. According to Horwitz:

“Brown pointed to a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia and deep into the South. Filled with natural forts and caves, these mountains, Brown said, had been placed by God ‘for the emancipation of the negro race’.”

This meeting was a turning point in Douglass’s evolution from a protégé of Garrison into a revolutionary abolitionist. Brown fought to convince him of the futility of non-resistance to the slaveholders. He told him that the only thing the slaveowners appreciated was sticks upside their heads—something like that. Five years later, Douglass would abandon his naive faith in pacifist non-resistance. He began to openly state that slavery could be destroyed only through bloodshed, which shocked his former comrades.

Going forward, several challenges loomed for both revolutionary abolitionists, Douglass and Brown: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the further expansion of slavery to the Western territories like Kansas, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The last involved a slave named Dred Scott who sued for his freedom on the basis that he had resided in a free state for many years. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled against Scott and went on to assert that black people, free or slave, were not U.S. citizens. In the words of Taney, which are echoed by today’s modern-day slaveholders—the ruling class in this country—black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Let me say a few things about the continued expansion of slavery. The South’s cotton production was booming in the 1840s and ’50s. It supplied most of the world’s demand, outstripping other American exports combined. Northerners wanted slavery to stay put where it was.

Many white laborers were primarily concerned with having to compete with black people for jobs, not with the inherent brutality against and degradation of slaves. Some Northern states, such as Ohio and Illinois, had long enacted “Black Laws” that set controls on freed blacks and deterred black people from migrating there. Meanwhile, there were bloody land grabs under way, such as during the 1846-48 Mexican-American War, when the United States seized about half of Mexico’s territory. The appetites of slaveowners and prospective ones were whetted. The question was sharply posed: Could Southerners carry “their” property into new territories? Would those territories be free or slave?

The Compromise of 1850, which was contentious in Congress, concluded that California would be a free state, while the question of Utah and New Mexico was left to the white settlers to decide. Along with this, the new Fugitive Slave Act (the first was enacted in 1793) now mandated that ordinary citizens were required to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves, even forming posses to do so. Northerners in effect became deputized slave catchers.

Douglass had plenty to say about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In 1852 he remarked: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen or more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check.” Anti-slavery fury was swelling in the North, and in places like Boston, slave catchers were set upon and fugitives freed. However, because the full power of the federal government lay behind the enforcement of the law, militant abolitionists were not always successful.

For his part, John Brown responded to the Fugitive Slave Act by forming a secret self-defense organization to fight slave catchers. The organization was called the United States League of Gileadites, named after Gideon, a figure in the Old Testament who repelled the attacks of enemies who far outnumbered his forces. Brown drew up a fighting program for the League called “Words of Advice.” In the League’s manifesto, he offered such tactics as “when engaged do not work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies…. Never confess, never betray, never renounce the cause.”

With a plan slowly germinating in his mind, John Brown was gathering the forces for the raid on Harpers Ferry. As then-Trotskyist George Novack wrote about Brown in January 1938 (printed in the New International), “By establishing a stronghold in the mountains bordering Southern territory from which his men could raid the plantations, he planned to free the slaves, and run them off to Canada.” Accordingly, Brown did a serious investigation of the terrain, including circling on a map figures on slave concentrations throughout the South. This information was discovered after he was captured at Harpers Ferry.

John Brown also prepared through reading and travel. A number of his business pursuits enabled him to go to places outside the U.S. like England, for example, where in 1851 he went seeking better prices for his wool. A key part of his trip to Europe was to inspect military fortifications, like at Waterloo where Napoleon met defeat. He studied military tactics and especially guerrilla war in mountainous terrain. He read books on Nat Turner’s revolt, the Maroons—the runaway slaves in Jamaica and other places who waged guerrilla warfare—and Francisco Espoz y Mina, the guerrilla leader in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. He also had books on Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and a biography of the leader of the English Revolution of 1640, Oliver Cromwell. Brown was familiar with and recited for his friends and followers the story of Spartacus, who led a slave rebellion against Roman rule.

His preparations for war meant that he didn’t spend a lot of time with the rest of his family in North Elba. They understood and agreed, knowing that while he was away, it was their duty to resist the slave catchers, even if it meant imprisonment or death. Brown cared deeply for his family’s welfare and tried to alleviate some of their brutal poverty. He did what he could to support them as they all endured incredible hardships and suffered many setbacks. For example, John himself fathered 20 children and lost nine of them before they reached age ten, including three on three consecutive days. The Brown family knew that the cause of the slaves’ emancipation transcended their personal lives and they stuck it out, together. For John Brown, slavery was the “sum of villanies,” the ultimate atrocity against human freedom. And the fight lay ahead.

[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1140
21 September 2018
 

In Honor of John Brown
(Part Two)
We print below the second part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander at a February 24 Black History Month forum in New York City. The first part appeared in WV No. 1139 (7 September).

I’m sure that most of you have heard that what’s so terrible about the abolitionist John Brown was that he was a heartless, bloodthirsty killer. These are longstanding bourgeois lies. The real John Brown fought for armed slave rebellion and organized armed struggle against the slave system in “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s.

In 1855, John Brown joined his four oldest sons who had migrated to Kansas to fight against it becoming a slave state and win the territory for the “free-soilers.” The free-soilers had been associated with the short-lived Free Soil Party, whose platform called both for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government to provide free homesteads to white settlers. In 1854, many of the Party’s former members had gone on to join the newly established Republican Party, which was born on the platform of “free soil” and “free labor.”

It was a period of turmoil. Congress had just passed a new law called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the terms of the 1820 Missouri Compromise that was supposed to limit slavery’s expansion. Sponsored by a Northern Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, the law allowed the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. According to Karl Marx, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had “placed slavery and freedom on the same footing.” As he described it, “For the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed” (“The North American Civil War” [1861]). The Kansas-Nebraska Act was nothing more than a signal for pro-slavery Missourians next door to invade and, through terror and violence, open Kansas to slavery.

At this point it was clear that there wouldn’t be, and couldn’t be, any lasting “compromises.” From the early days of the republic there evolved several sham “compromises” between the North and South. The first of these concessions, coming out of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, made slaves three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress; this gave the Southern slaveowners control of Washington. Now, the fundamental and irreconcilable class interests between the slavocracy and the Northern industrial bourgeoisie were coming to a head. One or the other would prevail. War was coming and Kansas was the next arena.

After some initial hesitation, Brown sought the approval of his black supporters and garnered the support of several radical abolitionists before joining his sons in Kansas. He decided that it was best to go there because it would be more important ultimately for the cause of freedom. From that point, his determination hardened and grew in the fight against slavery.

John Brown brought weapons and ammunition with him to Kansas to equip an anti-slavery militia where he was captain. He and his sons confronted a well-armed pro-slavery group of Missourians appropriately called the Border Ruffians, who were pouring into the state to terrorize free settlers. The free settlers needed an infusion of fresh blood to beat back a highly organized campaign of intimidation and murder. John Brown, his sons and supporters waged several successful battles in their defense. His militia retaliated for a number of murders of free settlers—in one night raid they killed five pro-slavery sympathizers near Pottawatomie Creek. Brown’s force struck fear into the hearts of the marauding pro-slavery bands.

Both the governor of Missouri and President James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat, offered rewards for Brown’s capture. Buchanan and other Northerners with Southern sympathies were called “doughfaces” because they were “half-baked and malleable.” Without John Brown’s intervention, which strengthened the free settlers’ morale and military defenses, a lot worse could have happened. It was not impossible that Kansas could have become a slave state.

Brown fought in Kansas throughout 1856. Toward the end of his stay, a Missouri slave crossed the border into Kansas, seeking help from anyone to keep him and his family from being sold. What do you think John Brown did? He led his militia to where the slaveholder was back in Missouri. His forces freed a number of slaves, eleven in all, including the family that was imperiled. A slaveowner was also killed. Brown’s militia seized horses and supplies to facilitate their escape and transport with the final destination being Canada. The local, state and federal authorities were outraged and over $3,000 was put on Brown’s head.

In the end, the slaves made it to Canada because of John Brown. In a frenzy, some of his abolitionist “friends” denounced him—not for seizing the slaves, but for the seizure of the slaveowners’ other personal property. And it’s not surprising, because some of these abolitionists were capitalists, for whom capitalist private property was sacred. For his part, John Brown had no trust in politicians from either political party. As author Stephen B. Oates noted in To Purge This Land With Blood (1970), Brown “hated the Democrats because he believed their party was dominated by the South and despised the Republicans because they were too ‘wishy-washy’ on the slavery issue.”

Roll Call for Harpers Ferry

The next arena for Brown was Chatham, Ontario. Chatham was a small town just east of Detroit and was a terminus on the Underground Railroad where thousands of fugitive slaves and free blacks resided. Living nearby in St. Catherines was Harriet Tubman. I’ll get back to her in a minute.

In Chatham in May 1858, John Brown convened a secret convention to debate the way forward and to finalize plans for the coming assault on and seizure of the federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The primary aim of the convention was to seek recruits for this action. One of the more important parts of the convention was a programmatic document he submitted—the Provisional Constitution. It was no mere empty exercise, but the basis for a selection of an abolitionist vanguard for revolutionary war. John Brown was making plans for a future provisional egalitarian free-state government in the mountains.

Brown’s Provisional Constitution was seriously debated. Some delegates argued that the best time to have a coordinated attack somewhere in the South would be when the U.S. government was at war. But the argument to delay was defeated. There were delegates who rejected any reference to the flag of the United States as a symbol of freedom; they said, this is my oppression, the American flag. Brown argued that the flag was an expression of America’s early democratic ideals—a vote was taken and he won. It became the flag against slavery during the Civil War, but today it is the flag of imperialist plunder and mass murder, racial oppression and anti-immigrant bigotry.

When his business was finished in Chatham, he finalized his plans for Harpers Ferry. Brown tirelessly gave speeches to raise money for his war preparations, for the consummation of his life’s work to free the slaves. In need of more money for arms and supplies, he contacted a radical abolitionist group that he relied upon: the “Secret Six,” which included Franklin Sanborn and Gerrit Smith, who were animated by his Kansas exploits. However, he never revealed to them the specific target of his next strike.

Brown knew that in order to attract significant black support, it was vital to win over Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Tubman was key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen and fugitives who had settled in Canada beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Through her courageous Underground Railroad work, Tubman had extensive knowledge of the planned Appalachian route. Showing deep appreciation of her leadership skills, Brown called her the “General” or “He.” Tubman fully embraced Brown’s plans. She was organizing people to go with her, but she fell ill and didn’t make it. Unceasing toil and hardships, on top of terrible spells of unconsciousness and injuries sustained from beatings by slaveowners, had taken their toll. John Brown was deeply disappointed.

John Brown was about to lead 21 men to what would be in effect the first battle of the Civil War. As the time for action arrived, Brown met one last time with Frederick Douglass. It didn’t go well. He revealed his plans for seizing the armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Douglass sharply disagreed and said that they were falling into a “perfect steel-trap” and would be crushed. They argued for several hours, and Douglass turned down the offer to go. However, at the meeting was a friend, an ex-slave named Shields Green, who was one tough fighter and became highly esteemed by John Brown and his associates. When questioned about going or staying, Green remarked: I think I’ll go with the Old Man. Four other black men went—Osborne Anderson, John Copeland, his uncle Lewis Leary and Dangerfield Newby (who in his 40s was the oldest black man to go). Newby was sturdy and immovable and joined to help get his wife and children out of slavery in Virginia.

Putting his plan into effect required meticulous preparation and sheer courage. To hide his forces from the eyes of the prying enemy, Brown required the assistance of trustworthy collaborators. His first pick was his wife Mary, for whom he had tremendous respect. It’s clear from his letters and correspondence that they shared and discussed the political news of the day. Brown’s 15-year-old daughter Annie and 16-year-old sister-in-law Martha were assigned to hold down the secret farmhouse five miles from Harpers Ferry, keeping watch and feeding soldiers. The men were John Brown men, so they knew how to help and keep the place clean. Though when they didn’t, they were set straight. The men were confined in a tiny place and stuffed in an attic. There they studied together, argued about the history of slavery and discussed Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. They were nearly broken by tension and their discipline was weakened, but the courageous young women kept up their morale and cohesion.

The whole thing could have been blown when one of the neighbors, who had a habit of showing up unannounced, caught a glimpse of a black man in the farmhouse. She suspected that Annie was helping runaways and challenged her to an explanation, but Annie denied it. Annie devised a plan to silence her neighbor by providing her and her children with food and helping them with other tasks as long as necessary.

In a very interesting biography of the women in John Brown’s family called The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism (2013), author Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz describes Annie’s “trial-by-fire inauguration into abolitionist activism.” Annie herself later described this as the most important period of her life. As Laughlin-Schultz remarked, “Though she did not march to Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Annie’s work in the Maryland countryside may have allowed Brown’s raiders to do so, and the work of Mary and Ruth [his wife and daughter] at North Elba helped smooth over the Brown men’s absences.”

The aim of John Brown was this: to procure arms, free slaves in the nearby area, lead his army into the mountains where they could establish a liberated area and, if need be, wage war against the slave masters. From a military point of view, Brown’s plan for Harpers Ferry was futile. His son Owen said it was like Napoleon trying to take Moscow. One of the reasons it failed was that Brown didn’t fully carry out his plans, which he admitted to afterwards. He also believed he was overly solicitous to his prisoners and relied on some of them to ward off the enemy’s blows. In the end, Brown’s forces killed five people but lost ten of their own. They held control for 36 hours, surrounded by gunmen from nearby towns and hamlets and eventually by federal troops. The troops were dispatched by President Buchanan, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future commander of Confederate forces during the Civil War (you know, the “honorable” man according to White House chief of staff John Kelly). Brown and most of his associates were rounded up and captured, though several managed to escape. Those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and later hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia.

The Aftermath

While they were defeated in the end, John Brown and his men certainly fought. The raid at Harpers Ferry was a bold but unsuccessful action staged by a small, determined, interracial revolutionary band. What soon followed was what abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison termed “the new reign of terror” against black people in the South and against any Northerner who dared raise his head. Southerners were conjuring up fears of more Nat Turner revolts.

Harpers Ferry also caused fright and panic among some of John Brown’s so-called radical abolitionist friends in the Secret Six—they burned their correspondence with him. Gerrit Smith claimed insanity and briefly checked into an asylum while others fled for Canada. Some of them had probably been, to put it mildly, surprised when they found out that the plan was an assault on a federal arsenal and armory. It was euphemistically described by Brown, referring to the Underground Railroad, as “Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale.” Secret Six member Thomas Wentworth Higginson refused to capitulate. He had told Brown before the raid that he was “always ready to invest in treason,” and didn’t burn his papers or correspondence. He later led a black regiment in the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass solidarized with the raid in a piece called “Capt. John Brown Not Insane” (Douglass’ Monthly, November 1859):

“Posterity will owe everlasting thanks to John Brown...[for he] has attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted to bring it to the death.... Like Samson, he has laid his hands upon the pillars of this great national temple of cruelty and blood, and when he falls, that temple, will speedily crumble to its final doom, burying its denizens in its ruins.”

Douglass had a price placed on his head by the federal government and used a pre-planned trip to England to escape.

John Brown knew that the pro-slavery federal government and its State of Virginia hangmen were close to finishing him off. While imprisoned, Brown was unbowed and wrote and answered many letters to family, friends and supporters (who mostly endorsed his action only some time after the fact). Above all, he pushed very hard for financial help to his family. He said that had he interfered on behalf of the rich, the oppressors would have poured praise upon him. Instead, his whole life had been devoted to fighting for the liberation of the slaves, and now he was willing to pay the ultimate price.

As I said, John Brown despised the ruling-class politicians of his day. For their murderous, cruel and unjust laws, he denounced the government as being filled with “fiends in human shape.” Before his death, in a letter to the abolitionist wife of George L. Stearns, Brown stated his wishes to be escorted to the gallows not by some pro-slavery clergyman but by poor blacks, his people: “I have asked to be spared from having any mock; or hypocritical prayers made over me, when I am publicly murdered: & that my only religious attendants be poor little, dirty, ragged, bare headed, & barefooted Slave Boys; & Girls led by some old grey headed Slave Mother.”

Following his execution, there were memorial services of black and white abolitionists in several cities. There was international impact. French writer Victor Hugo had written a rousing appeal to stop his execution and that of his followers. (The British abolitionists sat on their hands.) Brown’s death was also keenly felt in Haiti, the country with the first and only successful slave revolution in the Western Hemisphere, which was against the French slaveholders in 1791. Haitians, who saw in John Brown the great revolutionary and liberator of black slaves, Toussaint L’Ouverture, organized gatherings and fundraisers for the Brown family in every corner of the country. In addition, there were German workers—the Red ’48ers—European refugees who came to the U.S. following the failure of the 1848 revolution, who ended up playing an important role in building up the Union Army. Alongside black people in Cincinnati, they marched to memorialize John Brown.

John Brown gave his all and championed the struggles of the oppressed worldwide, including the 19th-century Hungarian, Greek and Polish struggles against national oppression. And it was his revolutionary war that opened the road to the annihilation of slavery. As radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips noted: “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hill, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,—it does not live,—hereafter.”

George Novack wrote a tribute to John Brown, published in January 1938 in the New International, journal of the revolutionary Trotskyists at that time, the Socialist Workers Party. He captured the dialectical development of events, noting how a seemingly stable and eternal slavocracy contained the seeds of its own destruction: “Through John Brown the coming civil war entered into the nerves of the people in the many months before it was exhibited in their ideas and actions.”

His Body Moldering in the Grave —His Soul Marching On

The Civil War broke out less than two years after the execution of Brown and his comrades. The Civil War was the last great bourgeois revolution, the last progressive war of the U.S. bourgeoisie. Instead of a confederation of states, it consolidated a unified capitalist market under a United States of America.

In the fires of secessionist rebellion and total war, Douglass called for arming the slaves. For his part, Lincoln was reluctant to wage what he called a “remorseless revolutionary struggle” to crush the slaveholders. Facing ongoing military reverses, Lincoln changed in the course of the war. He was compelled to deploy powerful black arms—ultimately 200,000 black soldiers and sailors—who were critical in tipping the balance of forces against the slavocracy. At the war’s end more than 600,000 Americans lay dead.

We are told that slavery was a “stain” on this “great” capitalist democracy. This suggests it was an aberration, a deviation from an essential goodness. This is a perfumed lie. Slavery was a barbarous economic system built into the very foundations of U.S. capitalism. Its legacy stamps every aspect of social and economic life. The slaves were liberated through the Civil War. But with the undoing of subsequent Radical Reconstruction, the most democratic period in U.S. history for black people, the promise of black equality was crushed through Klan terror and defeated by political counterrevolution. This led to the consolidation of black people as an oppressed race-color caste toward the end of the 19th century.

John Brown considered himself to be an instrument of “God.” He believed that it was part of God’s will for him to liberate the slaves through force, unlike those preachers who pontificated about solace and consolation to the oppressed. We are atheists and dialectical materialists, and we base our revolutionary Marxist outlook firmly upon science. This means explaining the world from the world itself, not from some nonexistent “higher power.” In the face of natural occurrences, early human beings devised a system of mystical explanations for what they didn’t understand. Earthquakes, famines, sickness and death were not attributed to the workings of a material, physical world—a world that existed prior to and independent of human consciousness. In contrast to a materialist view, an idealist view maintains ideas, opinions and thoughts as primary and material reality as secondary. In his writings, Karl Marx asserts that “man makes religion, religion does not make man,” that “religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering,” and that religion is the “opium of the people.”

When the hour of action arrived, John Brown’s advice was to be quick, not to trifle. That is good advice. Importantly, he also struggled firmly to win revolutionary abolitionists to the fight for black freedom. He knew his foibles well and wrote about them. But what comes through from those who knew him was not a sense of superiority, but his kindness. Though we should proceed with historical care in analogies, one could say that there was a similarity he shared with Oliver Cromwell—the great 17th-century Puritan revolutionary of England. Brown would, as Trotsky noted of Cromwell, hesitate at nothing to smash oppression.

We of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) seek to build Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties that will hesitate at nothing in the fight to put the wealth of the world created by labor into the hands of labor itself through proletarian revolutions across the globe. Guided by a firm, revolutionary vanguard party, the workers will forge the class-struggle leadership of labor by ousting the agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers movement.

In racist capitalist America, we will remember those like John Brown and many others who waged war to throw off the shackles of the oppressed. Capitalism cannot be reformed—no ruling class ever has relinquished its power, its profits and accumulated wealth without a fight and it never will. This understanding is contrary to the illusions spread by the reformist socialists, such as the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative, that you can pressure the Democrats to reform capitalism.

We understand that class struggle is the motor force of history. But this is not all. Even before Marx and Engels, bourgeois historians were writing about class struggle in France and elsewhere. We Marxists seek to extend this to recognizing the necessity for proletarian power, for proletarian dictatorship that will eliminate capitalism. We fight to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, as part of a transition to a classless society of material abundance.

We stand for the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist order, for revolutionary integrationism. This means integrated class struggle, mobilizing the social power of the proletariat to lead the fight against all manifestations of racial oppression, against racist police terror, against segregated education, against the hated Confederate flag of slavery and finally, to victory over the exploiters.

We fight to win a new generation of conscious workers and militant youth to take up the banner of genuine Marxism: Trotskyism. As a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party acting as a tribune of the people, we have no interests separate from the working class and oppressed. We fight for a communist future. We say: Remember John Brown and all our revolutionary heroes and heroines! We say: Finish the Civil War! For a third American Revolution! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

T For Texas, Texas Blues-Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues (2000)-A CD Review

T For Texas, Texas Blues-Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues (2000)-A CD Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Milk Cow Blues, Willie Nelson and others, 2000

My old high school friend Greg Garret whom I am still in close touch with reminded me the other day when he was over at my house and I had the CD under review playing in the background, Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues, that back in the early 1980s he recalled that I had had what he called my “outlaw country cowboy moment.” I didn’t recall that I uttered that particular expression although I did recall that I had for a brief period been drawn to the likes of Willie, Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt and a number of other singer-songwriters who broke out of the traditional stylized Nashville formula mold epitomized then by guys like George Jones and gals like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Just then rock and roll was taking one of its various detours which I could not follow, folk music, the social protest kind anyway that had attracted me in my youth was fading fast even among aficionados and the blues was losing its star performers by the day and the younger crowd was heading to what would become the hip-hop tradition so I was up for listening to something different. Willie, not clean-shaven, pony-tailed, not shining sparkly suit Willie filled the bill.           

Yeah, Willie filled the bill with songs about two-timing men, women too, lost love, the heartache of love relationships, getting out from under some rock that was weighting him down but down in soulful, thoughtful way with a bit of a gravelly voice, a kind of voice that always had the ability to draw me in, to make me stop what I was doing and listen up. Of course I had remembered back then that Willie had written a song that Patsy Cline whom I had always liked had made famous in the late 1950s, Crazy, which I had learned about when I was at Cheapo Records over in Cambridge looking for some bluesy stuff back in the 1960s. 


Fast forward to 2000 and this CD. I had expected that Willie, now ancient Willie if he had written Crazy back in the 1950s, would still be grinding out in his twangy way the old classics which fill out this album. Would put his Texas touch on these standards. Guess what-he switched up on me, made an album of well-known covers made hits by some very famous like Cline, Bessie Smith, B.B. King (who is featured on a couple of songs here), Jerry Lee but changed the tempo. Put everything in a bluesy frame, and let the beat go on. Let the music carry the day with whoever was singing along with him on each cut. Not a recognizable cowboy sound in the house. Now part of that switch-up represented the hard fact that age had like with Bob Dylan rusted up his voice and so he no longer tried, or was capable of , hitting the high white notes. Part of it was to let the other singers or the musicians carry the force of the songs. But guess what if you, and Greg agreed with me on this, need some nice jazzy, bluesy background music this one fills the bill. Yeah, we all have come a long way from that old “outlaw country cowboy moment” Greg claimed I was in thrall to. Enough said.      

Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano, Part 2 - Astaire’s “Shall We Dance” (1937)-A Film Review

Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano, Part 2 - Astaire’s “Shall We Dance” (1937)-A Film Review



DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers, music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, 1937

Those of you who saw my recent review of song and dance man Gene Kelly’s performance in An American In Paris know that that review had come about after a dispute I had had with the general editor of this space, one Pete Markin, over who was the better popular music male dancer Kelly or Fred Astaire. (Neither party disputes the proposition that nobody today, maybe nobody since their respective times, is even close to this pair so don’t bother to bring up any other contenders if that is what you are thinking about). Markin, after years, decades of honorable service to the memory of Mister Astaire’s talents was swayed by Kelly’s performance in that above-mentioned and corralled me by the water cooler one office morning and laid that dead-ass bombshell on me. Naturally I had to upbraid him for his treason, there is no other way to put it even though I would be hard-pressed to have him prosecuted and tried on the charge since I lack a second witness to the travesty and whether it is wartime, declared by Congress wartime, currently is disputable, and error. Now I am reviewing Mister Astaire’s stellar efforts in a second string song and dance genre classic, Shall We Dance, (the seventh of ten in which he shared the dance floor with Ms. Rogers the earlier ones being usually better so here the dancing really shows his superiority) a vehicle like An American In Paris for the music and lyrics of super talented composer and lyrist George and Ira Gershwin.  

I mentioned in the lead-up to the Kelly review that someday I would give you the long suffering reader the complete story of how a film critic gets his or her assignments from “upstairs,” from the general editor, from a guy just like Markin (unless of course that person is hard road free-lancing and is just submitting pieces to publications “on spec”). I noted then that I should know the ropes of that slippery slope after some thirty plus years of doing this type of work recently here and for many years at the American Film Gazette (where I still do on-line reviews and where I started out as that free-lancer submitting pieces “on spec” when the publication was strictly hard copy before I was taken on as a staff member). A reader, a thoughtful reader I assumed, wrote in to ask for a specific example of such behavior, of an odd-ball experience in assignment world to give her an inside view of the madhouse. I immediately explained the genesis of this current review (and the Kelly review) as nothing but hubris from Markin. I explained that the only reason that I was on a “run” was I got this assignment to review first Gene Kelly’s An American In Paris and now this film because Markin had grabbed these two films via Amazon for one purpose and one purpose only-to see who was the better dancer back in the day -Kelly or Astaire.
Here is another one, another prime example of odd-ball assignments out of the blue. A few months ago Markin was all hopped up on some exhibition out at the de Young Museum in San Francisco that one of his growing up childhood friends had told him about after viewing what was called The Summer Of Love Experience (from 1967 so they were commemorating the 50th anniversary of the events in style) he had me and my associate film critic Alden Riley working like seven whirling dervishes to write up a ton of stuff on the music (deemed “acid” rock for its connection with LSD), films and documentaries of the times. After I had reviewed a break-through documentary by D.A. Pennebaker chronicling the first Monterey International Pops Festival held that same 1967 year where Janis Joplin (and others like Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar) made her big splash in the rock icono-sphere I asked Alden, a much younger man than I, what he thought of Janis Joplin. He stated to me that he had never heard of her. Somehow Markin heard about that remark and being very much connected with that whole Summer of Love, 1967 scene (having actually gone out there from his growing up home in North Adamsville, Massachusetts hitchhiking out with a couple of friends) told Alden, by-passing me, that his next assignment would be a biopic about Janis Joplin titled Little Girl Blues. That will give you just a rather current example of the inside the pressure cooker atmosphere we work under.     
But back to the Astaire-Kelly controversy what I called a tempest in a teapot in that Kelly review. A remark that I now wish to publicly apologize to Mister Markin for making in the heat of a writing a review under deadline. Of course in a world going to hell in a handbasket with rightwing movements sprouting up all over the world, with bare-faced  nuclear war threats on the table, with climate change dramatic weather and natural disasters on the rise and  with the social fabric coming undone in this American society (what the political commentator Frank Jackman has rightly I think called the first stages of a “cold civil war” likely to get hot) there is no question that the presses (or cyberspace) should stop while we haggle over which of two long dead  popular culture dancers was the max daddy of the genre. But to the lists once again to right a minor wrong in this crooked little orb of a planet. 

I noted in that review of An American In Paris with its paper thin plotline that it might not be the best place to critique Mister Kelly’s dancing (or acting efforts which whatever faults I find in his dancing they do not compare to his wooden glad hand acting in that role) but I did not throw down the gauntlet this time. Frankly although Shall We Dance has a plotline a bit superior to the Kelly vehicle it would not be out of place to call that paper thin as well. Apparently in the song and dance genre all the dough goes for staging and about three dollars to screenwriters to come up with a plausible scenario to justify all the sprouting out to sing and dance at the drop of a hat.  

As with An American in Paris I do not utter that term “paper thin” lightly here. Here’s the play as my predecessor and friend in this department Sam Lowell always liked to say in his reviews. Astaire whose character is called Petrov is actually an American ballet dancer working in Paris whose most fervent desire is to blend that youthful ballet training with modern jazz that is running rampart in the land and hence the need for the services of the Gershwin brothers to do the music and lyrics in this film. But I am getting ahead of myself. Petrov spies this dishy tap-dancer, Linda, Ginger Roger’s role, and immediately makes a play for her for love (and maybe, just maybe as a dance partner who might have the moves to jazz dance). She of course gives him the cold shoulder-sees him as some Russian stupe. Naturally there has to be a nefarious plan hatched by others to get them together. Bingo a rumor is started that the “lovebirds” are married, which they are not at first, and to make this thing go away they do get married with Linda intending to get a divorce ASAP.      

Get this though. She starts falling for the big Russian turned American cuckoo until she finds that he is playing footsies with another dame. Then the big freeze is on. But you know the thaw is on the wings and they will be lovebird back together again before twelve more song and dances are completed. Like I said with the Kelly plotline watch the song and dance stuff and go numb in between.      


Of course this whole dispute, this tempest in a teapot, no I already said I apologized for my indiscretion on that score so forget I said that expression, brewed up by Mister Markin is not about the qualities of the storyline but about Kelly’s dancing superiority. I have already conceded that on the question of pure physical energy and verve Kelly is not bad reflecting I think the hopped up (maybe drugged up) post-World War II period when everybody who had slogged through the war was in a rush to get to wherever they thought they should be going. But Fred did the Gershwins proud in all the numbers that he performed with Rogers despite the silly plotline. Catch classic Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off and They Can’t Take That Away From Me and you will get my drift. He had his own sense of controlled athleticism and looking at any one number like his tap dance in the ship’s hull with a black ship’s crew for support shows his physical prowess. But where Astaire had it all over Kelly was his grace, his long reaches and close insteps. Notice in contrast that Kelly never did much pair dancing with Caron and Astaire waltzed and two-stepped Ginger right out of her shoes. Like I said in the Kelly review how the usually level-headed Markin could have turned traitor on a dime tells a lot. Tells me he, he Mister fancy general editor has maybe really has been at the hash pipe too long of late. Touché-again.      

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Entry Of The International Brigades Into The Spanish Civil War All Honor To The Memory Of The "Premature" Anti-Fascist Fighters

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Entry Of The International Brigades Into The Spanish Civil War All Honor To The Memory Of The "Premature" Anti-Fascist  Fighters




Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the International Brigades and their role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.
******
Saturday, May 20, 2006

"Viva La Quince Brigada"- The Abraham Lincoln Battalion In The Spanish Civil War 

BOOK REVIEW

THE ODYSSEY OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE: AMERICANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, Peter N. Carroll, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994.

AS WE HEAD INTO THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY IN JULY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR MILITANTS NEED TO STUDY THIS IMPORTANT EVENT OF INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS HISTORY. THE WRITER WILL BE REVIEWING AND COMMENTING ON SEVERAL ASPECTS OF THAT FIGHT FOR MILITANTS TODAY.

I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 since I was a teenager. My first term paper was on this subject. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class uprisings after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of success. Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted in one of his writings on Spain that the Spanish proletariat at the start of its revolutionary period had a higher political consciousness than the Russian proletariat in 1917. That calls into question the strategies put forth by the parties of the Popular Front, including the Spanish Communist Party- defeat Franco first, and then make the social transformation of society. Mr. Carroll’s book while not directly addressing that issue nevertheless demonstrates through the story of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion how the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and through it the policy of the Communist International in calling for international brigades to fight in Spain aided in the defeat of that promising revolution.

Mr. Carroll chronicles anecdotally how individual militants were recruited, transported, fought and died as ‘premature anti-fascists’ in that struggle. No militant today, or ever, can deny the heroic qualities of the volunteers and their commitment to defeat fascism- the number one issue for militants of that generation-despite the fatal policy of the the various party leaderships. Such individuals were desperately needed then, as now, if revolutionary struggle is to succeed. However, to truly honor their sacrifice we must learn the lessons of that defeat through mistaken strategy as we fight today. Interestingly, as chronicled here, and elsewhere in the memoirs of some veterans, many of the surviving militants of that struggle continued to believe that it was necessary to defeat Franco first, and then fight for socialism. This was most dramatically evoked by the Lincolns' negative response to the Barcelona uprising of 1937-the last time a flat out fight for leadership of the revolution could have galvanized the demoralized workers and peasants for a desperate struggle against Franco.

Probably the most important part of Mr. Carroll’s book is tracing the trials and tribulations of the volunteers after their withdrawal from Spain in late 1938. Their organization-the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade- was constantly harassed and monitored by the United States government for many years as a Communist 'front' group. Individuals also faced prosecution and discrimination for their past association with the Brigades. He also traces the aging and death of that cadre. In short, this book is a labor of love for the subjects of his treatment. Whatever else this writer certainly does not disagree with that purpose. If you want to read about what a heroic part of the vanguard of the international working class looked like in the 1930’s, look here. Viva la Quince Brigada!!
Labels: abraham lincoln brigade, AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, international brigades, SPAIN 1936, spanish civil war


posted by Markin at 7:53 AM

2 Comments:
markin said...
Two Songs Of The Spanish Civil War: "Viva La Quince Brigada" And "El Paso Del Ebro"


By Thomas Keyes
Apr. 16, 2005

“¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” (Long Live the Fifteenth Brigade!) and “El Paso del Ebro” (Crossing the Ebro) are two songs of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) sung to the same melody. The original version of the song goes back to the time of the Napoleonic Wars, but I haven’t found the lyrics for that version. The lyrics of these two songs both pertain to the later war, since both mention aircraft. “¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” is also called “¡Ay, Manuela!”, while “El Paso del Ebro” is also called “¡Ay, Carmela!” “Manuela” and “Carmela” are women’s names.

Unfortunately, the two audible versions that I was able to find on the Web are somewhat different from the song as I know it, and not as good in my opinion, but perhaps they are more authentic. I have known “¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” since the 1960’s, but to date have not learned “El Paso del Ebro”. I just like the music for its own sake and for its value as a souvenir of Spanish culture. I don’t take sides on the Spanish Civil War, because I don’t know much about it. Incidentally, the Ebro is a major river in the north of Spain. The Jarama, mentioned in the first song, is another river.

I have provided my own translations, for those who cannot manage the very easy Spanish lyrics. Below are the URL’s for the music:

http://idd003x0.eresmas.net/mp3/El%20Paso%20Del%20Ebro.mp3

http://personales.ya.com/altavoz/midis/elpasodelebro.mid

VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA (Spanish Lyrics)

Viva la quince brigada,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Viva la quince brigada,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Que se ha cubierto de gloria.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Que se ha cubierto de gloria.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

Luchamos contra los moros,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Luchamos contra los moros,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Mercenarios y fascistas.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Mercenarios y fascistas.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

Solo es nuestro deseo,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Solo es nuestro deseo,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Acabar con el fascismo.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Acabar con el fascismo.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

En los frentes de Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
En los frentes de Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
No tenemos ni aviones,
Ni tanques, ti cañones.
No tenemos ni aviones,
Ni tanques, ti cañones.

Ya salimos de España,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Ya salimos de España,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
A luchar en otros frentes,
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
A luchar en otros frentes,
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

EL PASO DEL EBRO (Spanish Lyrics)

El ejército del Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
El ejército del Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Una noche el río paso.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Una noche el río paso.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Y a las tropas invasoras,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Y a las tropas invasoras,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Buena paliza les dio,
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Buena paliza les dio,
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

El furor de los traidores,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
El furor de los traidores,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Lo descarga su aviación.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Lo descarga su aviación.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Pero nada pueden bombas,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Pero nada pueden bombas,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Donde sobra corazón.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Donde sobra corazón.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Contraataques muy rabiosos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Contraataques muy rabiosos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Deberemos resistir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Deberemos resistir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Pero igual que combatimos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Pero igual que combatimos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Prometemos combatir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Prometemos combatir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA (English Translation)
Long live the fifteenth brigade,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Long live the fifteenth brigade,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Which has covered itself with glory.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Which has covered itself with glory.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

We are fighting against the Moors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We are fighting against the Moors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Mercenaries and fascists.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Mercenaries and fascists.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

It’s our sole desire,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
It’s our sole desire,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
To be done with fascism.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
To be done with fascism.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

On the front lines of the Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
On the front lines of the Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We have neither airplanes,
Tanks nor cannon.
We have neither airplanes,
Tanks nor cannon.

We’re already leaving Spain,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We’re already leaving Spain,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
To fight on other fronts.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
To fight on other fronts.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

EL PASO DEL EBRO (English Lyrics)

The army of the Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
The army of the Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Crossed the river one night.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Crossed the river one night.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

And to the invading troops.
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
And to the invading troops.
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
It gave a sound beating.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
It gave a sound beating.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

The fury of the traitors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
The fury of the traitors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
They discharge with their airplanes.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
They discharge with their airplanes.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

But bombs can do nothing,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
But bombs can do nothing,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Where there’s a lot of heart.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Where there’s a lot of heart.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Very rabid counterattacks,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Very rabid counterattacks,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We will owe it to resist.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
We will owe it to resist.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

But as we have fought,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
But as we have fought,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We promise to fight.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
We promise to fight.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

2:30 PM


markin said...
Lyrics to Jarama Valley :

by Woody Guthrie

There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama
It’s a place that we all know so well
It was there that we fought against the Fascists
We saw a peacful valley turn to hell

From this valley they say we are going
But don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

We were men of the Lincoln Battalion
We’re proud of the fight that we made
We know that you people of the valley
Will remember our Lincoln Brigade

From this valley they say we are going
But don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

You will never find peace with these Fascists
You’ll never find friends such as we
So remember that valley of Jarama
And the people that’ll set that valley free

From this valley they say we are going
Don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

All this world is like this valley called Jarama
So green and so bright and so fair
No fascists can dwell in our valley
Nor breathe in our new freedom’s air

From this valley they say we are going
Do not hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

[ Jarama Valley Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/

Friday, October 15, 2021

Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano- Kelly’s “An American In Paris” ( 1951 )-A Film Review

Gene Kelly And Fred Astaire Go Mano a Mano- Kelly’s “An American In Paris” ( 1951 )-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

An American In Paris, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, music by George and Ira Gershwin, 1951

Someday let me give you the complete story of how a film critic gets his or her assignments from “upstairs” (unless of course that person is hard road free-lancing and is just submitting pieces to publications “on spec”). I should know after some thirty plus years of doing this type of work recently here and from many years at the American Film Gazette (where I still do on-line reviews and where I started out as that free-lancer submitting pieces “on spec” when the publication was strictly hard copy  before I was taken on as a staff member). For now though since I am on a “run” so let me say that the reason I got this assignment to review Gene Kelly’s An American In Paris (and the next one which will be on Fred Astaire’s, and Ginger Roger’s, Shall We Dance) is that the editor here, Pete Markin, had grabbed these two films via Amazon for one purpose and one purpose only-to see who was the better dancer back in the day -Kelly or Astaire. (There is not even a question of anybody today touching the hem of either’s skirt since dance kings are a rare breed and one would be hard pressed to name one male popular dancer who is even close. Whatever else our disagreements as will be noted below we agree on that point-to our collective sorrows.)

This no academic question because not only did Pete go out of his way to view both film he engaged me in a heated argument one morning in front of the water cooler when he casually laid a bombshell on me. The bombshell? After years of assuming that Fred Astaire had the title of king hell king popular dancer wrapped up he had switched his allegiance to Kelly on the sole basis of this film under review. Needless to say I had to upbraid him for both his treason and his error. And hence this “run.” So you see here is a prime example of the odd-ball ways of those high and mighty general editors in doling out the work. But to the lists.          

Maybe An American In Paris with its paper thin plotline is not the best place to critique Mister Kelly’s dancing (or acting efforts which whatever faults I find in his dancer they do not compare to his wooden glad hand acting in this role) but I did not throw down the gauntlet this time. I do not utter that term “paper thin” lightly here. Here’s the play as my predecessor and friend in this department Sam Lowell always liked to say. Kelly finds himself in Paris after the war, after World War II of which he was some of veteran of although it was probably work in a Special Services unit entertaining entertainment-starved G.I.s fresh off the front lines with his song and dance routine. Empathically not after World War I when Paris was the center of the F. Scott Fitzgerald-dubbed Jazz Age and the period when the Gershwins, George and Ira, wrote the music and lyrics for the origin concept and which given the playlist here would have been a better time frame for Kelly’s character, a guy, a regular guy, named Gerry Mulligan stew to have strutted his stuff. In gay Paree (gay in the old-fashioned sense of happy, light, and so on not today’s sexual identity usage) Gerry was doing his best to be a mediocre artist, a painter (already you can see there is a problem since the transition to dancer in each routine seems bizarre or his being an artist seems bizarre when he was at least a better dancer than artist - take your pick). He is getting nowhere fast in his humble little garret imitation of how he thinks his heroes the Impressionists suffered for their art. Finally some moneybags “art patroness” takes up his cause and easy street and high society (which is really a ruse for trying to get him to fall for her-no dice-no nice dice)

What or rather who he does fall for, falls hard for, is a little French twist with a turned up nose and who we will find out quickly is as light on her feet as Gerry is on his on the dance floor. She gives him the cold shoulder for a while mainly because she is trying to do the honorable thing for her benefactor and fiancé (and to boot Gerry’s friend too). As Gerry pulls the hammer down on the romance she softens a bit. But still no sale until the end when after this serious imaginary dance Gerry has worked himself up over recreating various paintings by his max daddy artist Impressionist artists heroes (and a couple of guys from early trends in French art) where he and Leslie trip the light fantastic she relents. Or rather her lover-benefactor seeing the writing on the wall brings her to Gerry’s doorstep. Nice guy. So you can see no way that even the best song and dance man could overcome these disservices to the Gershwins 1920s be-bop Jazz Age pieces.    


Of course this whole dispute, this tempest in a teapot, brewed up by Mister Markin is not about the qualities of the storyline but about Kelly’s dancing (and singing too but dancing is enough to chew on). On the question of pure physical energy and verve Kelly is not bad reflecting I think the hopped up (maybe drugged up) post-World War II period when everybody who had slogged through the war was in a rush to get to wherever they thought they should be going. He has all the moves if not all the grace that Fred Astaire had in his own prime. And that is really the sticking point here, the point that became clear during that seventeen minute interlude where Gerry imagined those painterly scenes from the works of his favored artists. Kelly was all arms and legs and odd-ball twists and turned but only for a few seconds during that whole “why the hell is this long scene in this film anyway except to prolong the film” did he exhibit any grace and that was when he was doing yeoman’s work lifting Ms. Caron in balletic style. How the usually level-headed Markin could have called that one of the best dance scenes he had ever seen tells a lot. Tells me he, he Mister fancy general editor has maybe been at the hash pipe too long of late. Touché    

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit





[The world of on-line editors and named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. I have been highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in Riverdale (that is in Massachusetts west of Boston) friends as he/they discuss a various older CDs which reflect a certain period in their then youth lives growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Part of this latest series of sketches by me is based on information that Seth has provided comes under the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the San Francisco and Bay area.      

I am a bit too young by about a decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small place.

As I said earlier I was a little too young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first hand but my eldest brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six others back west with him. And the rest is history.             
I mean that “rest is history” part literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from those long ago drugs, and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though. When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together. One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming (not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing published. Which I did without too much trouble.    

The publication and distribution of that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth comes in. While he was not part of the Summer of Love experience he did drift out west after college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye which operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to say right now. Zack James]     

CD Review

The Best Of Bonnie Raiit

By Zack James

Seth Garth and Jack Callahan who had been friends since highs school down in Riverdale after they returned from a whirlwind few months on the road on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road merry pranksters adventure out in California during the Summer of Love, 1967, were sitting in Jack’s, the local hang-out bar in Cambridge where the drinks were cheap and the conversation interesting, when a young woman stepped up to the small stage preparing to sing. Jack mentioned to Seth that she looked familiar, that flaming red hair a giveaway, and asked him if he could place the face. Seth who was beginning his long career as a music critic just then for The Eye whom he had contracted with when he was out in California blurted out that didn’t Jack remember seeing her, seeing Bonnie Raitt, on the Boston Common before they had taken off for California where she blew away the crowd with a cover of Down Highway 61. Jack laughed and said that he was so stoned that night that he wasn’t sure who he had heard (Seth reminding him that it had been an afternoon concert).                    

Of course Seth, as a budding music critic, expecting to ride the wave from folk to folk rock to what was now being called “acid” rock with all the strobe lights and dipping into the drug bag to bring out the right mood had done some basic research on Bonnie as an up and coming star who was riding her own wave of the new trend in having female singers lead the bands they were in. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Amy Kline, Nicky Adams and then her. He had found out that Bonnie had dropped out of Radcliffe a little earlier in order to pursue her musical career as a result of the success of the Boston Common concert. He also had found out that her budding virtuosity with the slide guitar had come from sitting at the feet of country blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell. So she had a pedigree. Still she a was only starting out and grateful that Jack’s had allowed her up on the stage a couple of years earlier where she had begun to hone her skills both at presenting a professional musical veneer and connecting with the audience. So the night Seth and Jack were sitting there at the bar drinking and talking about everything under the sun Bonnie was doing “pay back.” Performing for the old crowd, performing for Jack. 

She started her first set with Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying and McDowell’s Highway 61 and the rest would be history. A history which is well documented in this compilation from those classics to Fairport Convention member Richard Thompson’s The Dimming of the Day.            


The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind

The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind




DVD Review

By Zack James

The Bank Job, starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, 2008


Recently I did a short review of the film adaptation of writer con-artist’s Clifford Irving’s The Hoax about his take (remember he was a con artist and so his fast-talking-writing should be taken for what it is worth) on his con of a major publishing company over an “autobiography” of the reclusive eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes back in the early 1970s and mentioned that everybody loves a con. Everybody except the person con of course. That notion can be extended, was extended in my old working-class growing up Acre section of North Adamsville, to include high profile bank robberies. In those days the big deal was the then never solved great Brink armored car robbery of the early 1950s where it turned out one of the participants had lived in the neighborhood at one time. So when Pete Markin tagged me to do a short piece on  the film under review The Bank Job about an equally famous bank robbery in London in the early 1970 I was all in.     

Usually the genesis of a bank robbery (aside from the famous bank robber Willie Sutton’s response to the question of why he robbed banks for a living- because that was where the money was) is to grab some quick dough and split. Average stuff. In this film, based on a true story, although it is hard to separate fact from fiction according to the historical record, the motives are a little bit trickier. Oh sure the guys who are touched for the job have that motivation-have that wanting habits hunger but this one has a catch to it. See the robbery is just supposed to be a front for getting some very juicy photographs of a member of the royal family, a royal princess acting the slut. (According to my sources that part is make-believe courtesy of the thriller-crazed producers and not a bad motive at that if you hold any republican sympathies. In any case given the batch of whores, whore-mongers, homos and lesbians when that was not cool, dope fiends, junkies, sex addicts, lunatics, mad men, philanders and the like who have made up the royal family and nobility that would not be so far-fetched. And those are from the good side of the families the others’ depravity starts from there.) Maybe nowadays with 24/7/365 celebrity exposure that would be nothing for royals to bother with but back then it was enough to get certain secretive governmental agencies on the move to cover the damn thing up-to bury it deep. That was the story then anyway make of it what you will.

The whole play came about because one neighborhood working class woman, Martine, played by Saffron Burrows, who took a turn at modeling had been stopped with a hell-broth of drugs in her suitcase at the airport.  So she needed to get out from under any way she could since female prison life would quickly turn her into somebody’s honey and she would not have looked good in prison garb anyway. Fortunately she had a lover-boyfriend from MI5 who was in need of a favor. Seems that a sneaky fiery black nationalist leader, Michael X, had the vaunted photographs in question in a safety deposit box for further use-blackmail, trade for freedom, you know the rest. Also in need of a favor was Terry, played by Jason Statham, a hard-pressed auto body shop owner and small time hood. The man, men, he needed a few confederates for this caper, and the moment meet. Martine cons Terry into this fantastical notion of robbing a bank (naturally the Baker Street branch bank where the safety deposit box is located) to get out from under-to get him and his family on easy street. At first he balks but then facing a blank wall future he bites.        

In a funny way the bank job is actually not only clever planned but despite a couple of glitches and close-calls a relatively easy job done by creating a tunnel from an adjoining shop to the vaults. Beautiful. Then all hell breaks loose once the job is done and the photographs secured.  See everybody and there aunt and uncle has something to hide from all that hidden cash and jewels to a listing of all the crooked cops on a local mobsters pay-roll. Between the governmental agents, the mobsters, the cops and who knows who else Terry and his comrades are led a merry chase. But in the end the resourceful Terry works his way out of danger and is allowed to keep the ill-gotten goods and seek a new life somewhere out of fetid London. Martine blows town with her cut. The royals dodge yet another scandal and the mobster and the crooked cops take a fall, a hard fall. But the hard criminal life is not for everybody and not everybody made the grade. One gang member got wasted for not giving up his comrades. That’s the way it is down on the edge. Whatever its closeness to what really happened before, during and after this caper on Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes’ street-right) the movie was well-done