As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around  since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….    

Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos

Three Soldiers 3.6 of 5 stars 3.60  ·  rating details  ·  590 ratings  ·  68 reviews

A searing novel exposing the fate of the common soldier during World War I. Driven by the idealism that infected many young Americans at the time (including Ernest Hemingway), author John Dos Passos joined the Ambulance Corps. His rapid and profound disillusionment forms the core of this fierce denouncement of the military and of the far-reaching social implications of its A searing novel exposing the fate of the common soldier during World War I. Driven by the idealism that infected many young Americans at the time (including Ernest Hemingway), author John Dos Passos joined the Ambulance Corps. His rapid and profound disillusionment forms the core of this fierce denouncement of the military and of the far-reaching social implications of its exploitation of young men. 400 pp. ...more

 

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

 

Several years ago, I guess about three years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery. In short, those who would come by on Sunday and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines but held back from further commitment. Now as we head into 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially the banks who led the way downhill) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama with might and main is still intact. The needs of working people although now widely discussed (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations) have not been ameliorated. All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          

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No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
 

It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

 

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China have broken the third world countryside. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

A View From The Left-From The Recent Past-Greece: European Union Austerity Elections-No Vote to Syriza! Vote Communist Party! Victory To The Greek Workers- Build Workers Councils Now-Fight For A Workers Government! Re-post from an American Left History blog, February 14, 2012 the major points which are appropriate today as we head into the upcoming Greek parliamentary elections: Markin comment: The situation in Greece today cries out to high heaven for a revolution and a revolutionary party to intervene and lead the damn thing. Enough of one day general strikes. General strikes only pose the question of power, of dual power. Who shall rule. We say labor must rule. Strike the final blow. Back to the communist road. The Greek workers are just this minute the vanguard, yes, terrible word to some, vanguard of the international working class struggle. Forward to victory. Tuesday, May 11, 2010-Repost from American Left History blog *Be Still My Heart- On Calling For The Greek Communist Parties And Trade Unions To Take Power Markin comment: On May 10, 2010 I posted an entry on the situation in Greece in response to a post from the International Marxist Tendency’s Greek section’s analysis of the tasks that confront revolutionaries today. I agreed with the comment in the post that general strikes were of limited value if they did not, at some point, pose the question of who shall rule- working people or the capitalists. I went further and proposed two propaganda points that revolutionaries in Greece, and their supporters internationally, should be fighting for. Right now. The first point revolved around the fight to create workers councils, committees of action or factory committees in order to fight for a revolutionary perspective. That program, the specifics which are better to left to those on the ground, needs to include refusal to pay the capitalists debts, under whatever guise, defense of the hard fought social welfare gains of the past, the struggle against the current government’s austerity program, the fight against any taint of popular frontism (opposition to alliances, at this critical juncture, with non-working class forces where the working class is the donkey and the small capitalist parties are the riders), and prepare to pose the question of who shall rule. Thus there is plenty of work that needs to be started now while the working masses are mobilized and in a furor over the current situation. The second point, which flows out of the first, is the call for the Communist parties and trade unions to take power in their own right and in the interest of the working class. Now, clearly, and this is where some confusion has entered the picture, this is TODAY a propaganda call but is a concrete way to pose the question of who shall rule. Of course, we revolutionaries should have no illusions in the Stalinists and ex-Stalinists who run those parties and who, in previous times, have lived very comfortably with their various popular front, anti-monopolist strategies that preserve capitalism. However, today those organizations call for anti-governmental action and are listened to by the masses in the streets. The point is to call their political bluff, carefully, but insistently. In that sense we are talking over the heads of the leaders to their social bases. Now that tactic is always proper for revolutionaries to gain authority but today we have to have a more concrete way to do so. In short, call on the Greek labor militants to call on their parties and unions to take power. And if not, then follow us. This is not some exotic formula from nowhere but reflects the sometimes painful experience, at least since the European revolutions of 1848. Note: I headed today’s headline with the expression “be still my heart” for a reason. It has been a very long time since we have been able to, even propagandistically, call for workers parties on the European continent to take power. Especially, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for Stalinist (reformed or otherwise) parties to do so. Frankly, I did not think, as a practical matter, that I would be making such a call in Europe again in my lifetime. All proportions guarded, this may be the first wave of a new revolutionary upsurge on that continent. But, hell, it’s nice just to be able to, rationally, make that political call. In any case, the old utopian dream of a serious capitalist United States of Europe is getting ready to go into the dustbin of history. Let’s replace it with a Socialist Federation of Europe- and Greece today is the “epicenter”. SYRIZA-KKE to power! *************************** Workers Vanguard No. 1060

23 January 2015

Greece: European Union Austerity Elections-No Vote to Syriza! Vote Communist Party!

 

Greek voters will go to the polls on January 25 with the dominant powers of the European Union (EU), centrally the German bankers, demanding continued austerity to pay for Greece’s massive debt. The snap parliamentary election was called by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of New Democracy (ND) when the parliament in late December failed for the third time to elect a new president.

In a country suffering mass unemployment and poverty due to the deep, ongoing capitalist economic crisis in Europe, the main issue looming behind the elections is Greece’s continued membership in the imperialist EU and use of the euro. Most ostensible socialists, in Greece and internationally, look to a victory by the left-sounding petty-bourgeois Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras, despite its explicit commitment to the EU. In contrast, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece call for critical electoral support to the Greek Communist Party (KKE) as they did in 2012. Printed below is a translation of the TGG’s January 15 statement, which raises the demands: Down with the EU! For workers revolution! For a Socialist United States of Europe!

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The Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), calls for a vote to the KKE in the January 25 general election. The KKE, uniquely on the left, is standing in this election completely opposed both to the imperialist EU and to all those parties who defend the EU, including the petty-bourgeois Syriza party. No vote to Syriza!

As Trotskyists, our perspective is the fight for workers revolution here and internationally. We therefore oppose Syriza not only because it is committed to keeping Greece in the EU, which is a pledge for more hunger and joblessness, but also because it does not in any way represent the interests of the working class. Syriza’s program is bourgeois and its base is among the petty-bourgeoisie—small business owners, farmers and professionals like lawyers, doctors, professors, etc.—a layer with no independent class interests, which under capitalism is generally drawn behind the interests of the bourgeoisie. Syriza’s mild anti-austerity rhetoric and left-sounding stances on some social questions may make the bourgeoisie scream about their supposed radicalism. And the EU imperialists and Greek capitalists are clearly worried that Syriza cannot be trusted to impose EU-dictated austerity. But Syriza’s class character is nonetheless bourgeois. This makes it unprincipled for revolutionary Marxists to give it any form of political support.

The reformist Antarsya has no such principles and even though it claims to oppose the EU, it cannot bring itself to call explicitly for a vote against Syriza. Antarsya complains that the KKE “turn their fire more toward the militant left forces instead of the government and the system” (“ANTARSYA statement for the elections of 25/1”). Given that the KKE’s polemical fire is overwhelmingly aimed at Syriza, this amounts to an attack on the KKE from the right in defense of Syriza. No vote to Antarsya! In contrast to the rest of the reformist left, the KKE opposes any kind of political support to Syriza and has continued to reject its overtures to form a coalition in order to bring a “left” capitalist government to power.

The International Communist League has stood in principled opposition to the imperialist EU and the euro from the beginning. The EU’s purpose is to enable the imperialist powers of Europe, led by Germany, to subordinate weaker capitalist countries like Greece and impose savage austerity on working people throughout Europe, including in Germany. The EU, IMF and local capitalists have devastated the living standards of the masses in Greece, Portugal, Spain and other countries and continue to demand more vicious cuts and the total overturn of trade union rights. Working people are thus made to pay the debts racked up by the capitalists and their bloodsucking banks. There is no way forward for the workers and the oppressed within the capitalist EU!

The reformist KKE correctly says: “Out of the EU, cancel the debt” and “Reject the blackmail and lies of ND-Syriza, the people have bled enough for the EU-plutocracy.” As we did in our campaign of critical support in 2012, we call for a vote to the KKE while sharply criticizing their political program of nationalist populism, which is an obstacle to the consciousness the working class needs in order to carry out a successful socialist revolution.

A Greek exit from the EU as a result of militant workers struggle would be an important step forward, but not a solution in itself. The crisis in Greece is part of a world economic crisis of the imperialist system, which cannot be resolved within the borders of any single country, particularly within small, dependent Greece with its low level of industry and resources. The only way forward is a series of socialist revolutions that will expropriate the bourgeoisies, including in the imperialist centers, and establish an internationally collectivized, planned economy under workers rule. For a Socialist United States of Europe!

But the KKE’s leaders posit that Greece can achieve “socialism” without an international extension of workers revolution, a Stalinist distortion of Marxism. They also call for “people’s power,” dissolving the proletariat, which uniquely has the social power to overthrow capitalism, into the “people.” This obscures that the central class division in capitalist society is between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and not between the “people” and the “monopolies.” The KKE embraces Greek nationalism, as shown by their defense of capitalist Greece’s borders. To prove their patriotism they are running as an election candidate Giannis Douniadakis, a retired Greek naval officer who served in defense posts for the Greek government. This bona fide representative of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state also served in NATO, which makes a mockery of the KKE’s opposition to this imperialist alliance. We say: No vote to Douniadakis!

Greek nationalism, based on the pillars of the Orthodox church, the institution of the family and the military, is the poison used by the fascist Golden Dawn to win support among the ruined petty-bourgeoisie and to deflect its anger toward immigrants, leftists, gay people and trade unionists. The KKE leadership has remained criminally passive in response to fascist attacks on its party and others. Despite the KKE’s social weight in the trade unions, it has no perspective of taking the lead in mobilizing contingents of workers, based on the unions, to defend immigrants, leftists and gay people and sweep the fascists off the streets. The working class cannot defend itself against the capitalist crisis if it does not take up this urgent struggle. The fascists’ ultimate goal is the destruction of the unions and the left, which is why the capitalists keep them in reserve. For mass, workers united-front mobilizations to stop the fascists!

Workers must not believe that the fascists can be stopped through the jailing of some Golden Dawn leaders and other legal measures by the state against them. Such measures serve to repress the left as well. No capitalist government, even a “left” one under Syriza, will be able to satisfy the desperate demands of the masses for jobs, healthcare and pensions. In these conditions, the fascists will continue to grow. It is necessary for the working class to come to the fore in militant struggle to defend all those ruined by the capitalist crisis. A class-struggle response to the populist demagogy of the fascists is needed: Organize the unorganized! Unions must defend immigrant workers—for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! For jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay! For a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the cost of living! Repudiate the debt! Nationalize the banks!

This struggle would point to the need for the working class to completely expropriate the bourgeoisie and establish its own government through socialist revolution. But this is not the perspective of the KKE leadership who might currently refuse a coalition government with Syriza, but are not opposed to administering the capitalist state. In fact, a KKE mayor currently administers the capitalist state on the local level in Patras, just as Syriza’s bourgeois prefect administers Attica. Nor has the KKE fundamentally broken with the program that led them to join bourgeois governments in the past, as explained at length in our article “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed” [in Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 64, Summer 2014, see the ad below to order, or read it on the ICL website at www.icl-fi.org].

We take Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party as our model for the kind of revolutionary party that needs to be forged here and internationally in counterposition to the reformist programs of both the Stalinist KKE and the rest of the Greek left. For new October Revolutions!

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A View From The Left -Senate Report Whitewashes White House-CIA Torture, Inc. Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

Senate Report Whitewashes White House-CIA Torture, Inc.

 

On December 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its summary report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and torture program. Most of those whose lives were destroyed under this program were picked up in Afghanistan and Iraq following the U.S. invasions—for the “crime” of being in those countries. The heavily censored summary (less than one-tenth the length of the classified full report) sheds a little more light on the crimes of U.S. imperialism by detailing the sadistic brutality of the CIA torturers. Yet this report, which mostly documents what was already known, is the mere tip of the iceberg in the “war on terror.”

The list of 119 detainees in the report does not touch on the many tens of thousands detained and tortured by the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib and beyond, its local proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the governments that received prisoners as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” operations. The report is also a complete cover-up for the White House, portraying the program as a rogue operation with President George W. Bush kept in the dark. In fact, both Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney have affirmed their knowledge of the program.

A section of the U.S. capitalist ruling class is worried that earlier exposures of the CIA’s widespread use of torture have done damage to the pretense that it is a champion of “human rights.” President Barack Obama declared torture to be “contrary to our values” and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the Senate committee’s chair, chimed in that it was “a stain on our values and our history.” By fessing up to the existence of the (supposedly defunct) CIA program and tossing the public some tidbits, the Senate report is an attempt to close the book on the issue.

The Senate committee’s main criticism of the CIA program is that torture “was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence.” Anyone subjected to the CIA’s depraved tortures would tell their tormenters whatever they wanted to hear, true or not. Such barbarism primarily serves as a means to establish domination and instill terror more widely. As one CIA officer said, torture like “rectal hydration” established the interrogator’s “total control over the detainee.”

Those dragged off to the CIA “black site” prisons were shackled in stress positions for extended periods, sometimes with broken limbs, and subjected to sleep deprivation and mock executions. One detainee, after weeks of waterboarding, was placed in a coffin-sized box for 266 hours. Another, Gul Rahman, was beaten, shackled to the wall of his cell and stripped of most of his clothing. The next day, he was dead from hypothermia. The report admits that 26 people did not even meet the CIA’s own standards for being detained, including two who were wrongly held “based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee” who had been tortured. The torturers realized that another man wasn’t the person they thought he was, but not before subjecting him to ice baths and 66 hours of standing without sleep.

No doubt there are many, especially young activists, who see a ray of hope that the CIA will be reined in as a result of these latest revelations, to which we can only say: “Ain’t going to happen.” The U.S. has tortured, is torturing and will continue to torture so long as it exists as a capitalist country. Under capitalism, society is ruled by the bourgeoisie, a tiny stratum that owns the means of production (factories, mines, banks, etc.) and lives off the profits extracted from the working class. That capitalist ruling class relies on the organized violence of its state apparatus to maintain its position atop the exploited and oppressed masses.

Under imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, mass murder, torture and humiliation necessarily accompany the exploitation of labor and the ceaseless struggle of competing advanced powers to dominate the world. The brutalization and dehumanization of “lesser peoples,” untermenschen to the Nazis, is a mainstay of imperialist subjugation—reinforcing the view of the capitalist masters that they are meant to rule over the poor, dirty masses. Former secretary of state John Foster Dulles expressed this mindset: “There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are others.”

In response to the recent report, Cheney pronounced, “I’d do it again in a minute,” while denying that the practices outlined in it constituted torture on the grounds that the victims were not Americans. In reality, the U.S. rulers have wielded torture against not only dark-skinned people around the world, but also leftists and minorities at home, particularly black people. When not presiding over torture themselves, the self-proclaimed leaders of the free world have shared their techniques with their blood-soaked client regimes, especially in Latin America.

State Repression and Bourgeois Democracy

The capitalist politicians behind the Senate committee report are trying to refurbish the image of U.S. imperialism in order to better prosecute the “war on terror,” which both the Democrats and Republicans have fully backed from the first. That so-called war has served as a pretext for imperialist depredations abroad and a wholesale assault on civil liberties at home. The release of the report was held up for two years as the committee, the CIA and the White House sought to balance releasing enough information to be credible against not revealing anything too damaging. After all, Commander-in-Chief Obama, just like any U.S. president, needs the likes of the CIA to do imperialism’s dirty work.

The facade that is bourgeois democracy, not least the lie that the government is responsible to the people, disguises the brutality at the core of capitalist class rule. Witness Feinstein, who is prancing around with a halo as a supposed defender of civil liberties. The Senator has helped push through the massive expansion of the repressive powers of the state under the “war on terror” and howled for the heads of those like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who exposed some of the imperialists’ crimes. Leading Congressional Democrats, including then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” as early as 2002.

A former White House official told the New York Times (26 December 2014): “Many presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community. I think Obama was more smitten than most,” adding, “this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.” Such a reference may seem bizarre to liberals who like to quote Eisenhower’s warnings against the growth of the “military industrial complex.” Like Obama today, Eisenhower fretted over military quagmires costing American lives and dollars. So he vastly expanded covert activity, authorizing the CIA to engineer the overthrow of left-nationalist governments, beginning with Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, with many more to follow. His efforts to undo the Cuban Revolution included a proposal for the U.S. government to carry out murderous acts of sabotage within the U.S. and blame them on Cuba as a pretext for war.

For his part, Obama, who never wanted the Senate investigation, has an anti-terror strategy that he presents as more compatible with the trappings of bourgeois democracy than that of his predecessor: pervasive snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA) and its ilk coupled with the CIA’s take-no-prisoners drone attacks, which have killed thousands, including many women and children. Torture isn’t by any means off Obama’s menu, though, as the 122 people still held in Guantánamo could attest.

Many liberals feel that the lack of any prosecutions weakens the effort to clean up the CIA’s image. Thus, the headline of a New York Times (21 December 2014) editorial calls to “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses” (by which its editors did not mean Bush). Since 2009, before his first inauguration, Obama has made clear that he did not intend to subject the torture carried out under Bush to official scrutiny, offering: “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Shortly after taking office, he promised CIA officers that none of them would ever be prosecuted and, indeed, a Justice Department review of the torture program found no reason to indict anyone. In response to the Senate report, Obama declared that “a profound debt of gratitude” is owed to “the dedicated men and women of our intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency.”

We are all for those responsible for torture getting their just deserts, while recognizing that such savagery is endemic to this system of exploitation and oppression. Justice for the innumerable victims of imperialist terror will only come when the working class has overthrown capitalist rule, sweeping aside the capitalist state apparatus and establishing a workers state. Reformist socialists pretend otherwise, sowing illusions in the possibility of a kinder, gentler imperialism, if only enough pressure is applied to Democratic Party politicians.

One such group, the Workers World Party, cites the Senate’s 1975-76 Church Committee as an example of the “struggle to restrain the CIA” (workers.org, 13 December 2014). Coming in the wake of the Watergate affair and the tumultuous social struggles of the 1960s and early ’70s, the Church Committee was set up to contain outrage sparked by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelations that the CIA was not only destabilizing foreign governments but also spying on thousands of Americans. Committee hearings exposed the FBI/CIA’s repeated efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders as well as the campaign of spying on antiwar and civil rights activists.

In the end, the Church Committee covered up more than it revealed and led to the implementation of toothless “reforms”: Congressional “oversight” committees that have rubber stamped all the CIA’s machinations and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has given legal sanction to massive CIA/NSA wiretapping and surveillance. A rare dose of reality emerged from the Church Committee hearings when James Angleton, the CIA’s former chief of counterintelligence, said, “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”

The Long History of American Torture

Far from an aberration, torture has been a commonplace of modern capitalist society: the Belgians in the Congo, the British in Kenya and Northern Ireland, the French in Algeria, the now-ubiquitous “war on terror.” The U.S.—a society originating with the genocide of the indigenous population and built on the systematic oppression of black people from chattel slavery to today’s wage slavery—has its own long history of torture.

After seizing the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico as colonies from Spain in 1898, U.S. troops killed up to half a million Filipinos to suppress a nationalist uprising. Colonel Jacob Smith (who a decade earlier participated in the massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee) declared to his troops: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.” Those who were taken prisoner were subjected to hideous torture. The most notorious was the “water cure,” in which bamboo tubes were forced down prisoners’ throats and dirty water pumped into their stomachs. Soldiers then jumped on their abdomens until the individual either “informed” or died.

While Washington was consolidating the country’s status as an imperialist power abroad, there was an epidemic of lynching at home. An average of two black people were lynched every week as Jim Crow segregation became the law of the land in the South. In addition to lynch mobs, there was the state’s legal lynching—the death penalty—often based on false confessions extracted with threats of the gun or the noose. But even the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1926 ruled that confessions obtained through waterboarding, “a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country,” had crossed a line that mandated overturning a murder conviction.

Most of the world knows of the Nazi torture machine in the 1930s and ’40s. Kept hidden are the horrendous practices of the imperialist democracies at the time, including during the occupation of Germany after World War II. The Americans, along with the British, had set up Direct Interrogation Centers purportedly to uncover Nazi war criminals, but with the Cold War beginning they shortly turned to gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union. Anyone who had contact with the Soviet Zone could wind up in an interrogation center, where they were stripped naked, beaten, forced to stand for hours and deprived of sleep, mirroring the tortures described in the recent Senate report.

As Giles MacDonogh records in his book After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (2007):

“The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in Dachau. One of these was keeping the prisoner for long periods in solitary confinement.... Worse still were the mock executions, where the men were led off in hoods, while their guards told them they were approaching the gallows. Prisoners were actually lifted bodily off the ground to convince them they were about to swing.”

Many were kept imprisoned solely for having too much firsthand knowledge of the tortures to which they were subjected. Most of those held in American prisoner-of-war camps were German army conscripts drawn from the working masses, while former Nazi intelligence agents of the Gehlen organization were incorporated into the CIA.

CIA-organized torture was a weapon in U.S. imperialism’s efforts to overthrow the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers states, not least its attempted rollback of the social revolution in Vietnam. The CIA’s Phoenix program, begun in 1967, set up torture centers in every district of that country. In 1970, two U.S. Congressmen went to Vietnam, finding tens of thousands of prisoners held in underground “tiger cages.” Then-Congressman Tom Harkin described, “There were as many as five people in an airless pit.... Many are forced to drink their own urine. Most of the men could not stand up, their legs having been paralyzed by beatings and by being shackled to a bar about one or two feet off the floor.”

In that same period, the cops and FBI tortured black militants in the U.S. One example was the effort to get Black Panthers to confess to the 1971 killing of San Francisco police officer John Young. During several days of interrogation in 1973, three Panther members were stripped, blindfolded and beaten, covered with blankets soaked in boiling water, shocked with electric cattle prods on their genitals and anuses. Even though the charges were thrown out in 1975 on the basis that their confessions had been coerced through torture, the vendetta against the former Panthers framed up for the killing of the cop continued until 2011.

Today, tortures such as isolation and sensory deprivation are a daily reality for the thousands of inmates—overwhelmingly black and Latino—in the solitary confinement Special Housing Units (SHU) of America’s prisons. The High Security Units in the Lexington, Kentucky, women’s prison were a prototype for the SHUs. Those units were designed to hold leftist political activists as part of Ronald Reagan’s “war on terror,” launched in 1986. Among the women locked up in them were leftists Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini as well as Alejandrina Torres, a supporter of the Puerto Rican-nationalist FALN.

The prisoner held the longest in solitary confinement in this country is Albert Woodfox. He has been in solitary since 1972, framed up with another Black Panther for the killing of a prison guard. Woodfox is kept in a closet-size, windowless cell 23 hours per day. He eats all his meals alone and has no access to the prison’s educational or religious activities. Even though he is under constant supervision and is shackled whenever he is moved, he is subjected to visual body cavity searches up to six times a day. Woodfox’s conviction has repeatedly been overturned, most recently this past November, but his conditions remain unchanged.

Socialist Revolution Will End Imperialist Barbarism

While torture is an intrinsic part of the armory of repression of capitalist states everywhere, another type of society is possible, the model for which issued out of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, that revolution made the working class the rulers of society for the first time in history. The Soviet workers state was a fundamentally different state than any capitalist state. It defended not the interests of a tiny exploiting minority but of the vast majority of society—the working masses of the proletariat and poor peasantry. As part of their liberating program, the Bolsheviks repudiated dehumanizing barbarities like torture, even while using all means necessary to ensure victory in the civil war against Russian counterrevolutionaries and the 14 capitalist powers that sent troops to overthrow the workers government.

Temporary and drastic measures were required to defeat counterrevolution. For that purpose, the early Soviet workers state established the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage). The Cheka’s methods reflected the proletarian morality of the Soviet power. In 1918, Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky issued the following instructions:

“Let all those who are assigned to conduct searches, take people into custody, and imprison them behave solicitously toward those being arrested or searched. Let them be much more courteous even than toward close friends. Let them remember that the incarcerated cannot defend themselves and that they are in our power. Each and every one must remember that they represent Soviet power, the workers’ and peasants’ government, and that any verbal abuse, rudeness, injustice, or impropriety is a blot upon the Soviet power.”

When a small Moscow journal, Cheka Weekly, published a letter calling for the use of torture, the Cheka responded, “The proletariat is merciless in its struggle. At the same time it is unshakable and strong. Not a single curse at our most wicked enemies. No tortures and torments!” The Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the highest governmental body, passed a decree: “The Soviet regime fundamentally rejects the measures advocated in the indicated article, as despicable, dangerous, and contrary to the interests of the struggle for Communism” (quoted in Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge [1972]). The Cheka Weekly was closed down, and the authors of the letter dismissed and forbidden to hold office in the Soviet republic.

The economic backwardness of Russia, the decimation of the advanced layers of the proletariat during the civil war and the failure to extend the revolution internationally allowed a bureaucratic caste headed by J.V. Stalin to usurp political power from the proletariat in 1923-24. Under the Stalinist regime, all the old “tortures and torments” denounced by the early Soviet government were revived. Despite its Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet Union remained a workers state, based on proletarian property forms, until its final undoing through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.

We stand in the tradition of the liberating goals of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. Our aim is to win revolutionary-minded youth and proletarian fighters to the necessity of building revolutionary parties, in the U.S. and internationally, to lead the working class to power. Only then will mankind be able put an end to torture, repression and imperialist war and develop a society of abundance, where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

A View From The Left...“National Unity” Crusade After Paris Massacres-France: Down With “War on Terror” Repression!

Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

“National Unity” Crusade After Paris Massacres-France: Down With “War on Terror” Repression!

 

In the wake of the horrific murders committed by jihadists in Paris, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry visited France to make a show of embracing French president François Hollande. Signaling how the French ruling class intends to capitalize on the recent shootings, the Socialist Party (SP) head of state likened them to the 11 September 2001 attacks, which in the U.S. led to a vast expansion in the state’s repressive arsenal and a qualitative diminution in democratic rights. In that spirit, the war criminals in Washington will host a February 18 global “security summit” with the French and other bloodstained imperialist powers. Kerry and fellow White House officials have already taken part in high-level talks with their European counterparts to pave the way for a renewed “war on terror” crackdown.

Kicking its machinery of repression into high gear, the Hollande government arrested scores for statements and protests it deemed as apologizing for terrorism while pouring troops and more cops onto the streets. With the war drums beating louder and faster, Paris dispatched an aircraft carrier group to launch bombing raids over Iraq, escalating its involvement in the U.S.-led war against ISIS.

Moves to ramp up the “anti-terror” crusade in Europe are further fuel for a rising tide of racist hysteria directed against dark-skinned people and immigrants. Far-right parties spewing anti-immigrant vitriol have been climbing in opinion polls in France, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands. In Germany, the racist national-chauvinists of Pegida have held weekly rallies in Dresden of up to 25,000 people.

Contrary to imperialist propaganda, Islam holds no monopoly on fundamentalist terrorism. In the U.S., the countless bombings, arson attacks and assaults against abortion clinics, including the assassination of eight people since the early 1990s, were carried out in the name of biblical injunction. Of course, such anti-woman violence does not count as religious extremism in a country where Christian fundamentalists wield substantial political influence.

We print below a translation of a January 17 statement issued by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France. It refers to Vigipirate, a massive mobilization of the French police and military to sow terror in minority neighborhoods and to patrol transportation hubs hunting for supposed terror suspects.

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The criminal attacks in Paris carried out by Islamic fundamentalists against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and during a hostage situation in a kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes—civilians selected and killed in a store because they were Jewish—are horrific acts that we categorically condemn. But this does not stop us from also vigorously opposing the cynical campaign of “national unity” fueled by the capitalist government to promote its “war on terrorism” and reinforce the police and military apparatus of French imperialism. We oppose the Vigipirate security plan and the climate of war created by the bourgeois propaganda machine. We are also opposed to all measures that strengthen the arsenal of police repression as well as the new “anti-terrorist” military adventures that have already been announced or are being prepared. The calls for the “unity” of classes, supported by the misleaders of the trade-union federations, serve only to bind the working class and the oppressed to their oppressors. Down with Vigipirate!

This “national unity” campaign will continue to fuel an anti-Muslim pogromist atmosphere throughout the country and strengthen the rise of the fascists of [the National Front’s Marine] Le Pen and her ilk. In the days following the attack against Charlie Hebdo, a series of attacks took place against the Muslim community in a dozen cities across France—gunshots, grenades, graffiti desecrations and pigs’ heads left at the doors of mosques. In this sense, the Paris terrorist attacks are also a blow against the Muslim population, which was already in the crosshairs of the capitalist state.

The January 11 demonstration in Paris, organized by the SP government, was an obscene expression of imperialist arrogance and hypocrisy. There one could see the heads of capitalist states who are among the most brutal and barbaric criminals in the world today, from [Germany’s Angela] Merkel and [Britain’s David] Cameron to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. And taking center stage was Hollande, who pursues a savage domestic policy of austerity and attacks against the working class and expels Roma and other immigrants by the thousands. Hollande is the leader of French imperialism, which has a history of over 100 years of oppression and the massacre of millions of colonized subjects. Recently, it has conducted murderous interventions in Iraq, Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali.

The repeated military interventions by France and other imperialist powers, with their legacy of destruction and massacres, have played a direct role in the rise of Islamists in the Near East—and in France itself. From North Africa to the Levant, the French bourgeoisie and its successive governments carry on today, as do other imperialist powers including the U.S. and Great Britain, a policy that dates back to colonial times. They plunder the natural resources and retard the economic development of their former colonies, and they have reduced entire regions to a pile of rubble while stoking deadly ethnic and religious divisions.

The National Assembly has just decided in an almost-unanimous vote to extend France’s military commitment in Iraq against ISIS. The imperialists have never had the slightest qualms about supporting such reactionary forces when they feel this can serve their sordid interests. For three years, the French in particular supported the “Syrian revolution,” even as the number of reactionary jihadists was steadily increasing. Now the French rulers have cynically turned against the monster they themselves helped to create.

It is the imperialists who are responsible for the bloody chaos into which this region has been plunged. They are the worst enemies of humanity, and any blow to the imperialist forces and their foot soldiers, even on the part of forces as repugnant as ISIS, would thus serve the interests of the international working class. Marxists place themselves militarily on the side of ISIS against imperialism, without giving the least political support to these reactionaries, who are our resolute enemies. Down with American and French imperialist intervention in Iraq! French troops out of the Near East and Africa!

The capitalist rulers have seized upon the Vincennes atrocity in order to posture as defenders of the Jews. What hypocrisy! The sordid history of the French bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the Jews includes the Dreyfus affair as well as the deportation of over 75,000 Jews—men, women, children and the elderly—to the Nazi death camps.

Since 2012, when Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Jews emigrating from France. The bourgeoisie has seized on that attack to pass off the entire population of the immigrant suburbs as repugnant anti-Semites, while supporting the terrorist actions of the Israeli state against the Palestinians. All of this is used by fundamentalist preachers and fascistic scum like Dieudonné/Soral, who seek to whip up reactionary anti-Jewish prejudices in the suburbs by identifying all Jews with the murderous Zionist rulers.

Of all the European countries, France has the largest population of Jews and Muslims. The French bourgeoisie uses the policy of “divide and rule” in order to benefit from the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Near East as well as to sow divisions within the working class here in France between its various components—those of so-called “French origin,” Jews, those of North African or Sub-Saharan African origin. The workers movement must defend Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, women and all the oppressed against attacks by reactionaries and fascists as well as against the offensive of the capitalist state.

The Paris demonstration was awash with “I Am Charlie” placards. The attack against Charlie Hebdo was a despicable criminal act. However, we are not “Charlie.” Since 11 September 2001, Charlie Hebdo has carved out a niche for itself in the Islamophobic bourgeois press. In a context of growing racist campaigns against the population of North African and African origin, and in the guise of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, Charlie Hebdo has regularly published anti-Muslim cartoons and articles. The front page of the issue published on the day of the murders promoted the latest racist and Islamophobic rant of writer Michel Houellebecq. Charlie Hebdo also provocatively published the racist Danish cartoons in 2006, including the one in which the turban of the prophet Mohammed covered a bomb. We denounced these cartoons, which serve only to encourage attacks by the state and the fascists against the oppressed. [See “Racist Anti-Muslim Cartoons Spark Fundamentalist Frenzy,” WV No. 864, 17 February 2006.]

While the French bourgeoisie and its government hail the right of free speech for Islamophobic provocations, this right is denied to anyone who expresses an opinion—even in a private conversation or on Facebook—that does not coincide with the government’s “republican values.” Indeed, under the Cazeneuve law that was passed in November, they can be thrown in jail. Two hundred public-school students were identified for not observing the January 8 national minute of silence as well as for other acts; about 40 of them were reported to the police. More than 70 people have been arrested so far, including the anti-Jewish demagogue Dieudonné, for “apology for acts of terrorism,” simply for having expressed an opinion. In Lille, three civil service workers are threatened with being fired for not observing the minute of silence. Hearings and trials have been sped up and several people have already been convicted—one was sentenced to four years in prison. The accused can be hit with heavy fines and up to five years in prison for a verbal offense and up to seven years if an offending text is posted on the Internet. We demand that these charges be dropped! Free those who have been jailed!

In the aftermath of the attacks, [Prime Minister Manuel] Valls is preparing to further beef up the already enormous police powers introduced over the past few years, allowing the state, among other things, to continue to siphon data from the Internet (now in all legality). Already, 10,500 soldiers and over 100,000 gendarmes and police have been deployed. Countless demonstrators on Sunday [January 11] applauded the cops. But the cops are the guardians of capital; their role is to protect the racist capitalist order. They are enemies of the working class and the oppressed. They persecute dark-skinned youth, round up undocumented workers and help the bosses break strikes. They are at the core of the state, which defends the capitalist ruling class, as shown for example in the police assassination of several hundred Algerian workers in Paris on 17 October 1961.

Islam in France is a minority religion in a country in which the bourgeoisie and its culture remain fundamentally Catholic. As Marxists, we are resolutely for the separation of the reactionary Catholic church and the state. That is what secularism is, but today in France it has become a code word used to stigmatize Islam.

The appearance in French cities of murderous Islamic fundamentalists, from Merah to Nemmouche and today the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, is a direct product of the segregation and alienation of millions of people, French second-class citizens who are victims of unrelenting racist discrimination. The influence of Islamic fundamentalism developed in the ghettos following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92 and the many betrayals committed for decades by the chauvinist leaders of the workers movement. Notably, the leaders of the organized workers movement refused to defend dark-skinned youth during the 2005 revolt in the suburbs, which was a desperate reaction to increasing daily racist terror and unemployment.

Against the “national unity” campaign, we Marxists say that only the organized working class, conscious of its historical role in liberating the oppressed masses, is able to put an end to the domination of the capitalist class and its state. The working class can advance the struggle against capitalist exploitation only through uncompromising defense of the oppressed and democratic rights, and in opposition to all imperialist atrocities committed by “its” capitalist ruling class, at home and abroad. Our task is to build a revolutionary proletarian party based on the Marxist understanding that the whole rotten capitalist system must be overthrown through workers revolution.

All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers-The Documentary 1971 

Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.        

Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).

Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience trying to shut down the government's war machine on the streets, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action.

The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.    

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The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI

John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)

Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.

They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s  Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.

 “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”

– John Raines

In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.

But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.

“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.

“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”

Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.

When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”

The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.

Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.

 “A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”

– John Adams

Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.

While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.

“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”

Watch the trailer for '1971':

Guests

• John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn.

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Make Your Voice Heard on the Olympics! The City of Boston will hold nine public meetings on Boston2024's bid.  It is important for all residents from across Massachusetts who have questions or concerns about the bid to attend these meetings and to make your voice heard. The City's meetings are separate from the Boston2024 Citizens Advisory Group.  Why Oppose The Games?