AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Friday, March 15, 2013

Video From 11 March Keystone XL Pipeline Protest

March 12th, 2013 · Steve · News and AnnouncementsNo comments

Solidarity!

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10 Years Later: Still Shocked, Not Awed

March 18, 2013
Washington, D.C.
The Langston Room at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Streets, NW
8-10 p.m.
Free and open to the public.

Sign up here: http://facebook.com/events/601163023231687

Ten years after the latest U.S. assault on Iraq began with a campaign of "Shock and Awe," we stop to consider where we've been and where we should be heading. Join:

Leah Bolger, Board Member and Past President of Veterans For Peace.

Andy Shallal, artist, peace and social justice activist and entrepreneur, is the founder of Busboys and Poets and Eatonville. He sits on the board of several art, business and peace and justice organizations including the Institute for Policy Studies, Anacostia Community Museum and Think Local First D.C.

Robert Shetterly, an award winning painter whose work is in collections all over the U.S. and Europe. For more than 10 years he has been painting the series of portraits Americans Who Tell the Truth. The exhibit has been traveling around the country since 2003. A book of the portraits has won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non-fiction.

Shetterly will be unveiling his latest portrait, that of David Swanson.

David Swanson, an author whose books include Daybreak (2009), War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012). Swanson hosts Talk Nation Radio, and works for RootsAction.org, as well as blogging at WarIsACrime.org.

Sponsoring organizations that have helped spread the word about this event:
WarIsACrime.org
RootsAction.org
World Can't Wait
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Veterans For Peace
Peace Action Montgomery
OccupyWashingtonDC.org / October2011
CodePink
Americans Who Tell the Truth
Busboys and Poets
Teaching for Change
C.H.O.I.C.E.S. (Committee for High-School Options and Information on Careers, Education and Self-Improvement)
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
Washington Peace Center
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore
Coffee Party
Liberty Tree Foundation

Boston Globe – Editorial – 3/15/13

City shouldn’t run sweepers between St. Patrick’s parades

THE CONTINUED exclusion of gay and lesbian groups from the St. Patrick’s Day veterans’ parade in South Boston feels increasingly out of place in an evolving city. Both the city and the neighborhood have changed dramatically since the bitter wars over the parade in the ’90s. Yet the battle lines remain as frozen as ever.

This year, though, the city has a rare opportunity to help thaw tensions. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the city is not required to run street sweepers between the main parade and a subsequent alternative parade that allows gay groups to march. The arrival of the sweepers may send an inadvertent signal to the crowd after the first parade that it’s time to go home. So the city should break with recent practice and run the sweepers only after both parades are over. It would be a small step, but by removing a barrier between the two groups, the city could promote the gradual healing of what, for too many Bostonians, still feels like an open wound.

The main parade, which wends through South Boston before thousands of cheering onlookers, is organized by the Allied War Veterans Council. It is an important cultural institution. But the council went all the way to the Supreme Court to win permission in 1995 to exclude gay groups, arguing successfully that it had a First Amendment right to control the message of the parade.

To many in South Boston, the effort by gay groups to march felt like a political gesture to hijack attention from an event devoted to veterans, and tapped into broader anxieties about change being imposed on Southie from outside. But to gays and lesbians, many of whom have proudly served in the military, exclusion from Boston’s marquee St. Patrick’s Day celebration felt like an unmistakable sign of discrimination.

Another group, Veterans for Peace, now holds a smaller parade along the same route. Theirs is open to gay groups. Under a previous court order, the alternative parade must start a mile behind the main parade. In past years, the city has interpreted the court order to mean that it has to run street-sweeping machines. The organizers of the alternative parade argue the sweepers scare away spectators and send a misleading message that the day’s festivities are over.

The organizers of the alternative parade argue the sweepers send a misleading message that the day’s festivities are over.

Now, though, Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings has clarified that deploying the street sweepers is optional. Maybe it will make no difference whether the sweepers run. But maybe without them, a few more spectators will stick around to watch the second parade. Maybe the distinction between the two will start to look and feel a little more artificial. Maybe it will provide a way forward that doesn’t require anyone to feel like they’ve “lost.” And maybe an end to a needlessly polarizing drama that has already pitted Bostonians against each other for too long will come a step closer.

*** As March 17^th Approaches-Remembrances Of Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade 2012

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

“Hey, just follow the Veterans For Peace (VFP) white and black dove-emblazoned flags down to D Street and you’ll run right into the Saint Patricks’ Peace Parade staging area,” a grizzled veteran, looking like a man who had seen his share of battles in war and peace, bellowed to one and all as Frank Jackman and his veteran and peace activist companions exited the Broadway Redline MBTA station on that overheated March 17^th 2012 Sunday morning in order to form up in that parade the old vet had informed them about.

[As it turned out, by the way, when Frank“interviewed” him later while they were waiting in that flag-festooned staging area, that grizzled veteran, Bob Ballad, had indeed seen his share of battles, having done two tours in ‘Nam, two tours as a “grunt,” an infantry man, “cannon fodder,” during hell time, 1966-68, and also of peace time battles against drugs and liquor, a couple of bouts of homelessness, a couple of divorces, and a few other of the now well-known pathologies of those who had had trouble coming back to the “real world “ after Vietnam that Frank had witnessed in his own family, in his own old time Hullsville neighborhood, and among his fellow VFPers. Moreover , unlike Frank, who was also a Vietnam veteran and had turned anti-war while in the military, that grizzled vet had not turned against war, the rumors of war, and all that war entails until his own son started clamoring for permission to go in the service when Iraq exploded in 1991. That is when he put his foot down, kept his son out and had been a stalwart ever since. Welcome aboard, brother, welcome aboard]

Frank had to chuckle to himself a little as he and his companions headed up Broadway among the throngs who were forming up for the official parade that although he had grown up in the Irishtown section of Hullsville (you could hardly walk down a street of that town at this time of year and not be confronted with more green than you would ever see short of maybe Dublin , that was true even these days when the town itself, reflecting a couple of generations more moving south of Boston had lost it dominate Irish feel) and had lived in Boston on and off for most of his adult life he had never gone to the official parade. Well except that one time in high school junior year when he and “flame” Kathy Flanagan (she of the long wild red hair, light freckled face and green eyes, and thin athletic body who disturbed his sleep more than one night in those days) had “skipped” school (unlike in Boston which was in a different county from Hullsville they did not have the day off from school in the days when the holiday was celebrated on the actual day not only on Sunday) headed via the long haul Eastern Mass bus armed with a pint of Southern Comfort, the drink of choice and cheap, over to the parade. Except they never got there. They had stopped off at Carson Beach and started drinking that ambrosia and well, one thing led to another and who gave a damn about some silly shamrock drunken parade anyway when a guy had a wild, green-eyed, red-headed girl next to him. So, although he had many close connections with old“Southie,” the first stop for many of the famine-borne (famine of one kind or another, not just the food kind although that was writ large on that benighted country’s history) Irish, including his family, this was to be the first time that he showed up in Southie for a parade on Saint Patty’s Day. And of course while he might be on those same hallowed streets his purpose that day was to march with the VFP contingent in their alternative peace parade.

Frank was not sure of all the details then about why there was a need for a separate parade, although later after the event he dug out some of the details from some guys who were closely involved in organizing the alternative event, but the gist of it centered on exclusion. Everybody in town, everybody who cared anyway, knew that back in the 1990s the official parade organizers had gone to court, hell, had gone to the Supremes, over excluding gays and lesbians (even Irish gays and lesbians like somehow that category could not be in Catholic-heavy Irishtown and was a dastardly thing, a mortal sin maybe, so if there was then they did want any part of it publicly). And won, won the right to exclude whomever they wanted from their “private”parade, as the Supremes in one of their more arcane legal decisions that made no sense backed them up.

See though, when you have a “right” to exclude that can take you into some strange places so when the VFP decided they wanted march in the official parade to protest various war actions of the American government, or just to send out a peace message to a large crowd they too were excluded by the official parade organizers. The “reason”-short and simple reason, they, the officials, didn’t want the words “veterans” and “peace” put together in their parade. Hence the march of the excluded that VFP had first organized the previous year. And hence Frank Jackman had responded to their call and was approaching the staging area with that sense of solidarity in mind.

As Frank waited, seemingly endlessly waited for the peace parade to step off (the officials had, as part of their victory, been able to legally keep any other formations at least one mile behind their procession) he began to think of the many connections he had with this old section of town, this section that he had heard had changed demographically and in other ways as the Irish moved south and the younger more diverse set moved in and rehabilitated the old cold- water triple-deckers that lined all the lettered and numbered streets of the section (at least showing some sense of order since the real of the town was identified by a miasma of odd-ball combinations). He remembered ancient first murky visits to those old cold- water flats where some great aunts and their huge broods lived in splendid squalor and of cheap ribbon candy offered at Christmas time and not much else. Or funny things like the few times that he had been“privileged” to drive his material grandmother Riley (nee O’Brian) over to Southie so that the sisters (some of those grand-aunts) could go to one of the “ladies invited”taverns and get drunk since Grandpa Riley refused, absolutely refused, to have liquor in the house (or cigarettes either). He wished he could remember the exact gin mill but he couldn’t except that it was near the Starlight Ballroom.

Or when he was older and his uncle on his mother’s side had taken him to Jim and Joe’s farther up Broadway, up toward M Street, and“baptized” him with his first drink of whiskey (no beer chasers then, that would could later). Or later still when he became something of a regular at Jim and Joe’s while he was working his way through college servicing vending machines for York Vending just around the corner from the staging area and the guys, the mainly Southie guys that he worked with, “forced “him to drink with them after work (and hence the genesis of beer chasers). Beyond those episode though except an occasion walk on Carson Beach (with and without female companionship) he had not been around Southie much.

After a while, a long hot while, since the weather was unseasonably warm for March in Boston, the peace parade stepped off, stepped off with VFP black and white dove-emblazoned flags flying in the lead paced by several cars for those really old (so he thought) World War II veterans, veterans from Franks’ late father’s time sitting on board. As he looked back he noticed a huge banner calling for No War On Iran and another calling for Freedom For Private Bradley Manning, another worthy cause, and behind that contingents of LGBT in various combinations, and behind them broken up at intervals by marching bands other progressive and social groups wishing to express solidarity with the excluded here, and throughout the world. Frank felt good, felt he had made the right decision to come this day despite some medical problems recently.

As the parade turned onto Broadway, old Broadway, of a thousand drinks and other assorted goings on, he again thought about the old days as he passed various landmarks, or the spots where the landmarks had been once. Artie’s where his first serious serious “flame” Sheila Shea had left him, left him for good, Jim and Joe’s now called the Green Tavern, where he had had more cheap whiskeys than he cared to recall, a couple of places farther up where ladies were invited back then (quaint notion, right),and he had been invited by a couple of ladies and then up where another small “flame” Minnie Kiley had lived, then up the cavernous West Broadway where the triple-deckers of his early youth still stood thick as thieves.

Then he started to notice that those self-same triple- deckers had been upgraded and that those who stood on the sidewalks clapping as the parade went by were not the “from hunger” Irish second and third cousins of his youth but looked, well, wed-fed and well-cared for. And as they marched toward the end of the parade route at Andrew Square he also noticed, very distinctly noticed, a small section of streets where gay men were standing with a sign and cheering. Frank then flashed back to an earlier time when the deep dark secret in Aunt Bernice’s brood, the one from K Street, was that one of the boys, Harry, was “different” and had been banished from the house. Yes, things had certainly changed but he wished that those idiots who were so keen on exclusion had moved away from those whiskey and beer chaser bar stools and come into the sunlight…

Saint Patrick's Peace Parade

The Alternative People's Parade for Peace. Equality, Jobs, Environmental Stewardship, Social & Economic Justice

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Assemble Time: 2:00 pm

Start Time: 3:00 pm (Approx.)

Start Location: Corner of West Broadway & D Street,

Four Blocks East of the - MBTA Redline "Broadway Station"

Look for Veterans For Peace Flags

End Location: Corner of Dorchester Ave. and Dorchester St)

"Andrew" MBTA Station

'The St. Patrick's Peace Day Parade STARTS on West Broadway (easterly), left onto East Broadway, Right onto "P" Street, Right onto "East 4th" Street, Left onto "K" Street, Right onto "East 5th" Street, Left onto "G" Street, Right onto the 'Southerly Arm of Thomas Park', Left onto "Telegraph" Street, Left onto "Dorchester Street" and ENDING at "Dorchester Avenue" (Andrew Square).

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Eyewitness To The Spanish Revolution-George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia

BOOK REVIEW

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, GEORGE ORWELL, HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, NEW YORK, 1952

AS WE APPROACH THE 70^TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR MILITANTS NEED TO DRAW THE LESSONS FOR THE DEFEAT OF THAT REVOLUTION.

I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was a teenager. 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 revolutions after the Russian revolution Spainshowed the most promise of success. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted that the political class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat was higher than that of the Russian proletariat in 1917. George Orwell’s book gives some eyewitness insights into the causes of that defeat from the perspective of a political rank and file militant who fought in the trenches in a Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militia unit during the key year 1937.Leon Trotsky in his polemical article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, collected in The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39 (reviewed elsewhere in this space), his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, while asserting that the POUM was the most honest revolutionary party in Spain, stated that in the final analysis the approaching defeat of the revolution could be laid to the policies of the POUM. Orwell’s book parallels that argument on the ground in Spain although he certainly was not a follower of Trotsky’s.

Let us be clear here- we are not talking about the Orwell who later lost his political moorings and decided that the road to human progress passed through the nefarious intelligence agencies of British imperialism. Unfortunately, many militants have traveled that road. Nor are we talking about the later author of Animal Farm and 1984 who warmed the hearts of Western Cold Warriors. We are talking about the militant George Orwell who fought as a volunteer against fascism in Spainin 1937 when it counted. That Orwell has something to say to militants. We need to listen to him if we are to make sense of the disaster in Spain.

While Homage to Cataloniais in part a journal of Orwell’s personal experiences as a militiaman under the stress of war that part is less useful to militants today. The parts that are important are the political chapters. One should discount Orwell’s self-proclaimed blasé attitude toward politics. Here is an intensely political man. Orwell draws two important conclusions from his experiences. First, the war against Franco could not be won without a simultaneous extension of the revolution to the creation of a workers state. The workers and peasants of Spain could not be persuaded to and would not and fight to the finish merely for ‘democracy’.This premise runs counter to the objective policies pursued by all the pro-Republican parties. Orwell describes very vividly the changes that occurred in working class morale in Barcelona, the Petrograd of Spain, during his stay.

The second conclusion Orwell draws is that the role of the Spanish Communist Party and its sponsor, the Soviet Unionwas not just momentarily anti-revolutionary in the interests of defeating Franco but counterrevolutionary. The Soviet Unionhad no interest in creating a second workers state. In the final analysis, despite providing weapons, the Soviet Unionwas more interested in finding allies among the European imperialist than in revolution. In long-range hindsight that seems clear but at the time it was far from obvious to militants on the ground, especially the militants of the Spanish Communist party who got caught up in the Stalinist security apparatus. Of course, this extreme shift to the right dovetailed with interests of the liberal Republicans. However, in the end they all had to flee.

This writer notes that at the time many European militants, like Victor Serge, and organizations , like the Independent Labor party in England, covered for the erroneous policies of the POUM based on their position as the most coherent, organized and militant ostensibly revolutionary organization in Spain. That support was at the time was the subject of intense debate on the extreme left. Fair enough. What does not make sense is that since 1991 or so under the impact of the so-called ‘death of communism’ a virtual cottage industry has developed, centered on the British journal Revolutionary History, seeking today to justify the positions of the POUM. Jesus, can’t these people learn something after all this time.

And what was the POUM. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. They made every mistake in the revolutionary book. Those conscious mistakes from its inception included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader, Nin; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the massive anarchist led-CNT to fight for the perspective of a workers state; a willful failure to seriously expand the organization outside of Catalonia; creation of its own militia units and other institutions reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937. In short, at best, the POUM pursued left social democratic policies in a situation that required Bolshevik policies. Read 1937 Orwell for other insights into the POUM.

Adrian Walker

Group battling to march for a cause

By Adrian Walker

| Globe Columnist March 13, 2013

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Peace has very nearly become a fighting word when it comes to the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston.
This Sunday’s parade — more precisely, who can march in it — has again pitted the Allied War Veterans Council, which runs the annual event, against Veterans For Peace, a group of former soldiers who hope to use the parade as a venue to promote alternatives to war.
The Allied War Veterans need little introduction. Their claim to fame, besides the parade itself, is winning a unanimous 1995 victory before the US Supreme Court in their bid to ban gays and lesbians from the parade. Since affirming their right to block whomever they want, they have asserted that any “political” group violates the spirit of St. Patrick.
Veterans for Peace have sought to march in the parade for nearly a decade, and they began holding their own counter-parade in 2011. They rightly mock the notion that the traditional parade, a key date on Boston’s political calendar, is somehow apolitical. Banning Veterans for Peace, they say, is about exclusion, pure and simple.

“The only reason given is that they consider the word peace objectionable,” said Vietnam veteran Tony Flaherty. “Peace is actively a dirty word.”
The conflict between the two veterans’ organizations is about more than just a parade. Veterans For Peace say they are driven, in part, by reflecting on their own wartime experiences.
Flaherty, 81, recalls that when he returned from duty in Vietnam to South Boston in 1974, he struggled with post-traumatic stress, then an unknown disorder. He understands the cost of war and dismisses the military-cheering crowds lining Broadway as clueless, saying, “It’s not going to be their . . . children who are cannon fodder.”
Ironically, the two veterans groups are linked in many odd ways: The best man at Flaherty’s wedding was John “Wacko” Hurley, long the face of the parade, and the guiding force behind banning gays and lesbians. Flaherty proudly asserts his hardscrabble South Boston heritage and derides parade organizers, his neighbors, as promoters of intolerance.
The ban on letting Veterans For Peace in the parade — reaffirmed, in writing, every year — led it to begin a counterparade in South Boston, beginning in 2011. This year’s parade will include not only decorated veterans from around the region, but gay and lesbian groups, religious groups, and environmentalists.
However, the event will be far behind the traditional St. Patrick’s Day marchers. A federal court ruled a few years ago that any counterparade had to walk at least 1 mile behind the end of the official parade.
It also defines the end of the parade as the moment when the last street-sweeping machine reaches the end of the route. Unfortunately, dust-blowing street-sweeping machines have a way of dispersing crowds. So the veterans are left marching after much of the crowd has left.
With the legal backing of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, they are contesting that ruling.
The veterans argue that Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has refused to march in the official parade since the antigay policy went into effect, could allow Veterans for Peace to begin closer to the end of the original parade. But Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce said Tuesday that the city’s hands are tied by the court ruling.
Veterans for Peace organizer Pat Scanlon expects as many as 4,000 marchers in its parade this year. For Scanlon, a former US Army intelligence officer in Cambodia, the cause of peace became personal when he realized just how much destruction he had helped to oversee.
“Every day a flatbed truck went by my window with coffins on it,” he said softly. “Some day there were two; some days there were 10; some days there were 20. Every day I’ve been trying to pay back the universe for what I did.”Get two weeks of FREE unlimited access to BostonGlobe.com. No credit card required.Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter:@Adrian_Walker.

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In this section: Metro

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