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

In say 1912 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other  to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing  who saw the v   of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy; writers of 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 to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….            

 

THE OLD SOLDIER


Lest the young soldiers be strange in heaven,
  God bids the old soldier they all adored
Come to Him and wait for them, clean, new-shriven,
  A happy doorkeeper in the House of the Lord.

Lest it abash them, the strange new splendour,
  Lest it affright them, the new robes clean;
Here's an old face, now, long-tried, and tender,
  A word and a hand-clasp as they troop in.

"My boys," he greets them: and heaven is homely,
  He their great captain in days gone o'er;
Dear is the friend's face, honest and comely,
  Waiting to welcome them by the strange door.

_Katharine Tynan_




LORD KITCHENER


Unflinching hero, watchful to foresee
  And face thy country's peril wheresoe'er,
  Directing war and peace with equal care,
Till by long duty ennobled thou wert he
Whom England call'd and bade "Set my arm free
  To obey my will and save my honour fair,"--
  What day the foe presumed on her despair
And she herself had trust in none but thee:

Among Herculean deeds the miracle
  That mass'd the labour of ten years in one
  Shall be thy monument. Thy work was done
Ere we could thank thee; and the high sea swell
Surgeth unheeding where thy proud ship fell
  By the lone Orkneys, at the set of sun.

_Robert Bridges_

_June 8, 1916_




KITCHENER


There is wild water from the north;
The headlands darken in their foam
As with a threat of challenge stubborn earth
Booms at that far wild sea-line charging home.

The night shall stand upon the shifting sea
As yesternight stood there,
And hear the cry of waters through the air,
The iron voice of headlands start and rise--
The noise of winds for mastery
That screams to hear the thunder in those cries.
But now henceforth there shall be heard
From Brough of Bursay, Marwick Head,
And shadows of the distant coast,
Another voice bestirred--
Telling of something greatly lost
Somewhere below the tidal glooms, and dead.
Beyond the uttermost
Of aught the night may hear on any seas
From tempest-known wild water's cry, and roar
Of iron shadows looming from the shore,
It shall be heard--and when the Orcades
Sleep in a hushed Atlantic's starry folds
As smoothly as, far down below the tides,
Sleep on the windless broad sea-wolds
Where this night's shipwreck hides.

By many a sea-holm where the shock
Of ocean's battle falls, and into spray
Gives up its ghosts of strife; by reef and rock
Ravaged by their eternal brute affray
With monstrous frenzies of their shore's green foe;
Where overstream and overfall and undertow
Strive, snatch away;
A wistful voice, without a sound,
Shall dwell beside Pomona, on the sea,
And speak the homeward- and the outward-bound,
And touch the helm of passing minds
And bid them steer as wistfully--
Saying: "He did great work, until the winds
And waters hereabout that night betrayed
Him to the drifting death! His work went on--
He would not be gainsaid....
Though where his bones are, no man knows, not one!"

_John Helston_




THE FALLEN SUBALTERN


The starshells float above, the bayonets glisten;
  We bear our fallen friend without a sound;
Below the waiting legions lie and listen
  To us, who march upon their burial-ground.

Wound in the flag of England, here we lay him;
  The guns will flash and thunder o'er the grave;
What other winding sheet should now array him,
  What other music should salute the brave?

As goes the Sun-god in his chariot glorious,
  When all his golden banners are unfurled,
So goes the soldier, fallen but victorious,
  And leaves behind a twilight in the world.

And those who come this way, in days hereafter,
  Will know that here a boy for England fell,
Who looked at danger with the eyes of laughter,
  And on the charge his days were ended well.

One last salute; the bayonets clash and glisten;
  With arms reversed we go without a sound:
One more has joined the men who lie and listen
  To us, who march upon their burial-ground.

_Herbert Asquith_

_1915_




THE DEBT UNPAYABLE


What have I given,
  Bold sailor on the sea,
In earth or heaven,
  That you should die for me?

What can I give,
  O soldier, leal and brave,
Long as I live,
  To pay the life you gave?

What tithe or part
  Can I return to thee,
O stricken heart,
  That thou shouldst break for me?

The wind of Death
  For you has slain life's flowers,
It withereth
  (God grant) all weeds in ours.

_F.W. Bourdillon_

29th Annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal...The Struggle That Passes Through The Prisons-Free the Class-War Prisoners! Workers Vanguard No. 1057	28 November 2014

29th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

 

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

 

For nearly three decades, the Partisan Defense Committee has provided stipends to class-war prisoners—those behind bars for opposing varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC is now organizing our annual Holiday Appeal fundraisers on behalf of 16 such prisoners. We send them $50 monthly stipends and provide holiday gifts for them and their families. The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life.

 

The PDC’s stipend program is modeled on a tradition of the early Communist movement, specifically the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon, from 1925-28. The ILD sent monthly contributions to more than 100 people imprisoned for fighting in the interests of the working people and the oppressed. As Cannon observed: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one.... All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class” (“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926).

 

This past year, we added Albert Woodfox as a stipend recipient. Along with other Black Panther Party members known as the Angola Three, Woodfox stood up against the hideous racism at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. In retaliation, prison authorities have subjected him to more than four decades of solitary confinement.

 

Others who had received stipends are now outside prison walls. After months of medical neglect and with thousands demanding her release, Lynne Stewart was finally let out of federal prison last New Year’s Eve. Suffering serious complications from breast cancer, Stewart is undergoing special treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York City. She reports that she is struggling with drug side effects and is having difficulty walking. Other former PDC stipend recipients are the young anti-fascist activists known as the Tinley Park 5, who were released at various times over the last 12 months or so. They had been tossed into prison for heroically dispersing a Chicago-area meeting of fascists in May 2012.

 

As Cannon said, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Join us in this vital work of solidarity. The 16 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

 

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 70-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another ten years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

 

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 37th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

 

Albert Woodfox is the last of the Angola Three still incarcerated. Along with Herman Wallace and Robert King, Woodfox fought the vicious, racist and dehumanizing conditions in Louisiana’s Angola prison and courageously organized a Black Panther Party chapter at the prison. Authorities framed up Woodfox and Wallace for the fatal stabbing of a prison guard in 1972 and falsely convicted King of killing a fellow inmate a year later. For over 42 years, Woodfox has been locked down in Closed Cell Restricted (CCR) blocks, the longest stretch in solitary confinement ever in this country. His conviction has been overturned three times! According to his lawyers, he suffers from hypertension, heart disease, chronic renal insufficiency, diabetes, anxiety and insomnia—conditions no doubt caused and/or exacerbated by decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment.

 

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

 

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

 

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence after having finally been released from the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

 

Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

Dear Friends, People internationally are taking action on and around the 17 December to protest Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment and to celebrate her birthday (see places below).  Please let us know if you are planning an event and we'll help publicise it, and please circulate this flyer widely. Power to the whistleblowers!  Free Chelsea Manning now! Payday and Queer Strike
Happy Birthday! CHELSEA MANNING Free her now!
Wed 17 December 2014, 2.30-4pm VIGIL on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 4JJ  Charing Cross   (St Martin’s requests that vigils on the steps are silent) Other actions so far include Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Venice . . . Chelsea Manning is 27 years old on this day.  Formerly known as Bradley, she is the transgender whistleblower, US soldier, Grand Marshal at San Francisco Pride 2014, who revealed US, UK and other governments’ war crimes and corruption.  She leaked hundred of thousands of documents to Wikileaks exposing the truth and therefore saving many lives.  Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, she was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013. Thanks to Chelsea's whistleblowing, we the public now know about: The “collateral murder” video of a US helicopter crew killing Iraqi civilians ● the cover-up of rape in Iraq & Afghanistan ● the secret use of drones for extra-judicial killing ● US dirty tricks in Haiti, Venezuela, Peru & elsewhere ● Egyptian and Palestinian Authority collusion with Israel’s bombing of Gaza . . . If the sentence stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen – we have to get her out! Sign Amnesty International’s petition for her immediate release. For more info: Chelsea Manning Support Network Payday men's network  www.refusingtokill.net US: 001 215 848 1120  UK: 020 7267 8698 Queer Strike    US: 001 415 626 4114  UK: 020 7482 2496

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night

 

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

 

I recently completed the first leg of this series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19^th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, later television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. That first leg dealt with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. This leg, centered on the music of my generation growing up in the Cold War 1950s, is a natural progression from that first leg since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a big musical break-out from the music that was wafting through many of our houses in the early 1950s.

The pitter-patter sound of stuff from Tin Pan Alley and sometimes from Broadway if they were not one in the same once they hit our muffled ears. You know Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca Cola, Tangerine, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, tear the goalposts down, grab a Tennessee waltz, and swing and sway with Big Buddha and some guy chomping on the chop sticks. The music of our “square” parents which was driving us to desperation for a new sound just in case those threatened bombs that we kept being warned about actually were detonated. At least that musical jail-break is the way we will tell the story now, although I, for one, have a little more tolerance for some of their music, those square parents still square but maybe there was hope if the listened to the Ink Spots crooning away at about seven million different songs with that great harmony, or the Duke taking that A train or better, much better sweet junkie Billie swaying a dark fruit, day and night, all of me, and whatever else Cole Porter could button up the night with. Some, I said, since I am unabashedly a child of rock and roll, now denominated classic rock. Jesus.   

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times, or whether we cared, our tribal music was as dear a thing to us, we who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. Whether we knew it or not in the big world- historic picture scheme of things, knew what sacred place the music of the 1950s, rhythm and blues, scat be-bop, rockabilly, doo wop, flat out pure rock and roll those tunes held a primordial place in our youthful hearts. That was our music, our getting through the tough times music of post-World War II teen alienation and angst, that went wafting through the house on the living room radio (when the parents were out), on the family record player (ditto on the parents), or, for some, the television (double ditto the parents out, especially when American Bandstand hit us like a hurricane and we breathlessly rushed home very afternoon after school to make sure we were hip to the latest songs, the latest dances, the latest hair styles, boys and girls, and whether that brunette with the boffo hair-do and showing an edge of cleavage was ‘going steady” or whether we has a dream chance at her, or her “sister,” same boffo hair-do sitting across from you in seventh grade English class), and best of all on that blessed transistor radio, compact enough to hide in shirt pockets but loud enough when placed next to your ear to block out that mother-father-brothers buzz that only disturbed you more,  rear a that allowed us to while away the time up in our rooms away from snooping parental ears. Yes, that was the pastime of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68.

Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That includes a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Jack or Jill or Chi town frat or frail whose father busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.

Yes we were crazy for the swing and sway of Big Joe Turner snapping those big fingers like some angel- herald letting the world know, if it did not know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not whether your young febrile brain caught any or all of the not so subtle to experienced ears sexual innuendoes that drove Shake, Rattle, and Roll, if you did not rock with or without Miss La Vern Baker, better with, better with, her hips swaying slightly, lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Jim Dandy vowing be her man just for that smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Elvis Presley, with or without the back-up boys, better with because they held the key to the backbeat that drove Elvis just a little bit hardy, rockier, and for the girls from about ten to one hundred sexier, belting out songs, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some teen-struck Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his Jailhouse Rock to the top of the charts. Elegant Bill Haley, with or without that guy blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas on Rock Around The Clock. Bo Diddley, all banded up if there is such a word, making eyes wild with that Afro-Carib beat on Who Do You Love. A young Ike Tina-less Turner too with his own aggregation wailing Rocket 88 that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare. Buddy Holly, with or without those damn glasses, talking up Peggy Sue before his too soon last journey. Miss Wanda Jackson, the female Elvis, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had (and that long black hair and ruby red lips to make a schoolboy dream funny dreams), that meaningful pause, on yeah, Let’s Have A Party. Miss (Ms.) Patsy Cline, with or without the bad moments, making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man on She’s Got You, Jesus. (And you not caring for all the strung-out emotion, or hubris, still wanting Patsy for a last chance last dance close up song to take a whirl at that she you had been eying until your eyes got sore all night.)   

Miss (Ms.) Brenda Lee too chiming in with I’m Sorry. Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis doing a million songs fronting that wild piano off the back of a flat-bed truck in High School Confidential calling out, no preaching out the new dispensation to anybody who wanted to rise in that rocking world, with or without a horde of cashmere sweater girls breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame. The Everly Brothers, always with that soft -spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, getting everybody nervous, everybody who had gone past curfew looking for a little, well, looking okay, and not reflecting enough on damn reputations except in the school pecking order determined first week of  ninth grade in the girls’ lounge and boys’ “lav,” doing teary Wake Up Little Susie. The Drifters with or without those boardwalks. The Sherilles with or without the leader of the pack, the Dixie Cups with or without whatever they were doing at that chapel. Miss Carole King, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of last gasp Tin Pan Alley. Yeah, our survival music. 

We, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “the greatest generation,” decidedly not our parents’ generation, finally could not bear to hear their music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.  

We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to  satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth  we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website- And A Personal Appeal From The American Left History Blog - Remembering The Class-War Prisoners During The Holiday Appeal     

 

James P. Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

CUBA-End The Bockade

Republicans are hyperventilating over Pres. Obama’s move to normalize relations with Cuba – along with a dwindling generation of Cuban exiles and counter-revolutionaries in Florida.  Opinions may differ on the nature of the Cuban political and economic system, but concern for “democracy” had nothing to do with US hostility. Our government had cordial relations with the pre-Castro Batista/Mafia dictatorship; it continued to remain supportive of anti-democratic regimes throughout Latin America – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile and Argentina -- while it pursued its war against Cuba.  And if it is commonly noted how “impoverished” Cuba remains, the question may well be asked, “in comparison with what?” Cuban life expectancy and literacy levels put it on par with the world’s most developed nations and far above nearly all of Latin America, including much “richer” countries.  The Cuban infant mortality rate is equal to that of Canada, and lower than the US.

 

US Was at Odds With World Over Cuba Policy

President Barack Obama's decision to pursue new relations with Cuba was driven in part by a stinging realization: Longstanding U.S. policies aimed at isolating Cuba had instead put Washington at odds with the rest of the world. The American economic embargo on Cuba drove a wedge between the U.S. and Latin American nations. In an annual diplomatic embarrassment, the United Nations General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to condemn the U.S. policy. And while the U.S. was clinging to its economic restrictions against the small communist nation just 90 miles off its shores, leaders of China, Russia and Brazil flocked to Havana, promising millions in investment… The latest vote on Oct. 29 was 188-2, with only the U.S. and Israel voting "no." General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding and unenforceable but they do reflect world opinion, and the vote has given Cuba an annual stage to demonstrate the isolation of the U.S. on the embargo. The number of Americans who see Cuba as a serious threat has declined. A 1983 CNN/Time poll found 29 percent considered Cuba a very serious threat. That dipped to 13 percent in 1994 and 12 percent in 1997.  More

 

US-Cuba relations: Global praise for normalisation of ties

World leaders have welcomed a historic move by the US to end more than 50 years of hostility towards Cuba and restore diplomatic relations.  Pope Francis joined leaders from Latin America and Europe in praising the "historic" deal which saw the release of prisoners from both countries… The announcement followed more than a year of secret talks in Canada and at the Vatican, directly involving the pontiff.  The European Union, which is in the process of normalising ties with Cuba, described the move as a "historical turning point", while leaders meeting at a Latin America summit in Argentina broke into applause at the news.  More

Holiday Greetings to All Friends

of Dorchester People for Peace!

Best Wishes from DPP to those observing the holidays – or simply enjoying the spirit of the season. . .

 

And a PEACEFUL NEW YEAR!

We have posted these videos many times before during the Holidays.  Watch them for the first time if you haven’t seen them before; watch them again and you won’t be disappointed.

 

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES -- 1914

In December, 1914, after months of slaughter during the First World War (it was supposed to be “The War to End all Wars”!), British and German soldiers declared an informal and spontaneous truce.  The story of their fraternization and holiday celebration is told in detail here and here.

 

 

Christmas In The Trenches VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9coPzDx6tA  

The event has been immortalized in a song by folksinger John McCutcheon, which you can hear and watch along with contemporary illustrations and a moving introduction by the performer.

 

The song ends with this stanza:

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.

 

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Celebrating War Over and Over and Peace Once 

From Bavaria to New Zealand, town squares across the world are adorned with memorials to local men “fallen” in 1914-1918, and statues and plaques honoring the war’s leading generals can be found from Edinburgh Castle to Pershing Square in Los Angeles. But virtually nothing similar celebrates those who served the cause of peace. The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who argued against the suppression of free speech both in the Kaiser’s Germany and in Soviet Russia, spent more than two years in a German prison for her opposition to the war. The eloquent British philosopher Bertrand Russell did six months’ time in a London jail for the same reason. The American labor leader Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for urging resistance to the draft, was still in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1920, two years after the war ended, when he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist Party candidate for president… Perhaps when the next anniversary of the Iraq War comes around, it’s time to break with a tradition that makes ever less sense in our world. Next time, why not have parades to celebrate those who tried to prevent that grim, still ongoing conflict from starting? Of course, there’s an even better way to honor and thank veterans of the struggle for peace: don’t start more wars.  More

 

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VIDEO: John Lennon – HAPPY CHRISTMAS (The War is Over)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN4Uu0OlmTg

 

 

 

John Lennon

(killed on December 8, 1980)

VIDEO:   “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yU0JuE1jTk

 

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Yusuf Ibrahim (aka Cat Stevens)

 

 

VIDEO: “Peace Train”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wEctHyuc0

 

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U.S. Nuclear Missiles on Instant Alert — A Catastrophe Waiting to Happen     The threat of accidental nuclear war is terrifyingly real, which can be seen by Googling that phrase (try it!). You will see how often we came so very close. And those entries do not even include the mishaps and near-disasters of the less-maintained Russian weapons, nor those of the other nuclear states. The current highly computerized launch-on-warning response policy on our 450 nuclear missiles allows very little time to check whether the perceived threat of an incoming strike is real, or merely reflections off some clouds. This confusion has happened before, and the world came close to catastrophe. In addition, studies have shown that to actually use our 450 nuclear missiles, even in response to a real attack, would probably be enough to cause a "nuclear winter.”  The rising dust produced by these nuclear detonations would block sunlight from reaching the Earth, likely causing world-wide agricultural collapse, and possibly human extinction. Fortunately, President Obama can take U.S. nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert, with his signature alone. No Congressional involvement is required. Just like George H.W. Bush did in 1991, when he unilaterally took all U.S. nuclear bombers circling around the globe 24/7 off hair-trigger alert. This eased the Russians' fears, and made them less jumpy on the trigger, so to speak.     Urge the President to use this post-election opportunity to de-alert all of our nuclear missiles, just like George H.W. Bush de-alerted our nuclear-armed bombers. Remind him of the terrifying threat of accidental, unintended, nuclear war, and that the nuclear winter set off by the use of our 450 missiles would likely kill us all. He needs a little push to do what he called for in 2007.   CONTACT:   PRESIDENT OBAMA Web: www.whitehouse.gov/contact Tel: 202 456-1111 (9:00 am to 5:00 pm) Fax: 202 456-2461 Mail: President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500 Photo: Mimi in Maine, Lois Barber 2014

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