Dear All, The 114th Congress convened in Washington this week, with many Members eager to express their hawkish foreign policy views, especially when it comes to Iran. Please ask your Senators to stand up for diplomacy in the new Congress. We need your help to explain to Congress why diplomacy matters. Many new Members of Congress are also new to foreign policy. They don’t understand their constituents care about nuclear negotiations with Iran. I often hear from frustrated Congressional staffers that politics gets in the way of policy, meaning that Congress won't oppose sanctions and support diplomacy unless they hear from us, loud and clear. Let’s flood Capitol Hill with a clear and unwavering pro-diplomacy message! Peace Action leaders from around the country will converge on Capitol Hill for lobby meetings in just over two weeks, so this is a particularly timely alert. Your emails will help lay the groundwork for that lobbying effort. Email your Senators today and explain why they must support diplomacy. Republicans in the Senate have made clear that one of their first orders of business will be to scuttle talks with Iran by passing new sanctions. Unless we act now, these new sanctions would violate the interim nuclear deal, push Iran away from the negotiating table, and put us on the path to war with Iran. With stakes this high, every single email is important. Can you take a moment right now to email your Senators? Thank you for your support and action. Humbly for Peace, Kevin Martin Executive Director Peace Action P.S. - Thank you to our colleagues at Win Without War for helping with this alert. Take Action: Email your Senators today and tell them no new sanctions on Iran. CONNECT TO US:  Find us on Facebook  Follow us on Twitter  Read our blog  Contact us You are subscribed to Peace Action's Action Alert Network. You can unsubscribe here.

On The Parliamentary Front Against The American Middle East Wars

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

THE BIPARTISAN WAR CONSENSUS

Why do elected officials give credence to the myth that U.S. military power is somehow fettered, when our troop presence looms large, even to the point of appearing overextended? Why does there seem to be a consensus in Washington that assumes a broad, expensive and invasive U.S. military presence to be a panacea?  The answer lies in distinguishing the superficial differences in foreign policy debates from the actual policies favored by both parties. The reality is that U.S. foreign policy isn’t nearly as democratic as it should be and the elites forming it tend to pretty much agree on everything. This elite consensus then gets further constrained by the insatiable budget appetites of defense bureaucracy. These are the reasons intervention is so often presented by the defense and foreign policy establishment as entirely obvious and completely inevitable. It begins with a total disregard for public opinion when defense strategy is formulated. Exempting extreme situations, what the American people want just doesn’t matter all that much.  More

 

The Tragedy of the American Military

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.  Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much…   “We are vulnerable,” the author William Greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight ISIS, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” And the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats.    More

 

Political Islam and US Policy in 2015

Arab political Islam generally includes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and al-Wefaq in Bahrain. The term “political Islam” does not include radical and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, or armed opposition groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Nor does it apply to terrorist groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and others.Unfortunately, in the past three years, many policy makers in the West, and curiously in several Arab countries, have equated mainstream political Islam with radical and terrorist groups. This erroneous and self-serving linkage has provided Washington with a fig leaf to justify its cozy relations with Arab autocrats and tolerance of their bloody repression of their citizens… Much as one might disagree with Islamic political ideology, it’s the height of folly to think that long-term domestic stability and economic security in Egypt, Bahrain, Palestine, or Lebanon could be achieved without including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Wefaq, Hamas, and Hezbollah in governance. Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.  More

 

Doubling Down on Dictatorship in the Middle East

When the Egyptian military — led by now-president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi — deposed the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Obama administration wavered about whether it would suspend military aid to Egypt, which U.S. law requires in the case of a coup. Yet despite some partial and temporary suspensions, the U.S. government continued to send military hardware. Now that Sisi heads a nominally civilian government — installed in a sham election by a small minority of voters — all restrictions on U.S. aid have been lifted, including for military helicopters that are used to intimidate and attack protesters. As Secretary of State John Kerry promised a month after Sisi's election, "The Apaches will come, and they will come very, very soon." In the tiny kingdom of Bahrain, meanwhile, the demonstrations for constitutional reform that began in February 2011 continue, despite the government's attempts to silence the opposition with everything at its disposal — from bird shot to life imprisonment. Throughout it all, Washington has treated Bahrain like a respectable ally.  More

 

AMERICA’S TOXIC MIDDLE EAST ALLIES

The 9/11 Commission Report acknowledged that charities based in Saudi Arabia provided funds to Al-Qaeda but “found no evidence that the Saudi government” was directly involved. However, the Bush administration excised 28 pages of findings on the subject of possible Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, citing national security concerns. Current and former members of Congress say those 28 pages contain direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi officials and entities… Attempts to pressure the Arab Gulf states to cut off the flow of support to terrorist groups have proven largely ineffective… The Gulf states receive tangible benefits from their alliance with the U.S. in the form of advanced military equipment, extensive training programs, protection of their vital natural resources, and the tacit guarantee that Washington will come to their defense if they are threatened or attacked… Washington’s client states in the Persian Gulf engage in behavior that contradicts U.S. interests. Outdated and misguided ideas about the importance of our Persian Gulf allies, driven by an imprudent and expansive grand strategy, continue to incentivize policymakers to overlook the substantial costs associated with them.  More

 

Also see this two-part article:

You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia

With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power.  It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia  More

 

Are There Nazis in Ukraine? A Visit to Lviv

When Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about fascists in Ukraine, many greeted his words with scorn… In fact, Right Sector gangs were integrated into the National Guard and sent to fight in East Ukraine while the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, accused of committing war crimes in the East, has attracted many Nazis. It has become undeniable that neo-Nazi units are operating in Ukraine with full governmental support… The fact that neo-Nazis now form part of army units sent to fight in East Ukraine and that Ukraine has been experiencing a wave of extreme nationalism as marches have recently been held in Kiev marking the 106th birthday of Bandera, means that it may be difficult to place the demons unleashed by the US back into the bottle… As the US continues to support Ukrainian fascists and delivers tanks to the wider region, the demons of the past have returned. The same fascist slogans of "Death to the Enemies" are being voiced in Kiev, with Ukrainian soldiers calling for "purification of the nation."  More

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

The past few days has been dominated by reports about the massacre of journalists and cartoonists at the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris -- and now there is news about further attacks in Paris.  These are very troubling events and raise a lot of issues. Simply put, nothing justifies murder, nothing mitigates the crime. 

However, we can also say that it is wrong for a magazine to profit from obscene insults to the religious beliefs of a whole people -- especially when they are members of an already racially victimized and marginalized community who live in France as a consequence of its own genocidal colonial history. And it’s foolish to expect that a nation’s imperial past and contemporary military interventions will have no negative outcomes.

Political satire that targets the powerful or the reactionary role of some religious figures or institutions is different from intentionally denigrating a people’s beliefs and culture (see here – warning, offensive – and in particular this one). Some of us in DPP are secular, some of various faiths, but none of us, I believe, would defend the wholesale ridicule of African-American religious pieties, even if we might disagree with institutional or doctrinal positions – such as opposition to marriage equality or the pro-Zionist stance of some leaders or churches.  We would rightly call such insults racism. 

Ironically, given the targeted incitement against immigrants within Europe, one of the police officers who was killed defending the building where the attack took place, Ahmed Merabet, was Muslim with immigrant roots.

In the great tradition of the French Revolution, LIBERTĖ is a hallowed principle, but so also are EGALITĖ and FRATERNITĖ. . .  Some would add: HUMANITÉ.

 

Long-time DPP member Hayat Imam (a practicing Muslim) sent this email response from Bangladesh.

(readers are invited to share their own views or comments):

 

I unreservedly condemn the murders at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo by Muslim perpetrators or non-Muslim provocateurs. I condemn it because this act was extreme, violent, intolerant, and devoid of compassion and humanity.

 

For these very same reasons, I want to express my deep disapproval of the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo that continued to belittle and needlessly insult the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), without caring that it hurt the hearts of millions of Muslims who love and revere this gentle man. Similarly, I also disapprove of a film like “The Interview”, which insults and disregards the feelings of a whole nation with its plot of assassinating its living leader, or abhor pornography that markets extreme violence and degradation of half of humanity.

 

The cry seems to be “in the name of free speech, it is my right to denigrate whoever I please”! But that cry is disingenuous because it is a cover up for hidden agendas and double standards. In fact the hallmark of a civilized society is that we must show self-restraint and self-censorship. It would be hard to swallow comments glorifying the Holocaust or justifying racist supremacy. I cling to the premise that compassion and humanity are our birthright as human beings. Let’s not get derailed by false pretenses regarding free-speech.

 

 

THE U.S. HAS MORE JAILS THAN COLLEGES

There were 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. as of the 2010 Census. It's often been remarked that our national incarceration rate of 707 adults per every 100,000 residents is the highest in the world, by a huge margin… To put these figures in context, we have slightly more jails and prisons in the U.S. -- 5,00 plus -- than we do degree-granting colleges and universities. In many parts of America, particularly the South, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses. Cumberland County, Pa. -- population 235,000 -- is home to 41 correctional facilities and 7 colleges. Prisons outnumber colleges 15-to-1 in Lexington County, S.C.  More

 

*   *   *   *

And then there is the issue of Western wars of aggression in the Middle East, support for repressive regimes, and our own long history of mobilizing religious fanaticism (as in Afghanistan or Indonesia) or allying with it (in Saudi Arabia) when politically expedient. All of these things have helped to foster the violence and despair among some Muslims that we decry. And, no, understanding the causes of extremism is not the same as endorsing or excusing it.

Those who speak about the “clash of civilizations” might remember Mahatma Gandhi’s famous long-ago exchange with a journalist: “What do you think of Western civilization?” “I think it would be a good idea”.  The region of France north of Paris, where the killers were under siege, is also near the location of massive trench battles of World War I, where millions of soldiers senselessly massacred each other. Random gun violence has killed many more people in the US than all the terrorist attacks together.

 

Scholar Tariq Ramadan on Charlie Hebdo Attack & How the West Treats Muslims

I think that we should be very clear on even the double standards, that there are things that you can say about Muslims today that you cannot say about Jews. Let it be clear, what we can’t say about Jews, which is anti-Semitism, it’s completely wrong. Islamophobia is wrong. Don’t have these double standards and just target the weak people…  The problem that I have in the West now, wherever you are—look at the demonstrations that we had in Germany recently—is the normalization in the political discourse of Islamophobic statements…  We are not going to defeat anything which has to do with violent extremism, if we are not dealing with justice, with freedom for the people, with the real reform—reformist approach in the Muslim-majority countries. And what is happening today is exactly the opposite. We have the West supporting the worst dictatorships and coming to us, as Western Muslims, say, "OK, now apologize for the consequences of what is happening." So, we should stand to principles, but we cannot avoid talking about the big picture, and a political one is essential.  More

 

Asad AbuKhalil, a Leftist Arab commentator wrote this:

If a Western publication specialized in insulting Jews and Judaism and in mocking the Holocaust, and if its cartoonists suffered a vicious attack (like the one in Paris yesterday), not a single Western writer or journalist would have dared to stand in solidarity with the publication. Not one person. 

 I am not Charlie Hebdo, and can't be.  And please don't give me the notion that the magazine satirized all religions. It did not. It specialized in mocking and insulting Muslims and Islam (all Muslims and not only radical Muslims).  And no, this stance does not mean that I don't condemn the attack. But the terrorists who attacked the publication, are your terrorists and not mine: these are the children of  Western policies in Syria where the West romanticized for more than three years what they dubbed as "moderate rebels" when in reality they were training and arming and nurturing vicious terrorists and Arab leftists like me were warning of the follies of Western policies and that those policies would produce vicious terrorists, and that the Afghanistan film from the 1980s will be repeated yet again… this was your version of Islam: the one you arm in Saudi Arabia.

 

PATRICK COCKBURN: From Syria to Paris

It was culpably naïve to imagine that sparks from the Iraq-Syrian civil war, now in its fourth year, would not spread explosive violence to Western Europe. With thousands of young Sunni Muslims making the difficult journey to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis, it has always been probable that some of them would choose to give a demonstration of their religious faith by attacking targets they deem anti-Islamic closer to home… The prison wardens of Abu Ghraib, by mistreating prisoners, and the CIA by torturing them, acted as recruiting sergeants. The counter-effectiveness of that strategy is demonstrated by the growth of al-Qaeda-type jihadi movements 14 years after 9/11…  Catching and punishing those responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre is not going to deter people who have martyrdom as a central feature of their faith. But bringing to an end, or even just de-escalating the war in Syria, would begin to drain the waters in which violent jihadism flourishes.   More

 

Paris Terrorist was Radicalized by Bush’s Iraq War, Abu Ghraib Torture

Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.” … Sharif was about to go to Iraq in 2005, himself, to fight Bush’s troops there (which he saw as aggressive foreign occupiers), but he and a friend were arrested and interrogated by the French police… At some point after 2011, the Kouashi brothers went to Syria to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad (which the French government also said it wanted to see overthrown). They are said to have returned this summer… Without Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is not at all clear that Sharif Kouachi would have gotten involved in fundamentalist vigilanteism. And if he hadn’t, he would not have gone on to be a point man in murdering out the staff of Charlie Hebdo along with two policemen.  More

 

GREENWALD: Police Now Monitoring and Criminalizing the Wrong Kinds of Online Speech

Despite frequent national boasting of free speech protections, the U.S. has joined, and sometimes led, the trend to monitor and criminalize online political speech. The DOJ in 2011 prosecuted a 24-year-old Pakistani resident of the United States, Jubair Ahmad, on terrorism charges for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of Abu Ghraib abuses, video of American armored trucks exploding, and prayer messages about “jihad” from the leader of a designated terror group; he was convicted and sent to prison for 12 years… Like the law generally, criminalizing online speech is reserved only for certain kinds of people (those with the least power) and certain kinds of views (the most marginalized and oppositional). Those who serve the most powerful factions or who endorse their orthodoxies are generally exempt.   More

 

Our Oldest Ally in the Middle East. . .

US urges Saudi to halt whipping of citizen journalist

The United States Thursday appealed to Saudi Arabia to annul a sentence of 1,000 lashes imposed on a Saudi rights activist and citizen journalist on top of a 10-year jail term.  Raef Badawi, 30, was sentenced on November 5 after questioning the Gulf kingdom's direction on the now-banned Liberal Saudi Network, which he set up… "Although Saudi Arabia condemned yesterday's cowardly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is now preparing to inflict the most barbaric punishment on a citizen who just used his freedom of expression and information, the same freedom that cost the French journalists their lives," Reporters Without Borders program director Lucie Morillon said.  More

 

‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow

Anti-immigrant attitudes have been on the rise in recent years in Europe, propelled in part by a moribund economy and high unemployment, as well as increasing immigration and more porous borders. The growing resentments have lifted the fortunes of established parties like the U.K. Independence Party in Britain and the National Front, as well as lesser-known groups like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West, which assembled 18,000 marchers in Dresden, Germany, on Monday. In Sweden, where there have been three recent attacks on mosques, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist Sweden Democrats Party has been getting about 15 percent support in recent public opinion polls… “Large parts of the European public are latently anti-Muslim, and increasing mobilization of these forces is now reaching into the center of society,” Mr. Neumann said. “If we see more of these incidents, and I think we will, we will see a further polarization of these European societies in the years to come.” Those who will suffer the most from such a backlash, he said, are the Muslim populations of Europe, “the ordinary normal Muslims who are trying to live their lives in Europe.”  More

 

EUROPE’S LAPSE OF REASON

The gap between where Europe is and where it would have been in the absence of the crisis continues to grow. In most European Union countries, per capita GDP is less than it was before the crisis. A lost half-decade is quickly turning into a whole one. Behind the cold statistics, lives are being ruined, dreams are being dashed, and families are falling apart (or not being formed) as stagnation – depression in some places – runs on year after year… But for how long can this continue? And how will voters react? Throughout Europe, we have seen the alarming growth of extreme nationalist parties, running counter to the Enlightenment values that have made Europe so successful. In some places, large separatist movements are rising.  More

Mosques Attacked In Wake Of Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Several attacks on French mosques following Wednesday's brutal Charlie Hebdo shooting have added to the fear of retaliation against the country's Muslim population… Three grenades were thrown at a mosque in Le Mans, west of Paris, and a bullet hole was found in one of the mosque's windows, AFP reported.  A Muslim prayer hall in the Port-la-Nouvelle district in southern France also received shots shortly after evening prayers, while a blast erupted at L’Imperial, a restaurant affiliated to a mosque in the French village of Villefranche-sur-Saone. No casualties were reported at any of the attacks.  More

 

The U.S. is about as unequal today as the U.K. was during Downton Abbey

Though the trends were headed in the other direction, the wealth distribution of Lord Grantham’s Britain is remarkably similar to what we are seeing in the U.S. today. The income share held by the wealthiest Americans and Britons fell in the mid-20th Century, due to the destruction of property during the wars and the Great Depression, as well as high tax and inflation rates that gradually eroded their wealth. But today they have crept back up to what they were in the 1920s.  More

 

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, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

Dr Dan Todman considers how remembrance and memorialisation have been used by nations and communities to negotiate the overwhelming losses of World War One.

Soldiers of the Magre who fell for their country in the world war 1914-1918

Publication printed in 1919 in Italy commemorating the soldiers from the small town of Magrè who died in the war.

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Free from known copyright restrictions

The scale and nature of the First World War both required and complicated its remembrance. The war was an immensely complex event. It was global in its reach, generated extremes of experience and emotion, and involved conflicts within as well as between nations. On the battlefronts, millions were left disabled or dead in prolonged battles of attrition. Many of those who died had no known grave. At home, societies underwent immense pressures: mass bereavement and prolonged separation, invasion and occupation, shortages and starvation, rebellion and revolution. But there was also a strong sense of living through a historic moment that needed to be recorded. What the war meant and how it would be remembered in the future were both matters of concern whilst the fighting was still going on, and remained so during the uneasy peace that came after.

The war’s changing meanings

In every combatant country, the war’s meanings changed as it was fought, and remained subject to debate after it had finished. Individuals and communities tried to work out what was happening to them and sought recognition of their sacrifices. Politicians, generals and governments attempted to justify losses and enthuse their populations for greater endeavours. Churches, charities and local civic leaders played an active role: providing solace by explaining the purpose of suffering was both a responsibility and a reinforcement of their position in society. Journalists, manufacturers, designers, sculptors, writers and publishers all responded to war as a creative stimulus and a commercial opportunity. Some of these responses were extremely modern in form, others reached back to more traditional representations of war, sacrifice and heroism in the search for comfort and understanding.

- See more at: http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/remembrance-and-memorials#sthash.QRj4gn4T.dpuf

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.          

******
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?

For The Legendary Rock Record Producer John Fry Who Has Passed On …

 

Frank Jackman

Back in the day, back in the time of what is now called the classic age of rock and roll, back starting in the early 1950s, guys and gals would go to small record studios in places like Memphis, Chicago and Detroit to record their work, if it was good enough. Hoping against hope (against oblivion hope and would accept, do you hear me, accept in a heartbeat a one hit johnnie or janie fate if it came to that just as long as they were on vinyl). Those small record companies were the life-blood or early rock and guys like Sam Philips, Leonard Chess and the like, including the late John Fry honored here would weed out the good from the bad and give the good a leg up. So not all those who loved rock and roll, who wanted to see it succeed (and make a little dough too, naturally) were in front of the microphone. Guys like Fry did the hard work of producing quality recordings and he and his label was known for that quality, and for an ear for the next great thing coming out. Kudos, brother, kudos.          

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow  (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.

That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.