Sunday, September 27, 2015

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War- In Honor Of The Heroic Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War- In Honor Of The Heroic Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment….  To Defend One’s Own    

 






Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

Here is what Sam wrote one time during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War:
In the wake of the travesties of justice in the Michael Brown murder case where a grand jury refused to indict a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and the Eric Garner stranglehold murder case in New York City where the same thing happened (and which has happened repeatedly over the years these two cases being egregious and the cause of blacks and their supporters saying enough) during Black History Month (hell, all year) it is appropriate to talk about the right of black self-defense (and of necessity at times, it is no accident that there is now renewed interest in groups like the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams author of  Negroes With Guns, and his left-wing NAACP chapter in North Carolina and a recent book describing heroic, and mostly unheralded due to the non-violence hype associated with the Martin Luther King-led segment of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s, armed self-defense actions in aid of Mississippi freedom fighters by local black militants). And when we talk about that issue the heroic struggles of the Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment easily come to mind.     
While there is no obvious link between the cases today and the heroic actions of black volunteers to defend their own by enlisting in the battle to eradicate slavery during the Civil War that is a matter of failure of imagination. From the very beginning of slavery in America, which means from the very beginning of the settlements, whites have feared, feared beyond reason at times, blacks, black men armed, or posing any kind of physical threat. In the case of the 54th the Southerners during the Civil War went crazy when confronted with the idea of armed black men fighting for their freedom and treated any black captives brutally as no more than chattel to be executed upon capture and not as prisoners of war from an organized opposing army. No better example of that blind hatred by South Carolina whites thinking there was no greater dishonor came after the battle before Fort Wagner when the rebels buried the white commander of the regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had fallen there with the dead black soldiers he commanded in a mass grave. (His high abolitionist parents, and many Northerners thought there was no greater honor when asked later whether they wanted to remove his body from that site.)        
And so it has gone throughout the last one hundred plus years from black sharecroppers defending themselves during Jim Crow times, Robert F. Williams down in North Carolina calling for armed self-defense against the marauding white racists during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the Deacons for Justice down in Louisiana, and later the Black Panthers from Oakland to Boston. All standing for their right to defend their own by any means necessary. And all getting the eternal hatred of those whites who fear militantly political blacks who wish to defend the community. And that is where the current uprising being formed mostly by the young, young blacks and their allies, under the general name Black Lives Matter should think about history and about all the options.

[One hundred and fifty years later there is no more fitting memorial to those heroic defenders of the 54th than the frieze on Beacon Street in Boston across from the State House commemorating their valor. Every time I go by the frieze, usually when we are demonstrating for or against some social policy of the day at the State House or at Park Street I stop and look at the determined faces of the soldiers as they march toward their destiny. Look particularly at the righteous grizzled old soldier by the head of Shaw’s horse marching with the “kids” to bring freedom and justice. Yeah, that was the place for old men to be during those hard tack Civil War time times. Today too, women too.]     

 

 

 

 



 

Free Chelsea Manning- Chelsea denied right to follow recommended grooming standards

Chelsea denied right to follow recommended grooming standards

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Chelsea Manning responds on Twitter (@xychelsea)
September 21, 2015 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
On Friday, Sept 18, the military denied Chelsea Manning the right to follow female grooming standards while incarcerated at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, KS. Chelsea has been fighting for medically appropriate gender-related care since her incarceration in 2013. After Manning was finally approved for hormone therapy in February of this year (following an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit), it is shocking that the military would continue to attempt to deny Chelsea her constitutional rights at seemingly every opportunity.
The military’s denial of Chelsea’s request fell the day after she began her 21 days of recreational restrictions. These restrictions confine Chelsea to her cell for most of the day, with the exception of work and meals, thereby cutting off her avenues of support when she needs them the most.
The following is a statement released by the ACLU on Sept 18, 2015:
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Military Officials Deny Chelsea Manning Clinically Recommended Treatment for Gender Dysphoria
Decision Prevents Chelsea Manning from Following Female Grooming Standards While Incarcerated
The United States military today issued another denial in response to Chelsea Manning’s ongoing request for permission to follow female grooming standards – including growing her hair – while serving a 35 year prison sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
The decision comes amidst demands that the ACLU requested in Manning v. Hagel, a lawsuit filed in September 2014, that the Department of Defense provide Chelsea with appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria. Her clinically recommended treatment includes hormone therapy, access to care by a qualified medical provider, and permission to follow female grooming standards, including those related to hair length. Chelsea was originally diagnosed with the condition in 2010 and announced that she would seek treatment while incarcerated in fall 2013.
“Even though the military agrees that allowing Chelsea to grow her hair is a critical part of her treatment plan, they continue to deny her basic human and constitutional rights,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project. “When we filed our lawsuit a year ago, Chelsea had already waited more than a year for even minimal care to treat her gender dysphoria. We are confident that this decision will be overturned by the court but saddened that Chelsea’s treatment continues to be needlessly impeded.”
Today’s decision comes after the military agreed to treat Chelsea with the hormone therapy, speech therapy, and cosmetics recommended by her providers at Ft. Leavenworth. Though the outside expert who evaluated her and the military’s own doctors agree that it is a medically necessary part of her treatment to follow the female grooming standards related to hair, the military has confirmed that they will continue to enforce the male standards against her, citing security concerns.  The ACLU will be back in court on October 2 to establish a plan for moving the case forward in light of this set back.
“Bad news for me: Military continues to make me cut my hair to male standards. I’m gonna fight in court,” said Chelsea Manning on her twitter feed this morning after learning the news.

NY Times review: ‘Whistleblower,’ a dance-theater take on Chelsea Manning

NY Times review: ‘Whistleblower,’ a dance-theater take on Chelsea Manning

21whistle-superJumboWhen the Army private Chelsea Manning, known at the time as Bradley Manning, leaked more than 700,000 sensitive documents, the possibility of a trial and sentence in a military prison may have been foreseeable. Less easy to predict was that the private’s situation would inspire “Whistleblower,” a piece of dance theater by the writer, director and choreographer Mark Dendy.
This diffuse play eventually argues that Ms. Manning’s experience of gender dysphoria should not be considered separate from the leaking of those documents. Or as the imagined voice of Karen Silkwood, another whistle-blower from the same Oklahoma town as Ms. Manning, says to the audience, “she conjoins the personal and the political in a distinctively queer way.” …
There are songs by the splendid composer Heather Christian, which were a highlight of Mr. Dendy’s last show, “Labyrinth,” but they are too few and diminished by Mr. Dendy’s somewhat callow rhyming lyrics. The dancing is visceral and athletic, but these turns and leaps don’t focus the play. Instead they send it spinning off in new directions, a fact that Ms. Manning, recently stripped of some prison privileges for possessing magazines and an expired tube of toothpaste, might or might not appreciate.
Read the full review here, with location and times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/theater/review-whistleblower…

Free Chelsea Manning-Write To Fort Leavenowrth Now!

Restrictions begin for Chelsea Manning; 21 days for expired toothpaste, books


The most recent photos of Chelsea available, from Feb 2015
The most recent photos of Chelsea available, from Feb 2015
September 18, 2015 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
After weeks of uncertainty, last night (Sept 17) Chelsea Manning received the paperwork that her 21-day recreational sentence would begin that very evening. This sentence was the result of an August 18th secret disciplinary panel that found Chelsea guilty of four ridiculously innocuous institutional offenses, including the possession of books and magazines related to politics and LBGTQ issues (which she received openly via the prison mail system), and having a tube of toothpaste that was past its expiration date–deemed “medical mis-use”. She was initially threatened with the potential of indefinite solitary confinement.
Read the actual charge sheet here via Chelsea’s Twitter account–here are a few more pages.
On the phone with a Support Network staff member, Chelsea quickly relayed the official restrictions in the limited time she now has outside her cell.
Chelsea is restricted from participating in any and all activities deemed to be recreational. Recreation includes but is not limited to the following:
  • Watching or listening to television, movies, radio
  • Being in possession of arts and crafts supplies
  • Participating in inside (gym, library) or outside recreation
  • Not authorized to retain personal headsets, earbuds, or radio
  • She will be restricted in her cell from 6:30 in the evening until 5:00 in the morning.
  • On weekends she will only be allowed outside her cell from 5:45 in the morning until 8 in the morning and meals.
  • She is allowed to make telephone calls during breakfast, lunch, and dinner
  • She can use the law library. Her visitation, mail, and academic courses are not affected.
As a result of these restrictions, Chelsea will only be able to spend minimal time outside of her cell besides when she works for the prison and meals. On weekends, Chelsea can only be outside her cell for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Chelsea Manning has been very vocal while in prison; she is a columnist for the Guardian, maintains a presence on Twitter, and has spoken out in interviews with Cosmopolitan, Amnesty International, and recently PAPER magazine. These restrictions are an unfortunate attempt by prison authorities to chill Chelsea’s voice.
Most disturbingly, these nonsensical charges, “will follow me through to any parole and clemency hearings, forever. I was expecting to be in minimum custody in February, but now years added,” Chelsea explained via phone.
Responding to the sentence in August, attorney Nancy Hollander said, “As Chelsea’s lawyer, I am horrified and angry about these convictions. This was a star chamber where Chelsea had to defend herself in secret. These convictions will not silence her. She will only be stronger and we will fight that much harder in her appeal to overturn her convictions and her sentence.”

Write


 

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Remember Jackson State"-"Workers Vanguard" (April 5, 1985)

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State

Atlanta, GA 16 February

Editor, Workers Vanguard

Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly tho­roughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of stu­dents were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropri­ately mentioned, we should remem­ber that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, Febru­ary 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).

Comradely, Joe Vetter

P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Donald Cox, 1936-2011:The beauty of the moon and the passion of the Black Panthers-By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2011


Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  





Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  



Donald Cox, 1936-2011:
The beauty of the moon
and the passion of the Black Panthers

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2011

It was sad news that former Black Panther, Don Cox, died in France, February 19, 2011, at the age of 74, but I had to laugh at The New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber that described the Panthers as “the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966.” True, the Panthers were founded by Newton and Seale in 1966 in Oakland, but they were not a socialist movement, not by any stretch of the imagination.

They did for a time provide breakfast for children and they did want community control of institutions, such as police departments and schools, in black neighborhoods, but they did not advocate socialism.

They were part of the Black Nationalist movement that made allies with young, radical whites, and they also shared optimism and the political tactics of the anti-colonial upsurges that spread across the Third World in the 1960s.

I met Donald Cox -- “DC” as we called him -- and got to know him, briefly, in Algiers in 1970. I had gone to Algiers with a group of Yippies to meet Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both of whom were wanted by U.S. authorities and were living in exile.

DC was the mellowest. DC was the coolest, and much less of a megalomaniac or egomaniac than Cleaver or Leary. In fact, he wasn’t a megalomaniac or an egomaniac at all. He didn’t want to change the world with guns or LSD and he didn’t want to run it either. Like Cleaver and Leary, he was also wanted by the FBI and considered “dangerous,” but he seemed wistful to me.


From left, Black Panthers Big Man, Don Cox, and June Hilliard at Panther national headquarters, Oakland, California, 1970. Image from gothamist.

In Algiers, he was concerned about the security of the Panthers and their Embassy because CIA agents monitored their activities. He was also a gracious host who took us -- Stew Albert, Anita Hoffman, Brian Flanagan, Jennifer Dohrn, Marty Kenner and me -- on a tour of the city, pointing out historical landmarks. He brought us one afternoon to the Place du Martyrs and explained that the French had executed suspected Algerian guerrillas here and then dumped their bodies into the harbor.

He turned to Jennifer Dohrn and asked her, “What color is that water?” She looked down. I looked down. We all did. “It’s reddish-blue,” Jennifer said. And indeed it was. It looked like the sea was awash in blood. “The Algerians say that it’s their blood that gives it that color,” DC explained. “The red blood of the guerrillas changed the color of the Mediterranean.”

At a feast at a seafood restaurant, DC was our official host and sat at the opposite head of the table from Cleaver. He ordered food for everyone -- shrimp and fish and white wine. DC was also made uneasy by two African Americans at the bar who said they were from San Francisco, and whom he suspected worked for the CIA. Sekou, one of the Panthers, spoke softly.

“I got us all covered,” he said. And indeed he did. I looked under the table and saw that he had a gun in his hand. I was confident he’d use it if need be. He had hijacked an airplane at gunpoint to get to Algiers.

DC didn’t have a gun in Algiers. I never saw him with one, either under a table or on his own person, though I did see Cleaver with an AK-47 in his lap. In 1970, DC expressed concern about living in exile. He hoped that he would not have to remain for the rest of his life outside his own native country. He missed San Francisco.

He did live in exile for the next 40 years of his life; his widow noted that before his death, exile had begun to wear on him. I’m sure it did and yet what strikes me most about DC now is his longevity. He lived longer than many of the Black Panthers, such as Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, who became a born-again Christian, a Republican, and a crack-head in the 1990s in Oakland.

DC never turned his back on his ideals, his passion for justice or his appreciation of beauty.

One night, we all looked up at the moon and admired its beauty.

“In Babylon, you can’t appreciate the moon’s beauty,” DC told us. “But here you have the time and space to dig on it.” That’s the way I’d like to remember DC, the Black Panther Field Marshal, who lived more than half his life in exile, and who learned in exile to appreciate the beauty of the moon.

[Jonah Raskin teaches at Sonoma State University and is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.]

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 9:57 AM
Labels: Algeria, American History, Black Liberation Movement, Black Panthers, Don Cox, Jonah Raskin, Leftists, Rag Bloggers, Sixties

3 Make/read comments:
b.f. said...
With regard to whether or not the BPP advocated for socialism in the 1960s and early 1970s, in his introduction to the 1970 book that he edited, "Black Panthers Speak", U.S. labor historian Philip Foner wrote that "one should add that the Black Panthers, while by no means the first blacks in the United States to oppose the capitalist system and espouse the cause of Socialism, were the first to do so as a separate organization...The Black Panthers, though favoring Socialism and coalitions with other oppressed groups, retain their separate identity as a revolutionary movement..."

And in February 1970, the Black Panther Party's national office also issued a statement to the U.S. "Guardian" radical newspaper which stated:

"The Black Panther Party stands for revolutionary solidarity with all people fighting against the forces of imperialism, capitalism, racism and fascism...

"In the words of the party's chairman, Bobby Seale, we will not fight capitalism with black capitalism; we will not fight imperialism with black imperialism; we will not fight racism with black racism. Rather we will take our stand against these evils with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism..."

Mar 15, 2011 1:33:00 PM
"John MF" said...
Marx taught that control of the "means of production" was the path to power, i.e. socialism on the way to what Engels called the "withering away of the state."

Since the means of production were virtually absent in the black communities, the Panthers, and particularly DC, espoused control of the institutions of society, the means of "serving the people" with defense (police powers), access to food and shelter (welfare and community food centers), and the voice of information (the people's media).
Home-grown, locally-controlled and self-defended may equal "socialism" in the streets, and solidarity with the international movements for freedom, justice and equality, but there was nothing academic about the pragmatism of the Field Marshall and his friends.

Mar 15, 2011 11:04:00 PM
Positive Quotes said...
We will take our stand against these evils with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism.

Mar 16, 2011 3:25:00 AM

One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane



 
 


 
 

 

Sam Lowell, ex-corner boy in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of America you had best have had corner boy comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed, ex-hippie “flower child” along with his long mourned and lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin heading out west on the hitchhike roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade, now a sedate grandfatherly lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he of late had been thinking about the 1950s. The 1950s when he came of age, came of musical age, drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio and their cranky old record player after they had, to insure domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those last year bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of discussion (by the way that room, shared with his two brothers also a beauty of hold up to your ear transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly scuffings). 

More than that though, more than just thinking about the old days he had via the beauties of the Internet been purchasing several record compilations of the “best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of rock and roll. He had to laugh about that as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner on those date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights for proclaiming to all who would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who wondered what he was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”

Mainly, through the archival marvels of modern technology, it had not died although it clearly no longer provided the same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish music. But funny when kids, his grandkids, for example, hear (and see) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in something like the film clip in Jailhouse Rock, Bo Diddley proclaiming that he put the rock in rock and roll, Chuck Berry telling a candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then, now too from what he had heard, that Mister Beethoven from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and move over because a new be-bop daddy was taking taking the reins, curl-in-hair Buddy Holly pining away for his Peggy Sue, Jerry Lee Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world that everybody had to do the high school hop bop, confidentially, Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy. Yeah, just like the young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah, those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the 1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation.

Sam had thought again recently about going back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies to cull out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost continuously since the 1950s(the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and she is wondering when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by the compilations to remember.

But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he (or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when we gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sods, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.

So that is how Sam played the game. Two (or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others can fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours or father borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one  all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when younger and at night when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.                      

From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive Website- The Alba Blog

From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive Website- The Alba
Blog



 






 

 

 


Click below to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping in the International Brigades that fought for our side, the side of the people in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.


http://www.albavolunteer.org/category/blog/

 

 

As everybody probably knows by now who has following this blog for a time Ralph Morris and I, Sam Eaton, met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 on the football field at then RFK Stadium while being held by the D.C. police (although Ralph was picked off by a National Guard soldier who transferred him to D.C. hands as the division of labor played out that day) for having tried to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war, that war being the Vietnam War that tore our generation, our nation asunder. I had gone down to Washington that weekend before May Day with a group of radicals from Cambridge who were part of an larger affinity group which had planned to “capture” the White House and Ralph had joined a group of anti-war Vietnam veterans who had planned to surround the Pentagon, a less exciting but more possible task.

Inevitably we had been arrested well before achieving either of our objectives along with thousands of others who were outraged by that endless war and committed to shutting it down, shutting it down some damn way so don’t smirk when you read this (“endless war,” sound familiar?). Ralph had noticed me wearing a button on my shirt indicating that I was a supporter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and had asked me if I had served in Vietnam. Having been exempted from military service by a hardship deferment due to my being the sole surviving supporter of my mother and four much younger sisters after my father had died of a massive heart attack in 1965 I rather sheepishly told Ralph the story of how my best buddy, my closest “corner boy,” Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in some God forsaken village up in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and that had spurred me who had been really indifferent to the war before to get involved as an anti-war activist a couple of years before doing civil disobedience actions leading up to the big action in D.C. in 1971. Ralph that afternoon (and late into the night since we wound up being held for three days before we figured that some side exits were unguarded and scooted out of the place) had told me his story of how he had come out of the Army after serving eighteen months with a unit up in that same Central Highlands where Jeff had been blown away and had been so angry at the government for making him and his Army buddies what he called “animals” that on discharge he had lined up with VVAW (through a fellow soldier in him in whom he had kept in touch with while stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts before he time was up).

After many hours of talking and getting a feel for each other we thereafter joined forces, did a number of actions later over the next couple of years until the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and faded. We have remained friends throughout, although some years sporadically,   and up until 2003 with the big invasion of Iraq would “do our duty” when some anti-war or social justice issue hit us between the eyes. Since then we have been on a steady diet of fighting the endless wars the last two American governments have immersed the country in without being any closer to the end than when we started.    

After May Day 1971, and for a while after the high tide ebbed through about 1976 I think (and Ralph thinks that is about the right time frame as well) he and I would attend various study groups run by radicals and “reds” to find out about the earlier history of the left-wing movement in America and internationally to see if we could learn any lessons that might help us in our social struggles. The whole summer of 1972 was spent in one such group when I was living in a commune in Cambridge and invited Ralph to stay with me and get involved in one of the “red collective” study groups that were sprouting up then as people despaired over the old strategies and tactics that had ground us to a standstill.

One of the big events that we studied which held us in thrall, especially since neither of us were history buffs or knew much from our high school history classes was the fierce battle between the fascists and republicans in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Particularly the exploits of the International Brigades and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade that fought valiantly if forlornly on the Republican side. Many a night we would ask ourselves the question of whether we would have fought, fought honorably in Spain (assuming that the Stalinists who controlled entry, controlled the “politically reliable elements” that they vetted into the Abraham Lincoln would have let us in). We hoped we would have. As Ralph and I have been fighting the good fight against the endless wars this time around (everyone will agree that over a dozen years and counting with no end in sight qualifies for such a designation) we have taken advantage of the Internet to see what other organizations and individuals have been up to. One day when I was Googling I came up upon this Abraham Lincoln Brigade website and was intrigued by its offerings. I made some comments about it and about Spain in the 1930s on the site. Here is what I had to say (I wrote this but Ralph put in his fair share of ideas so it is a two person commentary):            

This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. Viva La Quince Brigada!  

*******

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

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat (okay, okay working class) 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 of 1917 Spain showed the most promise of success. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky who had helped lead the successful October revolution and then led the military fight to defend the gains against the Whites arms in hands noted that the political class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat at that time was higher than that of the Russian proletariat in 1917. Yet it failed in Spain. Trotsky's writings on this period represent a provocative and thoughtful approach to an understanding of the causes of that failure. Moreover, with all proper historical proportions considered, his analysis has continuing value as the international working class struggles against the seemingly one-sided class war being waged by the international bourgeoisie today.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which were made into a volume for publication is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.

The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.

This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.

Trotsky's polemics in that volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes 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 an organization which almost consciously limited itself to organizing in vanguard Catalonia in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.

Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.

The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn,’ into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basis for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left-wing organizations like the POUM, the left-anarchists around Durrutti and so on. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book which is available on-line at the Leon Trotsky Archives section of the Marxist Internet Archives for the year 1939.

"Viva La Quince Brigada"- The Abraham Lincoln Battalion In The Spanish Civil War (2006)


BOOK REVIEW

THE ODYSSEY OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE: AMERICANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, Peter N. Carroll, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994.
I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 since I was in my twenties. My first paper for a study group presentation sponsored by one of the “red collectives” that were sprouting forth in the early 1970s as disoriented and disheartened radicals and “reds” were seriously and studiously searching for ways to fight the American monster government after years of failure was on this subject. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

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

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

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

*Playwright's Corner- From The Pen Of Jean Genet-"The Blacks"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French playwright Jean Genet's play, "The Blacks".




Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson speak about his latest documentary –The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)  



Book Review

The Blacks, Jean Genet, 1959


Recently, in reviewing the text for the play “The Maids” by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I write the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of the play under review , The Blacks”, as well:

“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”

As I have mentioned elsewhere once I “discover” a writer I tend to read through everything else that he or she has written to see if there is anymore gold in store. That is the case here. In a race-driven and obsessed society like America, notwithstanding a current black president, the question of the relationship, for good or evil but mainly evil, between blacks and whites necessarily has to dominate the central societal drama. Many black writers, including James Baldwin or Richard Wright, have been very sensitive to that need to blacks to “wear” a mask around whites. That a French writer, immersed in white waterfront and prison lumpen culture could capture that same idea in a sharply symbolic (read the direction instructions) play is another matter.

This play, unlike “The Maid”, reaches way down to a place where most play-goings, black and white, do not want to go. And that tells the tale here. I will wonder out loud how today’s audience, spoon-fed on the notion of a “post-racial” society, would react. More simply put, this is the difference between Malcolm X’s racial truth and Martin Luther King’s. Enough said.


Note: If you look at the above linked “Wikipedia” entry for “The Blacks” you will realize that the first performances of this play was a very important part of the acting careers of many black performers, including James Earl Jones. I have seen this play but without the star-studded cast of the original performances.