This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Dec. 13, 2015 | Pubic statement
by American Muslims and friends
We stand against attempts to
subvert our common humanity in the name of religion, politics, nationalism or
any other ideology
Nearly a
year ago, on Dec 16, 2014, Taliban attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar,
Pakistan, killing 144 schoolchildren and 10 teachers, and wounding countless
others. This was one of the most brutal attacks in Pakistan where militants have
killed some 50,000 civilians and 10,000 military personnel over the last
decade.
Those of us gathered here
represent different faiths and political beliefs. We stand as one to remember
those killed and to tell their families we haven’t forgotten - “The smallest
coffins are the heaviest”.
We
believe that the ideology behind the Peshawar school attack is the same that
lies behind many other attacks that have claimed headlines around the world in
recent years – in New York, London, Madrid,Mumbai,
Bali, and most recently, Beirut, Paris
andSan Bernardino, to name a
few.
The
militants claim to act in the name of Islam, yet they kill innocents, including
Muslim women and children, and Muslims who disagree with their violent ideology.
They have killed more Muslims than non-Muslims in their quest for political
power since 9/11.
We
unequivocally condemn these senseless attacks committed in the name of religion,
heinous crimes that go against all principles of humanity. Such barbarity has no
place in the civilized world.
The
motive behind these attacks, whether in Pakistan or Lebanon, Paris or America,
is the same: to terrorize innocents and create chaos. Militants feed on the fear
and divisions in a community in order to push their hate narrative and further
polarize society.
We
refuse to allow that to happen. We stand against attempts to subvert our common
humanity in the name of religion, politics, nationalism or any other
ideology.
We
reject the radicalization of Islam or any other religion. The cancer of
extremism has to be eradicated.
We stand
united against the forces that are trying to hijack Islam, a religion that 1.4
billion Muslims peacefully follow.
We
assert that religion is a personal matter and no one has the right to impose
their version upon anyone else.
We stand
against the use of religion for political agendas.
We
condemn and reject the radicalization of political thought in America and
elsewhere. Violent and extremist political rhetoric leads to violent and extreme
actions. It de-humanizes a community and encourages some to feel justified in
attacking ‘the other’.
We saw
this in Europe when the Fascists targeted Jews and Gypsies. We saw Americans of
Japanese heritage being targeted and interned during WWII. We saw the
“communist” witch-hunt of the 1950s. The origin of the term witch hunt itself
stems from the persecution of alleged witches, burnt at the stake in the name of
religion.
History
is replete with such examples. Today the target is Muslims. Countless
individuals have been attacked, intimidated and threatened in public places just
for being or ‘looking like’ Muslims.
We stand
with those who refuse to allow this witch-hunt mentality to prevail today. It is
out of place in our value system. It violates the Constitution that ensures
freedom, liberty and justice for all. We reject rhetoric in the name of religion
or politics that polarizes communities, making them weak from
within.
Shared at public
demonstrations on Sunday, Dec 13, 2015 in Providence, RI, and Boston,
MA
In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Song-Catcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
From The Pen Of Josh Breslin
Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger (and maybe his son Peter too in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County or story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)
Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers althougheven then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say, implied in the lyrics. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Carver where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene). That night I heard the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.
The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and buy the advertiser’s products once they were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance, out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.
But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no.”)
All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio.
But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Aware of where you are, how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand no longer used for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.
Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.
Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]
COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES (A.P. Carter)
The Carter Family - 1932
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning
They will first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
To make you think that they love you true
Straightway they'll go and court some other
Oh that's the love that they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting
When your head lay upon my breast
You could make me believe with the falling of your arm
That the sun rose in the West
I wish I were some little sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I would fly away to my false true lover
And while he'll talk I would sit and cry
But I am not some little sparrow
I have no wings nor can I fly
So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow
And try to pass my troubles by
I wish I had known before I courted
That love had been so hard to gain
I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden
And fastened it down with a silver chain
Young men never cast your eye on beauty
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away
The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -No Troops To Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! No One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!
Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.
Sam Eaton thought it was funny that every time that he and his old time comrade from the anti-war struggles here in America, Ralph Morris, seemed to run out of steam the government would, under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, force them to dust off the old “Stop The War” you fill in the blank which war banners, write up some new leaflet denouncing the latest government rationale for blowing people in other countries to smithereens or raise dough from their circle of ex-radical and left liberal friends guilty about having left the struggle to send people to D.C. or New York to once against voice their opposition. Sam had thought it funny just then as the President had just authorized another escalation (you fill in the President and the country) because the pair had been doing this kind of fairly lonesome work for a long time although they too had had some fairly long periods of inactivity for personal reasons like raising kids and the like.
They had thought, and had talked about the matter several times when they would get together for a few drinks when Ralph was in town and to talk about the old days, that they would be able to “retire” from the anti-war fights once they had reached occupation retirement age. But that was not to be, not the way they were built. See they had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when a lot of radicals, revolutionaries and just plain thoughtful liberals who were totally fed up with the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War (fed up about other issues too, but that was the burning one) and decided to take matters into their own hands by trying to shut down the government if the government did not shut down the war. Now the idea of civil disobedience has a long and proud history and if any situation required civil disobedience to try and stop the madness it was that damn war but the whole scheme was as Ralph called it at the time “utopian” since the anti-war forces were totally inadequate for the array of forces the government had sent out to stop them in their tracks that day. So for their efforts Sam, Ralph and many thousands of others wound up in the bastinado, would up in their case spending about four days in detention inside the Robert F. Kennedy football stadium that on autumn Sundays was the home field of the Washington Redskins before they just walked out of a side exit and nobody stopped them.
They had met in the stadium after Ralph had been picked off by the police around Massachusetts Avenue and Sam on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue headed to the White House. Ralph had noticed that Sam was wearing the button of a supporter of Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and had asked Sam if he was a veteran. Sam answered no but that a close friend had been killed there and that had triggered something inside him to oppose the war after he had been rather indifferent about it previously. He told Ralph he felt most comfortable with VVAWers once he told them his motivation for supporting their efforts and they had welcomed him. So one the things that drew them together was that they had similar motives for being in Washington at that time. Sam from Carver (the cranberry bog capital of the world) a working class town about thirty miles south of Boston and Ralph from General Electric-dominated working class Troy in upstate New York had had very personal reasons at the time. Sam like he had said had lost a close hang around guy from high school, Jeff Mullins, out in some jungle outpost in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Although he was exempted from the drat as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away from a heart attack in 1965 that lost affected him deeply, at the time more deeply than any intellectual argument anybody could have presented. Those arguments would come later. Ralph had served in Vietnam (1967-1969) and although he survived what he had seen there led him to total opposition to the war once he got back. So the unlikely pair struck up a friendship that has lasted ever since.
What both Ralph and Sam did not figure on was that they would still be at it with some breaks over forty years later. At a point sometime in the mid-1970s they both had figured out that the big wave of the 1960s had ebbed and so they slipped away from the movement, or at least their 24/7 devotion to it to go back to “normalcy,” Sam to restart his print shop that he had left behind after he got “religion” on the war question and raise a family and Ralph to take over his father’s electrical shop when he retires and raise a family. They would stay in contact, periodically as their kids got older would have shared vacations together in the Adirondacks and sniff around whatever struggles needed a little help like the opposition to the American government in Central America, the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the fast over first Iraq War in 1991. Nothing big but they had a profile.
Then all hell broke loose after 9/11 when with the same kind of governmental hubris that Sam and Ralph were very familiar with from Vietnam War days began to rear its head in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq. In late 2002 when the drums of war were being beaten savagely by the Bush administration they met at Jack Higgin’s Grille in Boston, Sam’s in-town watering hole and vowed now that they again had some time that they would wage “peace” as Sam called it until the American troops left the Middle East. Knowing that such efforts requires some kind of organizational affiliation Ralph as a member and Sam as a supporter joined Veterans for Peace a group Sam had heard about in Boston at an anti-war march. And they have been involved as best they can ever since, although Ralph has had some medical issues of late.
Along the way, especially after the furor over the Iraq War faded once that war actually started (that faded something both men could not understand having witnessed the rise of the opposition to the Vietnam War go in the other direction as that war escalated and dragged on), the would run into and join the dwindling other groups and individuals who wanted to oppose the permanent war policies of the American government. Around 2010 or so in the “dog days” of the anti-war opposition when Barack Obama was riding high they would attend meetings of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) which was trying to unite all the various, mostly small, groupings under one umbrella. Sam, a little better at writing stuff than Ralph, after their most recent discussion about how long they had been at the struggle against war, wrote something to try to make sense of what they were doing. Here is what he had to say and see if that helps at all:
“A while back, maybe last year [Fall, 2014] as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.
Over the summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to Syria. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”
The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.
So as the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria, sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like my friend Ralph Morris who has kept the faith, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops.
Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- Hands Off Syria!
Here is something to think about:
Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.
[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right] ”
Here’s a plug for UNAC Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!
On 2 December 1859, the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown was executed for having led the multiracial anti-slavery uprising in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, two months earlier. Brown’s raid prepared the road for the liberation of slaves through the Civil War, the Second American Revolution. But with the undoing of Radical Reconstruction, the promise of black equality was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie. Racial oppression remains in the very marrow of American capitalism. Ending the oppression of black people that is inherent in American capitalism will require a workers socialist revolution. The following is an excerpt from an 1881 oration by leading black abolitionist and radical democrat Frederick Douglass honoring his friend and comrade given at the historically black Storer College in Harpers Ferry. The speech was published as a pamphlet to fund an endowment for a John Brown Professorship.
But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harper’s Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harper’s Ferry to save his life. The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause.... If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia—not Fort Sumpter, but Harper’s Ferry and the arsenal—not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed host of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.
—Frederick Douglass, “John Brown: An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College” (May 1881)
Usually when I post
something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may
be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the
words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article
speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself without
further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all
I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and
the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in
solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
Workers Vanguard No. 1079
27 November 2015
Vindictive Retrial of Former Black Panther-Albert Woodfox Is Innocent—Free Him Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On November 9, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state of Louisiana could try class-war prisoner Albert Woodfox a third time for the 1972 murder of a Louisiana prison guard. The court also gave the state the green light to keep the 68-year-old Woodfox locked up while his judicial railroading drags on. Woodfox was falsely convicted as part of a racist vendetta against him due to his political activities within Angola prison and then spent 43 years in solitary confinement, the longest stint of any prisoner in the U.S. His conviction has been overturned twice because of prosecutorial misconduct and racist grand jury rigging. Today, even according to bourgeois legal standards, Woodfox stands innocent of murder. Yet the state continues to imprison Woodfox—who suffers from heart disease, renal failure and hepatitis C—aiming to ensure that he dies in prison.
In June, after Woodfox was indicted a third time on the same trumped-up murder charge, District Court judge James Brady barred the state from retrying him. Brady cited the fact that Woodfox could not possibly receive a fair trial and ordered his immediate and unconditional release. Louisiana attorney general James Caldwell appealed that decision and now, in a two-to-one decision, the appeals panel has overturned Brady’s ruling and allowed for yet another bogus trial to go forward. The dissenting judge declared, “If ever a case justifiably could be considered to present ‘exceptional circumstance’ barring reprosecution, this is that case.”
It was 1971 when Woodfox was first sent to Angola prison, which fittingly sits on the site of a former slave plantation. There, he and fellow inmates Herman Wallace and Robert King started a Black Panther Party chapter and organized inmate work stoppages and protests. That put them in the crosshairs of their jailers. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were framed up for the fatal stabbing of prison guard Brent Miller. A year later, King was falsely convicted of killing a fellow inmate. The men, known as the Angola Three, fought their convictions for over four decades. Wallace was finally freed in 2013, only to die of liver cancer three days after his release. King, who was released in 2001, has since been prominent in the fight to free Woodfox. So transparent was the frame-up that Miller’s widow, Leontine Rogers, believes Woodfox to be innocent and has joined the calls to release him.
There has never been one shred of physical evidence implicating Woodfox in Miller’s killing. Only now will a bloody fingerprint found at the scene of the murder, which did not match any of the Angola Three, be tested against all of the inmates in Angola at that time—and only because Woodfox’s attorneys successfully fought for it. Likewise, DNA testing will now for the first time be performed on the knife allegedly used in the killing.
For this third trial of Woodfox, the state has already engaged in its usual frame-up machinations. Since all four supposed eyewitnesses to the murder have since died, a state judge ruled in September that their prior testimony will be read to the jury by stand-ins. Woodfox’s lawyers will thus be unable to cross-examine witnesses to challenge their credibility—a denial of the basic right of the accused to confront his accusers. That goes particularly for the government’s key witness, the late Hezekiah Brown, without whose testimony the state has admitted it would not even have a case. After the first trial, it came out that Brown’s testimony had been coerced by prison authorities, who threatened him with solitary confinement while dangling before him the promise of a pardon.
Woodfox should not spend another moment behind prison walls. In an August 25 letter to the Partisan Defense Committee, Woodfox evoked the 23-hour lockdowns that he was being forced to endure, declaring: “The persecution by the state of Louisiana goes on! But as ever, I remain strong and determined.... I will not break!”
We reiterate our call for Woodfox’s immediate freedom and encourage our supporters to take up his cause and write to Albert Woodfox #72148, West Feliciana Parish Detention Center, PO Box 2727, St. Francisville, LA 70775.
Polish Judge Denies Extradition to U.S.-Defend Roman Polanski!
LONDON—On October 30, a judge in the Polish city of Krakow slapped down the latest attempt by American authorities to drag renowned film director Roman Polanski back to a California prison. In 1977, a Los Angeles court convicted Polanski on the charge of having sex with a minor and sent him down for six weeks of “psychiatric observation” in a California state prison. When the Los Angeles judge reneged on the original plea bargain deal and threatened to return him to prison, Polanski fled to Europe, where he has remained ever since. For four decades the American injustice system has pursued its vendetta, continuing to stretch its long arm toward Polanski’s throat.
Describing the extradition request as “obviously unlawful,” Judge Dariusz Mazur asserted, “I do not find any logical, rational explanation as to why the U.S. is pursuing the extradition” (Warsaw Voice, 2 November). Mazur also took aim at the original proceedings, stating: “The judge (in California) had no reason to move back from the [plea bargain] agreement.” Even Polanski’s supposed victim, Samantha Geimer, praised the latest ruling: “I believe they did the right thing and made the right decision given all the facts,” she told NBC News (31 October).
Five years ago, a court in Switzerland likewise struck down a U.S. extradition request for Polanski, who has dual French and Polish citizenship. After his arrest in Zurich in late 2009, Polanski was held in prison for two months and subjected to further months of house arrest before a judge ruled against the deportation order. That arrest came on the heels of the 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which exposed the original frame-up, including revealing evidence of collusion between the judge and the prosecution.
As Marxists, we oppose the bourgeois state enforcing “decency” through the criminal code. Reactionary “age of consent” and “statutory rape” laws conflate consensual sex with the violent crime of rape. In determining whether an act is rape or not, the guiding principle should be effective consent—nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. Laws criminalizing consensual relationships aim to strengthen the bourgeois state’s regimentation of the population and to impose abstinence and guilt on youth while locking up adults who “deviate” from the sexual “norms” that the ruling class hypocritically tries to foist on the masses. We say: Government out of the bedroom!
Any notion that Polanski plied an innocent teen with champagne and Quaaludes during a photo shoot and then raped her was destroyed in court. It was shown that the 13-year-old Geimer, who was sexually experienced and had been “experimenting” with Quaaludes since the age of 10 or 11, was eager to consort with the director at a Hollywood photo shoot. Geimer subsequently acknowledged that she did not object to Polanski’s behavior at the time. In 2013 she wrote: “I ran into the two-headed monster of the California criminal justice system and its corrupt players, whose lust for publicity overwhelmed their concern with justice.”
In our 1978 article “Stop the Puritan Witchhunt Against Roman Polanski!” (WV No. 192, 10 February 1978) we wrote: “Sexual and social life in southern California, with its thriving drug culture and troupes of precocious and sexually active groupies hanging about the fringes of the entertainment industry, produces thousands of ‘aspiring actresses’...like the one Polanski had the misfortune to run into. Regardless of what one thinks of the scene as a whole, its all-too-obvious reality makes absurd [Judge] Rittenband’s attempts to force rigid morality of the Victorian era into L.A. freeways and bedrooms.”
Noting that “official repression and enforced standards of sexual activity have brought oppression and pain throughout history,” our article continued:
“All those laws which define ‘sex crimes’ in America today are fundamentally aimed at glorifying and propping up the obscene and repressive prison of the family, for centuries the main institution for the oppression of women and children....
“[Polanski’s] prosecution, like the furor over ‘kiddie porn,’ feeds into the sanctimonious ‘Save Our Children’ crusade epitomized by Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexual witchhunt—a reactionary offensive which hides behind the ‘innocence’ of children to enforce bourgeois morality through the vindictive persecution of ‘deviants’.”
What triggered the U.S. government’s latest attempt to have Polanski arrested was his appearance as an invited guest at the ceremonial opening in October 2014 of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. As a young boy in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow, Polanski survived Hitler’s Holocaust. Currently he is filming in Poland an account of the Dreyfus affair, the frame-up of a Jewish officer in the French army in the 1890s, which served as a litmus test for the socialist movement internationally at the time.
The U.S. vendetta against Polanski is likely not over. Los Angeles district attorney Jackie Lacey immediately vowed to continue pursuing him. The Polish prosecutor’s office has the right to appeal Mazur’s ruling. If they do so, they would find conditions favorable to the witchhunt. Only days before the court ruling, the anti-immigrant Catholic-clericalist Law and Justice Party came to power in Polish elections. Its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, an overt anti-Muslim and anti-Russian bigot, highlighted his support for Polanski’s extradition during the election campaign, while his new minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, ranted, “paedophilia is an evil that must be pursued.” Such statements are no surprise from this party which includes open anti-Jewish racists like Minister of Defense Antoni Macierewicz.
Lamentably, retrograde views are not a monopoly of the reactionary right. Down the years, we Spartacists have been the target of many leftists because of our defense of Polanski. When Stalinists are so engaged, they are just being consistent in bigotry, having, for example, traditionally decried homosexuals as deviants from the family-values norm. While that attitude is not so fashionable today, there are still Maoist sects like the Revolutionary Communist Party in the U.S. that campaign against pornography, in the name of protecting women, of course. But the vendetta against Polanski has brought together many social-democratic leftists who piously decry totalitarian Stalinism while similarly echoing the twisted social values of oppressive capitalist society and promoting interference of the capitalist state in people’s lives.
One example in Britain is the “libertarian communist” group associated with the website libcom.org, which has made it a point to go after the Spartacist League for our consistent defense of Polanski. Falsely describing him as a “convicted child rapist,” they accuse us of “sexist, pro-child abuse, rape-denying views” (libcom.org, 11 February 2014). It likewise denounces our defense of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) against puritanical persecution by the bourgeois state. In the eyes of the state and its amen corner in the left and gay rights milieus, NAMBLA’s crime is its advocacy of the sexual rights of youth, including in relationships with older men.
The fact that ostensibly anti-state “libertarian communists” champion the Victorian moral strictures of the church and sections of the capitalist ruling class speaks volumes. It is a measure of their proximity to bourgeois “family values” hypocrisy and their great distance from the class line, let alone from the remotest concept of real human freedom. Free love? Perhaps, but only if you’re over the age of 18 and it’s sanctioned by the state. In September a 14-year-old boy from the north of England was placed on a police “sex offenders” database, which is to haunt him for at least ten years, for sexting a nude photo of himself to a girl his age. Jeremy Forrest, a teacher, was recently released after serving two years in prison for having had a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old student (see “Britain: Teacher Jailed in Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” WV No. 1028, 9 August 2013). In a communist society, where the state and the family have withered away, young (and old) people will have the freedom to engage in whatever form of sexual relationship they want.
Our defense of Polanski is part of our struggle to forge a Leninist party that will act as a tribune of the people, able to react, as Lenin put it in What Is to Be Done?, “to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.” If the capitalist state can get away with railroading Polanski, all the easier for it to go after the nameless, faceless thousands who end up imprisoned or placed on a “sex offenders” list because they came up against the wrong side of bourgeois morality.
Missouri and Beyond-Campus Racism Sparks Protests-For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
In the wake of the nationwide explosion of outrage against racist cop terror, protests are now sweeping campuses across the country against the pervasive racism faced by the dwindling number of black youth “lucky” enough to have made it into a university. Skyrocketing tuition and the decades-long assault on affirmative action programs, which granted a measure of access to higher education for black youth, have led to a wholesale racist purge at colleges and universities. The few remaining black students are treated like, at best, undeserving outsiders. This message is also delivered by frat rats and other bigots with provocations reminiscent of the KKK, like the effigy of a black body swinging from a noose on the renowned “progressive” campus of UC Berkeley in 2012.
The current protests were sparked by students at the University of Missouri in Columbia, little more than 100 miles from Ferguson, where the police execution of Michael Brown ignited mass demonstrations last year. Protests at “Mizzou” began in September after black student Payton Head, president of the Missouri Students Association, described in a Facebook post how he had been terrorized by racists in a pickup truck screaming the “N” word. Spearheading the protests were a group of black students called Concerned Student 1950, referring to the year when black students were first admitted to the university. The University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe called out the campus cops to disperse demonstrators.
After it was reported that a swastika had been smeared in feces on the wall of a dorm bathroom in late October, a black graduate student began a hunger strike to demand that Wolfe be ousted. Many students, faculty and staff walked out in support, an action that was spurred by graduate student workers who had earlier fought back and won against the university’s attempt to cut off their health insurance. But it was the school’s black football players, supported by their white coach and teammates, who turned the tide with the threat that they would boycott the next home game if Wolfe didn’t resign. Cancellation of the game would have cost the school a million dollars. Wolfe resigned, as did the chancellor of the university.
The Mizzou football team’s threatened boycott underlines the power of the college athletes who generate billions for university administrations as well as major corporations such as broadcasting and video games manufacturers. As we wrote in our Young Spartacus article “College Sports Plantation” (WV No. 1054, 17 October 2014) supporting the fight by college athletes to unionize, strike and collectively bargain for wages, health and other benefits currently denied them: “While students in general have virtually no social power, if college athletes were to withdraw their labor and go on strike, it could have a significant impact.”
Such power all the more lies in the hands of the multiracial working class whose labor produces the wealth that is appropriated in the form of massive profits by the minuscule, and ruthless, capitalist class—the owners of the means of production. The sons and daughters of the working class, white as well as black and Latino, have increasingly been priced out of a college education or are buried under mountains of student debt. Here lies the potential for a class-struggle fight—allying the students with the power of labor—for free, quality, integrated education for all including open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all students. A central obstacle to the power of labor being brought to bear is the misleaders of the unions who are not even defending their own members, much less lifting a finger in defense of the embattled black population.
Given the long history of betrayals by the trade-union bureaucrats, it is not surprising that there is little to no appreciation of the social power of the working class. This has done much to condition a view that the only avenue of struggle is one of pressuring the rulers to act in the interests of those they viciously exploit and oppress. Just as the Black Lives Matter movement has looked to the Feds to rein in the killer cops, the student protesters overwhelmingly appeal to agents of capitalist class rule, e.g., the campus administration, to transform the universities into arenas of racial diversity and inclusion. The idea that the campuses can be transformed into oases of racial equality under capitalism is a pipe dream. Life in the “ivory tower” is but a reflection of the reality of American capitalism, whose entire existence has been rooted in black oppression.
Liberal Nostrums and Racist Reaction
There was, understandably, much celebration when Wolfe resigned, especially given the racist arrogance with which he had dismissed the demands of black students. But replacing the university president will not change the role of the campus administration, whose job is to run the university in the interests of society’s capitalist rulers. Fundamentally, universities under capitalism exist to educate and train administrators, technicians and intellectuals, as well as the next generation of war criminals, union-busting lawyers and murderous spies needed to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism against the working class and dark-skinned people at home and abroad. The affirmative action programs in education, which we defended, were won through the massive civil rights movement protests of the 1960s but were intended to defuse social struggle. These gains, albeit largely token, were granted with the aim of co-opting a thin layer of the black population, the so-called “talented tenth,” some of whom would go on to serve America’s rulers as mayors, police chiefs, military officers, etc.
Wolfe has been replaced, at least temporarily, by Mike Middleton. The retired deputy chancellor and one of the first black law graduates from the university, Middleton was himself involved in the black student protests at Mizzou in 1969. Will that make any real difference? For the past eight years, this country has been ruled by a black president, Barack Obama. His presence in the White House has done nothing to stem the vicious racial oppression of black people. The ghetto poor are little more than targets for the trigger-happy racist cops. Similarly, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria continue to be maimed and killed by U.S. drones and airstrikes.
For the racist rulers of America, Obama’s election provided a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism. The image of a black man in the highest office of the land provided a thin gloss on murderous capitalist class rule. A black student protester at Yale expressed the disillusion that is now widespread: “It really is hard to believe because we want to believe that we’re a postracial society, but it’s just not true” (New York Times, 11 November). Nor will it ever be true short of a successful proletarian socialist revolution that shatters this entire system of racial oppression and class exploitation. In the absence of any such perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement, like so many other movements before it, is rapidly being sucked into the Democratic Party electoral machine in the interminable 2016 presidential campaign.
Many anti-racist activists have appealed for “speech codes” and “codes of conduct” in an attempt to transform the campuses into so-called “safe spaces.” Such appeals disarm the victims of racist attacks on colleges by fostering illusions in the supposed “neutrality” of the university administration, itself an extension of the capitalist state. Among the demands at Amherst College are that the university president discipline “racially insensitive” students as well as that the campus cops issue a statement of “protection and defense” of the protesters against any retaliation. The notion that the police would protect protesters is a suicidal illusion. Anything that gives the campus administration and its cops greater authority allows them freer rein to crack down on political dissent by leftists, black students and other minorities. It also plays into the hands of right-wingers who, while whining about “free speech,” aim to purge and silence all opposition to the status quo.
For a Class-Struggle Fight for Black Freedom!
Amid the all-sided offensive against black people in this country, it is hardly surprising that any notion of social equality seems a distant prospect. In this context, the limited and symbolic demands of the black students and other minorities are both an understandable reaction to the very real racist bigotry permeating the campuses and an accommodation to it. After a recent visit to the Mizzou campus, a WV sales team reported that few of the students they spoke to looked beyond raising awareness and breaking down racist stereotypes. This perspective reflects the mistaken belief that racial oppression is the result of “bad ideas” that can supposedly be overcome through “sensitivity training.” On the contrary, black oppression is deeply rooted in this country that was built on the backs of black slaves. Today, the majority of the black population remains forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, subject to desperate poverty and police terror, while the rulers wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the working class.
Unlike liberals and others who seek to sanitize the racist status quo, our purpose as Marxists is to change that reality by fighting to mobilize the power of the multiracial working class behind a series of demands that address the felt needs of the working and oppressed masses, including free, quality, integrated education for all. This requires breaking the grip of the Democratic Party on both the unions and the black population. The working class needs its own party, a revolutionary workers party that champions the cause of all of the oppressed. We seek to win a new generation, both on the campuses and elsewhere, to the perspective of socialist revolution, which will lay the basis for the genuine liberation of black people and the freedom of humanity.
