Saturday, August 20, 2016

*****The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth


 

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth 

  




 



A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).
That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.
 
I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.
At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.
At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.
Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).    
At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere. 
On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 
 
[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea ]  

 
Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27th birthday in December with a rally (and did again this year on her 28th birthday).
More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)
Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     
We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.
After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

Friday, August 19, 2016

Sailing To The Danger Zone When The Deal Went Down In The 1950s Red Scare Night-The Golden Rule Rides Again

Sailing To The Danger Zone When The Deal Went Down In The 1950s Red Scare Night-The Golden Rule Rides Again   






Before The Rock and Roll Jailbreak-With The Music Of Rosemary Clooney In Mind

Before The Rock and Roll Jailbreak-With The Music Of Rosemary Clooney In Mind



CD Review
By Zack James
The Sixteen Greatest Hits of Rosemary Clooney, Rosemary Clooney, Columbian Records, 1975  
Some bars in the old working-class neighborhoods right after World War II like Jack Miller’s Irish Tavern over in Gloversville were hang-outs for guys who worked in the shipyard a few towns over in Weymouth, guys who a few years before were knee deep in Normandy muds, or scraping their shins on coral reef in the great Pacific wars. In such joints, simple drunk tanks really, a few stools, a few booths and the long bar with plenty of beers and low-shelf liquors and Jack serving them off the arm in lieu of hiring a waitress to do such chores which he was too cheap to do (and if truth be known no woman would have lasted too long with that crowd and to save more than a few marriages and some broken windows and doors Jack did the honors) the neighborhood fathers and in some cases older brothers did their serious drinking. Serious payday drinking in too many cases leaving too many mostly Irish wives, and one generation off the boat mostly, with short money for the always chronically short weekly bill envelopes that were the only different between a roof over the family’s head and the streets (or worse. almost better to be on the streets and maybe Saint Vincent DePaul would help out, the county farm). Serious drinking in the case of Jimmy Jenkins’ father, William, a crackerjack welder when he was sober, yeah, when he was sober and it is better left at that.   
So now that you know the story, know what was what when Jimmy was growing up and spent half his free time away from school trying to coax his father out of Jack’s, had to stand around for hours sometime while his father “finished’ his business, that business being buying yet another round for the boyos, his boyos from the softball team that played at Devens Field a couple of nights a week and which was the excuse for the boyos to stop off at Jack’s after the game and quench their thirsts. While waiting Jimmy would inevitably hear the music from Jack’s jukebox which seemed to have stopped at the year 1951 in terms of selections. Hear all the music that his father when he was “in his cups” would say had gotten him and Jimmy’s mother, Eleanor, through the war she at home waiting for the other shoe to drop and he in France on the way to Germany waiting for his own shoe to drop. Tops on the list when William and the boyos had had a few was their girl, their own Irish rose Rosemary Clooney singing all kinds of weeping songs along with covering a few popular tunes as well. Jimmy would grind his teeth anytime anybody from his own crowd, the crowd he hung around with at Vinnie’s Variety Store over on Talbot Avenue mentioned anything about the ‘stuff that got their parents through the war,” square nothing but square.    
That was not the worst of the situation because when Jimmy was not shagging after his father in some gin mill (after William got wise to the fact that Eleanor was sending Jimmy on missions of mercy to save something for those almost empty white envelopes he would sometimes go to the Starlight Lounge or to Benny’s) but when he got up in the morning or when he got home after school the family radio located right in the middle of the living room would be turned on to WJDA which catered exclusively in those days to the “songs that got them, (and you now know who them is), the war.”  See Eleanor was in some time warp believing Jimmy thought that if she listened hard enough to that stuff things would turn around (they never did William packed a bag one day in 1960 and was never heard from again-Jimmy by then saying good riddance-mostly). Though particularly that Rosemary Clooney’s No Too Young would get them by. So more grinding of Jimmy’s teeth (he made Bart Webber laugh one time when he said that might have been the reason he had spent a lifetime at the dentist’s. Bart ever the wit said it was that genetic bad teeth Irish thing so a double curse of William Jenkins).
One night in 2007, maybe early 2008, winter time anyway, Jimmy was sitting in the Shattuck Lounge in Riverdale talking to Bart, one of the few friends from high school that he kept in contact with over years when somebody played Rosemary Clooney’s cover of Blues In The Night. He did not, until he asked a few minutes after the song was over and went up to the older woman who had played the song (and a couple of  Harry James instrumentals), know that the artist being played was Ms. Clooney but said to Bart that the song sounded familiar. More importantly that it sounded good. After discovering who had sung the song Bart and Jimmy had a good laugh, a laugh about how what goes around comes around.
Here is the funny thing though he started picking up Rosemary Clooney material, started getting her CDs which were being re-issued including the one mentioned above. On some nights when he was alone after his wife went to bed he would crank up his computer and play some of the CDs. And shed a tear for his mother who never did draw a break in the world whatever hopes she had after World War II and shed a tear too for his father who he hadn’t thought about in years. Yeah, what goes around comes around.              

An Encore Just Because- A Very Different Look At May Day On A May Day- A Personal View

An Encore Just Because- A Very Different Look At May Day On A May Day- A Personal View





Markin comment originally posted on May Day 2010:




For those of a certain age, who came of age during the Cold War, the images of May Day evokes pictures of the latest display of Soviet weaponry and of elite military units marching in step in Red Square in Moscow before some glowering delegation from the Communist Party Politburo. Such pictures gave the usually information-starved and speculation-crazy Western Sovietologists plenty of ammunition for figuring out who was “in” and who was “out” in the internal party regime. At least until the next public display on the November 7th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution when the search for the elusive “musical chairs” would start all over again. For others, more historically- oriented, perhaps, May Day evokes the struggle for the eight hour work day and the Chicago Haymarket martyrs. Those with a more recent interest may evoke the continuing struggle for the recognition of immigrant rights. Now all of these are worthy, if highly political, views of May Day and I certainly have no quarrel with those evocations. However, just for the few minutes that it takes to write this entry I wish to evoke another, more ancient, more pagan, vision of May Day that, strangely, may dovetail with the motives behind those more political expressions put forth on this day.



I, of course, refer to the ancient roots of the holiday or rather the pre-Christian religious significance of the day as a day of renewal and of homage to the virtues of spring. Especially for those whose heritage stems from the British Isles. Under normal circumstances I would not necessarily be in a mood to reflect on this aspect of the day but a couple of things have set me to thinking about it. The first, as a result of having recently read a number of 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan-etched short stories, including “The May Pole Of Merry Mount” got me thinking about that May Day pagan scenario and also about how deeply, even now, the formal Puritan ethic that frowned on such celebrations is embedded in our common cultural experiences. The second had to do with childhood reflections of our kid's version of May basket, May Day.



As to the first, whatever the “official” line is on the Puritan history here in America and in England as laid down by the likes of Professors Perry Miller and Hugh Trevor-Roper, to name a couple that come mind, I am privy to a “secret” history of the doings of the old Puritan stock. While Hawthorne’s Puritans, as he sternly portrayed them, are no friends to the fun-loving that is rather more his hang up and his way to make a quick dollar on that saga from punishment fetishists. The real “skinny” on the Puritans here and back in the old country is that they were not adverse to a little “good times”, just not in excess.



How is one to otherwise make sense of that little ménage of Pricilla and John Alden and Myles Standish? Or the real story about Tommy Wollaston’s wood fetish? Or Governor’ Winthrop’s private dope stash that he tried to pass off as tobacco (and which in any case he did not inhale). And to complete the story on the other side of the ocean, how about arch-Puritan poet and revolutionary John Milton’s open endorsement of concubinage, including, and I “reveal” this here for the first time, his own bevy of "ladies". “A Paradise within Thee, Happier Far”, indeed. For a long time the poem "Paradise Lost" was a book with seven seals. Now it all fits. And I should not fail to mention the other well-known arch-Puritan Oliver Cromwell whose well-hidden drinking problem ( he called his "tea", wink-wink) goes a long way to explaining those rash outbursts when Parliament was in session. Rump, indeed.



Okay, I am sure that the reader has had enough of my 'insight' into the rough stuff of the seamy edges of history. I will reprieve you with a final few thoughts about my own childhood relationship to this other May Day. Of course, I am something of a “homer” on this one, at least on the pre and post-Puritan English traditions since I grew up frequently passing the site of the Merry Mount May Pole (now on land used as a cemetery) at Mount Wollaston, which is a part of Quincy the town where I grew up. I knew this story as part of the Quincy town history from very early on. I am not sure whether it was through a teacher or by the local city historian, Edward Rowe Snow, but I knew all about old Tommy Wollaston and his crowd of "wild boys and girls". Sounded like fun, and it was.



On kid time May Day , as I recall, we were given little May crepe paper-lined baskets with a chocolate treat in it from one or another source, and in at least one year we danced around the Puritan-forbidden May Pole. I guess, even then, I had a secret desire that old Tommy should have won. Call me a pagan but that is the truth. But also note this, to kind of put this little “fluff” piece in perspective. Isn’t, in the final analysis, either the old pagan ritual or the newer May Pole festivity emblematic of the kind of thing that those of us who are trying to create “a newer world” aiming for. To make the world and its pleasures a common thing, for everyone. I think that I am on to something here. May Day greetings from this space.

An Encore -The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind


An Encore -The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind




From The Pen Of Sam Lowell





Bart Webber thought he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road, definite in giving him and a goodly portion of his generation that last push to go, well, go search a new world, or at least get the dust of your old town growing up off of your shoes, that had much to do with his wanderings. Got him going in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe,” Peter Paul Markin called the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams I will do so here). Any way you cut it seeking that new world that gave Bart his fitful dream. That  “driving him crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings, that search had begun, and finished shortly thereafter, about fifty years before when he left the road after a few months. Just like Jack Callahan who left for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life. Decided that like many others who went that same route he was not build for the long haul road after all.  

 

But maybe it is best to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night several weeks before when Bart , Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Jack, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day” get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block down Massachusetts Avenue from where Jimmy lives. We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, more recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking (drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys, and draino Southern Comfort, and that draino designation no lie, especially the first time you took a slug, the only way to take it, before you acquired the taste for it).

 

The night I am talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think, mentioned that he had read in the Globe that up in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart as did thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 who went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul Markin.

 

Yeah, we still moan for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our youths come up. It might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies,” the hard-bitten Friday or Saturday night times when nothing to do and nothing to do it with he would hold forth, was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions).

 

We would change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss” car, like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past square one with girls, the girls we knew, or were attracted to, in those days).           

 

Markin was whistling in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading us heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart Webber, in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better once a couple of Cambridge girls asked me if I liked folk music one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several months.

 

But enough of me and my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Bart like Jack Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Jack who left to go back to Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota).

 

In a lot of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all, all in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”  Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.       

 

So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, and of the limits of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack Kerouac’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.

 

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.              

 

Here the odd thing, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.           

 

But enough of the quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five kinds of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read about how his hero Benjamin Franklin had started in the business, get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after about seven million drum-fire assaults by Markin pressing him to read the thing.

 

So there he was by himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going  to hitchhike to save money and hell just to do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully started his trip on). There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French- Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of love was all about.

 

Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the 1940s.

 

Ti Jean whose did not look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown, kind of blew that off when Providence seemed too provincial to him, had fled to New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters and hustlers.

 

After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times than you would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book that was never published because there were too many squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.

 

Then Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.              







An Appeal From Veteran For Peace-It Is Desperately Necessary To Get President Obama To Pardon Chelsea Manning Now-She Must Not Die In Prison!

An Appeal From Veteran For Peace-It Is Desperately Necessary To Get President Obama To Pardon Chelsea Manning Now-She Must Not Die In Prison!







An Appeal From Veterans For Peace- Get The U.S. Military Bases Out Of Okinawa -Now!

An Appeal From Veterans For Peace- Get The U.S. Military Bases Out Of Okinawa -Now!





A View From The International Left- Pope’s Inquisition Targets Journalists-The Vatican: Cancer of Italy

Workers Vanguard No. 1093
29 July 2016
 
Pope’s Inquisition Targets Journalists-The Vatican: Cancer of Italy

We print below a translation of an article published by our comrades of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia in their newspaper Spartaco (No. 79, April 2016).

At the end of November 2015, the Vatican tribunal brought journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi to trial. They are, respectively, authors of Avarizia and Via Crucis [the latter is published in English as Merchants in the Temple]. These two books revealed the Holy See’s wealth and scandals, including by publishing secret documents and investigations into the Vatican bank (IOR) and the financial dealings of bishops and cardinals. The journalists’ presumed sources were also put on trial: Lucio Vallejo Balda, a Spanish prelate and ex-secretary to the commission (COSEA) that conducted an inquiry into the Vatican’s finances, and his collaborators, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Nicola Maio. [On July 7, the Vatican court sentenced Vallejo Balda to 18 months of prison and gave Chaouqui a suspended sentence of ten months. The court found Nicola Maio not guilty and ruled that it had no jurisdiction over Fittipaldi and Nuzzi.]
Via Crucis and Avarizia detail the finances of the Vatican, whose institutions manage its own and others’ assets totaling approximately 9-10 billion euros [$10-11 billion]. The financial shenanigans they document include fraud, the high-flying lifestyles of cardinals, extensive international investments, the huge moneymaking business of church hospitals, the Vatican bank’s schemes and intrigues, and the real value of the Pope’s finances. The London Review of Books (18 February) aptly described what the two books reveal:
“The anecdotes are endless: the monsignor who appropriates a room from the adjacent apartment of a poorer priest simply by knocking down the party wall while the other man is in hospital; the diplomat priest who takes advantage of the diplomatic bag to carry mafia money across the Swiss border; the organisation Propaganda Fide, instituted to evangelise the world, that spends relatively little on this mission while owning almost a thousand valuable properties in and around Rome, many of them rented way below market price to friends and favourites.
“It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. When priests in Salerno were granted €2.3 million of public money to build an orphanage in a depressed urban area, they built a luxury hotel instead. Found guilty of appropriating funds under false pretences in 2012, the archbishop of Salerno avoided punishment when the crime lapsed under the statute of limitations before his appeal could be heard.”
The greed and corruption of the Roman Curia has been common knowledge since the days of Dante and Luther, when the Vatican earned its name the “Whore of Babylon.” The 1970s and 1980s were marked by interminable scandals over the Vatican’s connections to the P2 Masonic Lodge, South American military regimes, crooked bankers like Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and organized crime. Thus, nobody will be surprised by what Avarizia and Via Crucis bring to light. Nevertheless, it is always good to see that from time to time someone reminds people of the real face behind the Vatican’s hypocritical mask.
The Vatican tribunal did not question the veracity of the writers’ assertions. Rather, the journalists have been accused of “divulging confidential information,” which the Vatican considers a “crime against the fatherland,” punishable by four to eight years in jail. Nuzzi described the first hearing as “a medieval procedure—crazy, absurd, Kafkaesque.” The accused were not charged with any specific facts to be proven; they were not shown the procedural documentation until just a few hours before the hearing; and they were not allowed to use their own lawyers but were instead forced to choose attorneys officially registered with the Vatican court.
One might think the clock had turned back to 1864, when Pope Pius IX (known as “Pope Pig” by Romans at the time, but beatified by the Vatican in 2000) issued his Encyclical against communism, socialism, civil marriage, freedom of religion, the right to public schools, and decreed that it was “insanity” to believe that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way” (“Condemning Current Errors,” 8 December 1864).
But it is 2016. The instigator of the trial is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (alias Pope Francis), monarch of the Vatican state with full legislative, executive and judicial powers. The aim is to silence the Vatican whistle-blowers as well as the journalists who published their testimonies.
We demand: Drop all charges against Nuzzi, Fittipaldi and their sources! We oppose the fact that the Catholic church arrogates the right to bring anyone to trial, especially journalists who shed light on the Vatican’s shady business.
Abolish the Concordat! Rescind the Lateran Treaty!
The Italian government endorsed the Vatican’s trial of the journalists, declaring through its mouthpiece, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano: “The Vatican has its own judicial system—one must never forget that in this kind of situation, the rules of international rights prevail.” What international rights? The Lateran Treaty of 1929, introduced under Mussolini’s fascist regime, granted the Catholic church sovereignty over a 44 hectare [109 acre] enclave in central Rome. This maneuver gave the church rights of extraterritoriality, countless privileges inside public Italian institutions, Catholic indoctrination in public schools and hefty funding masked as “international” prerogatives. But the fact that the Roman Catholic church can claim the right to arrest its employees and try journalists is one more example of the reactionary interpenetration of the Catholic church and the Italian capitalist state.
As for the judicial order of the Vatican, it is nothing but garbage left over from the Middle Ages. The Vatican still has a “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which, as the Vatican website says, “Founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III...was originally called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition as its duty was to defend the Church from heresy.” For centuries, the Inquisition was the means by which “heretics,” Jews, Muslims, etc., were condemned to horrific torture, jail and death. To cite another example: the President of the Court of Vatican City, who sent Nuzzi and Fittipaldi to trial, is none other than Count Giuseppe Dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto, Lieutenant-General and Knight of the Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, founded in 1099 by Goffredo di Buglione during the First Crusade...yet this “court” is legally recognized by the Italian Republic “founded in the Resistance.” Amen.
At issue is not simply defending freedom of the press from clerical meddling, but fighting for the abolition of all privileges that the Italian state grants the Catholic church.
Marxism is a materialist and atheist worldview and hostile to all religions. All churches, whatever they may be, are instruments of bourgeois reaction to defend exploitation and to drug the working class. We uphold the ideals of freedom expounded by the Enlightenment. We Marxists fight for the democratic principle of equality of citizens—which demands that religious beliefs be viewed as a private matter. If someone wants to worship Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Satan, or Otelma the Wizard [an Italian TV personality], they should be able to do so without government interference, but also without any state support. We do not want religion of any kind to determine public policies or be imposed in schools. This is the meaning of the separation of church and state.
We oppose every form of persecution and oppression of all non-Catholic citizens—whether atheists or followers of other religions—particularly the one-and-a-half million Muslim immigrants and citizens who are regularly the victims of racist attacks and discrimination. For this reason, from France to Italy, we oppose government attempts to ban the Islamic headscarf or hijab in schools and public buildings. We are also opposed to laws, like those that were approved in Lombardy and are now also proposed in Veneto, to obstruct the building of mosques and other places of worship for religious minorities. (All this in a country where there is a Catholic church on every corner and where nobody bats an eye at the fact that ninety thousand nuns walk the streets in veils of their religious order.)
Pope Francis Poses Pure as the Driven Snow
Bergoglio’s ascension to the papacy was carried out to great fanfare in the media, pushed by a big chunk of the reformist and liberal left, to present him as a “progressive” reformer of the Catholic church for supposedly opening his arms to the poor, immigrants, women and homosexuals. The Advocate (an LGBT journal in the U.S.) named him its “Person of the Year” for 2013. Meanwhile in Italy, Nichi Vendola, head of the Left Ecology and Freedom Party, wrote ecstatically on Facebook: “If political life had one-millionth of Bergoglio’s capacity to listen and breathe, then it really could transform itself and the lives of those who suffer.” But has anything changed about the role of the Catholic church as a bulwark of reaction under capitalism?
In 2013, France was rocked by mass reactionary demonstrations against gay marriage, organized by Catholic forces. On January 30 of this year, Catholic bigots staged a huge “Family Day” event in Rome to try to block the parliament from introducing a law recognizing gay civil unions. The despicable role of the Catholic church was also demonstrated recently in Brazil, where the spreading Zika virus epidemic has led to a dramatic increase in newborn babies affected by microcephaly. In a country where millions of people live in abject poverty with no access to health care and where abortion is illegal except in instances involving rape, incest, encephalitis or endangerment of the mother’s life, the Zika virus has spurred demands for therapeutic abortions as an emergency measure. In response, the Catholic church in Brazil ranted against abortion and contraception and cynically preached “abstinence.”
Paradoxically, both Avarizia and Via Crucis are part of Francis of Buenos Aires’s supposed campaign of reform against corruption in the church. Fittipaldi describes the struggle underway inside the “Vatican jungle” of “discredited and voracious Italian cardinals” gathered around Cardinal Bertone vs. Bergoglio’s supporters for control of the Vatican’s two financial institutions: IOR (the Vatican bank) and APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See). This conflict reflects the tensions between the Italian ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has historically controlled the Vatican, and the Catholic church internationally, particularly in South America and Africa, where the majority of practicing Catholics are now found. To strengthen his hand, Bergoglio has resuscitated the timeworn church rhetoric that “blessed are the poor,” which resonates in the underdeveloped world, and he has launched a campaign against “corruption” in the Vatican establishment. There are several reasons for the Vatican’s new posture. On the one hand, it is an attempt to stem hemorrhaging from the church in Latin America, where tens of millions of followers (some 30 percent in Honduras and Nicaragua and 15 percent in Brazil), mainly from among the poor, have deserted Catholicism for Pentecostal or evangelical churches over the past 20 years. On the other hand, in this historical period, in which a handful of capitalist exploiters are amassing inconceivable wealth while billions live in desperate destitution, the Catholic church is trying to regain approval ratings by offering a pinch of charity and large quantities of religious opium.
As we wrote when Bergoglio first visited Cuba:
“The current Pope, the first from Latin America, has sought to carve out a progressive image through his homilies on behalf of the poor and oppressed. But, fawning statements by the PCC bureaucrats to the contrary, the face behind Francis’ mask is deeply reactionary. In his youth, Jorge Bergoglio was a member of Argentina’s right-wing, clericalist Iron Guard. He was part of the Catholic hierarchy there in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the church shored up the military junta of General Jorge Videla. The generals’ bloodsoaked regime, which was backed to the hilt by U.S. imperialism, killed or ‘disappeared’ at least 30,000 workers and leftists. A bishop or a cardinal was present at every public event or national holiday to bless the dictators.”
— “Castro Regime Welcomes Reactionary Vatican,” WV No. 1077, 30 October 2015
In the same period, the Vatican spearheaded the imperialists’ Cold War anti-Communist offensive against the Soviet Union. Selecting as Pope Karol Wojtyla [also known as John Paul II] in 1978 was a clear sign of the church’s eagerness to be in the front line of the efforts to restore capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and across East Europe. The Vatican was especially instrumental in funneling enormous amounts of money to Solidarność, the Polish company “union” also financed by the CIA.
Argentina was one of the last stops on the infamous “Ratline”—the system by which the Vatican and the Red Cross, in cahoots with the Allied Occupation Forces, rescued thousands of Nazi and fascist war criminals at the end of World War II and recycled them for the fight against communism. To name just a few of the individuals who were taken to safety in Argentina via passage through Italian convents in Tirol and the Port of Genoa: Adolf Eichmann, the infamous “architect” of the Holocaust; Josef Mengele; Erich Priebke, the butcher of the Ardeatine caves massacre; and Ante Pavelic, the bloodthirsty “Duce” of the Croatian Ustasha.
The Vatican: Cancer of Italy
The existence of the Vatican, to borrow the words of revolutionary democrat Giuseppe Garibaldi, is “the cancer of Italy.” It is a medieval relic that transformed itself into a bastion of the capitalist system. The Catholic church has historically played the role of world center of social and political reaction. The struggle of the emerging bourgeois classes to forge modern nation states and political democracy was above all a struggle against the Catholic church, which was the economic and ideological center of feudalism. This was doubly true in Italy, where the church had its own state and where, to borrow another phrase by Garibaldi, “the first order of business in Italy is to shake the Vatican’s rotten catafalque, smash it to pieces and get rid of it” (Letter to Melari, 14 March 1870).
However, unlike the 1789 French Revolution, the Italian bourgeois revolution was neither radical nor democratic. By the mid 19th century, the Italian bourgeoisie was a latecomer and too weak to place itself at the head of an agrarian revolution. Like other capitalist classes in Europe following the 1848 insurrections, it feared uprisings by the proletariat or peasantry so much that it preferred to ally itself with the remnants of the aristocracy in order to hold back or suppress any movements by the peasantry or by the proletariat in the cities. The result was a non-democratic bourgeois revolution from above, devoid of the radical, democratic and popular qualities of the Great French Revolution. If on the one hand, the unification of Italy laid the basis for the development of a modern capitalist economy, clearing aside certain obsolete feudal structures and tiny absolutist states, on the other hand, it granted power to the House of Savoy monarchy. The latter was in alliance with southern Italian landowners and granted limited suffrage to a tiny stratum of the propertied elite, which comprised less than 2 percent of the population (and women were excluded). Although it eliminated papal power in secular matters and annulled many of the feudal privileges enjoyed by the clergy, the Italian state allowed the church to maintain a vital foothold—just one year after Piedmontese troops took Rome in 1870, the House of Savoy [the Italian monarchy] introduced the Law of Guarantees, conceding a small city-state with rights of extraterritoriality to the Pope in the Vatican.
While the church initially boycotted the new Italian state, it gradually abandoned this stance when it became clear to both the Vatican and the Italian capitalists that they had to unite in common cause against the rising tide of proletarian and peasant struggles that rocked Italy multiple times in the early 20th century. This process culminated in the marriage between the Catholic church and the Italian state, which was officially celebrated on 11 February 1929, when the Vatican and Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime signed the Lateran Treaty, formally ending the conflict between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy. What cemented the alliance between the church and fascism was the need to unite forces against the working class. Workers had taken power in Russia in 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, and their example inspired a revolutionary wave throughout Europe, including Italy’s biennio rosso of 1919-20.
The Lateran Treaty sanctioned the formation of the Vatican as a real, independent state in the center of Rome and granted the Catholic church various extraterritorial rights. The Concordat made Catholicism the official and exclusive state religion, imposed Catholic religion as the foundation of public education, and granted legal authority to religious marriages. Furthermore, the Vatican was showered with gold through the payment of hefty “reparations” for the 1870 “conquest” of Rome and through the state’s commitment to pay the salaries of priests. In exchange, the clergy enthusiastically supported fascism in all its repressive actions, imposition of racial laws, and in its imperialist adventures, from the invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.
By the end of WWII, the bourgeois order was discredited in the eyes of the working class and vast sections of the population. Likewise, the Catholic church was discredited for its collaboration with fascism and capital. Both were saved thanks only to the treacherous role played by the leaders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
In the mid 1930s, following its degeneration under Stalin, the Communist International embraced the policy of the “popular front,” i.e., the alliance with a supposedly “anti-fascist” wing of the bourgeoisie. In Italy, this class collaboration was concretized toward the end of the Second World War when, instead of leading the working class to power, the PCI disarmed the partisans and became partners in a series of bourgeois governments with General [Pietro] Badoglio’s monarchists and the Christian Democracy. Part of the price paid by the Italian working class on the altar of class collaboration was the Communist Party’s support to the Catholic church as the state church. In 1947, the PCI supported the insertion of the Lateran Treaty as an integral part (Article 7) of the Italian Constitution. A few months later, in May 1947, when the immediate revolutionary wave had passed and American imperialism had begun its Cold War against the Soviet Union, the PCI was thrown out of the government. In 1949, the Vatican launched a ferociously anti-Communist campaign, including excommunicating all PCI members, voters and allies from the church.
The original theocratic formulations of the Lateran Treaty and the multifaceted ways in which the state was effectively subordinated to the church became increasingly intolerable as Italian society modernized and industrialized in the 1960s. Moreover, this industrialization was accompanied by the rise of working-class struggle, culminating in the prerevolutionary situation of the “hot autumn” of 1969. In fact, the fight for abortion rights and the right to divorce, which were won in the late 1970s, were fundamental aspects of these struggles. But once again, thanks to the class collaboration of the Communist Party, which abandoned allegiance to the Soviet degenerated workers state in the 1970s to embrace NATO and the “Historic Compromise” with the Christian Democracy, many gains were rolled back or torn up to honor the wishes of the church.
In 1984, the Concordat was formally revised and cloaked with a little verbiage such as the statement that Catholicism “is not the only religion” of the Italian state. But the substance of the Lateran Treaty remained. Indeed, some of the church’s privileges were reinforced: for example, religion is now taught in public schools starting in kindergarten. State funding of the church was multiplied and the “Eight per Thousand” tax law was introduced, enabling priests to pocket about a billion euros per year. And funding for the church doesn’t stop there. According to meticulous research by the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR), if all tax exemptions are taken into account, the Catholic church receives an estimated nearly 6.5 billion euros each year from the state, including the state-funded wages paid to religion teachers selected by bishops, state financing of private Catholic schools, and myriad other items (icostidellachiesa.it).
In addition to this manna from the state, the church is up to its eyes in financial speculation, enormous real estate deals and business worldwide—the fruit of exploiting the poor whom the church claims it seeks to help. In Italy alone, the church is the biggest landowner and owns about 20 percent of all buildings. In 1977, a European investigation calculated that 25 percent of the city of Rome is church property. Furthermore, the church runs half of all the hospitals and health care facilities in Italy, most of them generously subsidized by the state’s national health plan. Expropriate all the Vatican’s property!
Marxism and Religion
The bourgeoisie has never fully achieved the separation of church and state in any country for the simple reason that religion plays such an important role in the survival of bourgeois rule. Capitalism has every reason to preserve and bolster feudal and prefeudal mysticisms such as Roman Catholicism and to exploit its patriarchal “values” in order to enslave the oppressed. Thanks to its deep roots in society, religion is a crucial bulwark for the family as a social institution and props up every kind of obscurantism, backwardness and social reaction to instill respect for the authority of the ruling class. All modern religions serve as instruments of capitalist reaction by defending the system of exploitation and muddling the minds of the working people.
The attitude of Marxists toward organized religion is defined by the fact that we are dialectical materialists, that is to say, irreconcilable atheists. As Lenin said:
“Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion....
“Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”
— “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion” (13 May 1909)
But as Lenin reminds us, if the struggle against religion is the ABC of materialism, “Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way.” We know that in a class-divided society, religion exists as a comforting illusion for the tangible and often terrible suffering of real life. As Karl Marx famously said, it is “the opium of the people.” Thus, we know that religion cannot simply be abolished by decree, through propaganda, education or a “war against religion,” but only through the organization and acquisition of higher consciousness by the working class through class struggle.
To eliminate religion requires that human beings control the social (and natural) conditions of their own existence. This, in turn, requires the overthrow of capitalism through proletarian revolution that will create the possibility of building a communist society based on material abundance, a society in which social and economic forces are rationally planned by the working people and where, to the degree possible, science and technology dominate the forces of nature. The new humanity that develops in this kind of society, where social classes, national divisions, the repressive state and the suffocating institution of the nuclear family have been overcome, will have no more need for religion. The examples of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe demonstrated that high levels of atheism emerge in populations where the state stops imposing religious values and behavior.
In Italy today, there is a stark contrast between the grip of the Catholic church on political life and an increasingly secular population, most notably youth, many of whom are sick and tired of the “religion hour” [of indoctrination in public schools] and who surely do not wait for the priests to tell them whether or when to get married, how to dress, or when and with whom to have sex. Yet and still, religion continues to have a strong hold on the political views of many of these very same youth. The right wing uses religion as a chauvinistic “tradition” to agitate against the right of millions of non-Catholic immigrants to live in this country with full citizenship rights.
As for the reformist left, it has always spread the myth that no matter how horrendous, corrupt and servile the church today is to the powers that be, workers must be guided by the true spirit of Christianity—“the social doctrine of the Church.” In a recent example, during a public debate organized last November by Rifondazione Comunista secretary Ferrero and featuring the Bishop of Asti, Ferrero repeated for the umpteenth time that “Catholic social doctrine, with its insistence on the need to redistribute wealth, to limit profits, represents something positive and is a strong element of convergence in a society which glorifies the rich and blames the poor” (rifondazione.it, 16 November 2015). We will allow Karl Marx to respond:
“The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces.
“The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.
“The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of those infamies on earth.
“The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.
“The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.
“The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.”
— “The Communism of Rheinischer Beobachter” (1847)
Rejecting the Marxist conception of nature and society, and even the idealist materialism of the Enlightenment, the reformist left has nothing to offer those who fight for a profound and radical change of reality. The Lega Trotskista d’Italia is committed to the liberation of all the oppressed from the yoke of religion. As we wrote in “Marxism and Religion” (WV No. 675, 3 October 1997):
“In order to win over a new generation to the struggle for socialism, based on a materialist conception of society, socialists must ceaselessly combat religion and other forms of idealism which look toward the supernatural, explaining that freedom from oppression lies in this world, not another.”