Poet's Corner- Claude Mckay's "America"-February Is Black History Month

Poet's Corner- Claude Mckay's "America"-February Is Black History Month

America by Claude McKay


Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.


Claude McKay, "America" from Liberator (December 1921). Courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schombourg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tildeen Foundations.

Source: Liberator (The Library of America, 1921)

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice    

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.  

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually know about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. Those heroic black fighters and their fallen leader deserve those honors. Glory, indeed.

Although Shaw was hesitant to take command of those troops after suffering wounds at Antietam, when he accepted, he took full charge of the training and discipline of the regiment. Moreover, as the regiment marched into Boston to cheering crowds before embarking on ships to take them South each trooper knew the score. Any blacks captured (or their white officers, for that matter) were subject to Southern ‘justice’, summary execution. Not one trooper flinched. Arms in hands, they fought bravely at the defeat of Fort Wagner and other Deep South battles, taking many causalities.

I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And the history of the Massachusetts 54th is prima facie evidence for that position.

I should also note that the Massachusetts 54th was made up primarily of better educated and skilled freedman and escaped slaves unlike the black troops recruited from the plantations in the Deep South in the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer black regiments. Thus, one might have suspected that they would not be up to the rigors of Southern duty. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story of the 54th compares very favorably with those units.

However, so as not to get carried away with the ‘liberalism’ of the Union political and military commands in granting permission for black recruitment it is necessary to point out some of the retrograde racial attitudes of the time. It took a major propaganda thrust by Frederick Douglass and other revolutionary abolitionists to get Lincoln to even consider arming blacks for their own emancipation. Only after several severe military reversals was permission granted to recruit black troops, although some maverick generals were already using them, particularly General Hunter. As mentioned above there were qualms about the ability of blacks to fight in disciplined units. Moreover, until 1864 black troops were paid less than their white counterparts. The Massachusetts 54th is also rightly famous for refusing pay until that disparity was corrected.

One should not forget that the North in its own way was as deeply racist as the South (think of the treacherous role of the Southern-sympathying Northern Copperheads and the Irish-led anti-black Draft Riots in New York City, for examples). This reflected itself in the racial attitudes of some commanding officers and enlisted men as well as the general paternalism of even the best white commanding officers, including Colonel Higginson of the 2nd South Carolina. It was further reflected in the disproportionately few blacks that became officers in the Civil War, despite the crying need for officers in those black regiments and elsewhere. Yet, all of these negatives notwithstanding, every modern black liberation fighter takes his or her hat off to the gallant 54th, arms in hand, and its important role in the struggle for black liberation

*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   
 

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/


Ralph Morris had recently written a letter to his old friend and comrade Sam Lowell from the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of cyber-audience after years of small rallies, small demonstrations, writing for small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post 9/11 world when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe” in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a follower, or another clink to opt out of status, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural and oppositional politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home. 

Ralph encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged (and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return as a result ) with whatever ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the most vicious powerful enemies of all humankind, chiefly in the "heart of the beast," the United States government. 

Life, or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now a goodly number of them (check the Rag Blog if you don't believe is what both Ralph and Sam recommended when another old radical friend discounted what they had seen)  have made that unkind condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense.

So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier days. Here is what he had to say straight up:    
 

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various actions and who saw that the people he was being led by make their significant actions in that year) we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and ageless Wobblies). (The designation “Generation of ’68 " for those not in the know signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American bourgeois political party  upheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of society that had the social power to lead that struggle.) 

Those scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on (thuggish  Stalinists to boot) who survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing, the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck when the "red-hunters" came knocking at your door, to do that surviving by any other means necessary including that down-turned head waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) as they carried the revolutionary torch forward and who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us.

Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.” 

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going or not except cautionary tales but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists. 

Problem is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be, should be youthful voices crying to the high heavens. (Recent small stirrings out of the remnant of Occupy and Black Lives Matter do not negate the  greater youthful indifference to our message.)  That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

Recently I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I named some of the possible locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class (classes) and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. 

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that it is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high-speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics; immigration, the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from. 

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against the robber barons should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   

One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out,  more times than I care to mention included my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program- Ten–A Nation Of One’s Own?

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program- Ten–A Nation Of One’s Own?    

Jackson Pulley had been doing his Saturday morning soapbox spiel in the environs of Lennox Avenue and 125^th Street in high Harlem up in New Jack City for as long as anyone could remember. Some grandmothers would tell their grandchildren whom they were minding or raising as their own while passing by doing the Saturday morning shopping that they could remember when their own grandmothers of blessed memory had taken them to that very same Saturday shopping not to listen to, not to be bothered by Jackson’s big boom voice, and of his hand-held mic that could be heard far above and below the avenue. And Jackson Pulley’s spiel had not changed much since he had first given voice to his project back in the late 1920s. His basis idea was that the black people in America, his people, his sweated, kicked around, abused beautiful people, someone later would call it the “beloved community,” due to the white man’s inherent racism, needed a country, a nation of their own. He would moreover argue his conceptions through good times and bad, against all comers, from old black knight scoundrel Marcus Garvey through the Communist Party turns for and against the black nation, through the “new negro” stuff in the 1950s through to the Doctor King and Malcolm X knock down drag out fight and right up until recently when the Black Panthers gave the idea of a black nation a whirl for a while. Old Jackson kept his main idea front and center and would as the “false” challengers arose kick them like tin cans down the road.  

Jackson had had no truck with old black knight Marcus Garvey seeing in him just another black hustler working the ignorant West Indies immigrant black janitors and black maids and down and out southern slave-branded sharecroppers out of their hard earned dough. He had been right as rain on that man when he first started seeing that blacks needed a new homeland. The pivotal event though that drove him to his position was seeing one of his own kin lynched right after World War I down in the great state of Georgia while the whites watched with red-heat passion bordering on lunacy. Later before heading north he bore the full brunt of Mister James Crow and his equally savage ways. No, it was time to separate, long past time.

He had had some respect for the Communist Party and their black nation idea. In fact he had been in a study circle with some brothers in the African Blood Brotherhood before some of them went over to the party. He could not go with them since he refused to belong to an organization that allowed whites in. Besides those reds didn’t follow that black nation policy except when they wanted to use it to recruit blacks in hard times. That “new negro” stuff was a joke as far as he was concerned, something out of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” and just another way to buy off the natural leaders of black people. Stuff them harmlessly out of the way like some old time Toms and Mister Whitey brought them out when trouble brewed to be “reasonable,” see things in the long perspective, take a little at a time if that was what was offered. Bullshit, excuse his English, his slave language English (he only swore in his own home for out on the streets he was more respectful learning that lesson the hard way when one irate grandmother swung an umbrella at him when he was young and not street talk savvy and sworn while her grandchildren were within earshot).

Jackson got serious when Malcolm X arose like a phoenix out of the ashes but he had no truck with Elijah Mohammed seeing him as a less clever Marcus Garvey with all that religious mumbo-jumbo that never did anybody any good. Just another fast-talking preacher hustle, except not Baptist hustle like he knew about while growing up. The Black Panthers of course demanded respect, respect as black warriors ready to stick their necks out for the black community,  but they had been taking a beating of late trying to stay in America, in the cities. Were taking a beating from whitey and his bad ass cops who went crazy when they saw black men with guns ready to defend their own. Still they were righteous and had an idea of what black people needed to get the hell off the eight-ball.       

When pressed Jackson like he was this Saturday by a young black brother who seemed to want to know more details about how it would work he would say that what blacks should fight for is a place like Idaho, a place with lots of land and far away from the vast majority of whites. Although he himself had never been there he was sure it would do, and equally sure once black people had had enough of the white man (and increasingly the white woman) on their necks they would be flocking there. But the young man seemed to say by the shrug of his shoulders like one grandmother said as she passed Jackson Pulley and his soapbox for the hundredth time to her grandchildren “Don’t pay old Jackson any never mind.”…      

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.



2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.



3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.



4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.



5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.



We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.



6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.



We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.



7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.



8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.



9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.



We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.



10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.



When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.



We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Film “Casablanca”- Out In The Film Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon

Out In The Film Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon

Films In Brief

The Maltese Falcon, written Dashiell Hammett, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet

In literature and film there have been no lack of private detective-types depicted from the urbane Nick Charles (also a Hammett creation) to Mickey Spillane’s rough and tumble Mike Hammer but the classic model for all modern ones is Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (the Humphrey Bogart role in the film) in The Maltese Falcon. Some may argue Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and may have a point but as for film adaptation Spade wins hands down. Compare, if you will, Bogart’s performance in The Maltese Falcon with The Big Sleep. Get my point. But enough of that. What make’s Spade the classic is his intrepidness, his orneriness, his dauntless dedication to the task at hand, his sense of irony, his incorruptibility, his willingness to take an inordinate amount of bumps and bruises for paltry fees and his off-hand manner with the ladies and a gun. And in The Maltese Falcon he needs all of these qualities and then some.

In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Film “Casablanca”- You Know How To Whistle, Don’t You?”-Lauren Bacall And Humphrey Bogart’s To Have And Have Not

***“You Know How To Whistle, Don’t You?”-Lauren Bacall And Humphrey Bogart’s To Have And Have Not

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

To Have And Have Not, starring Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Hoagy Carmichael, directed by Howard Hawks, screenplay by William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, 1944

The recent passing away of the actress Lauren Bacall (Summer, 2014) got me to thinking about watching (again) her very first movie with her paramour met on the film then, Humphrey Bogart, the now classic To Have and Have Not. And so I did and reminded myself how that film has always been at the top of my list for the greatest films that I have seen. And why not. Look at the pedigree. Based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway (although in the end quite loosely for I do not believe a fox like Marie, the role Ms. Bacall plays in the film, would have stayed in the same room as the novel’s Captain Morgan for a minute). Based on a screenplay at least in part written by William Faulkner who had a feel for such dialogue. Some musical interludes played by the great popular composer (Stardust, How Little We Know), Hoagy Carmichael, as the worldly piano player, Cricket, at the bar of the hotel where Marie and Captain Morgan (Steve before long, before she gets her hooks into him) play out their dance. A very good performance by Walter Brennan as a drunk who thinks he is watching out for the good captain. Directed by well-regarded Howard Hawks. But all of that is so much eye-wash what makes this film great is the chemistry between Marie and Steve. Chemistry I have mentioned elsewhere producing some of the sexiest scenes that two people can make with their clothes on. (Nudity would detract enormously from this mating ritual. Beside, unlike in pre-code 1930s Hollywood, no such thing would occur before the screen. Christ they were afraid to show assumed nudity scenes behind a shower curtain and gave married couples twin beds. Jesus.)              

Even the plotline pales before the dance these two put on. Frankly some of the story seems a bit of a rehash of the earlier Bogart vehicle (with Ingrid Bergman), Casablanca, where a recalcitrant Rick, owner of Rick’s American Café and recovering from a lost love affair gets involved with the Free French (the good guy against the damn Vichy) as well. Here day sports fishing boat Captain Morgan walks into the same thing except in Martinique rather than Morocco. But not before shedding his doubts about taking such risks, and of course when Marie enters the scene by coyly asking him for a match for her cigarette you know those fears will fall by the wayside. (By the way it seems that they, everybody from the breakfast table to the smoke-filled night clubs are lighting cigarettes every two seconds reminding me of how much smoking when on then in the movies, and in life including mine.)

See Steve (Captain Morgan to you guys who don’t know him) is strictly  hand to mouth on this day fishing trip business.  Right when they meet he has no dough having been stiffed by some goof fisherman (and a guy Marie clipped a wallet from which started the official dance between them). Once Marie tells her story though and how she hold up when the chips are down (at the police station where they are questioned by the local gestapo-types and she is slapped and later when she performs nurse duties without flinching) gets to him in the end. Naturally once Steve moves off the dime he is totally committed to seeing that some reckless resistance fighter who got nicked the first time he tried gets to finish the job he was sent to that outpost to do (getting a chief resistance man off Devils’ Island no mean task). Like I say all that is window-dressing for the moves Marie and Steve put on each other from that first tossed matchbook to the ‘you know how to whistles scene” to her seductively singing with Cricket to that shimmy she puts on as they walk out the door of the bar (Eddie trailing behind) off to see what the future brings-together. Thanks Bogie-Thanks Lauren-RIP        

In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Film “Casablanca”- Hell No They Ain’t No Angels-Humphrey Bogart’s We’re No Angels

Hell No They Ain’t No Angels-Humphrey Bogart’s We’re No Angels

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

We’re No Angels, starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Aldo Ray         

Over the past couple of years I have been running the table on Humphrey Bogart films, as an expression of the kind of guy, cinematic guy anyway, that I could relate to as a kid (and still admire in certain ways). You know a guy that no one would dare throw sand in their face, certainly no woman, not because of his physical size so much as that he had a look that if somebody was so foolhardy as to do such a deed they would find themselves in a bad place on some dark, foggy night when they least expect to find themselves facing his personal bastinado. A guy not looking for trouble but not ducking it either, not ducking even some punk hood, all what did they call it back then, yeah, all “gaudy and show” with some dangling hot gun that he would be more than happy to take away from such a miscreant, and the punk, being a punk would have to take it, have to take it or else. And speaking of dames, twists, frills, frails or whatever you called women, good-looking femme fatale-type women in your old corner boy night, including good-looking dames who might be so foolhardy as to throw sand in a guy’s face (not literal sand but fog-bound sand and story to mix a guy up beyond belief), a guy who was not afraid to take a little gaff for some twisty dame who gave him that come hither look. A guy ready to chase some windmills for that look just to see where it led. Best of all a guy not afraid to run the rack on some bad guy (or a good guy who was looking to turn bad) just because he was a bad guy, maybe kept some old man awake at night, worrying, or some frail tied up to his rackets, that kind of thing.  

Now some of those attributes might not mean a lot, might in fact be kind of old-fashioned, kind of rough male of the species over the top these days in some circles in polite Western society but there you have it. For a time that running the table included reviews of Bogie as the hard-nosed, take no prisoners, give no quarter and take none shoot first and ask questions later mad monk gangster Duke Mantee who really was a man of his deadly word in the matchup between primitive man and the increasingly effete intellectual modern world man featured in The Petrified Forest and the take no nonsense world-weary, world-wary detective Sam Spade ready at the drop of a hat to either chase some stuff of dreams windmills or to put the handcuffs on tight for some wayward femme with that come hither look and that jasmine scent or whatever the hell she was wearing in the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Reviews as well of the jaded ex-pat (who had that funny little prior resume point of having been a “premature anti-fascist” in the 1930s struggle in Spain) “welcome to the struggle” ready to take on the whole German Army once he got religion and once she, and you know the she even if she did not have the price of that jasmine scent, for the seven thousandth time got under his skin Rick of Rick’s Café in Casablanca, and, oh yeah, along that same vein the knight in shining armor, or better because more useful sea-worthy boat captain ready to take on the whole Vichy French apparatus in the wartime (World War II version) to save a damsel in distress, a dame who would have gotten under anybody’s skin once she asked for that off-hand cigarette-lighting match and gave that come hither whistle, in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have Or Have Not. And to give a couple more examples for those who don’t get the allure a couple of reviews of Bogie as the resourceful but also world-weary, world wary detective Phillip Marlowe who keeps the dreams of an old man alive (and his wayward daughters, including one who took dead aim at him as a windmill chaser and the other just dead aim, out of trouble) in taking a punk mobster down to size in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and as a  “don’t leave your buddy behind” true blue Army guy looking for the bad guys who tried to blocked him from doing just that in Dead Reckoning. So with just those few examples you can see that they were all films where Bogie exhibited certain manly traits that were (and some may still be) worth emulating. And then we come to the film under review, We’re No Angels, and the guy switches up on us. Turns into a Good Samaritan, of sorts, an ironic one splashed with a little humorous bend too.           

What gives? What gives, just to give a snapshot of what this film is about, is that Bogie is one of three hardened convicts (the other two played Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray), French convicts, hard cases all (murderers, career criminals) who are doing hard time at that little maximum prison resort in the Caribbean, Devil’s Island. But being resourceful, especially around Christmas time, they escaped to the town nearby with plans to set sail for France and to take up their old lives as carefree guys once again, maybe a heist here, a con there, simple stuff. But first they need dough, plenty of dough, and some new duds since to grab that departing ship requires not just dough but a certain look, a look like you did not just escape from high security Devil’s Island.  So they planned to rob a clothing merchant to give them that cash, and throw in the duds while they were at it. Turned out though, as the film slowly developed, the merchant was no good as a businessman having failed in France and been sent out to the boondocks by his greedy rich cousin, a nefarious relative as it turned out, no question, had a wife, a fetching wife, no question, who stood by him (they don’t always, the fetching ones), and a sweet teenage daughter, all betwixt and between, who was in love with, well, you know how teenagers are, in love with being in love.   

So our hardened criminals, our nefarious bad guys slowly turned things around and went from attempted robberies and petty pilfering of civilian outfits to Good Samaritans and help the merchant (by getting rid of, getting rid in a very final way, the greedy cousin who had come from France for an inspection), the wife (still standing by her husband to Bogie’s chagrin), and that smitten daughter (who fell in and out of love with one guy, and then in love with another, like I said a typical teenager) being witty, ironic, and funny by turns, especially Bogie. And get this, once they have spread their Christmas cheer they head back to jail, no, head back to hellhole Devil’s Island. What the heck is going on with our man Bogie. Give me Duke Mantee who would just as soon put a slug in a guy as look at him (and does in that endless cinematic battle between the primitive instincts of man and the modern attempts to curb those baser instincts which got a thorough-going test in the real world of the 1930s and 1940s) or Sam Spade who turned over, once he took a cold shower to wipe that come hither look out of his mind and opened a window to let the city air merge and melt that jasmine scent, that filled with the stuff of dreams femme fatale who just so happened to have an itchy trigger-finger to the coppers without a tear. Give me that Rick of Rick’s Café who gave up his honey, without or without the jasmine scent as a lure that was just the way it was with them, for the good of the cause or that made of sterner stuff skirt-chasing Captain Morgan once he saw she could sing too, sing and take a few knocks without crying about the matter. Okay, and give me that handy Philip Marlowe, avenger of sullen women’s sicknesses, avenger of old men’s broken dreams, avenger of wrong track turned right femmes, avenger of small time right gees and grifters by bad hombres who put paid to the career of one Eddie Mars or the stick to his guns, undeterred, inquisitive, and vengeful Rip not leaving his Army buddy behind, or anything to sullen his memory. You take him in We’re No Angels, okay.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- AN EX-STALINIST'S TAKE ON THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF LENIN

BOOK REVIEW

LENIN- LIFE AND LEGACY, D.A. VOLKGANOV, HARPER BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1995

In my political life I have read numerous biographies, sketches and essays on the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, none of them recently. Thus, in looking for a new book on Lenin’s life I was searching for one that would reflect the latest information from the various archives opened up by the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92. With that in mind I happened upon this biography by a Soviet historian who had intimate access to and control of the Soviet archives. However, even with that imprimatur this hostile biography could easily have been written in 1955 by any number of former communist turned anti-communist Western writers during the heart of the Cold War under the influence of the ‘god that failed’ theory of anti-communism. So much for the virtue of access to the new files!

Moreover, after reading the biography I found that it told more about the author than the subject. He was a good Khrushchevite when Khrushchev was in power. He was a good Brezhnevite when Brezhnev was in power. He was a good Gorbachevite when Gorbachev was in power. Finally, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the capitalist counter-revolution under Yeltsin he was a good Yeltstinite. No one can deny that he knew how to trim his sails to determine which way the political winds blew. Whether such a checkered personal biography permits him then to write a critique of a revolutionary leader, any revolutionary leader, apparently without the least embarrassment is another question. Well, such is the literary life.

And so what is the latest in Soviet historiography on Lenin? The author retails every ‘horror’ story about Lenin that has sifted through the anti-communist milieu since Lenin first came on the political scene at the turn of the 20th century Russia. Of course, the author starts with the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903- that is the ‘original sin’ for all anti-Leninists who claim to stand in any tendency of the international social democratic tradition. He then goes through the litany of later sins; the anti-nationalist, anti-war Bolshevik propaganda of the First World War; the hoary tales of ‘German’ gold to the Bolsheviks in the wake of the February Revolution in Russia; the ‘sealed train’ through Germany bringing Lenin and other Social Democrats back to Russia; the defeatism toward the Provisional Government; the Bolshevik ‘coup’ in October; the outrage to the author’s nationalist sentiments of the Brest Litovsk Treaty with Germany; the horrors of the Civil War, lightly passing over the White internal and foreign counterrevolutionary actions and placing the onus on the Bolsheviks; and the 'Moscow' gold provided to foreign Communist parties by the Communist International. And much more in that same vane.

The real point of the documentation presented throughout the book, however, is to buttress the author’s central argument that bad old Stalinism was not some sort of distortion of Bolshevism and Leninist thought but the true and natural heir of Leninism. Others have argued that position far more persuasively with far less access to the archives. The fact of the matter, at least based on this exposition, is that the archives provide little new hard material about Lenin and the early Bolshevik regime that has not already been in circulation for a long time. Take one example, the ‘relationship’ between the Bolsheviks and the German High Command during World War I that has been speculated on in reams of material. Volkganov sets up his argument for such an alliance using the time worn innuendoes of secret meetings, use of intermediaries, etc. However, if an author is using this argument in the post-Soviet period then one would expect some new information that definitely links Lenin to German ‘gold’ or let it rest. Where is the smoking gun? As there is nothing new the author lets us off with some dubious circumstantial evidence and lots and lots of conjecture. It goes on and on like that throughout most of the book. The author has personal axes to grind here and the archives only marginally help him in those efforts.

Finally, what of the counterfactual argument that every historian makes to argue that an alternative situation to the one that occurred was possible? Here the author argues that in 1917 some form of Menshevik/Social Revolutionary government or a more stable Kerensky government i.e. some kind of bourgeois government could have brought Russia out of its impasse and into the Western democratic parliamentary tradition. He even has a kind word for the Czar in retrospect, at least as a battering ram against the Bolsheviks. This hardened Stalinist who has since found ‘religion’ attempts to argue a very, very improbable position. Kerensky was the best, and I do mean best, those bourgeois democratic forces had at their command in 1917. No more need be said. We do not always get the revolutions in the pristine condition that we would like and this is not the place to argue extensively about the author’s politics but both by their actions and by the crush of events the possibility of some kind of stable bourgeois democracy in 1917 Russia was the least likely outcome. In short, like in other such revolutionary periods, it was the Bolsheviks or the counterrevolutionary Whites. And one had to take sides accordingly. I will stand with Lenin and Trotsky.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- Up Close And Personal- John Reed and The Russian Revolution Of 1917

Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archives.

BOOK REVIEW


This is the Anniversary of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. It is fitting that I review a book that did much to give Westerners a bird's-eye view of what happened during that tumultuous year. Forward To New Octobers!


Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed, New American Library Edition, New York, 1967



I, on more than one occasion, have mentioned that for a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from February to October of that year your man is the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution" is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. I have also mentioned in that same context that there are other excellent sources on this subject, depending on your needs. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". If you need a more journalistic account for the period of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the immediate aftermath, the book under review, John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable.

If we do not, as mentioned above, expect our historians to be ‘objective’ then we have a lesser expectation of those journalists who write the ‘first draft of history’. Reed makes no bones about the fact that that he is a partisan of the Bolshevik-led social revolution that he was witnessing. He, nevertheless, tells his story reasonably well for those who are not partisans. Moreover, Reed seems to have been everywhere in Petersburg during those days. He is as likely to have been reporting from Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky's Provisional Government, as Smolny, the seat of the insurgent Soviets. We can find him among the bourgeois politicians of the City Duma or at the Russian Army General Staff headquarters. Hell, he was also in Moscow when things were hot there as the Soviet forces tried to seize the Kremlin. He is at meetings large-Peasant Soviet size- or in some back room at Smolny with Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee that directed the uprising. To that extent, as a free lancer on the move, he covers physically during this period much more territory than Trotsky could as central director of the action and thus has more first hand observations.

Reed’s style tends toward straight forward reportage with little obvious sense of irony in the various situations that he is witnessing. Of course, against Trotsky’s masterly ironic sense he is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless Reed gets us into places like the City Duma and into the heads of various characters like the Mayor of Petersburg that Trotsky, frankly, displayed no interest in dealing with. Probably the greatest compliment that one could pay Reed is that he is widely quoted as a reliable source in many historical accounts from Trotsky on the winning side to someone like Kerensky on the losing side. For those who want a quick but serious overview of the dynamic of the October Revolution then here is your man. Add in his companion Louise Bryant’s separate account, "Six Month In Red Russia" (if you can find it), and some very good primary source poster, pamphlet and newspaper material in the appendices of Reed’s book and you are on your way.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION" by Victor Serge

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives and his acclaimed "Year One Of The Russian Revolution". Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.

YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Victor Serge

Book Review 

Present At The Creation 

I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. See his The Case of Comrade Tulayev. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.

The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.

Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And then stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated that Russia as the weakest link in the international capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its own road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as, at best, utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the Russian Question as a factor in world politics on a day to day basis anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.

Some of the books reviewed here may not be readily available at local libraries and bookstores. Check Amazon.com/books for availability there, both new and used.