Sunday, June 04, 2017

*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-Turkey: Women And Permanent Revolution

Click on the headline to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive" online copy of his seminal work, "Permanent Revolution". This is required reading for those who want to make socialist revolution in the "third world", and the "first".

Workers Vanguard No. 916
6 June 2008

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Turkey: Women and the Permanent Revolution

Down With Islamic Reaction! Down With Turkish Nationalism!

(Women and Revolution pages)

The following article is reprinted from Spartakist No. 170 (March 2008), newspaper of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).


In the novel Snow, by acclaimed Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a local official tells Ka, a returning political exile investigating a wave of suicides among young women and girls, “What is certain is that these girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy.... But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves.” Pamuk’s novel is set in Kars, in northeastern Turkey. In the southeastern Anatolian town of Batman, a real epidemic of suicides, forced and otherwise, has seen hundreds of young women attempt to take their own lives, and dozens have succeeded. The great 19th-century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier explained that the status of women in any given society reflects that society’s general level of human emancipation. These deaths throw into stark relief the terrible oppression of women in Turkey, revealing a society marked by profound religious and social reaction that is reinforced and deepened by imperialist domination.

The status of women has become a battleground in the political struggles that have been rocking Turkey for some time. The re-election in July 2007 of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his reactionary Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) followed massive protests last April in defense of the espoused secularism of the Kemalist Turkish bourgeoisie and against the AKP’s plan to appoint Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, whose wife wears a headscarf, to the presidency. Some Turkish commentators called these protests in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir a “women’s revolution.” Millions of women, frightened by the danger Islamic fundamentalism poses, were said to have taken part.

On February 9, in spite of mass nationalist protests in Ankara and Istanbul, the Turkish parliament voted in favor of an amendment to the constitution allowing headscarves to be worn at Turkish universities. An article in junge Welt (9 February) described how the Erdogan regime secured, for now, the generals’ acquiescence:

“Less than a year ago the Turkish generals threatened a putsch if Erdogan continued advancing the Islamization of the country. But all of a sudden there’s no objection to be heard. The MP Aysel Tugluk of the DTP [pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party] recently revealed in a speech in parliament that the reason for this was a deal between the government and the armed forces. Erdogan gave the military men free rein on the Kurdish question—and in return he got free rein on the headscarf question.”

On 22 February, at the same time that the Turkish army’s ground offensive against the Kurds in northern Iraq was taking place, President Gül confirmed the lifting of the headscarf ban. There are already calls by the Kemalists and “Non-Governmental Organizations” for mass protests in Izmir and Ankara on March 7, for International Women’s Day, against the constitutional amendment.

The motor force behind the mobilizations was a de facto coalition of the army, the bourgeois Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the constitutional court, presenting themselves as guardians of the “secular legacy” of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nationalist founder of modern Turkey. The election itself was sparked when in May 2007 the constitutional court, emboldened by the military’s threats against the government, ruled Gül’s appointment unconstitutional. The Ankara protest in 2007 was organized by the Association for Atatürkist Thought, headed by a former military commander currently under investigation for plotting a coup in 2003-2004. Looking to the blood-drenched military as an ally in the struggle for women’s liberation is deadly.

For Permanent Revolution!

Subjugated by imperialism, straddling Europe and Asia Minor, Turkey is a country of massive social and political contradictions. Leon Trotsky, who with V.I. Lenin was co-leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, termed such contradictions “combined and uneven development.” Unique among Islamic countries in that it is officially secular, modern Turkey arose not from a bourgeois revolution, but from the subordination of the clerical Ottoman state to the nationalist forces led by Atatürk. Rising Turkish nationalism also meant the ruthless suppression of national minorities, in particular the slaughter of Armenians and Kurds. To this day, uneven social development is seen in every aspect of Turkish society. A sizable industrial proletariat exists alongside the mass of peasants in the Anatolian heartland still subject to precapitalist forms of exploitation. Behind Istanbul’s pubs, chic cafés, bright malls and unveiled women in jeans or miniskirts, stands a vast country locked in barbaric, centuries-old anti-woman practices, stamped by dire unemployment and poverty.

The forces of political Islam now vie with those of the “secular,” military-backed bourgeoisie over who shall shape Turkey’s destiny and reap the profits. We revolutionary Marxists reject this framework, for these are the “choices” posed by a bankrupt capitalist ruling class incapable of modernizing this country. We look instead to the revolutionary mobilization of Turkey’s powerful multiethnic working class, standing at the head of all the oppressed, which alone can shatter the chains of backwardness.

With its enormous social contradictions, Turkey presents a powerful argument for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which found living confirmation in the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky’s theory provides the program for resolving the fundamental democratic questions posed by combined and uneven development in countries like Turkey that came to capitalist development in the epoch of imperialism. In such economically backward countries, the weak national bourgeoisie, dependent on its imperialist masters and fearing its “own” proletariat, is incapable of taking up the democratic tasks formerly associated with the European bourgeois revolutions: separation of the state from religion, agrarian revolution, national liberation. To assure the completion of these tasks it is necessary for the proletariat to come to power through socialist revolution. Having already divided the world for exploitation, a handful of the most powerful imperialists economically strangles the masses of semicolonial countries. In such countries, Trotsky wrote,

“the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”

—The Permanent Revolution (1930)

In power, the proletariat will expropriate the bourgeoisie and the holdings of its imperialist masters in order to establish a collectivized, planned economy where production is based on social need rather than profit. But short of international extension of the revolution, especially to the advanced capitalist countries, the development of the social revolution will be arrested and ultimately reversed.

The struggles of the Turkish working class have been repeatedly wrecked by Stalinist reformists who, pushing the class-collaborationist program of “two-stage revolution,” have fostered illusions in the supposed “progressives” of the deeply anti-communist CHP. The program of fighting for a “democratic” revolution in league with a mythical “progressive” and “anti-imperialist” wing of the bourgeoisie, relegating the struggle for socialism to an indefinite future, has brought defeat after bloody defeat. From the massacres of Indonesian Communists by Suharto in 1965 to Pinochet’s 1973 reign of terror against the Chilean masses, history has repeatedly demonstrated that the first “stage” of “two-stage revolution” ends in the blood of the workers and oppressed. The second stage never comes. As we wrote in our “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” (1998):

“Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution is the alternative to placing confidence in fantasies resting upon the backward, imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie of one’s own oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.”

In Turkey, as in other backward countries, the oppression of women is deeply rooted in religious obscurantism and precapitalist “customs” that are manipulated and buttressed by imperialism. Above all, it is the institution of the family that is central to upholding the subjugation of women everywhere.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, developing capitalism spawned social and political revolutions against the aristocracies, monarchies and churches that propped up the old feudal order, to the great benefit of women. The elementary rights that most Western women take for granted—to choose your marriage partner, birth control, divorce, access to education, the right to vote—do not exist for women in the tradition-bound, priest-ridden countries of the East. Christianity and Judaism had to conform with rising industrial capitalism and the bourgeois nation-states, but Islam did not have to adapt, largely because it remains rooted in those parts of the world where imperialism has reinforced social backwardness as a prop to its domination. Bourgeois-democratic gains do not eliminate the fundamental oppression of women in the institution of the family.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels explained that the monogamous patrilineal family arose “to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own.” Along with the state and organized religion, the family is a mainstay of social reaction, regimenting the population, instilling subservience to authority and reinforcing the hold of religion. To the rulers, poor and working-class women serve the purpose of raising a new generation of exploited toilers. Women in the home are isolated from the centers of production. But working-class women, along with working-class men, have great potential social power to overthrow the capitalist system. Only a socialist revolution can lay the material basis for the replacement of the family and for women’s social independence from its confines through collective childcare, laundries and dining halls.

As the demonstrations over the last year headed by the Kemalist bourgeoisie and military show, if women are not mobilized as part of the proletarian class struggle they can be mobilized by other forces for reactionary ends. The fate of women and their struggle for emancipation is a strategic question. Because the oppression of women is integral to capitalist property relations and is bolstered ideologically by religion, women’s oppression cannot be eradicated in capitalist society. At the same time, without a struggle to end women’s oppression, which reinforces all forms of social backwardness, there will be no proletarian revolution.

To unleash the enormous revolutionary potential of the proletariat requires the leadership of a genuinely communist workers party—drawing in women as part of its leadership—armed with a program for the political independence of the working class and for the fight for socialist revolution, as well as a broad vision of a social order of equality and freedom. Such a party will champion full equality for women and their integration into the workforce, where they will acquire social power. Such a party will stand for equal pay for equal work and will lead the fight to end all backward practices, such as “honor” killings, polygamy and bride price. The fight for basic needs and democratic rights—an end to arranged and forced marriages and the seclusion of the veil, freedom from poverty and legal subjugation, the right to education and free health care, including free and safe abortion on demand—is an attack on the foundations of the imperialist-dominated capitalist social order and poses nothing less than a socialist revolution.

The “Headscarf Wars” and Women’s Oppression

The imperialists welcomed the AKP’s re-election last July. A European Union (EU) spokesman declared, “Gül is appreciated in Europe,” and financial analysts in the U.S. were similarly bullish on the AKP. In its prior five years in power, the AKP carried out privatizations, attacked Turkey’s unions and followed the IMF’s dictates to the letter in most cases. As long as Erdogan delivers stability and profits for the imperialists, his goal of resolving Turkey’s contradictions in favor of Islam will not unduly trouble his European and American masters.

In the wake of its victory, the AKP wasted no time in this regard. New constitutional amendments were announced scrapping the longstanding ban on the headscarf in colleges and public institutions and replacing a clause in the current constitution that obliges the government to “ensure equality for both men and women” with one that describes women as a “vulnerable group in need of special protection.” Meanwhile, the emboldened forces of Islamic reaction are starting to change the political and social landscape of Turkey, including in cities like Istanbul. Some government offices are organizing work schedules according to prayer times, and boys and girls are being separated in high schools, a wholly reactionary measure. During the month of Ramadan last fall, which is holy to Muslims, most restaurants stopped serving alcohol and the police brutally beat people for smoking and drinking. The effect of more than two decades of rising political Islam in the Near East is apparent in Istanbul, where the veil and headscarf are increasingly prevalent. Today, some form of veiling is worn by more than 60 percent of Turkish women.

The ban on the veil harks back to the early days of the republic when Atatürk, in his drive to modernize the country at gunpoint, campaigned vigorously against religious symbols and issued decrees banning all forms of religious dress in schools and public institutions. The current “headscarf war” dates back to the early 1980s, when the military, self-appointed guardians of “secular order,” reinforced the ban after their 1980 coup. The rising forces of Islamic fundamentalism naturally opposed it.

When the Islamic Welfare Party of Necmettin Erbakan surged to power in 1996 and allowed veiling in government offices, the military again tightened the ban on the veil as part of its effort to stem the tide of “Islamic subversive activities.” Erbakan was forced out of power by the military in 1997, and in 1998 his Welfare Party was banned. It was in this context that a medical student, Leyla Sahin, expelled from Istanbul University in 1998 for refusing to remove her headscarf, launched a legal challenge to the ban. In November 2005, the bourgeois European Court of Human Rights ruled on her case, upholding Turkey’s ban on women wearing headscarves in universities.

We are opposed to the veil, no matter what its form, as both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression, but we are equally unambiguous in our opposition to state bans or restrictions on it. As Marxists we uphold the democratic principle of separation of religion and state and oppose both state funding of religious schools and religious instruction within public educational institutions. We are for free, secular education for all. Islamic fundamentalists will use any easing of the ban on the headscarf to exert social pressure on women to cover themselves. Nonetheless, we oppose state interference in private religious practices, which paves the way for the state to meddle in the lives of religious minorities and to repress workers and leftist organizations.

We also oppose the bans against veiled Muslim girls and women that have spread across West Europe. These bans are simply racist and have seen girls expelled from school and women driven from jobs and public places. The oppressed Muslim minority in Europe suffers the daily humiliations of racism, segregation and police violence. The anti-veil hysteria also serves as an extension of the racist “war on terror” directed in the main against Muslims.

In Turkey, as in West Europe, barring religious women from education and universities because they refuse to remove their headscarves can only deepen their isolation from secular currents, increasing the hold of religious reaction and family domination. Moreover, cases like Sahin’s, or Erdogan’s daughters, who were sent to study in the U.S. where they could wear the headscarf, become lightning rods for religious reaction in the name of “democratic” rights. The mass of Turkish women, who are mostly poor, have no options such as those available to Erdogan’s daughters. Their fate will continue to be forced marriages, stultifying household drudgery and successive pregnancies.

Contrary to Erdogan and Islamic women’s groups, the veil is not an exercise in “religious freedom” or a sign of submission to a deity. Nor is it simply a reactionary symbol of religious affiliation like the Christian cross or Jewish yarmulke. The veil is the physical symbol of the submission of women to men, the permanent, imposed affirmation of their inferior status. It represents the extension outside the home of the seclusion imposed on women by reactionary sharia law (Islamic law).

To depict the covering of a woman’s body as a quaint cultural attribute or merely a “choice” of dress is liberal nonsense. Such “cultural relativism” prettifies hideous oppression and Marxists reject it. The headscarf might be less onerous than the chador or niqab, prisons for the body beneath which the wearer suffocates, but they all reflect the view of women as property, less than fully human. The veil is the glaring manifestation of the social program of the reactionary Islamist forces operating in Iran, Saudi Arabia and beyond, and it means nothing less than total servitude for women.

Atatürk and the Limits of Bourgeois Nationalism

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its defeat in World War I, the Near East was carved up between the British and French imperialists. The rapacious Treaty of Sèvres saw the Ottoman Empire dismembered and driven out of the Balkans. However, the imperialists did not reckon with the Bolsheviks. The 1917 Russian Revolution—and its extension to largely Muslim Central Asia in the course of the bloody three-year Civil War against the imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary White armies—triggered a series of national revolts and popular uprisings in the broad swath occupied by British forces from Egypt through the Fertile Crescent to Iran. In Turkey, a 1919 peasant revolt gave mass backing to Atatürk and his bourgeois-nationalist forces. Emerging from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish republic was founded in 1923 following a fierce war that drove out the imperialist forces, notably Britain, which was pushing to assert its domination over Turkey. The defeat of the British-sponsored military offensive was achieved through extended economic and military support from Soviet Russia under Lenin.

Atatürk and his Republican People’s Party inherited an economically retarded country lacking a concentration of modern industry. Insofar as a small capitalist class existed, it was Armenian and Greek, with a smaller Jewish component. To build the national capitalist state, the Kemalist movement used Turkish nationalism as a weapon. The Armenians—victims of a genocidal campaign in World War I—were driven from the country, as were the Greeks, and the Jews were subjected to pogromist violence.

Acting as the vanguard of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie, the Kemalists embarked on a program of reforms aimed at removing all obstacles to the development of a modern capitalist nation-state. Dismantling the strongholds of institutionalized Islam, they proclaimed the country a “secular” republic and abolished the caliphate (office of Islamic ruler). Islam, which does not recognize national boundaries, was in contradiction to the Kemalist aim of constructing a Turkish nation-state, and it ceased to be the state religion. Sharia law was replaced by a constitution based on the Swiss Civil Code and the Italian Penal Code, polygamy was prohibited, and religious orders and brotherhoods were outlawed. Religious symbols—the veil in schools and public institutions, and the fez everywhere—were banned. The Latin alphabet was introduced and the Western calendar was adopted.

The social position of women also changed. The huge loss of men in the imperialist carnage of World War I and in the Turkish War of Independence created a labor shortage. As a result, women were drawn into the labor force. They were granted the right to vote in the 1930 local elections. In 1934, they won the right to vote and run for office in parliamentary elections, well before women in many European countries. In the 1937 elections, 18 women deputies were elected to parliament (a result never again equaled).

Atatürk saw himself as a modernizer who could, with a few strokes of his pen, drag the country from the medieval age into the 20th century. Grafted onto a backward society, 80 percent of which was rural and dominated by feudal relations, his reforms were necessarily partial and prone to challenge and reversal. Turkey lacked not only a national bourgeoisie but also a significant proletariat, which alone could transform the country and lay the basis for continued social progress. As Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution:

“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.”

In the first instance, the results in Turkey were directed against the fledgling Communists. Although Atatürk had lifted the ban on the Communist Party following the Soviet-Turkish Treaty, once the British-backed Greek military was defeated in 1922-23, Atatürk crushed the Communists, murdering their leaders. The young Soviet state and the Communist International had sought to advance the cause of socialist revolution in Turkey, and the Comintern denounced “these new crimes of the ruling classes in Turkey.”

Atatürk’s reforms could not resolve the basic democratic questions. There were no attempts at land reform or expropriation of the landlords. Far from resolving the question of national minorities, especially the Kurdish question, Atatürk unleashed a bloody assault against the Kurds in the name of fighting religious backwardness. By the late 1930s, 1.5 million people were either massacred or forcibly transferred. Public use and teaching of the Kurdish language was prohibited. The caliphate was abolished, but genuine separation of mosque and state was never carried out. Rather, the religious hierarchy was brought under the control of the state through the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Today, with a staff of 80,000 imams (Muslim religious leaders), this institution controls a network of nearly 77,000 mosques, religious education, foundations and charities and even dictates the content of the Friday sermons.

Urban women, especially those of the ruling class, certainly benefited from the Kemalist reforms. But the lives of the overwhelming majority of women, especially in the backward, conservative countryside, changed little. The headscarf ban, instead of a liberating measure, deepened women’s exclusion from school, government service and public life. The gulf between the secular, educated bourgeoisie and the illiterate masses, between city and countryside, widened. Indeed, nothing is more cynical than the Kemalist elite’s posture as partisans of women’s rights. The same Turkish state that banned the veil in schools in the guise of liberating women, for years forced virginity tests on schoolgirls, women in police custody and girls in state-run foster homes, a practice banned only after five girls attempted suicide in 1999. Women’s inferior status is reinforced by textbooks pounding children with the message, “The father is the head of the family, and the wife, who does the cooking and looks after the children, is his assistant and companion.”

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The social transformations in Soviet Russia, especially in Central Asia, stood in powerful contrast to the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk. Between Kemalism and Bolshevism lay the gigantic achievement of a thoroughgoing proletarian revolution. Having expropriated the bourgeoisie, nationalized the land and collectivized industry, the Bolshevik Revolution gave national rights to the myriad oppressed peoples in the tsarist “prison house of peoples” and abolished the estates of the landed nobility. The first steps taken by the workers state toward planning the economy in the interests of the toilers brought enormous gains to working women.

The Marxist understanding of women’s oppression as linked to private property and especially to the oppressive institution of the family was integral to the Bolshevik program and strategy for building socialism internationally. The Russian Revolution sought to bring women into full participation in economic, social and political life (see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006). But the Bolsheviks were keenly aware that they could not overcome the backwardness and poverty of Russia simply by decree—they knew that without qualitative economic development that would lay the material basis for replacing the social functions of the family, the full liberation of women was a utopian fantasy. That is why they built the Communist International and fought for the international extension of the revolution to the advanced industrialized countries.

In the historically Muslim regions of Central Asia, the Bolsheviks undertook the enormous task of trying to liberate women. When they spoke of “martyrs fallen on the women’s liberation front,” they were talking about the dedicated and heroic activists from the Department for Work Among Women (Zhenotdel), who put on the veil to bring to the women of the Muslim East news of the new Soviet laws and programs that would change their lives. In Central Asia, where a small but significant proletariat held state power, the workers state was able to invest some of the economic surplus from the more advanced urban areas of the Soviet Union. It took a couple of decades before the productive capacity of the planned economy had developed sufficiently to provide jobs, education, medical care and social services on a scale wide enough to undercut primitive Islamic traditions. But by this time, the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary program had been supplanted by Stalinism’s nationalist ideology of building “socialism in one country” and its counterrevolutionary glorification of the family. Notwithstanding the degeneration of the Soviet workers state, the planned economy demonstrated its superiority in the great advances achieved for women and the historically Muslim peoples in Soviet Central Asia, where conditions before the Bolshevik Revolution had been as backward and benighted as in Afghanistan today.

It is the oppressive institution of the family that is at the heart of the increasing number of “namus,” or “honor” killings, in Turkey, a barbaric practice steeped in the backwardness of rural societies. In 1983 we reviewed Yilmaz Güney’s film Yol, in which a husband murders his wife as punishment for adultery, and a young couple, forced to flee to get married because the parents disapprove, is hunted down and killed by the bride’s family (Women and Revolution No. 27, Winter 1983-84). Twenty-four years later, at least 200 girls and young women are thought to be murdered each year by their families. The real number is likely far higher, as most “honor” murders are hushed up and go unreported or take the form of “forced suicides.” A UN report puts these barbaric killings worldwide at over 5,000 a year, a number that surely understates reality.

Young girls have been strangled, buried alive or stoned to death for such “crimes” as having a consensual sexual relationship outside marriage, rejecting an arranged marriage, wearing a short skirt, dating, stealing a glance at a boy or being raped by a stranger or relative. Malicious neighborhood gossip can incur a death sentence. Until recently, murderers received lenient sentences, as the law provides “unjust provocation” as an available defense.

In impoverished rural Turkey, where a woman’s “honor” is a measurable commodity, young brides are humiliated by having to display a bloody sheet after their wedding night. Anatolian girls are often married off at a very young age to men they have never seen, treated little better than cattle to be purchased at the proper price. Divorce, considered a social taboo, is extremely rare; only 2.6 percent of Turkish women over 30 are single. Interethnic and interfaith marriages are not allowed. Crossing these lines can mean a death sentence for women (and the men who marry them).

The travails of Turkish and Kurdish women do not end when they emigrate to Europe. In the segregated immigrant communities, all the reactionary, oppressive traditions are preserved through ties to the homeland. Young immigrant and minority women are trapped between the racism of these societies and oppressive, rigid family strictures. Unable to find jobs that provide financial independence, life for them is an endless saga of miseries. The 2005 murder by her brothers of Hatun Sürücü, a young Kurdish mother in Germany, shows that women may pay with their lives. Her “crime” was to leave an arranged marriage, seek an independent life with her child and choose a Western lifestyle. As we explained in “‘Honor’ Killings in Germany” (Workers Vanguard No. 850, 10 June 2005):

“The concept of ‘family honor,’ i.e., control of the sexuality of women by their family, is not exclusively Islamic, but rather connected to a mode of production where a clan—a series of related extended families—holds and works the land in common.”

Indeed, “honor” killings in the Near East take place in Christian families as well as Muslim ones. Engels put it trenchantly: “In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.”

Islam Rising, Women Falling

Erdogan has taken pains to show that he is not a Turkish version of the Iranian fundamentalist mullahs, and there is some truth to that. But he and the AKP have always been open about their goal of breaking down all barriers to Islamic domination of social life. “Thank God Almighty, I am a servant of the Shariah” (Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2006), Erdogan once boasted. After his election as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, he proclaimed himself the city’s imam, opened public meetings with prayers and banned alcohol in municipal restaurants, a ban now extended to 61 of Turkey’s 81 provinces. Erdogan opposes abortion and contraception and he tried, without success, to criminalize adultery. He would not shake a woman’s hand. He has rejected any suggestion that Turkey is a “moderate” Islamic state, declaring, “Islam is Islam” (Today’s Zaman, 10 October 2007).

This reactionary climate, in which religious violence vies with nationalism, is a deadly danger. A 92-year-old professor of Sumerian history was put on trial for publishing a book linking the origin of the veil to prostitutes in Sumerian times. In the 1990s, secular writers, academics, feminists and journalists were killed in a spate of attacks by fundamentalists as well as by nationalists and circles close to the military. More recently, several intellectuals and writers were put on trial for “insulting Turkishness.” Among them was Orhan Pamuk. The charges against him were dropped after an international outcry. Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, an advocate of exposing the mass killings of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, was less fortunate. His murder by a Turkish nationalist was the direct result of his conviction for “insulting Turkish identity.”

As in much of the Near East in the last two decades, Islamic fundamentalism as a mass political force in Turkey is a reactionary outcome of disenchantment with the ineptitude, corruption and bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism, Stalinist betrayal and, above all, the absence of a viable communist alternative. The frustration, anger and despair of the masses that grew out of their dire misery and degradation have provided fertile ground for the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Not only is religion the opium of the people, as Marx said, but also:

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

The millions of dispossessed peasants, unemployed youth and low-wage migrant workers in the shantytowns ringing Turkey’s major cities find a comforting retreat in religion. They direct their hopes not only to heaven, but more so to its earthly representation in the Islamic solidarity networks of clinics, schools, charities, cooperatives and other free personal and social services that have become a vitally necessary alternative to scant government services gutted by IMF-imposed austerity measures. They have provided a bottomless pool for recruitment to the ranks of Islamic fundamentalists who pose as anti-imperialists, saviors from mass poverty and promoters of social justice.

It was under the rule of the “secular” military generals in the early 1980s that Islamic fundamentalism began to flourish. Islam was viewed as a potential bulwark against communism and trade-union militancy. The generals’ constitution made religious instruction compulsory at all pre-university levels. The religious schools set up for the imams were seedbeds for Islamic ideology and provided activists and leaders for the Islamic fundamentalist movement. The number of religious school graduates increased fourteen-fold, compared with a tripling of those from the secular state schools, during the military’s rule.

The watershed for the Islamic fundamentalist movement was the 1979 Iranian “revolution.” In the minds of many impoverished Muslims, this mass upheaval, which overthrew one of the most oppressive, Western-backed regimes in the region, redefined (falsely) Islamic reaction as an anti-imperialist ideology of liberation. While most of the left around the world tailed the Iranian mullahs, the International Communist League (then the international Spartacist tendency) declared: “Down with the Shah! Down with Khomeini! For workers revolution in Iran!” Once in power, the mullahs enslaved women under the veil, slaughtered thousands of workers, leftists and homosexuals, and intensified murderous repression against Kurds and other minorities.

The growth of Islamic fundamentalism was further augmented in the 1980s by U.S. imperialism’s massive arming and organizing of the Afghan mujahedin holy warriors against the Soviet Union’s 1979 intervention in Afghanistan. This was the CIA’s largest covert operation ever, and it turned Afghanistan into the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union through capitalist counterrevolution. We hailed the Red Army intervention, for it opened the way to the liberation of the Afghan peoples, especially the horribly oppressed women, and we called to extend the gains of the October 1917 Revolution to the Afghan peoples. In the first war in modern history in which women’s emancipation was a central issue, the Red Army battled the murderous imperialist-armed and -financed Islamic fundamentalists, who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and killed schoolteachers who taught young girls to read. We denounced the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan as a betrayal of women and the oppressed Afghan peoples. The Red Army pullout was a pivotal event directly linked to the final collapse of the USSR itself, which was a historic defeat not only for the peoples of the Soviet Union, but for the whole of the international working class.

We Trotskyists fought until the last barricade to defend the Soviet Union and, earlier, the deformed workers states in East Europe. We were guided by our Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of these states against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and of proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies. During 1989-92, the International Communist League intervened uniquely, first in East Germany and then in the Soviet Union, fighting in defense of the gains of the 1917 October Revolution. Despite the victory of counterrevolution in East Europe and the Soviet Union, about a quarter of the world’s population still lives in countries over which the capitalist exploiters do not rule. Today, we fight to defend the remaining deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Capitalist counterrevolution would be devastating and embolden the capitalists internationally to launch more savage attacks on workers, rural toilers, women, minorities and immigrants.

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union has enormously fueled the growth of religious obscurantism worldwide: Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world, Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, Orthodox Jewish fundamentalism in Israel and the ever-expanding reach of the Catholic church. In the Near East, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism is seen as at best a failed experiment, not as a viable alternative. In a region where allegiance to communism once flourished, today the masses widely perceive the nationalists on the one hand or the Islamists on the other as the only two credible alternatives.

It is the task of the working class in Turkey, leading all the oppressed behind it, to overthrow the rule of the Turkish bourgeoisie. Key to this perspective is the forging of a Marxist workers party. Such parties must be built throughout the Near East to unite the diverse proletariats in struggle against imperialism and against their own capitalist rulers. The fight for workers rule in the Near East includes shattering Turkey’s ally, the Zionist garrison state of Israel, through Arab/Hebrew workers revolution. The Stalinized Communist parties of the Near East—which made a mockery of this revolutionary perspective through their subordination of the proletariat to mythical “progressive” bourgeois forces—share responsibility for the growth of Islamic fundamentalism among the working and oppressed masses. The construction of revolutionary workers parties is essential to implant genuine Marxism and break the Near Eastern proletariat from nationalism and fundamentalism in the struggle for socialist revolution.

Turkey and the Imperialist Order: From the Cold War to the EU

For more than one hundred years, since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has been both a pawn and a prize for the imperialists. With the largest NATO army in Europe, during the Cold War Turkey served as a strategic bulwark in the anti-Soviet imperialist military alliance. Today, Turkey is under the military thumb of the U.S. and economically beholden to German imperialism. It provides a strategic center offering a crucial energy route into Europe, preserving and extending imperialist interests in the Near East. In 1991, Turkey served the U.S. imperialists as a launching pad for their bloody war against Iraq.

The army generals, who are the self-conscious custodians of Atatürk’s legacy, combine bonapartist bourgeois nationalism with pro-Western “secularism” and fierce anti-communism. Acting as agents of Western imperialism and the domestic national bourgeoisie, they have staged three bloody imperialist-backed coups to quell popular unrest, in 1960, 1971 and 1980. The generals are sworn enemies of labor and the left, and the “path of Atatürk’s legacy” is strewn with the corpses of thousands of Kurds, Communists and labor-union leaders. According to a leaked parliamentary report, security forces and the fascistic Gray Wolves death squads were responsible for many of the 14,000 unsolved murders and disappearances during the 1990s. On May Day 2007, workers demonstrating in Istanbul were brutally attacked by police; close to 600 were arrested.

The issue of Turkey’s admission to the EU colors all aspects of political life in the country. For years, the Turkish ruling class has been campaigning to join the European Union and has come under pressure to clean up their “human rights” record as the price of admission. While prospects of EU membership are dimming, many Turks think or hope that the EU will bring “democracy” and “prosperity” to the country. Some Kurds think the EU will put an end to their oppression, and many women believe the same. Nothing could be more mistaken.

We are against the EU, a cartel of the main European imperialist powers centered on improving their competitiveness against their American and Japanese rivals and deepening imperialist exploitation of the weaker member states. Such an alliance can only be at the expense of the multiethnic proletariat in Europe and those under the boot of neocolonialism.

For the Right of Self-Determination for the Kurds

The Kurdish question is pivotal in Turkey. The 25 to 30 million Kurdish people in the Near East constitute the largest nation in the world without a state. Kurds make up a fifth of Turkey’s population. Kurdistan extends from eastern Turkey through a portion of Syria, across northern Iraq and into Iran. Since the mid 1980s the Turkish army, backed and armed by the U.S. and Germany, has been waging a bloody war against the oppressed Kurdish minority in which some 37,000 people have been killed and several thousand villages have been burned. So intent has been the Turkish bourgeoisie on stamping out any hint of Kurdish separatism that for years speaking Kurdish in public and the use of Kurdish names were outlawed. Kurdish people were referred to as “mountain Turks.”

In recent years, the Turkish bourgeoisie introduced cosmetic reforms intended to appease the EU. They cynically allowed Kurdish-language classes in private schools, which few impoverished Kurds can afford to attend. Kurdish radio broadcasts were limited to four hours per week and television broadcasts to two hours. None of this interfered with the AKP government’s incessant attacks on Kurds. In March 2007, Ahmet Turk, a Kurdish leader of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) was sentenced to six months in prison for giving Abdullah Öcalan, jailed leader of the Kurdish-nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a respectful title by calling him the “Sayin,” meaning “esteemed” or “Mister.” He was also sentenced, along with a DTP deputy leader, to 18 months in prison for distributing party literature in the Kurdish language. We demand: Freedom for Öcalan! Hands off Ahmet Turk and the DTP!

The situation of the Kurdish people in Turkey has sharply deteriorated in recent months. On 21 October 2007, during a Turkish military anti-Kurdish offensive near the Iraq border, PKK guerrilla fighters attacked a military convoy, killing 12 Turkish soldiers. In response, Erdogan declared, “Our anger, our hatred is great.” This signaled a massive outburst of Turkish nationalism that saw 300,000 marching on October 27 in the Anatolian city of Kayseri. Thousands of runners in Istanbul’s Eurasian Marathon carried Turkish flags and chanted anti-PKK slogans. Mob attacks on Kurdish businesses went largely unreported in the press, while many Kurds sought to allay pogromist violence by hanging Turkish flags on their homes and workplaces.

On February 22, with the blatant aid of the U.S. imperialists and after having launched massive air raids into Iraq in December, the Turkish military sent ten thousand troops over the border to “hunt down” Kurdish PKK fighters. Already last December, the military bragged that they had killed “hundreds of terrorists” in attacks that hit villages, schools and hospitals, forcing some 1,800 people to flee their homes, according to a UN report. While we give the PKK no political support, we say that the Turkish regime’s bloody terror attacks must be condemned by the international workers movement—including in Turkey—which must stand for the military defense of the PKK against the Turkish state. By mobilizing against these attacks, linking this to opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq and defense of Kurdish national rights, the powerful Turkish proletariat could strike a blow in the interests of all the oppressed. U.S., NATO, Germany out of Afghanistan! Turkey—Hands off the PKK! U.S. out of Iraq! Turkish army out of Kurdistan!

The struggle for independence for the Kurdish people not only intersects powerfully the struggle for women’s liberation, but is also a crucial measure of revolutionary integrity of any party claiming to lead the working class. It is integral to the struggle for proletarian power, requiring the overthrow of bourgeois rule in Turkey, Iran and Syria and an end to the American imperialist occupation of Iraq. But the Kurdish nationalist leaders actively and militarily collaborated with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and today act as pawns of the U.S. occupiers. As we wrote in “The U.S. Occupation and the Kurdish Question,” (WV No. 871, 26 May 2006):

“This is a cynical parody of self-determination for the Kurdish people, who have endured generations of oppression at the hands of various colonialist and nationalist regimes. The Kurdish nationalist leaders in Iraq have subordinated themselves to the American-led occupation forces. And many Iraqi Kurds mistakenly look with favor on the occupation as a guarantor against Arab conquest. Any fight for Kurdish independence that does not take as its starting point opposition to the occupation and to the nationalist parties that serve it will necessarily be subordinated to the occupation….

“As part of the multinational proletariat of the Near East, Kurdish workers can play a leading role in bringing down the rotten structure set up to serve the imperialist overlords. Kurdish and Turkish workers in Europe, especially in Germany, can serve as a living bridge linking the Kurdish struggle for independence to the fight for socialist revolution in the Near East and the advanced capitalist countries of West Europe. This struggle requires the leadership of internationalist workers parties, which will inscribe on their banner the call for a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan, part of a socialist federation of the Near East.”

For the Communism of Lenin and Trotsky!

IMF-imposed austerity measures generated mass workers strikes that shook the country throughout the 1990s. In 2003, amid large trade-union dominated protests in cities across Turkey, the government denied the U.S. use of Turkish territory for deployment of troops, preventing the opening of a northern front in the Iraq war. In recent years, however, because of cyclical economic crises, a series of natural disasters, massive unemployment following the brutal IMF and EU austerity and privatization measures, and decades of betrayal and disorientation by the Stalinists, the working class has taken significant defeats.

Though presently beleaguered, the integrated Turkish/Kurdish proletariat has not ceased its struggles. On International Women’s Day in March 2007, thousands of women, joined by workers unions, demonstrated in Istanbul. Their banners read: “Do Not Interfere with My Body and My Honor,” “Our Body Is Ours” and “No Honor Killings.” They demanded equality and nurseries for children of working women. They called for an end to IMF interference and an end to the occupation of Iraq. Kurdish women joined the demonstrations, demanding peace, and courageous gay and lesbian activists protested their oppression. These demonstrations touched on many of the burning questions that confront revolutionaries seeking the road to the overthrow of capitalist class rule in imperialist-dependent Turkey.

Among the demonstrators, in T-shirts and baseball caps, were striking women workers from the German- and Italian-owned Novamed factory, in an Anatolian export zone. The strike of these women workers, which ended after 16 months, put a spotlight on the brutal conditions of women workers. Company abuse, which included a “pregnancy list” to regulate when women would be “allowed” to become pregnant, was supplemented by grinding social oppression. The Novamed strikers had to win the support of their husbands and families before even launching the union. This strike sparked widespread solidarity and won a collective agreement and wage increases. A strike in late 2007 by 27,000 workers at Turk Telekom against union-busting and for a new collective agreement had an impact in towns and cities across Turkey.

In the Near East, the struggle against imperialism and its neocolonial surrogate regimes cannot be resolved within the confines of a single country. Justice for the Palestinian people, national emancipation for the Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities, freedom for women from the veil and Islamic law require sweeping away the capitalist regimes from Iran to Egypt to the shores of the Bosphorus and establishing a socialist federation of the Near East. The struggle for proletarian power in the Near East must be linked to the fight for workers rule in the advanced capitalist countries, and it demands the forging of internationalist workers parties to win the working masses of the region to the communism of Lenin and Trotsky and fight intransigently for working-class power.

The way out of the Turkish impasse lies in forging a revolutionary leadership of the proletariat at the head of the peasant masses, on the model of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution and the political independence of the proletariat. Like the Bolsheviks, such a party will recognize that the struggle for the liberation of women is a motor force for revolution. As Trotsky wrote of the Muslim women of Central Asia in 1924 (reprinted in “Communism and Women of the East” in Spartacist No. 60 [English-language edition], Autumn 2007):

“The Eastern woman who is the most paralysed in life, in her habits and in creativity, the slave of slaves, that she, having at the demand of the new economic relations taken off her cloak will at once feel herself lacking any sort of religious buttress; she will have a passionate thirst to gain new ideas, a new consciousness which will permit her to appreciate her new position in society. And there will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker.”

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Zolo Azania


  • In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Zolo Azania
     
    http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
     
    A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

    Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

    Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

    In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
    That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
    Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
  • *The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-The Anniversary Of The Resignation Of Richard Milhous Nixon, President Of The United States And Common Criminal -From The Pen Of Hunter Thompson

    *The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-The Anniversary Of The Resignation Of Richard Milhous Nixon, President Of The United States And Common Criminal -From The Pen Of Hunter Thompson

    Zack James’ comment June, 2017 :
    You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   


    Better yet he would have had this Trump thug wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth would have been bumpier than in those more civilized times. He did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too with these thugs find himself in some back alley himself bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  


    Click on title to link to an excepts in Wikipedia from the late Doctor Gonzo published in some 1974 issues of "Rolling Stone" magazine entitled "Fear And Loathing In...." on Richard Nixon's pardon by fellow Republican, Nixon-appointed Vice-President, and Nixon's presidential successor, Gerald Ford.

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#On_Nixon


    I could not find a full "Fear and Loathing" essay from the series that he wrote for "Rolling Stone" magazine in 1974 so if you want more you have to go get the book "The Great Shark Hunt". As for me, the idea of even mentioning the 35th anniversary of anything that Richard Nixon did makes me want to yawn. Except National Public Radio (NPR) made a fairly big deal out of it. So naturally I had to as well, right? All I can say is that I no longer wake up screaming in the night at the mention of Nixon's name. I am reserving those screams for one Barack H. Obama and his current Iraq and Afghan war policies (among other things). I'm a big boy now and am not afraid of the dark. Thanks "Tricky Dick".

    The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976

    The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976  




    Zack James’ comment June, 2017 :
    You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   

    Better yet he would have had this Trump thug wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth would have been bumpier than in those more civilized times. He did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too with these thugs find himself in some back alley himself bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  


    Book Review

    By Joshua Lawrence Breslin

    Fear And Loathing In America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, The Gonzo Letters, Volume Two, 1968-1976, Hunter S. Thompson, Simon &Schuster, New York, 2006 



    I have written a number of reviews about the book s of the late outlaw gonzo journalist “Doctor Gonzo” Hunter S. Thompson. Those reviews have centered on the impact of his journalistic work in the pantheon of American political and social criticism and the jail break way that he presented his material that was like a breath of fresh air coming from out in the jet stream somewhere after all the lame gibberish of most reportage in the 1960s and 1970s (extending unfortunately to this day). His seemingly one man revolt (okay, okay Tom Wolfe and others too but he was the king hell king, alright) against paid by the word minute stuff of hack journalism told us the “skinny,” and told that straight, warts and all. The book under review however is more for aficionados like this writer who are interested in the minutiae about how this man created what he created, and the trials and tribulations, sometime bizarre, he went through to get the damn stuff published. And while one can rightly pass on the pre-Gonzo first volume of Thompson’s letters this one is worth reading for it provides the back drop to Doctor Gonzo’s most creative period, that period from about the publication of Hell’s Angels until his “discovery” of one Jimmy Carter. The period when Hunter S. Thompson was “riding with the king.”

    In those earlier reviews (especially Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing On Campaign 1972, and Songs of The Doomed) I began with some generic comments applicable to all his work and they apply here as well so I will recycle them and intersperse additional comments about this book as well.

    “Generally the most the trenchant social criticism, commentary and analysis complete with a prescriptive social program ripe for implementation has been done by thinkers and writers who work outside the realm of bourgeois society, notably socialists and other progressive thinkers. Bourgeois society rarely allows itself, in self-defense or hidebound fear, to be skewered by trenchant criticism from within. This is particularly true when it comes from a known dope fiend, gun freak and all-around lifestyle addict like the late, lamented Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Nevertheless, although he was far from any thought of a socialist solution to what ails society, particularly American society, and would reject such a political designation we of the extra-parliamentary could travel part of the way with him. We saw him as a kindred spirit. He was not one of us- but he was one of us. All honor to him for pushing the envelope of journalism in new directions and for his pinpricks at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Such men are dangerous.

    I am not sure whether at the end of the day Hunter Thompson saw himself or wanted to been seen as a voice, or the voice, of his generation but he would not be an unworthy candidate. In any case, his was not the voice of the generation of 1968 being just enough older than us to have been formed by an earlier, less forgiving milieu. The hellhole, red scare, cold war night in all its infamy that even singed my generation. His earliest writings show that shadow night blanket, the National Observer stuff, well-written but mainly “objective” stuff that a thousand other guys were writing (and were getting better paid for). Nevertheless, only a few, and with time it seems fewer in each generation, allow themselves to search for some kind of truth even if they cannot go the whole distance. This compilation under review is a hodgepodge of letters over the best part of Thompson’s career, 1968-76.

    As with all journalists, as indeed with all writers especially those who are writing under the gun and for mass circulation media, these letters reveal the tremendous time pressures put on writers under contractual publishing deadlines, the ridiculous amount of time spent trying to “hustle” one’s work around the industry even by a fairly well-known writer , the creative processes behind specific works (particularly the Fear and Loathing books) as outlined in several letters, including some amusing “cut and paste” efforts to use one article to serve about six purposes , and horror of horrors, damn writer’s block (or ennui). Some of these letters are minor works of art; others seem to have been thrown in as filler. However the total effect is to show the back story of a guy who blasted old bourgeois society almost to its foundations. Others will have to push on further.

    “Gonzo” journalism as it emerges in the crucible of these letters, by the way, is quite compatible, with historical materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within himself/herself as an actor in the story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in other disciplines like history and political science is that somehow one must be ‘objective.’ Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter’s way. And that premise shines through some of these letters.

    As a member of the generation of 1968 I note that this was a period of particular importance in which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on raging deep into the night against one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common criminal (unindicted, of course), and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when Nixon was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick Nixon when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the “dark side” of the American spirit- the side that appeared then, and today, as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson’s work first. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books to know what it was like when men and women plied the journalist trade for keeps.

    In Search of …With Lost Loves In Mind

    In Search of …With Lost Loves In Mind





    By Bart Webber

    In search of… that sure as hell fit Dan Hawkins’ fix, his inevitable lost love fix that had this time taken him by surprise, taken him for a spin as well. That terrible fix had a name, Moira Kiley, whom Dan had had a long, long for him at thirty, relationship with for three years, three and one half years if you included the six months he had been in shellshock since she had left. It hadn’t been like he couldn’t have seen it coming, if he had had his eyes wide open for there were signs and word fights that came ever closer a few times. And then there was that time about a year before after they had gotten back from Paris, a freaking week after they both agreed that they had had a great time there and he had thought they had turned a corner, had thought about moving on from living together to marriage and such (that “and such” the question of children which he was ambiguous about and she was as well although less so).

    That week after Paris one night, one Friday night, a night they called their “wine date” night which they were using as a way to touch base with each other, time to enjoy each other and be silly if they liked, silliness not a strong suit between them Moira first lowered the boom. She had told him that she was dissatisfied with their relationship in no uncertain terms, that the great time in Paris only made it clear to her that the episodic good times they had could not make up for all the times in between. Could not make up for his ill-humored fits of anger at her for no earthly reason making her afraid to mention anything in the slightest bit negative for fear of that rage. Could not make up for his usual indifference to her when he was hopped up on one of his work projects, one of his damn cases, one of his lawyer things. 

    That time Moira coolly suggested to him that they go to couples counselling, something like that or she was leaving, way “going to find herself,” going find out what she was meant to do in this wicked old world (Dan’s term not hers) before it was too late (she was about to turn thirty, a critical age for such decisions as Dan had to acknowledge in his own turning thirty). Dan, who had grown up in a strongly working-class neighborhood, the Acre, in Riverdale about thirty miles west of Boston had been no partisan of what he called, what the guys whom he hung around with there, in college, and in law school called “New Age touchy-feely stuff” and at first had balked but after several hours of discussion over that weekend as Moira literarily was packing her bags he agreed. The funny thing was that once they found a suitable counsellor, a New Age-type no question, in Cambridge but who was very much into letting the couples have the floor, work out between themselves what ailed them, he could see the wisdom of Moira’s suggestion. Could see that his off-the-wall behaviors and her reactions were the source of their problems.

    Naturally he had to “kick and scream” a bit about this therapy business but after a few sessions he was, using his term, “all in.” And so it had gone for the better part of a year before the crash, the lowering of Moira’s boom. Some sessions were good, the ones where they had to deal with each other’s hurt, hurts started in childhood with Dan having to prove he was not-bum-of-the-month which his father constantly called him and she with a father who would shut her up anytime she uttered anything, anytime. No question not a happy mixture. Some sessions, and this would part of Moira’s final indictment of him, seemed like a match between two professional talkers, the counselor and the lawyer, with her on the outside looking in. Still he, they had held on until their summer vacation for a week up in Maine. That Maine trip was another great time, a time when they not know for goofiness had beside the usual beach and dinner out routine gone and played miniature golf, gone to an old-fashioned drive-in theater and to a bowling alley. Then, a week after that great time, this week after a great time for Moira to spring something bad which Dan had thought a lot about the six months she had been gone, Moira lowered that final boom. After a short indictment of Dan’s short-comings, after again expressing her desire to find herself, to see what she was on earth to do she packed her bags that night and told him she was going to her sister’s house where she would stay until she found a place of her own. That was the last he had seen or heard from her except a few impersonal e-mails about forwarding her mail and forwarding her cellphone number to any friends who might call expecting that she would be found there.

    For that six months since Moira had gone Dan had had time to think things through, think about what made Moira tick the way she did and how what seemed like a union of soulmates (both had used that designation when they gave each other holiday and birthday cards and the like) had turned to ashes with nothing in the end left behind. So he had been sad, been in a funk, and had worked like seven banshees to try to get her out of his mind, to move on. Then one day he realized that working twelve hour days and moping around was not going to either bring her back or allow him to move on. That six months had been in any case the longest he had been without a woman, been without some girlfriend, serious or not. Dan was now aching to get back into “the game” even if he had been sobered up about his own short-comings and was slightly apprehensive about getting back into a relationship, serious or not.

    Dan was not sure how to go about finding somebody since he felt that he was too old to go to the bar-hopping “meat-market” and he did not meet many available, or desirable, women in his profession so he left his feeling stir for a while. One afternoon he heard a fellow male lawyer on his cellphone talking to somebody in such a way that it was a female and that he did not know the woman well. Once the fellow lawyer saw that Dan had overheard the conversation and knowing of his alone status mentioned that he had found Susan, the woman that he was talking to in the phone with whom he had just set up their first date, on a well-known on-line dating service. Asked Dan why didn’t he try it since they had vaguely talked about how hard it was to meet interesting women who were in the same profession as they were. Dan laughed and said no way that he was going to “meet” somebody, who knows some monster or serial killer, through the Internet. He had always found a girlfriend the old-fashioned way-meet them and then get their phones numbers if he was interested and go from there. But that conversation put a bug in Dan’s ear.                                                   

    The long and short of it was that a couple of weeks later he decided to try “just for kicks” this new form of dating and signed up for the same service he fellow lawyer said he used. At first he was put off by the idea of paying for a dating service which despite the “come-on” of a free membership entailed payment if you wanted to get anywhere (and before he succumbed to payment he was badgered endlessly by the service about the benefits of membership). What floored him though was the questions he was supposed to answer to fill out his on-line “profile” (complete with on-line moniker-he used zackjames12 after his old friend from high school as a name he would remember easily when he logged into the site. He filled out some of the formation, left some of it blank, told little white lies about some stuff (what he was looking for in a woman which really amounted to getting somebody under the sheets, somebody to have sex with and see what happened after that but he pull some bullshit about a “meeting of the minds”). And he was off.      

    Or Dan thought he was off but as it turned out he was having trouble connecting with most of the women on-line, probably because they were not Moira. One night when he was his father’s house in Riverdale he mentioned that since Moira had left him he had not had a girlfriend and then told the story about how he joined an on-line dating service but was not having much success except a few “chats” and a couple of cellphone calls that turned out to be not worth pursuing. He was down in the dumps about the situation. Dan’s father, Jethro, had to laugh. Women troubles would always plague the Hawkins men it seemed. Dan and his father had been estranged for several years after his father had divorced his mother to run after some other woman which had not worked out either. Dan had taken his late mother’s side and that had led to the years of estrangement (and had that constant belittling of him by Jethro). They had reconciled at his mother’s funeral and would periodically meet for supper and the elder Hawkins’ house.               

    Beyond the seemingly endless women troubles of the Hawkins’ men the reason that Jethro had laughed at Dan was that he had a few years before joined the very site Dan had joined, or the senior version of that same site, Seniors Please. Jethro had always been a lady’s man of sorts, had had several girlfriends after he had left his wife and his girlfriend he was abandoning her for left him. He told Dan that over the past few years it was getting harder to meet women in the flesh. Those he came in contact with now that he was retired were concerned more about their grandchildren than dating men or else they were too young and didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about when he mentioned the hell he had raised in the 1960s. One had threatened to call the cops when he mentioned that he still like to smoke grass and was glad that a number of states were allowing recreational purchases. Wished Massachusetts would get on the stick about it and stop keeping it as some goddam crime. So he was reduced to going on-line, or that was the way he put it to his son that night.   

    Jethro told Dan that he had had the same troubles at first in reconciling the old-fashioned way he had always previously met women just as Dan had in the days before cellphones, on-line credit card payments and the Internet. But eventually he got the hang of it. Realized that all he had to do was write a couple of cogent paragraphs and the women would jump at the chance to meet him. Well not quite that easy but it seemed from what the women told him when they “chatted,” on-line, on the phone or the few he met for a date that most of the guys, older guys remember, who trolled these sites were loons, guys who thought they were twenty-something and talked boyish sex talk or about how nice some mature woman would look in a black dress and high heels. He had learned to avoid the on-line grandmothers whose idea of being appealing to a man, an older man, was to fill their profile pages with photographs of each and every grandchild. Had learned to avoid sixty-something women who had never been married since what the hell would they know about life. Was lukewarm about women who had children at home but overall he had taken the position that the rest were worth checking out-and not be too choosey looking over the on-line “meat market, senior version.” They talked some more about the do’s and don’t like don’t give a woman your real e-mail address since one woman still sends him messages about getting together and that was months before and don’t respond to anybody, woman or man, who asks for money. That dough will be long gone.              


    That night Dan when he went back to his Cambridge apartment he turned on his computer and worked for a few hours “hitting” on every good-looking woman who did not look like a mass murderer and who could write a couple of complete paragraphs. But mostly that they did not look like Moira. Yeah, in search …    

    “Hitting the sawdust trail”-Preacher Jack Holds Forth

    “Hitting the sawdust trail”-Preacher Jack Holds Forth     




    By Zack James


    “I am saved, I am saved, I am finally saved. I had sinned against the sanctified sons of Adam, blessed Cain for his courage and fallen Abel for laughing at him for falling down after the serpent screwed up their former digs East of Eden. Had flung my seed far and wide among comely women, tarts and the just curious who got the big brush off when I took off with some latter apple-fetching Eve leaving them barren for a time. Had spent my hours in avarice, the midnight sneak a specialty but armed robbery if necessary starting that first night at the Citgo gas station and debauchery-wine, women and song if I haven’t covered all of them previously. Had coveted, coveted wives, land, pigs, plastic, pottage. Had been lost in the rain outside the gates of Eden looking for Saint Anne up on some faraway hill but hitching up for a three day crawl and sheet fest  with sweet Melinda who could cure all your nightmares with those bloated lips made for undercover sheets. (She said she was just a girl who like to play the “pennywhistle” as long as a guy didn’t try to con her with crazy talk of love and going places.) Had trammeled the hedges of the wise and the thoughtful hags of evil misdoing showing old Macbeth what was what and that damn psycho he was hitched up to as well so much for the sirens of thickets and brews.

    “Had been bent around a stick of jade, a stick of hash, a stick of jimson, a stick of the everlasting good and said my say in the midnight hours around the black hole of Calcutta. Had worshiped Stone Age totems from afar and prayed for dinosaur-etched dreams. Had been in that windswept night when all the cauldron of sinners were lined up for their daily soup. Had seen visions of cocaine codeine elixirs mired in sweated muddy fields of May. Had spoken ill of virgin sisters who repented their lustful ways to find chastity in the nomad hills out around Big Sur. Had been the poster boy for 24/7/365 sprees unto the death totems along windswept California beaches that Big Sur I mentioned when the virgin sisters had repented their lustful ways. Fuck them, sorry. Had drawn blasphemous guns in the desert night facing tommy-hawks and tommy guns. Had blanketed seven vestal virgins down in Delphi town and cast them out like lost sheep looking for fodder. Had sworn a sacred oath to Baal in the secret crevices of my mind. Had not thought twice about the slaughter and mayhem when Baal went behind the clouds looking for sweet Melinda and her long-line penny-whistle.   

    “Had repented, how I had repented, for an hour, a day, and then murdered sleep. Had told death straight out that I did not believe in him, her or whatever gender-bender was being played out. Had seen visions of the great unmasking on the seven hills but I would be damned which seven hills seeking a sign that maybe Saint Francis would come and rescue a poor sinner. Had swollen my tongue unto the seventh generation of the seventh son and me an only child. Had been conceived in a dark cave by midget anglers who sent me forth to reek of whiskies, of fetid dopes, of sexed-up layaway plans. Had blasphemed against the sons of evil’s sons. Had laughed when the angels came by and spread their noisy wings. Had been a harlot with my head on fire swaying gently in the crosswinds of desire. Had seen the land of the righteous which some call milk and honey and detonated a time bomb box for the eternal. Had lifted up my head toward the sky seeking praise and pissed in rivers of pure noxious gas. Had seen lights in the sky giving me the okay to drive the pure from their abodes and sink them in clammy sea-beds beyond tepid seas. Had burned amulets and charred my face with the residue of empty desire against the great Western blue-pink night. Had danced the Day-Glo canyons around Death Valley and known what the ancient heathen warrior had craved when they reached for a man’s scalp. Had been besotted and wetted by pure rage against the coming of the light. Had done all of these things in fearless desire to crush whatever profit I could out of the flinty stone of Smith& Wesson,” cried out Preacher Jack.

    Cried out to the throng that was standing, mostly standing except the few cripples, no they don’t call them that anymore even if they are all crippled up, something like handicapped or disabled or differently abled, under the big circus-style tent where he was have his yearly revival meeting in Peoria. That is in Illinois for those who have forgotten that town used to be a bell-weather for a million trends from the latest in overalls wear to skinflint motion pictures. Preacher Jack had just then completed the “call” part of his sermon to those who were in the audience who had traipsed from far and wide to hear his yearly message to the fallen angels of some strange Miltonic dream fest.  

    Preacher Jack had been being calling out the saved message for at least the previous forty years ever since he had come back to the “real” world from over the Japan Seas in Asia where most of the stuff he declared himself saved from had occurred. Most of the rage, pillage, murder, arson. Had found himself beached in Southern California after running through a couple of marriages, run through a couple of benighted fortunes on dope, women, sin, gambling, more women, more sin and tagging along with a bunch of “brothers” from ‘Nam who also were having a tough time coming to terms with the real world after they got back. It had been there that Preacher Jack, then just Jack, John Lewis Jackson, Junior first heard the word, first got his senses back and began that long uphill climb to speak to those laid out before him in the seats between the freshly laid sawdust aisles. As he waited his usual few moment before he came to the “response” part of his ceremony he could, he could as he had counted on some many times, hear the soft sound  of moaning of those out there in the dark as they ran through their own sinful litanies in word silence.

    Here’s the pitch as he continued, “Sinners against the bedeviled blessed night, the devil’s blessed night for that is his calling card time who will be saved” [Not a question and no response but some shuffling-the “no response” an expected one since Preacher Jack was just warming up to his subject and the crowd was still taking in his own confessions against their expectations and were not ready to “hit the sawdust trail” leading to the redemption center behind where Preacher Jack was holding forth.] “Ah, shy, huh, shy or sly thinking that no judgement can penetrate you can take you away from your worldly profit-gouged sins. Thinking that Preacher Jack will absolve you with merciless attentions for your intentions. You brother, you over there with the Robert Hall suit on and lust in your heart, be gone, take off your cloak, go back out into a candid world and tell the brethren of your new found understanding of what makes the world go round, about who shall be the king of kings, who shall benefit from your new-found nakedness.” [And on cue the man in the Robert Hall suit who just so happened to be one of Preacher Jack’s confederates, Jimmy Jamison, a guy who he had met under the bridges in Southern California, a fellow ‘Nam veteran who when he, Preacher Jack, “got religion” after attending a revival tent meeting near Saddleback Valley and saw the profits to be made getting the world-weary to cough up some salvation dough was when cleaned up was the perfect non-descript guy to pull off the “naked go forth” routine off and get people a little antsy seeing a totally naked guy heading out the back of the tent, or wherever the Preacher was holding forth, and would draw many disbelieving stares but no followers. No followers as expected since the idea was not to lead the sheep out the back door but up the sawdust strewn aisle to show true repentance with cash, credit card, no personal checks, in hand to continue the work of the, well, of the lord]              

    After due time for the Robert Hall man to clear the premises the Preacher went in for the kill, went into the long harangue which produced the dough just as long as the “saved,” getting salvation on the cheap if you think about the matter closely did not have to show skinny shanks, desiccated stomachs or ground-sagging breasts. Beautiful.             

    “You, you madam, you with the short dress on and the young children hanging off your arms, what evil thoughts drove you to cloak yourself in garb unfit for the Lord’s eyes. Did you come here for salvation or to continue your wicked whorish ways, looking to smite Adams once more before the Fall. Looking for a whore’s bounty in your hour of need. Speak up, sister, speak up we are all sinners her.” The women immediately put  a sweater she was wearing over those tender knees and spoke of how in the past she had had to take any man’s offer to provide for her children, had to  do things against the Lord’s word.      

    [Preacher Jack had a habit of scanning the crowd in front of him before his performance or during the “call” section to eye who he would bed that evening. Usually it was a good-looking woman like the called upon one with the kids hanging her but sometimes it was some young thing that had a virginal look about her, and very occasionally a married woman who took his talk for good coin. Amazingly he was able to con them into bed by the old “hook” that they were serving God’s message or messenger by “putting” out for the good man of the clothe. Preacher Jack called it a fringe benefit of the job and claimed, without proof, that half the time he would be confronted by a woman who propositioned him. In any case on the night in question that short-skirted woman did give herself to the Preacher in order to be “saved”. ]      

    He asked the woman, not expecting her to, to come forward and testify, to “hit the sawdust trail,” to come and be “saved.” (As mentioned above he had other plans for her salvation.) As he warmed up to the audience he sensed a certain reticence in the crowd to bear witness after that woman did not come forth. He then went into overdrive. To a male cripple [disabled person] on the ground in front he said “Fallen brother I know your affliction, I know you have sinned against the father of us all [the man lowers his head], have had evil thoughts in your heart, have cursed the Lord, his son, for putting in your condition. Have called on the demons to restore you to no avail. Look up brother, hear my words, hear what the Lord has directed me to say to you. Get up, walk, walk the sawdust trail, for a sign. [The man dumbfounded cannot move just yet.] Come now believe, believe in the word, believe in the holy word of God which I bring forth unto you, unto this crowd of sinners. [The crowd a little restless stirs.]  Walk dear brother and accept the Lord’s bounty. [The man makes the first struggling inept attempts to stand up and falters.] Come now the Father of us all will take away the stain of your misbegotten sins, will free you from your affliction if you believe in him. [Once more the man, now in focus to the Preacher, a young man, moves, drags himself forward a bit, pushes on his arms to rise and falls back. The crowd begins to become fixated on the man’s struggle.] I am an agent of the Lord, come and join me, come up the sawdust trial which in the end times will insure the ‘rapture.” [On hearing the word ‘rapture” the young man moves with his arms forward some more the crowd softly urging him on.] Come brother a few more steps and you will be free. [The young man moves close enough for the Preacher to grab and raise him up to a standing position giving a victory sign before quickly sitting him down on the chair behind him. The crowd visibly draws collective sighs and some motion forward is to be seen.] This brother has been raised by the Lord who can deny it. He is saved, he will walk henceforth. Who else will be saved. [The Preacher points to various hearers and direct them to the sawdust.  Several come, eyes closed, hands raised in praise of the Lord.]


    The pitch over Preacher Jack said to himself that that night’s take would be good, very good. This saving souls business was good, very good to him. Strangely he had had to exert very little effort to raise that young man so for a moment he thought maybe there was something to this whole thing, began for a just a slip of a minute to believe his own bullshit. Then suddenly his thoughts turned to that short-skirted woman and the kinky little things he would have her do that night in order for her to gain salvation.                       

    An Encore -Eddie Daley’s Big Score –With Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s The Sting In Mind

    An Encore -Eddie Daley’s Big Score –With Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s The Sting In Mind

     

     

     

     

    A Sketch From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

     

    Eddie Daley, Edward James Daley, to the 1940s slapdash Dorchester triple-decker tenements within earshot of the rattling Redline subway born, dreamed, dreamed big dreams, ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper as the old time used-up now corny expression had it, of making the big score, making easy street, and in the process leaving behind a legend that guys, corner boy guys and grifters would talk about long after he was gone. Talk about in reverent hushed whispers about the guy, Eddie Daley, thereafter to be dubbed the “king of the grifters” who pulled the biggest con that there ever was, and walked away from it free as a bird. Not all big scores, cons, even if consummated, had that final part, that walk away free part, just ask the shade of Frankie Finn who pulled the big Shiloh Fur scam worth two million easy (a lot of money back in the 1950s even when split four ways and a fifth cut for the fence plus his expenses although that sum just walking around money today), pulled it off with just four guys, a good number for the haul, but who “forgot” that he was dealing with one “Rocket Kid,” Johnny Silver, in his entourage who after the heist put two between the eyes of his three confederates, figuring one is easier to count than four no matter than two of the guys were his long time corner boys. The Rocket Kid, Johnny, was subsequently “hit” by one of Buddy Boyle’s boys, everybody though Rolling Rex Buddy’s main contract man did the deed since he had not been seen around for a while, when he tried to fence the stuff since Buddy was the front money man on that caper and Frankie Finn’s cousin to boot. Buddy already rolling in dough had his own way of figuring one is easier to count when he was the one. So that walking away free part was no small part of the leaving a legend behind scenario.

    Eddie’s dream might seem strange to the squares, to those who live life on the square, wake up and do the nine to five bit, or whatever the time bit these days with flexible hours, take two weeks’ vacation in Maine in the summer, raise and put three kids through college at great expense and get a gold watch or a pat on the back when they are turned out to pasture. Yeah, that dream definitely might seem odd to those who have never been from hunger, not just “wants” hunger like a million guys have, maybe more, but no food on the table hunger when the old man drank away the week’s paycheck at the Dublin Grille or hand-me-down clothes from older brothers in style or not hunger that ate deeply into every way that Eddie thought about things from very early on. Those who never worried about big scores, or cons since they had it coming in whatever they had to put out in expenses would never figure Eddie’s dreams out.

    See Eddie was a what they called, called back in the old days, back in the 1930s, and still called them back in Eddie’s coming of age time in the 1960s when he came of age in that Dorchester section of Boston where he triple decker tenement grew up a natural-born grifter. When Eddie first heard that word used, strangely after he had already done his first con and somebody on the corner, that hang out corner being Mel’s Variety on Neponset Avenue near the Fields Corner subway stop, called him a born “grifter” he faked it and said yeah and then next day went to the library and looked it up in the dictionary and came up with this-“A grifter is someone who swindles you through deception or fraud. Synonyms include fraudster, con artist, cheater, confidence man, scammer, hustler, swindler, etc.”

    Eddie smiled the smile of the just on that one. Yeah, a grifter, is a guy like him who figured some angles, any angles, a guy who did this and that, did the best he could without working some nine to five hump job. [Here is a practical corner boy, not Mel’s but Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner down in Carver about thirty miles south of Dorchester but still in “from hunger” land definition- “A grifter to fill in the gaps for the unknowing and clueless was a guy, sometimes a dame, although usually where there was a dame involved she was a roper especially if the mark was hopped up on some sex thing, who spent his eternal life figuring how to go from point A to point B, and point A was wanting dough and point B was getting it by any means necessary but mainly by stealth. By the way do not discount women in the grifter society one of the best who ever lived was a gal who went by the name Delores Del Rio, named herself after the 1940s movie star, who took some duke over in Europe for a cool two million in jewelry after she got him all jammed up and picked him clean leaving him with some fake jewels worth about six dollars in Woolworth’s, beautiful.]

    So Eddie started figuring the angles very early on, very early on indeed and would regale, if that is the right word for it, the corner boys in front of Mel’s Variety Store on Neponset Avenue with tales of his daring do once he started hanging out there when he began high school at Dot High. Of course that was all kids’ stuff, baubles and beads stuff, since nobody expected a kid to have the talents for grifting right out of the box (having the heart, the “from hunger” wanting habits heart was a separate and maybe more pressing question) but there are certain guys, certain Eddie guys, who cling to those dreams pretty hard and give themselves a workout getting in shape.

    From what one guy, Southie Slim, one of the Mel’s corner boys before he moved on to other stuff told me Eddie started pretty early, started simply conning other kids out of their milk money in elementary school over at the Monroe Trotter School. Here is the skinny on that first round according to Slim who got caught out himself before he picked up the grifter life for a while until he found out dealing high-grade dope to the Beacon Hill crowd was a great deal more profitable, and socially smart too once you added in willing women. Eddie somehow had picked up some dice, yeah, a pair and he would bet other kids, boys or girls it did not matter, their milk money on the results. Of course he somehow had “loaded” them so he would win. Now that was a fairly easy thing but here is where Eddie learned his craft. To keep play going he would let the other kids win occasionally, just enough to keep them interested rather than be a greed-head like big bully Matty Dugan down at my elementary school, Myles Standish, down in Carver who just strong-armed a kid a day for his (or her, it did not matter) milk money. But the real tip he picked up young as he was that as long as kids, people, think they can  “pick you clean” you will always have a willing pool of suckers, of people to swindle, small or large but think large.            

    One night, one slow Friday night years later after he had settled deeply into the routine of the life, Eddie was cutting up touches about his old days while smoothing down high-shelf scotch (a no-no when you are on the hustle by the way save that for slow Friday nights when you are cutting up old touches Eddie said), about how he moved up after that dice thing ran its course as all such scams do if for no other reason that the grifter gets tired of the play, and he related what happened after that first scam when he got to the Curley Junior High School. Here is how it went, the basic outline since Eddie was kind of cagey about some of the details like the guys he was talking to that night were going to run right out and pull the scam themselves. Eddie basically ran a pyramid scheme on his fellow students. He conned the kids into giving him their money by saying he knew a guy, a friend of his older brother, Lawrence, who worked as a stable boy at the track and who knew when the fix was on in a race and who could place bets for him and get some bucks fast. Eddie convinced a couple of guys that if they put all their dough together they could buy a ticket and make some easy dough. And it worked for a while since Eddie in his devilish way paid off the guys with his own dough. Each guy getting maybe a buck which to a “from hunger” kid was a big deal. Word got out and soon plenty of kids, even girls were looking to get in on easy street. And so he would dole out some more dough. Then he pulled the plug, told everybody that he was going in for a big score that he was going to put twenty dollars on a sure thing that the stable boy had tipped him to. In the event he actually got about thirty five dollars collected altogether. Of course the horse ran out, never came close so all was lost. Hey, wait a minute have you been listening? Eddie didn’t know any stable boy, didn’t make any bet, so minus his seed money expenses he cleared twenty-five bucks. Here is what Eddie learned though know the “clients” (Eddie’s word) who you are dealing with and don’t be too greedy. He did that same small con for a couple of years and it worked like magic, got him his money for the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Gallivan Boulevard and movie money too. Small con wisdom but still wisdom.

    Eddie as he got older, got into high school, got hanging around with his corner boys at Mel’s, got restless, always had that idea in back of his mind that he would pull a big score if he learned all the tricks of the trade, if he could get onto something big. For a while in high school it looked like he was on the fast track, he learned how to work the charity circuit for walking daddy (his term) walking around money using the old homeless but proud gag that those private charity donors love that he picked up one day when he was playing hooky from school and ran into an old con man, Railroad Bill, on a bench at Boston Common near the Park Street Station who gave him the tip. Eddie would laugh at how easy it was to pull off walking into let’s say the United Methodist Church Social Services office up on Beacon Street dressed in his very real hand-me- downs and unshaven making him look older but not too old (meaning the old telltale sign that the guy had been “on the bum” too long to be proud and work his way out of his current jam) going through his rough things but wanting to get back on track if he only had a the price of a week’s rent in one of the rooming houses that dotted the other side of the hill then (a few still there even today, significantly fewer though). That was good for ten or twenty at a time although the down side of that caper was that you could only use it once, maybe twice. The upside was that there were numerous private social service agencies like that looking for somebody “worthy” to give the dough to.  

     With that walking around money Eddie would work a variation of his kids’ stuff milk money run, he would sell lottery tickets (in the days before the state got its greasy hands into that racket), for different charities, say he was raising it for blind kids or to send kids to summer camp. Offer as prizes radios, televisions, maybe a record player, stuff like that which people wouldn’t mind spending a dollar or “three for five dollars” on to help some crippled-up kids, give them fresh air, or some other small break or something. So he would grab the dough and then have one or more of his corner boys rip off what was needed over at Lechmere Sales or someplace like that (usually using at first “Five Fingers” Riley or “Rat” Malone who started that racket early once they figured out that if you were fearless in grabbing stuff nobody was going to catch you, and that worked for a long time until they “graduated” to armed robberies and did consecutive nickels, dimes and quarters in various Massachusetts state pens).

    See nobody gave a good damn if the charity he was hustling for ever got the dough all they knew was that for a buck, or three for five, they had a chance for their own television, radio, or record player important to hard-pressed high school kids who would not have those items otherwise. Needless to say the corner boys he used were good and he paid them off well like he should to keep them in line, another lesson learned, and so he honed his skills.

    When Eddie graduated from high school and was to face the workaday world though he panicked a bit, decided that he needed to move up a step if he was going to avoid the fate of his belabored father, belabored by drink, yes, but also hard work on the docks, not always steady and with a brood of kids and a nagging wife to contend with. If the nine-to-five was not for Eddie neither was staying down in the depths either. (A history teacher had mentioned one time in class that all of her charges should seek to move up the latter of society at least one jump ahead of their parents and that kind of stuck with him.) So he started going into downtown Boston, started hanging around the Commons regularly unlike in high school where he would go just when playing hooky but really to blow off steam when something exploded at home in that damn crowded apartment, started to listen to guys to see if they had any ideas like that time “Railroad Bill” gave him the scoop on the private charity gag, had been on easy street at one time. He didn’t bother with the eternal winos and junkies for they had nothing to say that he could use but to guys and there always were guys who maybe had been on the hustle and got waylaid, or just got old in a young man’s racket and so maybe had some words to share. And before he knew it he met Sidewalk Sam and Bright Boy Benny a couple of guys who told him about old time scams, about how guys survived by their wits in the hard-ass Depression days. And come some old Friday night, a slow girl-less Friday usually, Eddie would hold forth about what he had learned in the world, learned from Sidewalk and Bright Boy.

    Here, for example, is what he told the boys one Friday night, one “Five-Fingers” Malone-less Friday night marking the first time he got bagged for doing a robbery, unarmed that time, of a gas station and was doing a six month stretch at Deer Island, which will give you an idea of where Eddie was heading, a story of a scam that seemed impossible to pull off given what they were trying to do. Unless you knew how very greedy some guys, even smart guys were. Let’s call it the wallet switch, an old scam that Eddie would perform a couple of times later, successfully. You need two guys for this, at least. In this case two used to be “from hunger” Great Depression grifters Denver Slim and Gash Lavin. And you must know your mark’s movements pretty well and whether they have dough on them, a more usual circumstance than you might think back then than now that we are in this age of the ATM and cashable credit cards among those a shade to the left of the law (and a whole new Eddie-less generation tech- savvy grifters with their dreams, and stories they are telling their confederates on slow Friday nights). I won’t go into the preliminaries about setting the mark up, but they knew their guy, knew his movements and knew what he was carrying, so just rest assured that Denver and Gash had seeded their mark. Well actually Denver had seeded the mark, one Ricardo “Slice” Russo (you figure out the why of that moniker, okay), who was the bag man for Lou Thorpe’s numbers racket in New York City, yes the Lou Thorpe who ran wild back in the day and made a splash in Vegas to top off his career but this is earlier when he was greedier than Midas and so was particularly susceptible to any scheme that put money in his waiting hands.

    Once a week Slice headed for Chicago on the midnight train to pay off Lou’s confederates there (at the high end of the rackets there are always confederates to pay off, cops too so it is just part of the overhead to keep on the streets. Guys down the bottom of the food chain don’t have such financial worries they are too busy keeping one eye out for looming John Law.)

    Now bag men are pretty low in the food chain of any criminal enterprise but are like Eddie and every other Eddie-like dreamer also groomed on the con, on easy street dreams. What Denver did was to ask Slice, whom he cornered by evoking “Shark” Mahoney’s name, a mutual acquaintance, as he was heading to the station on the way to Chicago to drop off three thousand to a guy, “Bones” Kelly, also known to both men, on Division Street in that city for him. That money had been placed in a wallet, a black leather wallet similar to the one Slice was carrying the twenty thousand pay-off in, and when Slice got to Chi town he gave the wallet to the Division Street guy, to Kelly, the one with three thousand in it, three thousand in counterfeit money as Kelly later found out. See Slice had figured that doing Denver’s delivery was like finding money on the ground especially when he thought up the fake dough angle. So tough luck, Denver. Worse though, worse for Slice anyway, the mob’s wallet also had twenty thousand in counterfeit money when he delivered the wallet to an office in the Loop.

    What had happened was that Gash had been on that train, had in the course of bumping into Slice switched wallets and got off in Cleveland leaving Slice to his troubles. But here is what you have to know, know about the mob. They thought Slice, a troublesome bag man and so an easy fall guy was pulling a fast one on them when he explained what he thought had happened and he wound up in the Illinois River face down before anybody investigated anything. Beautiful work by Denver and Gash who headed out West for a while just to be on the safe side but also know this-if you are running on the high side expect some blow-back, nasty blow-back if you don’t walk away clean. Just ask Slice

    One night, another of those aimless nights when there was no action, or maybe Eddie was cooling out from a con, a wise move since overdoing the con scene leads inevitably to trouble, usually fist, gun or John Law trouble, he told the guys a story, a story about the granddaddy of all the scores, a haul of almost half a million back in the 1930s when half a million was not just walking around money like it is today. A story that Nutsy Callahan, another one of the Great Depression guys he would listen to over on the Commons told him about one afternoon after he had played out some luscious honey over on Tremont Street who had “curled his toes” and he was a bit too restless to head home (Eddie wasn’t much for girlfriends or serious female company on his way up and maybe it was better for him to just catch a quick “curl the toes” on an off-afternoon with some passing fancy because no question women are far tougher to deal with that the hardest scam). The way Nutsy told the story implied that he might have been in on the caper, although like all good grifters, grafters, percentage guys, and midnight sifters, he would put the account in the third person just in case the statute of limitations had not run out on whatever the offenses were, or, more likely, some pissed off Capo or his descendants were still looking to take some shots at guys who pulled such scams.

    Nutsy had told Eddie a few lesser scams that he had been involved in and Eddie told a few lies of his own but the important thing for Eddie, or rather Eddie’s future was that he was looking to break out of the penny-ante grifts and ride easy street so he was looking for ideas, long ago ideas really because just maybe with a duke here and a juke there the thing could be played again. Eddie didn’t bother to tell Nutsy that for Nutsy would probably not have told the story or as likely dismiss Eddie’s chances out of hand. So Nutsy told the story and Eddie’s eyes went bonkers over the whole set-up.

    This one involved “Top Hat” Hogan so named for the simple fact that as long as anybody had known him, or could remember, he always wore a fancy day top hat although rarely, very rarely, with any accompanying evening clothes. Some of his girl friends said he wore the damn thing when he was in bed with them and that was just fine because Top Hat was a walking daddy when it came to loving his women. Top Hat had been widely assumed to have been the brains behind the Silver Smith Fur scam, the Morgan Bank scam and the Golden Gate Mine dust-up which people talked about almost until the war (World War II if you are counting). So Top Hat under any circumstances was a number one grifter who any guy with any dough, any serious dough, had better check up on to see if Top Hat had been in the vicinity if he wanted to keep said cash. The other key guy, and the reason Top Hat, who had been semi-retired at the time of this caper and rightfully so having run the rack already, was a raw kid, a kid with promise but not much else then, was “Jet” Jenkins. And the reason that Top Hat even considered teaming up with a raw kid like Jet, was that he was the son of Happy Heddy Jenkins, a fancy woman who had “curled his toes” back in his younger days. Heddy had had some good days and bad days but one of the bad days had been meeting up with the famous gambler, Black Bart Benson, one of the great flim-flam, flim-flam meaning simply a cheater without mercy and guys, leg-breakers if anybody had a problem with that, poker players of the day.

    Old Bart had nevertheless had run into a streak of bad luck at cards which even cheaters face at times, had borrowed and lost almost a one hundred thousand dollars from Heddy (who ran on the best, friendliest, and easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouses in Chicago). Somehow things had taken a turn for the worst after Black Bart left Heddy high and dry and she was back on cheap street trying to raise a helter-skelter growing boy with short funds. Not so Black Bart who had cheated his way to a million dollar bonanza when his luck changed. (That cheating not known, obviously, to the guys taking the beating at the card table but Heddy knew her Bart and imparted that wisdom onto her son.) When Heddy sent Jet to see if Bart would ante up the cash he had borrowed from her he dismissed Jet with a flick of his hand, and after a serious beating by one of his leg-breakers had him dumped him in some back alley in Altoona one night. Bart had, with a laugh, as his boys administered that beating, told Jet that he should sue him in court to get his money back as he wasn’t in the mood to give some bent whore dough that she had gotten from her whorehouse dollies. So Heddy, so Jet, and after hearing about what Bart had called Heddy, so Top Hat were primed for revenge. But more than revenge because that is easy, kids’ stuff, but to send Bart back to cheap street hustling winos with three-card Monte tricks or stuff like that.

    The key to understanding Black Bart was that like a lot of con artists, no, most con artists, no, make that all con artists, is that beside being easy prey to any scam especially a scam that plays to their greed they always assume that they are smarter than whoever is making the proposition and can double-back on it to their profit. Top Hat had easy pickings when he ran across guys like Bart. Here is the way that Top Hat worked his magic, although when Nutsy finished telling Eddie the lay Eddie thought the venture had too many moving parts, too many guys in on the score once Black Bart was brought down.

    It went like this. “Buggy” Bannon knew Black Bart, knew he was always interested in an easy score so Buggy put the word in Bart’s ear about some silver and gold mining stock that was about to go through the roof once the worst parts of the Depression were over. So Buggy, who had worked with Top Hat on the Silver Smith scam and so was trustworthy, or as trustworthy as any guy working on a scam can be introduced Top Hat to Bart as a chief stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. Then Top Hat went through the traces, got Bart hooked in with the knowledge about the gold and silver stock. Of course Top Hat had had “Horseless” Harry sent up a nice brochure in color all about the various possibilities of the mining stock and Bart got interested, saw quick dollar signs. Of course even an over-the-top greedy guy like Bart had to see some real stuff, some real stockbroker operation, so Top Hat had rented out space in a building in the financial district and created out of sheer nothing a stock market room complete with ticker-tape, running around employees (all grifters from out west so that Bart would not recognize them) or and investors milling around.

    That was the part that Eddie thought was over the top, the too many moving parts aspect, but in any case it all looked good to Bart. Here is the carrot Top Hat told Bart to invest a few thousand to see how it went. And so Bart did, bringing to the stock room five thousand in cash as all con artists did then in the days before working kited checks and credit cards and stuff like that opened out new ways to bilk people, including smart guys. A few days later Top Hat delivers ten thousand to Bart, all fresh dough, and so they are off to the races because now he sees that this thing could make him really rich. Of course Top Hat knowing that you have to bring a guy, a sucker along, knowing you needed to whet his appetite had just added five of his own money to Bart’s to bring in the bonanza (writing it off as overhead just like any other legal or illegal operation).

    Bart, although no fool and who still had some suspicions, was no question hooked though as Top Hat fed him another stock tip and told him he should let the ten thousand ride, which he did. About a week later Top Hat delivers twenty-two thousand to Bart and he was really hooked, really wants to put more money down. Especially when that twenty-two went to fifty grand a few weeks later. Bart said to Top Hat that it was like finding money on the street. Then Top Hat really got to him, let him know that in South Africa, a known gold, silver and diamond mother lode to everybody in those days that a new field was within days of being explored and discovered and that Bart should be ready to go big and get in on the ground floor. Here is the beauty of the thing though. The financial pages were almost in a conspiracy with Top Hat because they were also projecting some speculation about new minefields. One day Top Hat told Bart to get all the cash he could gather because that South African stock, low, very low at the time would be going through the roof once the discovery was confirmed. So a few days later Bart brought a suitcase filled with cash, about a million maybe a little less, and pushed it over to Top Hat. Top Hat went to the cashier (“Hangman” Henry of all people) and brought back a receipt to Bart.

    Now you can figure out the rest. A few days later news of that new minefield did come in and that stock did rise although in a world filled with gold and silver with nobody to buy stuff yet not as much as you would have expected but still a good take. Bart then called Top Hat to tell him to cash in. No answer at Top Hat’s number. Bart then went to the stock exchange room to find nothing but a “for rent” sign on the doors. As for Top Hat and Jet well they were on the train back to New York with that one hundred grand for Heddy and a twinkle came into Top Hat’s eyes about those old days when she “curled his toes,” and might again. Beautiful.

    That story etched in his brain Eddie Daley started putting together a few ideas in his head, getting on the phone to a few guys (fewer than Top Hat had in his operation), and started making some dough connections for financing. Out in the grifter night they still talk about Eddie Daley, whereabouts unknown, “king of the grifters” after he took Vince Edwards the big book operator for about a million and a quarter in cold hard cash. You now know the back story on that one.