Sunday, November 26, 2017

The Meaning of Black Friday

The Meaning of Black Friday

When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths.

Black Friday began as a traffic accident. Or a series of them. In Philadelphia in the early 1960s, police noted that the two days after Thanksgiving were characterized by heavy traffic, and, in the pre-Nader days of perilous auto travel, more bloody mayhem than usual.
The relationship between extra traffic and downtown sales had been observed early on, and traders were unhappy that the ominous name was sticking to one of their best sales days. Doubtless this had happened elsewhere too, but in Philadelphia business had Abe Rosen as their municipal representative. One of the country’s leading PR gurus, Rosen suggested the city rename the two days after Thanksgiving “Big Friday” and “Big Saturday.”
The crude boosterism worked, but not as intended. “Big Saturday” dropped away. “Big Friday” was noted, but simply reverted to its earlier designation as “Black Friday.” Picking it out as an event had drawn attention to it, and the Philadelphia Inquirer played it big. By the 1980s, the name began to spread across the country.
That “Big Friday” returned to “Black Friday” was inevitable. Black days have a history as long as the calendar, and attach to many events, but they have one common attribute: reversal, subversion, undermining. In modernity it has attached itself to financial collapse, natural disaster, terrorism, and military defeat. In the Roman calendar, a “black letter day” was one marked with charcoal on the wall calendar, one to be waited out with circumspection.
More pertinently in the Christian era, these days were marked with the idea of “black mass,” initially applied by the early official Church to gnostic sects, who included sexual rituals in their masses. By the medieval period, “black masses” also referred to parody church services held on fair days, and “Mad May,” when long-suffering parishioners conduct comic masses, wearing silly hats and reciting the Eucharistic with barnyard animal cries.
The church tolerated Mad May and the like as a necessary release valve, perhaps with some awareness of just how oppressive their official theology could be. “Black” anything, in this respect, is a nod to the incompleteness of any belief system, its inability to map onto the full range of human experience — its materiality, muck, and venality.
So it was inevitable that “Big Friday” would revert, for “Black Friday” is constitutionally mired in sin. By the time it stuck in the eighties, it had acquired a new meaning that cemented it. It was allegedly the day that retailers finally “went into the black” — made a profit — and shopping thus acquired a civic and patriotic dimension.
That didn’t hold either. As the day became bigger through the 1990s and 2000s, with ever-more dramatic price reductions, ever-larger and rambunctious crowds, and greater acts of consumer durable acquisition, the character of it as a day of disorder returned.
As with all aspects of American consumption in the 2000s, it acquired a surreal aspect. The many objects being hoarded and carted away were so large, the malls were so big, the cars were so oversized that the spectacle was almost a parody of consumption.
It was a kind of reverse potlatch, the somewhat mythical ceremonies of object-destruction crafted by anthropologists out of various ceremonies in the Native American Pacific Northwest. In such ceremonies, weapons, tools, and even canoes were destroyed in tribute and competition, and as a release from objects themselves, their sequestration of energy in material.
The social purpose of such activities — in the very abundant Pacific Northwest — appears to have been to prevent the accumulation of surplus, which would distort reciprocal relations. The side effect was Dionysian release, energy returned to energy, the present moment reasserted. We are not what we have made, we are what we do.
In its heroic era, from the 1980s to 2008, “Black Friday” had a paradoxical cast. It was an accumulation of things, but it was also a dissipation of energy, a breaking of rigid structures. That structure was, of course, Thanksgiving itself, which has long since lost its festive aspect and become a dutiful occasion, larded with anxiety and forced conviviality.
In its original form, Thanksgiving combined Dionysian excess — the joy of eating actual meat! — with agape, collective love. Right into the 1970s, meat consumption was not an everyday possibility for many in the middle class and below; limited incomes remained associated with limited caloric intake. The holiday retained its pre-modern association with luxe and indulgence. It’s no coincidence that the iconic Thanksgiving portrayal — Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting as part of his “Four Freedoms” series — was dedicated to “Freedom From Want.”
The turkey in the picture looks average to our eyes, but it was exaggeratedly large for the time, a period when the birds were not dosed with antibiotics. Moreover the freedom Rockwell was commemorating had nothing to do with the “negative” freedoms endemic in the American tradition. It was one of the two “positive freedoms” (together with “freedom from fear”) that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had smuggled into patriotism, from the European socialist tradition.
In its original form, Thanksgiving took the Christian sacrament and regressed it to a degree, to its pagan roots in harvest celebration. The rare mood of well-being from adequate protein and carbs could submerge whatever irritations with each other the pilgrims might have entertained. This infrequent satiation bonded together people who otherwise spent a lot of time damning each other to hell (and massacring native peoples).
That, of course, no longer holds. For nearly half a century, Thanksgiving has occurred in a society where food for many Americans is not only not scarce, but in perpetual excess. For not a few, most of life consists of warding off food — resisting its intrusion into every area of existence, its ability to attach to multiple forms of desire.
Relationship to food defines class. In popular depictions, the rising professional class is defined by its ability to resist food, its puritan moral strength. A broader working class is increasingly defined but its joyful surrender to it. Whole regional cultures — the Gulf South around Mississippi for example — have come to be characterized by it. You can see its register in that ultimate arbiter of American class, sitcoms, where middle-class examples are populated by thin, tight people, while those with broader appeal — The King of QueensMike and Molly — put obesity at the center of everyday life.
Thanksgiving now consists of doing what most people try not to do all the time — systematically overeat — with relatives one may or may not wish to spend some time with.
In its original formulation it was Dionysian, a feast of food it may well have been wiser to store, but what the hell. It was, in its way, a kind of Black Thursday, when the meager stores got used up in ill-advised excess. The celebration was a zero-sum game, since every additional course meant further shortage later. Now, for many in the advanced capitalist world there is no shortage.
So in response to duty — to the alleged abandon disguised as duty — Black Friday has developed as the sly alternative. The activity is, by its very nature, as anti-Thanksgiving as you could get. Thanksgiving is, after all, a subject, even an abject celebration, in which one acknowledges submission to the whims of a distant God. Its role is in part to balance out Christmas and the practice of giving to children, in which non-reciprocity is celebrated: the child receives gifts without any expectation of reciprocal action on its part. The child’s role is simply to be. As adults we take our joy from that — Christmas Day without children is worthless and sad.
In that respect, Black Friday has a mutant aspect to it. It has taken the cornucopia effect of Christmas, and applied it to adults. It is, or was, a release from the duty of giving thanks, into a day of infantilized desire. Everything about Black Friday in its high phase acquired a ritual meaning: the drive to the mall, the lining up in the snow, the fist fights, the local news crews there for the fist fights, the rush as the doors opened, the carting away, the staggering under the weight of seventy-inch plasma screens.
The actual utility of the discount goods really functioned as a McGuffin for the activity of acquiring them. What possible improvement in viewing could a seventy-inch plasma screen offer that exceeded the sheer joy of carting it away at a major discount? You enacted the Dinoysian ceremony, but then all the shit stuck around, silting up your house. Black Friday participants, if they had any sense, would buy their goods, leave the store, and dump them straight in waiting garbage cans. They would never feel as good in their adult lives.
For two decades, Thanksgiving and Black Friday had an uneasy truce. Right up until the last five years or so, the stores observed the limits of Black Friday, holding to the daylight hour of nine 9 AM before opening the doors. Until the 2007–8 crash, that implicit limit was respected. But after that, as the country dipped into recession, those rules began to collapse. The start of Black Friday got earlier and earlier, as big box stores tried to compete with each other for scarce customers, and against online retail, which could offer discounts at any time.
Cyber retail has dissolved the commercial nexus of time and space altogether. Discount waves can be offered on specific classes of goods, geared to specific algorithms, and a bargain can be had on an iPhone, in a two-minute exchange, while waiting for the pie to brown properly.
Online retailing de-fetishizes consumption and turns stores into delivery depots. No matter how much online retailers try to replicate the ritual fetish of physical shopping, they cannot, and online retailing starts to reduce consumption of consumer durables back to a more rational pattern. The relative shrinking of the circuit of consumption — which lies at the root of the current non-recovery — appears to be in part a result of the dephysicalization of retail. The core techniques relied on by retailers of the past century, such as the “paradise effect” — the sense of overwhelming plenty in department stores — and the “Gruen transfer” — the disorientation that occurs on walking into an atrium mall — no longer applies. People are less likely to buy shit they have no use for.
The 2007–8 crash saw the collapse of a whole range of chains, but perhaps the most significant were Brookstone and The Sharper Image, mall-fodder selling — what? No one quite knew, even when they had left a store having made a purchase. The Sharper Image, a sort of repository of pointless miscellany, founded in the seventies on a quintessential seventies product, jogging watches, disappeared altogether. With them went Borders and Circuit City and many others. Dozens of chains are now hanging on waiting for the inevitable blow, another recession, and a fresh winnowing. Meanwhile, online retailers continue to trade in loss. Amazon, having destroyed physical retailing as an enterprise of profit, is yet to make one.
Thus the damage at the moment is doubled. Big box stores and chains, in their desperate attempt to keep spatial retailing going, have extended Black Friday to Thanksgiving. Eventually, they’ll push it to Wednesday, in some absurd attempt to pretend it has not dissolved altogether.
By 2011, stores such as Target and Macy’s began opening at midnight plus one second, technically observing the sanctity of Thanksgiving, but traducing it with the technical manner of their obeisance. The next year, the rubicon was crossed. Walmart and others began opening at 8 PM on Thanksgiving Day in states where that was permitted. This year, Radio Shack, that bizarre coelacanth survivor of electronics retailing, announced that they would open at 8 AM on Thanksgiving.
Black Friday consumes White Thursday. The holiday is abolished — not just for the unhappy staff compelled to turn up to half-empty stores on a holiday of family gathering, but for everyone. That’s the whole point of the sacred and the profane, and the asymmetry between them, and the manner in which a culture appends on such.
To remain sacred, a cultural limit must be respected by everyone. To debase it into profanity, into muck, filth, shit, and waste, requires only a single debaser. Thus does the transition from culture to accumulation work. It takes only one hoarder to hold their axe or canoe back from potlatch, for the cultural system to be upended, and reciprocity to be dissolved.
Black Friday came to glory in the last period of Western consumerism, when the economy effectively ran in reverse — when an ever-inflated circuit of consumption kept an ever-shrinking circuit of production alive. The final respatialization of US living — the desperate gold rush of mall building and exurbanization — peaked as a parabola, its high moment a zero point.
Deadmalls.com, that compendium of retail decay, starts in the late 1990s, and has all but concluded by the mid 2000s, after around 20 percent of the malls in the US have met their demise. Many have now been demolished or turned into “new urban” town centers. They are dying too, now, and deadmalls.com, will get a fresh crop in the years to come, if anyone can even be bothered to catalog a fresh round of retail failure. Most likely, the gloss will have gone off.
The first round of deadmalls was spectacular: vast spaces designed for commercial fun rotting away. A few remain, such as White Flint outside Washington, DC, a near-dead mall with two stores remaining, but with the entire mall perpetually running, escalators humming away, lights on. I would advise everyone to make a day-trip of it, before the wrecking ball finally comes through. Not for nothing is the great photographic record of dead malls titled “Black Friday.” The second round will just be sad.
In the last couple of years, the encroachment of Black Friday on Thanksgiving has come to the attention of the wider culture. For years, workers have been protesting the demands of corporations, that they serve on what is a holiday for others. But, since Shays’ Rebellion and before, the American idea of universal celebration and citizenship has never included the propertyless, so their protests were overlooked.
It was only when the encroachment of Black Friday on Thanksgiving became absurd, a stuffing, a farce, that mainstream media began to sit up and take notice. The fact that this could even occur — that a sales event could wholly encroach on a collective holiday that lies at the root of national identity — is a measure of how decayed and compromised that identity has become.
One no longer expects the conservatives, centered around National Review, to object to this winnowing away of grassroots American life, but even the renewed and iconoclastic paleo-conservatives at the American Conservative cannot find it within themselves to make a clear and declarative protest against the cannibalization of tradition by capitalist process. They cannot admit what they will have to acknowledge sooner or later: that capitalism is a deconstructive, nihilistic process that lives off its cultural outside, and thereby consumes it.
Black Friday relies for its occult meaning on the previous inviolability of Thanksgiving, which it then debases. This year, with the 8 AM Thanksgiving openings, it has completed the process, and eaten its way out the other side of what remained of the “holy” day.
As a traffic accident it began, and thus does it end, a disaster that everyone recognizes as such, but no one has much idea what to do about — paralyzed by the contradictions of a culture whose system has gone to war against it.

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance   

This holiday time of year (and Political Prisoner Month each June as well) is when by traditions of solidarity and comradeship those of us who today stand outside the prison walls sent our best wishes from freedom to our class-war sisters and brothers inside the walls and redouble our efforts in that task.  

Don't forget Mumia, Leonard Peltier, Reality Leigh Winner, The Ohio 7's Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman and all those Black Panther and other black militants still be held in this country's prisons for  risking their necks for a better world for their people, for all people.

  

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside -It Is The Same Struggle

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance   

This holiday time of year (and Political Prisoner Month each June as well) is when by traditions of solidarity and comradeship those of us who today stand outside the prison walls sent our best wishes from freedom to our class-war sisters and brothers inside the walls and redouble our efforts in that task.  

Don't forget Mumia, Leonard Peltier, Reality Leigh Winner, The Ohio 7's Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman and all those Black Panther and other black militants still be held in this country's prisons for  risking their necks for a better world for their people, for all people.

  

From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace-"Racketeers For Peace"

From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace-"Racketeers For Peace" 


The "'racketeer" reference is from a statement by General Smedley Butler who after a lifetime of military service as a Marine from grunt to the highest levels of generalship concluded that "war is a racket"-you can find the rest of his statement with those words pominently in it at Wikipedia by Googling his name. 




                 RACKETEERS  FOR  PEACE
For Sev, Pat and Comrades
                      November 16, 2017

                                    I
Since Cain killed Abel countless years ago,
The world has suffered violence and war
As personal and national ego
Push us to murder and make fields of gore.

A second fundamental motive--fear,
Convinces us to fight in self-defense
When great, imagined menaces appear
To threaten us, with or without good evidence.

Demonic greed will often overrule
God-given reason, urge men to ignore
The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule,
Especially with assists from Emperor.

Patriotism is a shibboleth
That leads poor sheep to slaughterhouse of war,
Whose wealthy stockholders, merchants of death,
Gain gold beyond the dreams of Caesar's whore.

Then countless brave benighted mothers' sons
And fathers' precious daughters fight and die,
Misguided myrmidons and amazons,
Whose needless deaths, most nations glorify.

Poor troops trapped in the labyrinth of war
May relish their adventure for a time,
Until they meet the raging Minotaur
Who murders even warriors in their prime.

That slaughterhouse, that labyrinth, impact
Millions of citizens, both near and far,
Who never plot or fear nor feel attacked
And want no part of useless, senseless war,

But suffer, nonetheless, the insane rage
That shatters lives and cities when it comes,
As mindless armies and armadas wage
War--paragon of pandemoniums.

                                  II
"War is a racket," Smedley Butler said:
"A few men profit while the many pay."
Their costs of business are the masses dead,
Maimed, grieving, homeless--worse in every way.

If General Butler could be here tonight,
He'd recognize and decorate his sons:
Veterans for Peace, determined to fight
The fatal folly of more bombs and guns.

We need to raise a racket for release
From deadly, bankrupting racket of war.
I cast my lot with you brave Vets for Peace,
Who've learned the hard way what's worth fighting for.

Two champions of peace for humankind--
Pat Scanlon, indefatigable man,
And Severyn Bruyn, inestimable mind--
Campaign for peace in every way they can.

These Veterans for Peace have gifts of Orpheus
To soothe the savage heart and pacify the mind:
Composer Sev, bold singer Pat, inspire us
To leave the bloody, so-called "arts of war" behind.

We comrades honor them as Racketeers
For Peace--the kind of citizens we need,
Who work to counter manufactured fears,
Defy the deadly enterprise of greed.

We strive with these prime paladins for peace,
Against the misled partisans of war,
To counter warmongers who want to fleece
The flock, and butcher some, to profit more.

We toast their leadership and zeal for peace,
The end of war´s destruction, death and grief.
Let patriotic theft and murder cease;
Unmask "heroic" war--killer and thief.

Congratulations, Sev, and kudos, Pat,
You guys, politically so incorrect!
May all, like you, heed Smedley's caveat:
The curse of war forevermore reject!

You led us in the church and in the streets,
Brave Racketeers for Peace who boldly say:
War victories are actually defeats.
There has to be….   Peace IS the better way!


 ©   Bob Wire 

Dancing Cheek To Cheek- Again-Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s “Top Hat” (1935)- A Film Review

Dancing Cheek To Cheek- Again-Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s “Top Hat” (1935)- A Film Review







DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, music by Irving Berlin, 1935

No, I will not start this review of what even to me seems like a never-ending series of dance films by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire reminding me of the never-ending Bob Dylan concert tours (and bootleg CD volumes) or the William Powell and Myrna Loy Nick and Nora Charles The Thin Man series going on and on about the superiority of Mr. Astaire’s dancing and grace compared to Mr. Gene Kelly based on the latter’s performance in the Gershwin-etched An American In Paris. Doing so would be merely overkill since once again in this film Mr. Astaire shows what grace, style and athleticism (the one attribute in which Mr. Kelly has an edge over Mr. Astaire) combined looks like when the hammer goes down. My understanding is the film under review Top Hat was one of the ten that this well-known dance pair did together although it seems like I did many more reviews than that already rather large number.

Since the real deal in these Astaire-Rogers pairings is the dancing this review can be mercifully short and sweet. After all nobody has ever accused the screenwriters of these frilly things of writing Oscar-worthy material to back up the dancing and the music by the likes of Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Cole Porter or as here Irving Berlin. Here is the “skinny,” very skinny as my old friend and colleague Sam Lowell is fond of saying. Top Broadway musical showman Jerry, Fred Astaire’s role, is in London to bail out some producer’s musical when along the way he meets, well who else, Dale, played by Ginger Rogers, who seems to be some kind of model for an upscale high society Italian fashion designer. Naturally Jerry goes bug-eyed when he spies Dale and makes his big play. She somewhat guardedly is intrigued by him (after out of nowhere doing a serious pair dance with him out in the park which either meant something was in the water or that the dance indicated in an unspoken way that they were kindred spirits-you figure it out).
   

All well and good although this would be an extremely short film with basically nothing else but dancing and singing if it was left to that. What keeps the thing moving along a bit is a case of mistaken identity. Dale is led to believe that Jerry is the producer who just so happens to be married and therefore nothing but a cad and ne’er-do-well even if he can dance up a storm. Moreover, supposedly married to a good friend of hers. This miscue business takes them eventually to Italy where the thing gets played out and resolved in Jerry’s favor after a few more songs and a few more dances. The dancing by Astaire making obvious that he was the one you could not keep your eyes off of with his moves and not Ms. Rogers. End of story as they go dancing into that good night. See this one mainly for the great dance scene when they go Dancing Cheek to Cheek.

US nuclear arsenal to cost $1.2tn over next 30 years, independent CBO report finds

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/31/us-nuclear-arsenal-cost-cbo-report?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=250448&subid=5509345&CMP=GT_US_collection

US nuclear arsenal to cost $1.2tn over next 30 years, independent CBO report finds

  • CBO finds total price tag marks 25% increase from previous estimate
  • Nuclear Posture Review under way and expected by end of the year
An intercontinental ballistic missile with a simulated warhead is launched during an operational test at Vandenberg air force base in California in April.
An intercontinental ballistic missile with a simulated warhead is launched during an operational test at Vandenberg air force base in California in April. Photograph: Pix/Rex/Shutterstock
The cost of the US nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years will be over $1.2tn, even before any new weapons ordered by the Trump administration, and is unlikely to be affordable without cuts elsewhere in the defence budget, according to a independent congressional report.

Trump team drawing up fresh plans to bolster US nuclear arsenal

The total price tag marks nearly a 25% increase from previous estimate, taking in the modernisation programme established under the Obama administration, which accounts for $400bn, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found. The costs would peak in the 2020s and the 2030s.
A new Nuclear Posture Review is under way and expected around the end of the year. Trump has repeatedly vowed to bolster the nuclear stockpile, and the defence department is reportedly considering the development of a low-yield warhead for a ballistic missile, and reintroducing a sea-launched cruise missile, among a variety of new options.
The CBO report warns that such new capabilities would increase the total bill for the US arsenal yet further.
“If these plans reach fruition, it would be the largest nuclear buildup since the Reagan administration. This is not affordable,” said Stephen Schwartz, an independent nuclear analyst and editor of the book, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940.
“Pursuing nuclear modernization will be challenging in the current environment,” the report said, adding that it would compete with parallel ambitions to upgrade the navy and the air force, and increase the size of the army.
It is the first comprehensive costing of the US nuclear weapons programme. The report offers three approaches for cost reductions to make it affordable. One would keep the programme as is currently planned but delay elements of it, bringing potential savings of 5%.
The second looks at ways of reducing the programme but keeping to the existing ceiling agreed with Russia of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. One variant of that approach examined by the CBO would be to do without one leg of the nuclear “triad”, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and keeping air-launched and sea-launched weapons. That would generate savings of 10%, the report said.
The third approach would incorporate a reduction of the deployed strategic stockpile to 1,000 warheads, a cut the defence department under the Obama administration said could be made without affecting the US nuclear deterrent, which would save 5% to 11% of the total.
“The report blows apart the ‘do everything or do nothing’ false choice repeatedly posited by Pentagon officials,” Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said. “But perhaps the biggest contribution of new CBO nuclear cost study is the evaluation of options to manage and reduce the mammoth price tag.”
Reif added: “Meanwhile, the Trump administration is reportedly considering adding new weapons to the arsenal, which would increase the budget train-wreck odds, and undermine US security.”

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From The Pages Of "Workers World"-After Bay of Pigs U.S. continues failed attempts against Cuban revolution


In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26th Movement


From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (2015)


Every leftist, hell, everybody who stands on the democratic principle that each nation has the right to self-determination should cautiously rejoice at the “defrosting” of the long-time diplomatic relations between the American imperial behemoth and the island of Cuba (and the freedom of the remaining Cuban Five in the bargain). Every leftist militant should understand that each non-capitalist like Cuba going back to the establishment of the now defunct Soviet Union has had the right (maybe until we win our socialist future the duty) to make whatever advantageous agreements they can with the capitalist world. That despite whatever disagreements we have with the political regimes ruling those non-capitalist states. That is a question for us to work out not the imperialists.

For those who have defended the Cuban Revolution since its victory in 1959 under whatever political rationale (pro-socialist, right to self-determination, or some other hands off policy) watching on black and white television the rebels entering Havana this day which commemorates the heroic if unsuccessful efforts at Moncada we should affirm our continued defense of the Cuban revolution. Oh yes, and tell the American government to give back Guantanamo while we are at it.   



50 years after Bay of Pigs U.S. continues failed attempts against Cuban revolution

By Teresa Gutierrez
Published Apr 20, 2011 7:55 PM

Fifty years ago, on April 16, 1961, Cuban Commander in Chief Fidel Castro declared the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution.

Beloved around the world to this day, Fidel stated in 1961: “This is what they cannot forgive us ... that we have made a Socialist Revolution right under the nose of the United States. ... Comrades, workers and farmers, this is the Socialist and democratic Revolution of the people, by the people and for the people. And for this Revolution ... we are willing to give our lives.”

It was a momentous development that shook the world. Revolutionaries everywhere triumphed in the victory, and all those in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America who lived wretchedly under the yoke of imperialism felt tremendous possibilities for their own liberation struggles.

It was a historic step forward for workers and oppressed worldwide — one that resonates today.

Fidel’s proclamation was made as Cubans paid their respects to those who had been killed the day before during the U.S. bombing of a Cuban airbase, an attack that was a prelude to the Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) incident.

The Bay of Pigs was a military attempt by the U.S. government to destroy the Cuban Revolution so that imperialism could restore its domination over Cuba. The military attack failed and was a major defeat for imperialism.

Counterrevolutionary efforts continue

U.S. imperialism has not and will never reconcile itself to the building of socialism at its doorstep. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. has never stopped its attempts to sabotage and undermine the Revolution. Overtly and covertly, it has carried out countless acts of aggression — including the longest economic and political blockade in U.S. history as well as numerous assassination attempts against Fidel — all aimed at destabilizing and overturning the Revolution.

On March 22 the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations issued a damning press release, announcing that a series of testimonial documentaries recently shown in Cuba revealed current “direct connections of counterrevolutionary individuals in the Island with the U.S.”

The four documentaries — “The Empire’s Pawns,” “Trues and Principles,” “Cyberwar” and “Well Paid Lies” — are a study in counterrevolutionary subterfuge.

The documentaries revealed U.S. plans to introduce illegal communication and spying systems on the island and how the U.S. Agency for International Development serves as a cover for anti-Cuba CIA activities.

USAID, the documentary demonstrated, sets out to “fabricate social leaders ... who try to influence youth and academics.”

The press release states that “in ‘The Empire’s Pawns,’ Moises Rodríguez and Carlos Serpa, who for a long time lived side by side with factions that operate on the Island under direct orders of terrorists who live in the U.S., revealed evidence of how the so-called dissidents or alleged advocates of the human rights in Cuba received money directly from the U.S.”

The U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which is equivalent to an embassy, was exposed once again as playing a role of sabotage, similar to its role in other countries the U.S. wants to undermine.

For example, Rodríguez explained receiving instructions from U.S. diplomats to plot against the Cuban government. He was also sent to Miami, where he held meetings with infamous terrorists, among them Luis Posada Carriles.

Serpa was instructed by anti-Cuba elements to spread false information about Cuba through Radio Martí and other U.S. media.

In “Trues and Principles,” Dalexis Gonzalez Madruga, a graduate student in telecommunication engineering at the Jose Antonio Echeverria University, showed how he was contacted by U.S. agents to “illegally introduce sophisticated equipment and install a network feasible to transmit directly to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.”

The documentary showed how equipment was hidden in surfing equipment and how major communication advances are used by the U.S., not to help economic and social development, but for destabilizing Cuba.

In “Cyberwar” the creation of cyber-dissidents or cyber-mercenaries, in an attempt to subvert order and create confusion among the Cuban population, was revealed. A website called “Cyber Dissidents on the Web” was created to organize a media campaign to defame Cuba by distorting Cuban reality, attacking socialism and slandering Cuban leaders. Bloggers at the website have all been linked to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

Despite an intense, well-orchestrated, constant, unremitting campaign to undermine the Cuban Revolution, U.S. imperialism has failed. It failed in 1961 and it is failing in 2011. The Cuban Revolution stands firm and steadfast not only because of its dedicated and knowing masses and its solid revolutionary leadership, but because of the overwhelming support the Cuban Revolution has earned worldwide.

The masses of the world who face untold misery and hardship cheer the Cuban Revolution, knowing that Cuba is not perfect, but its free education and health care are leaps and bounds ahead of the starvation and death the majority of the oppressed face. “Long live the Cuban Revolution” was the cry in 1961 heard around the world — and it remains today.
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Markin comment:

Those of us who came of age in the 1960s, especially those of us who cut our political teeth on defending, under one principle or another (right to national self-determination, socialist solidarity, general anti-imperialist agenda, etc.), the Cuban revolution that we were front row television witnesses to, cherish the memory of the heroic Cuban defenders at the Bay of Pigs. No one cried when the American imperial adventure was foiled and President John Kennedy (whatever else we felt about him then), egg on face, had to take responsibility for the fiasco.

Those of us who continue to adhere to the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist agenda, whatever our differences with the Cuban leadership, today can join in honoring those heroic fighters. Today is also a day to face the hard fact that we have had too few victories against the imperialist behemoth. The imperial defeat at the Bay of Pigs was however our victory. As today’s imperialist activity in Libya, painfully, testifies to those forces, however, have not gotten weaker in the past 50 years. So the lesson for today’s (and future) young militants is to honor our fallen forebears and realize that the beast can be defeated, if you are willing to fight it. Forward! Defend the Cuban Revolution! Defend Libya against the imperialist onslaught!

From North Korea to Grove Hall: Confronting War, Struggling for Peace & Justice


From North Korea to Grove  Hall:

Confronting War, Struggling  for  Peace & Justice

Respondent: Judith Roderick


Thursday, Dec. 7, 5:30 pm Grove Hall Branch Library 41 Geneva Ave., Dorchester
The Trump Administration is doubling  down on war policies which have developed during the Bush and Obama administrations. We now have inter- national crises in Syria, Korea, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Niger, Palestine and more. The military budget and nuclear weapons spending  are  increasing,  as  is  USmilitary
intervention in Africa. Militarization of the police is affecting Black and other communities at home. In this context, Ajamu Baraka will address the relationship of the Black liberation movement to the struggle for peace.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, which was launched on April 4th of this year, the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Beyond Viet Nam” speech where he came out against the Viet Nam war. Baraka will talk with us about this work and about re-building the anti-war movement in the face of a government which is devoted to “full spectrum dominance”.
An internationally recognized advocate for human rights with roots in the Black Liberation Movement, Baraka was the Green Party's vice presidential candidate in 2016. He was the Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network from 2004 to 2011 and his political analysis has been covered by CNN, BBC, Washington Post, RT, and New York Times. He is a contributing columnist for Black Agenda Report and Counterpunch. Baraka serves on the board of Cooperation Jackson, a solidarity economy project in Jackson, Mississippi, and is working on the Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases. Baraka emphasizes that “placing people, planet, and peace before profit has to be not  just a slogan but a political objective that is realized.”
Please arrive at 5:30 for snacks and discussion.  The talk will begin promptly at 6:00 pm.
Transit: Take the Fairmount Line from South Station to Four Corners/Geneva Ave., departing 5:00 or 5:45 (use regular MBTA pass).  Or take 19 bus from Fields Corner station.



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Black Lives Matter Boston Event co sponsored by the Smedleys-VFP

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For more information, email m4blmboston@gmail.com.

IMAGINE! An Evening of Encouragement. Inspiration. Radical Imagination!
by Black Lives Matter Boston, Union United Methodist Church, The Dignity Project


Description

We have been working. We have been organizing. We have been marching. We have been resisting. We have been fighting back! Now let us come together for a time of refreshing, an evening of soulful, intimate conversation. Encouragement. Inspiration. Radical Imagination! We need it...

Ticketed Event: $35.00

Please consider making an additional donation (purchase an extra ticket) to sponsor another attendee. No one turned away due to funds.

Doors open at 6:30


Date and Time                                        Tickets:    www.eventbrite.com
Tue, November 28, 2017

Location

Union Church
485 Columbus Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
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