This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create
a human being, maybe any being, out of spare human parts, and few jolts of
electricity. Back in day 1818 when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred
breeding via feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and anarcho- philosopher William
Godwin and channeling Romantic era poet Percy Shelley and who hung around with
ill-fated heroic Lord Byron) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein. I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better
since science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the
former’s clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash
manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Unlike today where through
genetic engineering we have better understanding of science and medicine
although at times we need to treat science like a thing from which we have to
run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering
everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening
a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the
military possibilities. At that point running away like cowardly Victor
Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)
Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy
thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where
women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button
create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in
marginal cases and probably would have shocked her sensibilities. Better if
humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA that also puts a
big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she
becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing
at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again,
that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17th poet
John Milton lost his eyesight over. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back
to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley.
We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern
Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek
mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick.
Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire
to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger.
Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that
rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially
since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in
1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who if you
will remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds
of 19th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he
was saying.
The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein,
the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like
some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he
would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have
started a string of murders for which he not the so-called “monster” was
morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a
cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.
On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently
taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of
one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive
logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright
thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s
take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use
to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans
who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the
Baker Street Irregulars.
I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to
decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight
for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd.
But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his
case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. That is my plan this bicentennial
year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament
avenging angel, to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far
too long. That may be a tough task but so be it.
Mary Shelley started something for us to think about and now
we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- A Pauper Comes Of Age- For the
Adamsville South Elementary School Class Of 1958-Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
This is the way my old corner boy,
Fritz Taylor, from down in “the projects” told me the story one night years
later when we were sitting on the grey granite steps of our high school, Miller
High, in Seaside Heights, that’s in New Hampshire. Those projects by the way,
all white projectsunlike the ones you
hear about lately which are mostly populated by minorities, had originally been
build right after World War II to help stem the heavy demand for housing from
returning servicemen with young families and not enough dough to finance a
house. The original idea as well was that the housing was temporary and had
been built with a certain careless abandon by some low-bidder contractors.
Fritz’s and my family had been among those families in the 1950s who did not
get to participate in the “golden age” and so we were long time tenants all
through our school years until we graduated from Miller High. Between the
isolated location of the projects and the high number of kids the place had it
had its own elementary school, Snug Harbor (sounds nice right, however, that
school was also expected to be temporary and built as such by those same
low-bidder contractors), where we both had gone through all six grades together
(we started in the time before kindergarten became a step in one’s education).
I am telling you about this because the story happened down there long before
we got to high school.
So there we were sitting there on the
steps, no dough in our pockets, our main guy for a ride out of town, Benny,
also a corner boy, on a family vacation up in Maine, no girls in hand, or
prospects either since any girls we were interested in had no interest us
either because we had not car or because we were from the projects, come to
think of it forget that last part it was because we were car-less and that
world was filled with guys with cars, “boss cars,” swooping down on the
interesting girls, talking slowly. Talking kind of softly for us although
loudly or softly no one would have been around to heard us that warm summer
night with about six weeks to go before school started again and we could go back
and start our junior year, kind of dreamy too really about the first times we
had been smitten by a girl, not necessarily a forever smitten thing (forever
then being maybe a month or six weeks, no more except for some oddball couples
who found love and stayed together for the next fifty years if you can believe
that in this day in age) but with a bug that disturbed our sleep.
Yeah, that is exactly the way to put
it, when some frail disturbed our sleep, the first of many sleepless nights on
that subject.(That “frail” a localism
for girl, heavily influenced by our corner boy with the car Benny watching too
many 1930s and 1940s George Raft or James Cagney gangster and Humphrey Bogart hard-boiled
private detective movies.) So we were sitting there thinking about how we were
now chasing other dreams, well, maybe not other dreams but older versions,
sweet sixteen versions of that same dream.Of course at sixteen it was all about girls but as it turned out that
subject had its own pre-history way back when. Just ask Fritz Taylor if you see
him.
Fritz Taylor, if he thought about it at
all and at times like that dream vision night at sixteen on the steps in front
of the high school he might have, probably would have said that he had his
history hat on again like when he was a kid, loving history or even the thought
of history since Miss Winot blew him away with talk of ancient Greeks and Romans.
Blew him away so that when he got in trouble with that teacher for saying
something fresh, and it really was, a swear word expression, “what the fuck,”
that he heard all the time around his house which he thought everybody said
when they were angry, assigned him a paper to write of five hundred words and
he wrote an essay about Greek democracy which she actually read to the class
she was so impressed. Miss Winot, blew him away more when she freaked him out
with talk of Egypt and Pharaoh times with the Pyramids and the slaves and all
time and he begged his older brother to drive him all the way down to the art
museum in Boston to look at old Pharaoh stuff some guys from Harvard had
unearthed. But all that is just stuff to let you know what kind of guy Fritz was
in elementary school before he wised up, or kind of wised up, in high school. Funny
one time when I wanted to take the bus down to Boston when I got the Pharaoh
bug in high school he dismissed me out of hand. Done that, he said. So that
night he had his history hat on so I knew I was in for a story, a bloody silly
story if I knew Fritz but we had nothing better to do so I let him go on. Let
him go on that sixteen years old summer night when out of the blue, the memory
time blue, he thought about more modern history, thought about her, thought
about fair Rosimund.
No, before you get all set to turn to
some other thing, some desperate alternate other thing, to do rather than read
Fritz’s poignant little story, this is not some American Revolution founding
fathers (or mothers, because old-time Abigail Adams may have been hovering in
some background granite-chiseled slab grave in a very old-time Quincy cemetery
while the events to be related occurred since Fritz was crazy about her too once
he figured out she was the real power behind John and John Quincy) or some bold
Massachusetts abolitionist regiment, the fighting 54th, out of the
American Civil War 150th anniversary memory history like Fritz used to like to
twist the tail around when you knew him, or his like. This is about “first love”
so rest easy.
Fritz, that early summer’s night, was
simply trying to put his thoughts together and figured that he would write
something, write something for those who could stand it, those fellow members
of our class who could stand to know that story. Although, at many levels that
was a very different experience from that of the average, average Miller High class
member the story had a universal quality that he thought might amuse them,
amuse them that is until the name, the thought of the name, the mist coming
from out of his mouth at the forming of the name, holy of holies, Rosimund,
stopped him dead in his tracks and forced him to tell me that story and to
write that different story later.
Still, once the initial trauma wore
off, Fritz thought what better way to celebrate that milestone on the rocky
road to surviving childhood than to take a trip down memory lane, that
Rosimund-strewn memory lane. Those days although they were filled with memorable
incidents, good and bad, paled beside this Rosimund-related story that cut
deep, deep into his brown-haired mind, and as it turned out one that he have
not forgotten after all. So rather than produce some hokey last dance, last
elementary school sweaty-palmed dance failure tale, some Billie Bradley-led
corner boy down in the back of Snug Harbor doo wop be-bop into the night luring
stick and shape girls like lemmings from the sea on hearing those doo wop
harmonies, those harmonies meant for them, the sticks and shapes that is, or
some wannabe gangster retread tale, or even some Captain Midnight how he saved
the world from the Cold War Russkies with his last minute-saving invention
Fritz preferred to relate a home truth, a hard home truth to be sure, but the truth
Here is his say:
At some point in elementary school a
boy is inevitably supposed to learn, maybe required to, depending on the whims
of your school district’s supervisory staff and maybe also what your parents
expected of such schools, to do two intertwined socially-oriented tasks - the
basics of some kind of dancing and to be paired off with, dare I say it, a girl
in that activity. After all that is what it is there for isn’t it. At least it
was that way a few years back, and if things have changed, changed dramatically
in that regard, you can fill in your own blanks experience. But here that is
where fair sweet Rosimund comes in, the paired-off part.
I can already hear your gasps, dear
reader, as I present this scenario. You are ready to flee, boy or girl flee, to
some safe attic hideaway, to reach for some dusty ancient comfort teddy bear,
or for the venturesome, some old sepia brownie camera picture album safely
hidden in those environs, but flee, no question, at the suggestion of those
painful first times when sweaty-handed, profusely sweaty-handed, boy met
too-tall girl on the dance floor (age too-tall girls hormone shooting up first,
later things settled down, a little). Now for those who are hopped up, or even
mildly interested, in such ancient rituals you may be thinking, oh well, this
won’t be so bad after all since I am talking about the mid-1950s and they had
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on the television to protect us from
having to dance close, what with those funny self-expression dance moves like
the Stroll and the Hully-Gully that you see on re-runs. And then go on except,
maybe, the last dance, the last close dance that spelled success or failure in
the special he or she night so let me tell you how really bad we had it in the
plaid 1960s. Wrong.
Oh, of course, we were all after school
black and white television-addled and addicted making sure that we got home by
three in the afternoon to catch the latest episode of the American Bandstand
saga about who would, or wouldn’t, dance with that cute girl in the corner (or
that leering Amazon in the front). That part was true, true enough. But here we
are not talking fun dancing, close or far away, but learning dancing,
school-time dancing, come on get with it. What we are talking about in my case
is that the dancing part turned out to be the basics of country bumpkin
square-dancing (go figure, for a city boy, right?). Not only did this clumsy,
yes, sweaty-palmed, star-crossed ten-year-old boy have to do the basic “swing
your partner” and some off-hand “doze-zee dozes(sic)” but I also had to do it
while I was paired, for this occasion, with the girl that I had a “crush” on, a
serious crush on, and that is where Rosimund really enters the story.
Rosimund see, moreover, was not from
“the projects” but from one of the new single-family homes, ranch-style homes
that the up and coming middle-class were moving into up the road. In case you
didn’t know, or have forgotten, I grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks”
down at the Seaside Heights Housing Authority apartments. The rough side of
town, okay. You knew that the minute I mentioned the name, that SHHA name, and
rough is what you thought, and that is okay. Now. But although I had started
getting a handle on the stick "projects" girls I was totally unsure
how to deal with girls from the “world.” And Rosimund very definitely was from
the world. I will not describe her here; although I could do so even today, but
let us leave it at her name. Rosimund. Enchanting name, right? Thoughts of
white-plumed knighted medieval jousts against some black-hooded, armored thug
knight for the fair maiden’s hand, or for her favors (whatever they were then,
mainly left unexplained, although we all know what they are now, and are glad
of it)
Nothing special about the story so far,
though. Even I am getting a little sleepy over it. Just your average
one-of-the-stages-of-the-eternal-coming-of-age-story. I wish. Well, the long
and short of it was that the reason we were practicing this square-dancing was
to demonstrate our prowess before our parents in the school gym. Nothing
unusual there either. After all there is no sense in doing this type of
school-time activity unless one can impress one's parents. I forget all the details
of the setup of the space for demonstration day and things like that but it was
a big deal. Parents, refreshments, various local dignitaries, half the school
administrators from downtown whom I will go to my grave believing could have
cared less if it was square-dancing or basket-weaving because they would have
ooh-ed and ah-ed us whatever it was. But that is so much background filler.
Here is the real deal. To honor the occasion, as this was my big moment to
impress Rosimund, I had, earlier in the day, cut up my dungarees to give myself
an authentic square-dancer look, some now farmer brown look but back then maybe
not so bad.
I thought I looked pretty good. And
Rosimund, looking nice in some blue taffeta dress with a dark red shawl thing
draped and pinned across her shoulders (although don’t quote me on that dress
thing, what did a ten-year old boy, sister-less, know of such girlish fashion
things. I was just trying to keep my hands in my pockets to wipe my sweaty
hands for twirling time, for Rosimund twirling time) actually beamed at me, and
said I looked like a gentleman farmer. Be still my heart. Like I said I though
I looked pretty good, and if Rosimund thought so well then, well indeed. And
things were going nicely. That is until my mother, sitting in a front row
audience seat as was her wont, saw what I had done to the pants. In a second
she got up from her seat, marched over to me, and started yelling about my
disrespect for my father's and her efforts to clothe me and about the fact that
since I only had a couple of pairs of pants how could I do such a thing. In
short, airing the family troubles in public for all to hear. That went on for
what seemed like an eternity.
Thereafter I was unceremoniously taken
home by said irate mother and placed on restriction for a week. Needless to say
my father also heard about it when he got home from that hard day’s work that
he was too infrequently able to get to keep the wolves from the door, and I
heard about it for weeks afterward. Needless to say I also blew my 'chances'
with dear, sweet Rosimund.
Now is this a tale of the hard lessons
of the nature of class society that I am always more than willing to put in a
word about? Just like you might have remembered about me back in the day.
Surely not. Is this a sad tale of young love thwarted by the vagaries of fate?
A little. Is this a tale about respect for the little we had in my family?
Perhaps. Was my mother, despite her rage, right? Well, yes. Did I learn
something about being poor in the world? Damn right. That is the point. …But,
oh, Rosimund.
The deaths of Russian military contractors under the rain of bombs and missiles unleashed by the Pentagon has sharply escalated war tensions.
By Bill Van Auken 14 February 2018
Reports emerging from Russia indicate that anywhere from dozens to hundreds of Russian military contractors may have been killed in the US air and artillery assault against a column of fighters loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in eastern Deir Ezzor province on February 7.
As yet, a handful of names of Russians killed in the one-sided battle have emerged. The right-wing nationalist “Other Russia” group reported that one of its members, Kirill Ananiev, who had gone to Syria a year ago, was among the dead. A spokesman for the group said there had been “substantial losses” inflicted upon “paramilitary structures with ties to Russia.”
A paramilitary organization calling itself the Baltic Cossak Union posted a statement online reporting that one of its members, Vladimir Loginov, had died in the US bombardment in Deir Ezzor.
The Conflict Intelligence Team, a Russian opposition group that has monitored developments in Syria, provided three other names: Alexi Ladigin of Ryazan and Stanislav Matviev and Igor Kostorov of Kaliningrad.
The Pentagon initially said it had killed 100 fighters in its February 7 attack, which took place on the western bank of the Euphrates River. It claimed it had responded to an advance by as many as 500 fighters, backed by tanks and artillery, on a headquarters of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, the US proxy ground force that consists overwhelmingly of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. US special forces troops directing the YPG’s operations in the area were reportedly at the site.
The US troops called in a withering assault by Apache attack helicopters, an AC-130 Specter gunship and F-15 fighter jets, as well artillery batteries.
The Syrian government denounced the US firestorm as a “massacre” and a “war crime,” insisting that its fighters had been targeting remnants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has reported that it mounted another attack in the same area on Saturday, calling in a strike against a Russian-made T-72 tank, which it claimed had been “maneuvering” into firing range of an SDF “defensive position.”
In both cases, US military spokesmen asserted that American forces used “deconfliction lines” to inform the Russian military about the strikes before and during their execution.
The location of the two attacks reveals the real motives underlying the military confrontations. Both took place near the Omar oil field, the Hashim gas field and the former Conoco gas refinery.
Deir Ezzor is the center of Syria’s gas and oil industry, which ISIS captured and exploited to finance its operations. The US military was so determined to lay claim to these strategic resources that it negotiated a surrender of the Syrian city of Raqqa last October in exchange for the evacuation of some 4,000 ISIS fighters to Deir Ezzor, where they were redeployed to impede the advance of Syrian government forces. Washington’s ground proxies in the YPG-dominated SDF were then rushed to the area to seize control of the oil and gas fields.
Washington’s aim is to deny these resources to the Assad government in order to impede its consolidation of control and the beginning of the shattered country’s reconstruction.
Russian military expert Viktor Murakhovsky told the daily Kommersant: “For the Arab Republic, these are serious resources… Actually, control over such resources in many ways was the source of the civil war in Syria.”
The Russian government of President Vladimir Putin, while denouncing US machinations in Syria, has remained tight-lipped about the reported Russian casualties in Deir-Ezzor.
Reuters cited sources in Russia who said that “dozens” of Russians were killed on February 7. Bloomberg wrote Tuesday that two Russian sources had reported more than 200 soldiers, “mostly Russians,” had died in the US attack.
Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the pro-Western, free-market Yabloko party and one of the original architects of capitalist restoration, issued a statement demanding that the Putin government make public what happened in Deir Ezzor.
“If there have been mass deaths of Russian citizens in Syria, then the relevant authorities, including the general staff of the Russian armed forces, have a duty to inform the country about this and decide who bears responsibility,” Yavlinsky said on Twitter. He is running against Putin in next month’s presidential election.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday that the account of Russian dead in Deir Ezzor was only “information published in the media,” adding that he did not believe Yavlinsky had “more reliable sources of information.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, has stated only that no members of the Russian military were in the area at the time of the attack. Other sources close to the Russian government have described reports of mass casualties as Western-driven “information warfare.”
Vitaly Naumkin, a leading expert on the Middle East who has collaborated closely with Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Syria, was somewhat more frank. He told Bloomberg: “No one wants to start a world war over a volunteer or mercenary who wasn’t sent by the state and was hit by the Americans.”
The Russians killed in the US attack, whatever their actual number, are believed to have been military contractors employed by the Wagner Group, an outfit that has been described as Russia’s equivalent to America’s Blackwater. Contractors from the group have been used to guard key facilities in Syria, including the Russian naval base at Tartus and the airbase at Hmeimim, as well as oil and gas installations. They have also been imbedded with Syrian troops, participating in heavy combat.
It strains credulity to accept that these contractors are operating in Syria with tanks and artillery without the approval and close collaboration of the Russian government. While Putin announced during a visit to Syria last December that Russian armed forces had achieved victory over ISIS and were being withdrawn from the country, the fighting continues, and Russian military contractors are apparently heavily involved.
The use of such forces, which allows the Kremlin to deny responsibility for military clashes and conceal from public scrutiny the casualties in Syria, has obvious attractions for the Putin government.
It has also been reported that Wagner is involved in deals with the Syrian government that guarantee Russian capitalist interests up to 25 percent of revenues from oil and gas fields that its fighters retake.
On Tuesday, Russian Minister of Energy Alexander Novak announced that Moscow had signed a “roadmap” agreement with the Syrian government for the recovery and development of oil and gas fields. It is highly probable that whoever died in the US bombardment in Deir Ezzor on February 7 was acting in furtherance of this agreement.
Russia’s military intervention in Syria, launched in 2015, has been directed at propping up Moscow’s principal ally in the Middle East and impeding the US-backed attempt to carry out regime-change through the arming and support of Al Qaeda-linked militias.
In part, Russian motives were bound up with the interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchs and Gazprom, the country’s largest corporation, which faced the prospect of Qatar gaining access to Syrian territory for a gas pipeline directed toward Western Europe, undermining Russian profit interests. Moscow also justifiably feared Syria becoming a base for Al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters drawn from Russia’s Caucasus region to launch a campaign, backed by the CIA, to destabilize and ultimately dismember the Russian Federation.
Despite this defensive element in Moscow’s intervention in Syria, there is nothing progressive about the motives of the Russian government, which represents the interests of a thoroughly reactionary and criminal capitalist oligarchy. It has, in recent weeks, provided tacit approval for the Turkish assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, as well as for the Israeli bombing of Syrian and Iranian forces.
Whatever the attempts of the Putin government to smooth over the latest military confrontation in Deir Ezzor, the objective geo-strategic conflicts underlying the fighting in Syria are pushing the world to the brink of a war between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
Reflecting the increasingly belligerent posture adopted by the US military and intelligence apparatus, along with decisive layers of the American ruling establishment, the Washington Post on Tuesday published an editorial calling for a further escalation in Syria.
“Far from winding down, Syria's civil war is threatening to trigger direct conflicts between the United States and Turkey, Israel and Iran, and even the United States and Russia. These threats can be defused only by high-level diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force. So far, the Trump administration’s response looks underpowered,” the Post warned.
The editorial insisted that Washington can block Russia from becoming “the dominant power in Syria and, by extension, a major player in the Middle East” only by means of a major military escalation.
One of the country’s most storied human rights organizations honors CIW for its “innovative organizing and profound impact on the lives of farmworkers…”
Today we have the honor of sharing some very good news.
Just this morning, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) announced that it has chosen the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to receive its prestigious ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism for 2018. For nearly forty years, ALBA has worked to educate the public about the brave volunteers — including thousands of Americans — of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and their fight against fascism in Spain before World War II. As a vital part of their efforts to keep the spirit of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade alive, ALBA administers the annual award of one of the world's largest monetary prizes for human rights, helping fuel movements for justice and freedom around the world today. Here is ALBA's mission, in their own words
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Drawing on the ALBA collections in New York University’s Tamiment Library, and working to expand such collections, ALBA works to preserve the legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as an inspiration for present and future generations...
