The Trials and Tribulations Of The Generation Of ’68-The Summer of 1969-Frank Jackman Casts His Fate With The Poor Peoples Of The Earth-And Tweaking The U.S. Army To Boot-With Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” In Mind

The Trials and Tribulations Of The Generation Of ’68-The Summer of 1969-Frank Jackman Casts His Fate With The Poor Peoples Of The Earth-And Tweaking The U.S. Army To Boot-With Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” In Mind  

By Frank Jackman 

Maybe it is the nature of this publication, maybe it is the nature of historic memory or maybe it is the nature of this man, me, this Frank Jackman who has staked his life on what he remembered hearing a long time ago on a radio folk music show in the heat of the folk minute that swept the nation, the nation’s youth particularly in the early 1960s when he was growing up poor in the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville a bunch of miles south of Boston. He had been startled to hear one Pete Seeger, banjo man extraordinaire playing that instrument and singing alternately in Spanish and English the old Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti’s version of Guantanamera when he came upon a later verse translated as “I want to cast my fate with the poor people of this earth.”* The story I have to tell, a personal Frank Jackman story is how in the summer of 1969, fifty years ago, yes, I know a lot of 50^th anniversaries have been addressed in this publication over the past few years by members of the Class of `68 still standing, had been a key decision point in my own fervent desire to cast my fate with the poor people of the earth. And have not done a bad job of staying committed to that vision at a time when things could have gone either way in that hell-bent Vietnam War year.    

[*I was about to say that with this song this was the first time I had even heard of the name Pete Seeger, a name I would come to know as a fellow activist and later when I took up writing reviews of music that mattered in the American songbook I got to know him personally as a “hail fellow, well met” but that is not true. Not true although that Sunday evening WBZ (in Boston) Dick Summer’s folk show I rightly assumed I had not heard of the man or his voice before because of one   Lester Dannon (known in the local professional music world as Lester Dannon and his Cannons, a jazzy, pop music grouping favored among the older set, the generation that had gone through the Great Depression and slogged through World War II as he had, my parent’s generation for weddings and family outings).  Lester whom we kids called innocently then without any other thought that taking part in a youthful rhyming craze called Lester the Molester, which these days would call for all kinds of interventions and investigations, had force-fed the most popular work of Pete’s and a group that he was a member of The Weaver’s cover of Leadbelly’s Goodnight, Irene.

Lester may have not been a molester, but he had a plan to wean us away from our growing love of break-out rock and roll music which he hated by playing on the record player and having us sing folk tunes like Irene and pop tunes from his, our parent’s generation. We bucked and buckled under that horrible weight for three junior high school years but gave in to the inevitable when he threatened to play classic music and opera if we didn’t learn his clowny stuff. (Lester may have not been a molester of anything but our growing music taste buds although he was caught up unjustly in a scandal later when the junior high school male gym teacher was fired because he was sexually molesting young underage boys although not from the school or town but elsewhere part of the reason he was able to be a predator for as long as he had been. We had to bring a big campaign to clear Lester’s name once we heard about the false accusations against him but that did not cause him to not hate rock and roll until his dying days or us to forgive him from ramming music we really did hate then, a generational thing, down our throats.)  

Many of the older writers still standing at this publication, I will just mention the guys I grew with still standing, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth, Jack Callahan, Allan Jackson, Bart Webber have written extensively the past couple of years on key anniversaries, key 50^th anniversaries which none of us would have thought possible back in the 1960s when the motto, if unspoken mostly was “live fast, die young, and make a good corpse.” Noteworthy and cause for much internal friction between older and younger writers who could have given a fuck about events their parents had come of age through happened a couple of years ago when then site manager Allan Jackson went crazy giving 24/7/365 or so it seemed to commemorating the Summer of Love, 1967 and subsequently the riotous happenings of 1968 too numerous to mention now but the anniversaries which were fully covered last year.*

Now in the year of the 50^th anniversary of Woodstock, the eternally etched rock festival that defined one end of a generation, we are in for another burst of writing about what it all meant historically and personally. It is with that backdrop that I tell my story which is not about Woodstock Nation, not then anyway, but about that previously mentioned then vague and untested idea of casting my fate with the poor people of the earth, my people. Others from that cohort of older writers I grew up with have written about my epiphany, especially Seth Garth’s Frank Jackman’s Masters of War but just now if nothing else as a cautionary tale I want to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of my personal decision to refuse orders to Vietnam, which is just a short cut way of saying that I had cast my fate with the poor people of the earth-for good.         

(*Look to the Archives from late 2017 to early 2018 to get the inside story of what happened to cause Allan Jackson’s downfall and subsequent short “exile” before new and current site manager Greg Green brought him back as a contributing editor. A short summary was that the younger writers balked at having to do assignments they didn’t’ care about to the exclusion of stuff they did know, brought the matter to a vote of no confidence, won the vote and brought Greg Green and an Editorial Board in to oversee that such things as Summer of Love mania never happened again. Strangely some of the assignments Greg decided on when he took charge, seemingly in order to assert his authority were frankly bizarre like the Marvel/DC comics come to cinema series that nobody young or old wanted to touch with a ten- foot pole.)

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Every guy and it was all guys then who came of age in most parts of the 1960s, who were of draft age, from eighteen to late twenty something, maybe later, had to face one big choice no matter where they stood on the issues of the day, on the Vietnam War. What to do about military service. Everybody from POTUS (Twitter speak) Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump down to the guys in the Acre neighborhood of growing up poor North Adamsville. I have heard many stories about how guys wound up in the military or figured a way around military duty over the past fifty years and have concluded that I would be less judgmental about how each person made their decision, except those who essentially bought their ways out like Bush and Trump but this story is not about them. It is a wonder so many survived their experiments, like those who found a way around going into the service like taking all kinds of drugs just before the dreaded physical which everybody passed unless you had some serious deficiency, military deficiency like only one leg or blindness, the Army needed two-legged men and non-visually-impaired men (now men and women) to hump the boonies as the saying went-meaning nowhere else in the world but sweated jungle, delta, river Vietnam. Like guys loading up on salt to drive their blood pressures up. Like declaring themselves homosexuals which today might seem weird giving the changes in policy but then meant you were refused and if you did get in and were found out that you really were gay subject to discharge and not an honorable one either (assuming that you were serious about your homosexuality and not just using it to avoid service which hung over guys for a long time.) Like guys declaring themselves fervent members of a whole number of communist organizations or their fronts when the security clearance questions were asked. That, by the way, lasted only so long until the Selective Service (the draft’s official organizational name) figured, knowingly figured from their FBI friends who had infiltrated those organizations in the previous decades, that there was a scam going on. The vast majority though one way or another who refused induction didn’t use these ruses some very clever but by a flat-out refusal to be drafted-not later when actually in the military as in my case.

The reader, hell, on reflection fifty years later writing this piece, me, may wonder why I did not join that last grouping by refusing military service as a civilian which took its own level of commitment and decision-making outside the box that society expected of us. I certainly knew that there were plenty of young guys, men who were refusing, although as I recall I did not know any personally on campus or elsewhere. I did know since I was working my way through college driving a truck and servicing coffee machines I passed the Arlington Street Church in the Back Bay section of Boston which was a central sanctuary for draft-resisters. Go back though to that point I made about coming from the hard-core working class, working poor Acre section of North Adamsville and that will give a better idea of why I had not resisted military service as a civilian. 

Start with the family, make that families since mine replicated the great majority of the families in the Irish-etched Roman Catholic Acre. Where would I have either learned or gained support from that milieu about not going into the military when my father had slogged through World War II in the Pacific War as a gung-ho Marine who faced all the island- hopping battles those Leathernecks were engaged in. Many other fathers and relatives had the same stories. (I was not close probably ever to my very distant father who had like many men from his generation had seen the ugly face of war and kept quiet about what they saw after their service did tell me one time that he, a son of the Hazard. Kentucky coalmines enlisted in the Marines on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, on the idea that he would rather take his chances against the Nips, a derogatory term for the Japanese then, than face life in the mines and what that meant and had never looked back. Maybe to his personal sorrows since he had nothing but a very tough life when he married my mother and landed in her hometown Acre neighborhood)    

Moreover even in my own Acre neighborhood generation, the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys as we called ourselves, which came of age not only under the sign of rock and roll but of the great Cold War ideologies and concepts which were held pretty firmly if not totally understood provided no cover for what I would do. My high school graduation class of 1964 for example had as I later found out when the males were asked for their military service if any almost all had some such record. Among Tonio corner boys as the war escalated every single guy with the exception of a couple who had disabilities which precluded military service wound up serving in Vietnam including the late Peter Markin who of all of us would had been the logical choice as a resister. (Markin whose life and fate still bring a tear to our eyes when we mention his name took his service harder than the others and would wind up falling down in the end to an early grave already extensively written about by everybody in our crowd including me, a bitter fate for a guy who was always ahead of the curve in our crowd about which way the social winds were blowing). Top that off with the deaths of two corner boys, Rick Rizzo and David White, whose names are forever etched on the Adamsville town memorial stone and down in black granite down in Washington, who laid down their heads in some bloody swamps in Vietnam and you get an idea of what the milieu was like and how likely the ideas of resistance were to come intellectually to me without some serious trial to confront me. (My family and many other families which I learned about second-hand after the dust had settled not only hated or did not understand what I did but supported the war efforts long after even guys like POTUS Richard M. Nixon had tried to get out from under anyway he could).   

No, no, now that I am on my high horse it is not good enough blame the social milieu as the defining reason for allowing myself to be inducted into the Army in January of 1969 against all good reason. No question a different milieu say in Shaker Heights and among the elite college brethren and intelligentsia would have provided more thought-provoking possibilities but that denies my, Frank Jackman’s, sense of himself and his desires and concerns. I believe I have written about it elsewhere in this publication and if not then I certainly have mentioned it in a million conversations the contradictions between that stated purpose of “casting my fate with the poor people of the earth” which has animated this whole piece and what I thought my life’s goals, destiny if you like, were to be can be summarized in what I was about in the fall of 1960 when I was just fourteen.

I had always been interested in politics, history, government, something I shared with the late Markin. Which did not preclude either of us from being extremely larcenous corner boys or totally bonkers about girls, cars and sex in whatever order you want to put those elemental categories like the other guys who lived and died exclusively on that plateau. Markin and I, although we had deeply imbibed the Cold War anti-communist ideologies that choked American society in the 1950s, had other ideas as well, centrally concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and a stirring concern about the emerging black civil rights struggle down the South. Ideas which we tended not to discuss with the fellow corner boys who would have either red-baited or race-baited us. In 1960 the blessed Quakers, and they were blessed and always will be as the reader will find out later when the deal when down in the summer of 1969 whatever religious or political differences we had then or now along with prominent liberals like Doctor Spock, the famous baby doctor whose words of wisdom many mothers although not Acre mothers lived and died by decided to have a nation-wide event to call for nuclear disarmament in October of that year.

Despite all kinds of advice, maybe some veiled threats, certainly scorn from fellow students and the civics teacher I argued for that cause in school and had decided to go to Boston, to the historic protest spots on Boston Common to take part in the nation-wide observance. Even, and maybe especially, our corner boy leader Frankie Riley argued against my going (we even made a corner boy famous bet about whether I would go or “chicken out”) since he feared for my life if I went there giving the times and given the reaction of what I would later call the rednecks. I went (winning that bet gladly since I could have money for a date with a certain girl I was then for a minute interested in) and met those forthright Quakers and a few others who braved the scorn of the crowds to protest the nuclear arms race. If one thinks today that politics and prejudices are ugly and headed to civil war if not stopped in their tracks then you get the idea back then right out on those mean streets, maybe more in your face if you can believe that.     

Contradiction. The fall of 1960 was also the time this country was knee deep in the upcoming presidential election between one Richard Milhous Nixon and our own Irish Jack Kennedy. “Our own” no wrong term for we were crazy in the Irish-strewn Acre to see Jack beat that bastard Nixon. I would all fall go door to door putting literature in doors touting Jack’s candidacy. For those who don’t remember or are too young a central component of Jack’s campaign was that there was a “missile gap,” with the Soviets overhauling us with ways to take advantage of their larger number of weapons, nuclear weapons. So in one short period I could, and did, express my sincere beliefs in nuclear disarmament in Boston and in tribal Jack of the gap. That would not be the first time or the last that such contradictions ruled my universe. In 1968, remember Bobby Kennedy with a tear, I went crazy around the East Coast trying to get him elected before he was felled breaking many dreams and my heart. More importantly to what will follow I let my somewhat vague, upon reflection, anti-war sentiments get overwhelmed by all the other considerations about why I should have refused induction, including a girlfriend whose brother was serving in Vietnam.

Forward though to January 1969. As previously pointed out there were little points of rebellion about going into the Army, but they did not dominate, no way and if the impression has been left that this was the case that is wrong. Probably the truest statement would be some kind of belief that either war would be over before I had to confront what every male of my generation had to confront whatever his personal beliefs might or that I expected somehow like at several times in my young life to skate by, not get called for some reason known only to me at the time. Given what was happening on the battlefields I think that the latter sentiment dominated. I got my “friends and neighbors at the draft board” notice in the early fall of 1968 to report for the inevitable almost forgone conclusion physical examination (that “friends and neighbors” the actual salutation on the letter). Naturally I passed it since at that time almost anybody with two arms and two legs passed unless they had some gimmick already to get them out but which even if I had known about it then would not have used still depending on luck I guess I would call it.

Then in December 1968, I think I got the notice to report to the Boston Army Base for induction (no longer there but now part of the up-scale Seaport District). While that certainly got my attention, I was still in some form of denial. Adding to that my girlfriend at the time (this after I had broken up with that girlfriend whose brother was in Vietnam for personal reasons) , Joyce, who had started graduate school at Boston University after having been through the “wars” out at the University of Wisconsin which along with Berkeley, Michigan and B.U. were among the most vociferous centers of anti-war opposition was pressuring me to refuse induction. Easy for her to say, although she would prove right and prove a stalwart as well during my imprisonments. Whatever idealistic views I had (via Robert Kennedy), some sloth and maybe my whole freaking youth in the Acre which could not and should not be discounted did not mesh-then. The only thing that might point to some future struggles on my part was that the day in January 1969 before I was to report for induction I had Joyce cut my longish hair (you could hardly be a young male in Boston without that longer hair to distinguish you from the rednecks) and giving the Army butcher-barbers the satisfaction of cutting my locks. Still I took the oath, accepted induction.

The expectation, gained from the Acre brethren who had already either served or were in the service in Vietnam like Sam Lowell, was that I would take basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. What happened was that for reasons known only to the Army Dix was full or something so those inducted that day were sent first to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and then transferred to Fort Gordon over in Augusta, Georgia (the site of the later to be revered by Sam Lowell Masters’ Golf Tournament) for basic. The former location is where I had my opening epiphany, where I first really knew I had made a mistake about accepting induction. And while it would still be premature to say I had decided to refuse to go the thought was getting etched into my psyche.

Stop. The previous pages represent a pretty good remembrance of my times before that fateful January day. In looking over what others like Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Zack James (Alex from Carver’s younger brother who was too young to have been involved in all of this but who is a very good writer and hence has written, from outside the inner circle, a good piece on my travails). Rather than reinvent the wheel I think Sam should take over and tell once again his version of what I went through. Hell I have said enough let’s let site manager Greg Green publish his Introduction and Sam’s piece and if anybody has further questions they can comment and I will answer in return.    

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Introduction To Sam Lowell’s Frank Jackman’s Masters of War by Greg Green

Life is full of surprises as everybody over the age of about three knows firsthand even if that hard fact does not stand out and light a fire under you at every possible moment. Take my own situation. A couple of years ago I was working hard at the American Film Gazette managing the overall film review schedule and trying to outdo the legendary publisher Larry Lorton from Film Daily in the number of films we did reviews on. Then Pete Markin (aka Allan Jackson who used that moniker in honor of a fallen hometown friend who taught him and a few of the other writers here a thing or two about the profession although he eventually fell on his own sword which is a story many had detailed here over time and I need not go into) brought me over here to run the day to day operations while he readied himself for retirement or some other project. Jesus, then the Summer of Love, 1967, or rather the 50^th anniversary commemoration of the event hit this place like a whirling dervish. I was too young to know much about that time but had heard some pretty raw and scary stuff about drugs, unprotected sex, unlicensed or registered vehicles including some converted yellow school bus that became home for varying times by some of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre  and other larcenies from writers here who had been there under Markin’s guidance, the real Markin not Allan. In any case Allan went crazy to make sure the damn event got almost as much coverage after 50 years as when the thing actually got off the ground and created what he and the others hatched up as a re-working of the antics of the Generation of ’68.

All well and good. Well not all well and good since the younger writers could in the words of Alden Riley one of the leaders of the Young Turks give a fuck about the fucking Summer of Love, 1967 or any other year in that decade. That led to a show-down and the demise of Allan Jackson, a founding member, and my elevation to site manager and the overall poohbah of this operation. According to what I hear around the water cooler things are calmer now that not everybody has to spent 24/7/365 neck-deep in the 1960s like that was the golden age, like that was the Garden as Lance Lawrence mockingly called it.

All this to say that some of the stuff from the 1960s, and the recently concluded The Roots is the Toots rock and roll series is one example that I was more than happy to give an encore presentation to (admittedly after a little nudge from Sam Lowell and others), is worth another inspection. That brings us to the real-life story below about what happened to Frank Jackman when he was of draft age, eighteen to who knows how long if things ever got really dicey, in the age when that meant something and meant some tough decisions for a whole generation of young men who didn’t know what the hell to do when their number got called. Yeah, maybe this tale is not the sexiest one on the block, on the lowdown of the 1960s when youth nation went overboard with sex, drugs and rock and roll but fifty years or so later it still reads like a good story that people should know about-and shout from the rooftops about as we enter another year of endless war in the endless wars of our times.

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Frank Jackman’s War from the pen of Sam Lowell

(I have changed up locales and people’s names but the story-line is as pure as I can make it for my friend Frank Jackman-S.L.)

Jack Callahan’s old friend from Sloan High School in Carver down in Southeastern Massachusetts Alex James (Alex short for Alex not as is the fashion today to just name a baby Alexander and be done with it) is an amateur writer and has been at it since he got out of high school. Found out that maybe by osmosis, something like that, the stuff Miss Enos taught him junior and senior years about literature and her favorite writers Hemingway, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker to name a few, with which she would entice the English class stuck with him with through college where although he majored in Political Science he was in thrall to the English literature courses that he snuck into to his schedule. Snuck in although Alex knew practically speaking he had a snowball’s chance in hell, an expression he had learned from Hemingway he thought, of making a career out of the literary life, would more likely wind up driving a cab through dangerous midnight sections of town occasionally getting mugged for his night’s work. That Political Science major winding up producing about the same practical results as the literary life though. Those literary designs stuck with him, savior stuck with him, through his tour of duty during the Vietnam War, and savior stayed with him through those tough years when he couldn’t quite get himself back to the “real” world after ‘Nam and let drugs and alcohol rule his life so that he wound up for some time as a “brother under the bridge” as Bruce Springsteen later put the situation in a song that he played continuously at times after he first heard the opening line “Saigon, long gone…."  Stuck with him after he recovered and started building up his sports supplies business, stuck with him through three happy/sad/savage/acrimonious “no go” marriages and a parcel of kids and child support.  And was still sticking with him now that he had time to stretch out and write longer pieces and beat away on the word processor a few million words on this and that.

Amateur writer meaning nothing more than that he liked to write, and that writing was not his profession, that he did not depend on the pen for his livelihood (or rather more correctly these days not the pen but the word processor). That livelihood business was taken up running a small sports apparel store in a mall not far from Lexington (the Lexington of American revolutionary battles to give the correct town and state) where he now lived. Although he was not a professional writer his interest was such that he liked these days with Jimmy Shore, the famous ex-runner running the day to day operations of the store, to perform some of his written work in public at various “open mic” writing (and poetry) jams that have sprouted up in his area.

This “open mic” business Alex had embarked on s was a familiar concept to Jack from the days back in the 1960s when he would go to such events in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square and Beacon Hill to hear amateur folk-singers perfect their acts and try to be recognized as the new voice of their generation, or something like that. For “no singing voice, no musical ear” Jack those were basically cheap date nights if the girl he was with was into folk music. The way most of the "open mics" worked, although they probably called them talent searches then, was each performer would sign up to do one, two, maybe three songs depending on how long the list of those wishing to perform happened to be (the places where each performer kicked in a couple of bucks in order to play usually had shorter lists). These singers usually performed in the period in front of the night’s feature who very well might have been somebody who a few weeks before had been noticed by the owner during a previous "open mic" and asked to do a set of six to sixteen songs depending on the night and the length of the list of players in front of him or her. The featured performer played, unlike the "open mic" people, for the “basket” (maybe a hat) passed around the crowd in the audience and that was the night’s “pay.” A tough racket for those starting out like all such endeavors. The attrition rate was pretty high after the folk minute died down with arrival of other genre like folk rock, heavy rock, and acid rock although you still see a few old folkies around the Square or playing the separate “open mic” folk circuit that also run through church coffeehouses just like these writing jams.

Jack was not surprised then when Alex told him he would like him to come to hear him perform one of his works at the monthly third Thursday “open mic” at the Congregational Church in Arlington the next town over from Lexington. Alex told Jack that that night he was going to perform something he had written and thought on about Frank Jackman, about what had happened to Frank when he was in the Army during Vietnam War times.

Jack knew almost automatically what Alex was going to do, he would somehow use Bob Dylan’s Masters of War lyrics as part of his presentation. Jack and Alex ( a Vietnam veteran who got “religion” on the anti-war issue while he in the Army and became a fervent anti-war guy after that experience despite his personal problems, including a couple of losing bout s with drugs and alcohol before getting twelve step sober) had met Frank in 1971 when they were doing some anti-war work among the soldiers at Fort Devens out in Ayer about forty miles west of Boston. Frank had gotten out of the Army several months before and since he was from Nashua in the southern part of New Hampshire not far from Devens and had heard about the G.I. coffeehouse, The Morning Report, where Jack and Alex were working as volunteers he had decided to volunteer to help out as well.

Now Frank was a quiet guy, quieter than Jack and Alex anyway, but one night he had told his Army story to a small group of volunteers gathered in the main room of the coffeehouse as they were planning to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s sensational whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various spots around the base (including as it turned out inside the fort itself with one copy landing on the commanding general’s desk for good measure). He wanted to tell this story since he wanted to explain why he would not be able to go with them if they went inside the gates at Fort Devens.

Jack knew Alex was going to tell Frank’s story so he told Frank he would be there since he had not heard the song or Frank’s story in a long while and had forgotten parts of it. Moreover, Alex wanted Jack there for moral support since this night other than the recitation of the lyrics he was going to speak off the cuff rather than his usual reading from some prepared paper. 

That night Alex was already in the hall talking to the organizer, Eli Walsh, you may have heard of him since he has written some searing poems about his time in three tours Iraq. Jack felt right at home in this basement section of the church and he probably could have walked around blind-folded since the writing jams were on almost exactly the same model as the old folkie “open mics.” A table as you entered to pay your admission this night three dollars (although the tradition is that no one is turned away for lack of funds) with a kindly woman asking if you intended to perform and direct you to the sign-up sheet if so. Another smaller table with various cookies, snacks, soda, water and glasses for those who wished to have such goodies, and who were asked to leave a donation in the jar on that table if possible. The set-up in the hall this night included a small stage where the performers would present their material slightly above the audience. On the stage a lectern for those who wished to use that for physical support or to read their work from and the ubiquitous simple battery-powered sound system complete with microphone. For the audience a bevy of chairs, mostly mismatched, mostly having seen plenty of use, and mostly uncomfortable. After paying his admission fee he went over to Alex to let him know he was in the audience. Alex had told him he was number seven on the list so not to wander too far once the session had begun.

This is the way Alex told the story and why Jack knew there would be some reference to Bob Dylan’s Masters of War that night:

Hi everybody my name is Alex James and I am glad that you all came out this cold night to hear Preston Borden present his moving war poetry and the rest of us to reflect on the main subject of this month’s writing jam-the endless wars that the American government under whatever regime of late has dragged us into, us kicking and screaming to little avail.  I want to thank Eli as always for setting this event up every month and for his own thoughtful war poetry. [Some polite applause.] But enough for thanks and all that because tonight I want to recite a poem, well, not really a poem, but lyrics to a song, to a Bob Dylan song, Masters of War, so it might very well be considered a poem in some sense.   

You know sometimes, a lot of times, a song, lyrics, a poem for that matter bring back certain associations. You know some song you heard on the radio when you went on your first date, your first dance, your first kiss, stuff like that which is forever etched in your memory and evokes that moment every time you hear it thereafter. Now how this Dylan song came back to me recently is a story in itself.

You remember Eli back in October when we went up to Maine to help the Maine Veterans for Peace on their yearly peace walk that I ran into Susan Rich, the Quaker gal we met up in Freeport who walked with us that day to Portland. [Eli shouted out “yes.”] I had not seen Susan in about forty years before that day, hadn’t seen her since the times we had worked together building up support for anti-war G.I.s out at the Morning Report coffeehouse in Ayer outside Fort Devens up on Route 2 about thirty miles from here. That’s when we met Frank Jackman who is the real subject of my presentation tonight since he is the one who I think about when I think about that song, think about his story and how that song relates to it. 

Funny as many Dylan songs as I knew Masters of War, written by Dylan in 1963 I had never heard until 1971. Never heard the lyrics until I met Frank out at Fort Devens where after I was discharged from the Army that year I went to do some volunteer anti-war G.I. work at the coffeehouse outside the base in Army town Ayer. Frank too was a volunteer, had heard about the place somehow I forget how, who had grown up in Nashua up in southern New Hampshire and after he was discharged from the Army down at Fort Dix in New Jersey came to volunteer just like me and my old friend Jack Callahan who is sitting in the audience tonight. Now Frank was a quiet guy didn’t talk much about his military service, but he made the anti-war soldiers who hung out there at night and on weekends feel at ease. One night thought he felt some urge to tell his story, tell why he thought it was unwise for him to participate in an anti-war action we were planning around the base. We were going to pass out copies of Daniel Ellsberg’s explosive whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various location around the fort and as it turned out on the base. The reason that Frank had balked at the prospect of going into the fort was that as part of his discharge paperwork was attached a statement that he was never to go on a military installation again. We all were startled by that remark, right Jack? [Jack nods agreement.]

And that night the heroic, our kind of heroic, Frank Jackman told us about the hows and whys of his Army experience. Frank had been drafted like a ton of guys back then, like me, and had allowed himself to be drafted in 1968 at the age of nineteen not being vociferously anti-war and not being aware then of the option of not taking the subsequent induction. After about three week down at Fort Dix, the main basic training facility for trainees coming from the Northeast then, he knew two things-he had made a serious mistake by allowing himself to be drafted and come hell or high water he was not going to fight against people he had no quarrel with in Vietnam. Of course the rigors of basic training and being away from home, away from anybody who could help him do he knew not what then kept him quiet and just waiting. Once Basic was over and he got his Advanced Infantry Training assignment also at Fort Dix which was to be an infantryman at a time when old Uncle Sam only wanted infantrymen in the rice paddles and jungles of Vietnam things came to a head.

After a few weeks in AIT he got a three day weekend pass which allowed him to go legally off the base and he used that time to come up to Boston, or really Cambridge because what he was looking for was help to file an conscientious objector application and he knew the Quakers were historically the ones who would know about going about that process. That is ironically where Susan Rich comes in again, although indirectly this time, since Frank went to the Meeting House on Brattle Street where they were doing draft and G.I. resistance counseling and Susan was a member of that Meeting although she had never met him at that time. He was advised by one of the Quaker counselors that he could submit a C.O. application in the military, which he had previously not been sure was possible since nobody told anybody anything about that in the military, when he got back to Fort Dix but just then, although they were better later, the odds were stacked against him since he had already accepted induction. So he went back, put in his application, took a lot of crap from the lifers and officers in his company after that and little support, mainly indifference, from his fellow trainees. He still had to go through the training, the infantry training though and although he had taken M-16 rifle training in basic he almost balked at continuing to fire weapons especially when it came to machine guns. He didn’t balk but in the end that was not a big deal since fairly shortly after that his C.O. application was rejected although almost all those who interviewed him in the process though he was “sincere” in his beliefs. That point becomes important later.

Frank, although he knew his chances of being discharged as a C.O. were slim since he had based his application on his Catholic upbringing and more general moral and ethical grounds. The Catholic Church which unlike Quakers and Mennonites and the like who were absolutely against war held to a just war theory, Vietnam being mainly a just war in the Catholic hierarchy’s opinion. But Frank was sincere, more importantly, he was determined to not go to war despite his hawkish family and his hometown friends,’ some who had already served, served in Vietnam too, scorn and lack of support. So he went back up to Cambridge on another three day pass to get some advice, which he actually didn’t take in the end or rather only partially took up  which had been to get a lawyer they would recommend and fight the C.O. denial in Federal court even though that was also still a long shot then.

Frank checked with the lawyer alright, Steve Brady, who had been radicalized by the war and was offering his services on a sliding scale basis to G.I.s since he also had the added virtue of having been in the JAG in the military and so knew some of the ropes of the military legal system, and legal action was taken but Frank was one of those old time avenging Jehovah types like John Brown or one of those guys and despite being a Catholic rather than a high holy Protestant which is the usual denomination for avenging angels decided to actively resist the military. And did it in fairly simple way when you think about it. One Monday morning when the whole of AIT was on the parade field for their weekly morning report ceremony Frank came out of his barracks with his civilian clothes on and carrying a handmade sign which read “Bring the Troops Home Now!”

That sign was simply but his life got a lot more complicated after that. In the immediate sense that meant he was pulled down on the ground by two lifer sergeants and brought to the Provost Marshal’s office since they were not sure that some dippy-hippie from near-by New York City might be pulling a stunt. When they found out that he was a soldier they threw him into solitary in the stockade.

For his offenses Frank was given a special court-martial which meant he faced six month maximum sentence which a panel of officers at his court-martial ultimately sentenced him to after a seven day trial which Steve Brady did his best to try to make into an anti-war platform but given the limitation of courts for such actions was only partially successful. After that six months was up minus some good time Frank was assigned to a special dead-beat unit waiting further action either by the military or in the federal district court in New Jersey. Still in high Jehovah form the next Monday morning after he was released he went out to that same parade field in civilian clothes carrying another homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home Now!” and he was again manhandled by another pair of lifer sergeants and this time thrown directly into solitary in the stockade since they knew who they were dealing with by then. And again he was given a special court-martial and duly sentenced by another panel of military officers to the six months maximum.

Frank admitted at that point he was in a little despair at the notion that he might have to keep doing the same action over and over again for eternity. Well he wound up serving almost all of that second six-month sentence but then he got a break. That is where listening to the Quakers a little to get legal advice did help. See what Steve Brady, like I said an ex-World War II Army JAG officer turned anti-war activist lawyer, did was take the rejection of his C.O. application to Federal District Court in New Jersey on a writ of habeas corpus arguing that since all Army interviewers agreed Frank was “sincere” that it had been arbitrary and capricious of the Army to turn down his application. And given that the United States Supreme Court and some lower court decisions had by then expanded who could be considered a C.O. beyond the historically recognized groupings and creeds the cranky judge in the lower court case agreed and granted that writ of habeas corpus. Frank was let out with an honorable discharge, ironically therefore entitled to all veterans’ benefits but with the stipulation that he never go onto a military base again under penalty of arrest and trial. Whether that could be enforced as a matter of course he said he did not want to test since he was hardily sick of military bases in any case. 

So where does Bob Dylan’s Masters of War come into the picture. Well as you know, or should know every prisoner, every convicted prisoner, has the right to make a statement in his or her defense during the trial or at the sentencing phase. Frank at both his court-martials rose up and recited Bob Dylan’s Masters of War for the record. So for all eternity, or a while anyway, in some secret recess of the Army archives (and of the federal courts too) there is that defiant statement of a real hero of the Vietnam War. Nice right? 

 Here is what had those bloated military officers on Frank’s court-martial boards seeing red and ready to swing him from the highest gallows, yeah, swing him high.

Masters Of War-Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

The Christmas Truce by Charlotte Koons

The Christmas Truce by Charlotte Koons

At 18, drafted into the Austrian Army
After having spent time in London
As an apprentice waiter, he
would tell a Christmas story
That I always thought was
just him spinning a charming fairy tale.
Only much later, did I learn
That he was part of that
1914 Christmas Truce
and was telling the truth

Read Charlotte's Full Poem

From The Partisan Defense Committee -Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145 30 November 2018 Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison. In 2004, Cooper was less than four hours away from being murdered by the State of California when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a stay of execution issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That stay was granted after questions were raised over the prosecution’s evidence against Cooper in his 1985 trial. As one of the appeals court judges, William Fletcher, later wrote: “Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be—and in my view probably is—innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.” Cooper’s case returned to the public spotlight earlier this year after the New York Times published a May 17 op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof that compellingly detailed the police frame-up. It began almost immediately after the brutally mutilated bodies of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old neighbor were found in the Ryens’ house in Chino Hills, California, on 5 June 1983. Incredibly, the Ryens’ 8-year-old son Joshua, whose throat was slit and skull fractured, survived. At the hospital, Joshua communicated to a social worker that the killers were three or four white men. This matched the coroner’s initial conclusion that there had been several killers who had used a hatchet, an ice pick and knives. But this and other evidence was thrown out by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department as soon as they realized they could pin the murders on Cooper. A 25-year-old black man with a criminal record, he more than fit the police profile of a wanted suspect in racist, capitalist America. Three days before the murders, Cooper had escaped from a nearby minimum-security prison, where he was serving a four-year sentence for burglary. He had then hidden out in a house next door to the Ryens before fleeing to Mexico. Evidence shows that Cooper checked into a Tijuana hotel on June 5. The next day, cops looked through the house where Cooper had hidden and found nothing. But as soon as Cooper became their prime suspect, “evidence” suddenly turned up, including a bloodstained button from a green prison uniform. Cooper’s was brown. A hatchet sheath was all of a sudden found in the house. Cigarette butts that the cops claimed were Cooper’s were likewise suddenly discovered in the ashtray of the Ryens’ station wagon, which had been stolen the night of the murders. Buried was the testimony of local residents who reported seeing three white men driving the station wagon, as well as the accounts of witnesses who had seen three white men in bloody clothing in a nearby bar. Two bloody shirts were later found down the street from the bar. On June 9, a call was made to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department by a woman saying that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had come home on the night of the Ryen murders in an unfamiliar station wagon, wearing bloody coveralls but not the T-shirt he had on earlier in the day. She turned the coveralls over to the police, who threw them away! Cooper, who has maintained his innocence from the beginning, fought to have a DNA test done on a bloody T-shirt that had been found near the Ryens’ house. When the test, which was conducted in 2002, showed his blood on the shirt, Cooper insisted that it had been planted by the police. Further testing after the 2004 stay of execution revealed that the blood on the shirt included a chemical that the police use to preserve blood samples. When a vial of the blood taken from Cooper was tested, it was found to contain the DNA of Cooper and another person. In short, it’s likely that the police planted blood from the vial on the shirt and then topped it off with someone else’s blood to make it look like the vial hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, the court upheld Cooper’s conviction and death sentence. In his op-ed, Kristof noted that the defense attorney’s repeated requests for advanced DNA testing had been refused by California’s Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown, as well as by Kamala Harris, who was the state’s attorney general from 2011-17. Now a U.S. Senator and hopeful contender for the top slot on the Democrats’ presidential ticket in 2020, Harris immediately responded to Kristof’s column, declaring: “As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing.” The cynicism is breathtaking. For his part, Governor Brown, who leaves office in January, has refused to grant Cooper’s request for DNA testing. When Kristof suggested that every day matters “for an innocent man on death row,” Brown simply shrugged that “California has 130,000 prisoners.” He should know. For years, Brown openly defied a Supreme Court ruling that conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons were so atrocious that they violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” In his previous stint as attorney general of California, which has the most death row inmates in the U.S., Brown similarly shrugged off the notion that anyone on death row could be innocent. Kristof presents the case of Kevin Cooper as “the story of a broken justice system.” Far from it. The police frame-up of Cooper is an object lesson in how the racist injustice system of American capitalism actually works. As Cooper himself observed: “I’m frameable, because I’m an uneducated black man in America. Sometimes it’s race, and sometimes it’s class.” The cops, courts, prisons and military are at the core of a state apparatus whose purpose is the defense of the profits, property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s machinery of violence. In the U.S., legal lynching is rooted in the very foundation of American capitalism, which was built on black chattel slavery and continues to be maintained through the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society. Those condemned to death row have always been disproportionately black. The fight for Cooper’s freedom is a cause that is in the interest of the multiracial working class and all opponents of the brutal racism, exploitation and oppression enforced by the capitalist state. Free Kevin Cooper now! Abolish the racist death penalty!

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two Free Ed Poindexter! (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145	30 November 2018

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two

Free Ed Poindexter!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom. Along with his codefendant Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, then known as David Rice, Poindexter was framed up on bogus charges of killing Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard in an August 1970 bomb explosion. Without a shred of physical evidence and based on the perjured testimony of teenager Duane Peak at their 1971 trial, Poindexter and Mondo, leaders of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a Black Panther Party (BPP) affiliate, were sentenced to life. Mondo died in prison in 2016. The racist capitalist rulers have made it clear that is the only way they will let Poindexter leave his prison hell.

A July 2018 book by Michael Richardson, Framed: J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO & the Omaha Two Story, lays bare the racist conspiracy by the FBI and Omaha police to frame up Poindexter and Mondo as part of the murderous FBI COINTELPRO vendetta against the Panthers. Based on a decade of meticulous research, the book exposes the lies of cops, prosecutors and FBI agents. It details collusion at the highest levels of the FBI with the Omaha police to suppress evidence, as well as prosecutorial intimidation and coaching of Duane Peak to concoct a scenario that tied Poindexter and Mondo to Minard’s killing.

Like the Panthers, the NCCF rejected the turn-the-other-cheek pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr., advocating armed self-defense in the face of racist cop terror. The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist BPP crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But the program of the Panthers was disdainful of the multiracial working class, which has real social power based on its role in production. This isolation from the proletariat left the Panthers especially vulnerable to government repression.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” He said of an expanded COINTELPRO: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” Hoover spelled out what he meant in 1968, when he stated: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

This was no idle threat. Thirty-eight Panthers were killed and hundreds more arrested on bogus charges. Richardson describes the 4 December 1969 FBI-orchestrated raid by Chicago cops on the apartment of 20-year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was assassinated together with Mark Clark as they slept in their beds. Four days later, a SWAT team laid siege to the Panther office in Los Angeles, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition. The primary target was L.A. BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Vietnam War vet whose military knowledge was crucial that day to saving his own life and those of his comrades. Geronimo was subsequently framed up for a 1968 murder and spent 27 years in prison (eight of them in solitary) before his conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1997; he died in 2011. Those the authorities couldn’t kill were railroaded to prison hell. Among them is class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was falsely convicted of the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

The sinister motivation for the frame-up of Poindexter and Mondo was made clear two decades later by Jack Swanson, the Omaha Police Intelligence Division liaison with the FBI. In a 1991 documentary by George Case, Black Panthers, Swanson boasted: “I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from the city of Omaha.” For his role in the frame-up, Swanson was promoted to lieutenant and later became Omaha’s chief of police.

By the time he joined the BPP, Mondo was known as a performance artist and anti-poverty worker. Like many military veterans, Poindexter was radicalized by the Vietnam War and sought in the BPP the vehicle to place his military experience in the service of the black freedom struggle. The two joined with the BPP in response to relentless racist police brutality—which brought Omaha to a boil with the killing of black 14-year-old Vivian Strong, who was shot in the back of the head by a cop in the summer of 1969. Strong’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury. A year earlier, a black high school student had been shot dead by the cops during protests against arch-segregationist George Wallace, who held a rally in the city during his presidential election campaign.

In the early morning hours of 17 August 1970, Omaha police received a 911 call from a man speaking with a deep gravelly voice, reporting that a woman was screaming from a vacant house. When the cops arrived, the house was empty except for a suitcase inside the doorway. That suitcase exploded, killing Minard. Afterward, Omaha police rounded up dozens of black people in a racist dragnet. Richardson points out that within hours, the FBI knew from its informants that Mondo and Poindexter were not involved in Minard’s death—but it is the two of them that the cops and FBI targeted.

Among those picked up was 15-year-old Duane Peak, who confessed to placing the bomb. Peak told the cops at least six versions of what happened. Initially, he stated that he acted alone, and that Poindexter and Mondo were not involved. Threatened with the death penalty and promised a deal, Peak agreed to implicate them.

At a preliminary hearing, he effectively recanted his accusations against Poindexter and Mondo. The prosecution asked for a break. Two hours later, Peak returned to court wearing sunglasses, which when removed revealed swollen eyes. He then repeated his earlier fabrication that Poindexter had built the bomb using dynamite that was stored in Mondo’s basement. The next day, Peak confided in a letter from jail to a family friend, Olivia Norris: “From now on I refuse to call myself a man, or anything close to a man, because I did what I did.” He added, “I not only turned against those two bloods, but I turned against myself and my own people.” That letter, which prosecutors knew about, was suppressed along with other evidence.

Peak testified that he carried the suitcase bomb around North Omaha from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., taking it into three different cars and two residences. Four witnesses, including two cousins of Peak, testified that Peak was never together with Poindexter and Mondo at the times and places that Peak claimed. Peak also testified that it was he who made the 911 call. A recording of the 911 call was never played for the jury. Omaha police had sent a copy of the tape to FBI headquarters for analysis but later asked that no written report be issued, putting a stop to the search for the identity of the caller. An FBI memo pointed to a warning by the Omaha assistant chief of police that use of the tapes “might be prejudicial to the police murder trial.” Hoover himself signed off on this suppression of evidence. Testifying at a 2007 hearing on Poindexter’s petition for a new trial, vocal analyst Tom Owen confirmed that Peak could not have made that phone call.

Peak testified that he never entered into a deal with the prosecution, and the prosecutor denied that any bargain was struck. After testifying against Mondo and Poindexter, Peak pleaded guilty to juvenile delinquency in juvenile court.

The cops’ claim that they had recovered dynamite from the basement of Mondo’s house was transparently false. Of the more than two dozen police photos of the basement, not one shows any dynamite—which only appears in photos of the trunk of a police cruiser. Jack Swanson testified at the 1971 trial that he found the dynamite in a coal bin but changed his story in a 1974 federal appeal hearing, saying he saw it by the furnace. In the 2007 hearing, another cop who at trial had backed up Swanson’s story claimed that he, not Swanson, discovered the dynamite. The court ruled these contradictions “immaterial.” Neither Mondo’s nor Poindexter’s fingerprints were found on the dynamite. In the George Case documentary, Marvin McClarty, a former Omaha policeman present at the search, said he knew that the cops “were out to get those two,” adding: “To this day I still believe that it [the dynamite] was planted in that house.”

The cops also claimed that residue recovered from Mondo’s pants and Poindexter’s pockets tested positive for dynamite. A photo of Mondo taken moments before he surrendered his pants showed him with his hands deeply thrust in his pockets, yet swabs from their hands tested negative. In 1999, a retired top FBI explosives expert, Fred Whitehurst, submitted an analysis. “I still find that suspicious. The dynamite is in cartridges that don’t need to be opened ever except to punch a hole in them and stick a blasting cap in them. But there are dynamite particles in many places. This is not right.” He concluded: “Something doesn’t add up here unless that evidence was salted.” Many of those initially rounded up tested positive for dynamite, only to be released with charges dropped immediately after Poindexter and Mondo were convicted.

Mondo remained an unbroken fighter against racial oppression until his last breath. Poindexter, who just turned 74, remains unbowed despite numerous health conditions, including recent triple-bypass heart surgery, no doubt exacerbated by nearly five decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment. He has earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is recognized as a caring mentor for fellow prisoners.

COINTELPRO was formally terminated two weeks after the conviction of the Omaha Two in the early 1970s. But it lives today not only in the ongoing imprisonment of a generation of Panthers and other fighters for black freedom but also in the surveillance, harassment and state terror directed against those who oppose depredations of racist American capitalism.

In 1974, a federal district court overturned Mondo’s conviction based on the illegal search of his house, a decision affirmed by a federal appellate court a year later. But in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case returned to Nebraska state court. The Nebraska Supreme Court then ruled that Mondo’s time to appeal had lapsed. Since 1993, Nebraska’s Parole Board has voted for the release of Poindexter and Mondo. However, the Nebraska Board of Pardons, made up of the governor, the attorney general and secretary of state, has refused to commute the life sentences to a term of years—a prerequisite to a grant of parole.

The FBI, cops and courts are core components of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to safeguard the bosses’ profit system through breaking strikes, terrorizing ghetto and barrio youth and repressing social protest. There will be no end to cop terror and racist frame-ups without getting rid of the capitalist system and its state through workers revolution. Ed Poindexter is an innocent man—Free him now!

*   *   *

Ed Poindexter is among the 11 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee, which is preparing to hold its 33rd annual Holiday Appeal fundraiser in support of this program. We first started providing stipends to Poindexter and Mondo in 1986. For more information about the PDC and its class-war prisoners fund, see www.partisandefense.org. You can write to Poindexter at: Ed Poindexter, 27767, 1-A-09, Nebraska State Penitentiary, P.O. Box 22500, Lincoln, NE 68542-2500.

Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters! (Quote of the Week) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145 30 November 2018 TROTSKY LENIN Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters! (Quote of the Week) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II. Some 40,000 men, women and children held off elite Nazi troops for 42 days before they were nearly all dragged off to the gas chambers. We reprint below an excerpt from Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), the newspaper of the Jewish Trotskyists in the Warsaw Ghetto, hailing the Red Army shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This selection originally appeared in WV No. 573 (9 April 1993). In the intervening period, we have misplaced the source material. The first workers state is fighting for its existence. The fate of the Russian Revolution and—to a considerable degree—the fate of the international revolution weigh in the balance. The workers of the whole world follow with bated breath the course of the greatest class war in the world, and their hearts and souls are with the Red Army…. Under which slogans will the Soviet bureaucracy lead the war? Under patriotic or revolutionary ones, “democratic” or class? The history of the last 17 years, beginning from the foundation of the theory of “socialism in one country,” and especially the “gains” of the last six years—the “people’s front,” betrayal of the Spanish revolution, the Moscow trials, the pogrom against the Bolshevik elite, the restoration of the officer caste in the Red Army, triumphant reaction in all spheres of Soviet life, the propagation of the cult of [tsarist generals] Suvorov, Kutuzov and similar “heroes,” the assassination of Trotsky and the friendship with Hitler, all Stalin’s crimes—the whole Soviet Thermidor would have had no sense if the Soviet bureaucracy were to show itself suddenly willing and capable to conduct revolutionary war…. We defend the workers state regardless of the Stalinist regime, as we defend every workers organization from the blows of the class enemy regardless of the reformist regime ruling it…. The war of the USSR against Hitler—is the war of the international proletariat, it is our war! “We accept the workers’ state as it is and we assert, ‘This is our state.’ Despite its heritage of backwardness, despite starvation and sluggishness, despite the bureaucratic mistakes and even abominations, the workers of the entire world must defend tooth and nail their future socialist fatherland which this state represents” (Trotsky, 1932). Long Live the Red Army! Long Live the Russian Revolution! Long Live the International Revolution! —“Our War,” Czerwony Sztandar (July 1941)

One Last Time On The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

One Last Time On The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?       

By Phil Larkin

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

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Today I choose not to go on and on about the recent internal disputes on this site which has led to the canny and “exile” of the former site administrator, Allan Jackman who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin when posting, etc., because I have bigger fish to fry as they used to say in the old days in my Irish Catholic growing up Acre section of North Adamsville south of Boston. (Allan in a retro piece written well before all the controversies has given his take on this dispute in a posting dated December 15, 2014.) Those “fish” meaning in this 50^th anniversary year of the Beatle’s world record bestselling album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  the world-historic dispute of that Acre growing up time about whether the Beatles or the Stones (Rolling Stones) were the band that fit our moods.  “Spoke” to us although we would have torn each other’s hearts out, or did a huge amount of “fag” baiting (yeah, we were way behind the curve then on sexual identity issues even though one of our hang-around guys, the biggest “fag-baiter” ultimately to our collective shock “came out” a couple of years after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City and for a while “shunned” him until we wised up a bit mainly through our own chances in politics and ways of looking at the world) if anybody had dared to use such an expression in the year of our Lord 1960 something.      

I have gone round and round on this one and by overwhelming general consensus, excepting our leader Frankie Riley, who tough and smart as he was, couldn’t get us to buy into his view that the “boys for Liverpool,” meaning po’ boy working class guys like us were superior to the Stones. And here is the funny part some fifty plus years later those of us who are still around from that time and still speaking to each other, including that gay brother (a couple of guys are not for very long ago reasons but in the baby-boomer male psyche “forgive and forget” was, is, a tough dollar) having recently gathered together to listen to a ton of Beatles and Stones material still believe that our youthful opinions hold true. That truth despite most of us, having survived the “from hunger” neighborhood, wound up having decent and honorable careers. Even Frankie belatedly to be sure feels that the “angry young men” Stones still represent best our own anger at our situations in a world we did not make than the more wistful Beatles. Personal preferences, time, and whatever youthful angst and alienation obviously mixing up the pot when comparison time comes around but there you have my take on that still simmering controversy.

So the Stones “win” that battle but today I want give a “shout out” especially to those on the Beatles side about a program on NPR’s Terry Gross- hosted Fresh Air. One day she had, in an encore edition originally aired on June 1^st, the son of George Martin, the guy who produced Sgt. Pepper who for the 50^th anniversary remixed his father’s original album work. For an hour he spoke about many interesting things that occurred during the original production and the things that he had done to give the thing a 50^th anniversary retooling.

Here’s the link but listen to Stones stuff before final judgment-okay:   

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531040084/50-years-later-producer-remixes-sgt-pepper-to-bring-it-into-the-modern-world

On The 50th Anniversary Of Beatle's "Sgt Pepper" Album (2017) The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

On The 50th Anniversary Of Beatle's "Sgt Pepper" Album (2017)    The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?

Allan Jackson (using the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) commentary

Working Class Hero

Street Fighting Man

The following is a response to a canned Q&A section from a committee of my high school Class of 1964 (a few edits here to delete personal information). I share it with the aging lefties and rock and roll aficionados in the audience.

Okay, so Markin has come in from the cold and reunited with the Class of 1964 after over forty years of ignoring that fact. Big deal, right? For those interested in my profile you can read my comments in the My Story section. But today, since I have joined this work and it is my dime, I feel I might as well use it for the purpose that I joined, to network with some of the old crowd.

I propose to use my bulletin board space to pose certain questions to my fellow classmates to which I am interested in getting answers. Thus I will be periodically throwing a question out and would appreciate an answer. No, I do not want to ask personal family questions. After forty years this space is hardly the place to air our dirty little secrets. No, I do not want to talk religion. That is everyone private affair. No, I do not want to talk politics, although those who might remember me know that I am a ‘political junkie’ from way back. In fact I mean to get myself into some 12 step rehab program as soon as this current campaign is over, if ever. What I want to do is ask questions like that posed below. Join me…..

“Manchurian Candidate” McCain vs. The Huckster”? Boring. Ms. Hillary vs. Obama ‘The Charma”? Ho, hum. Three dollar gas at the pump? Oh, well. No, what has my blood boiling is a question that I am, after forty years, desperate to know about my classmates from 1964. In your callow youth, back in the mist of time, did you prefer the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? The question was posed in the canned Q&A section above but I feel the issue warrants a full airing out. I make no bones about my preference for the Rolling Stones and will motivate that below but here let me just set the parameters. I am talking about when we were in high school. I do not mean the later material like the Beatles "Sergeant Pepper" or the Stones' "Gimme Shelter". And no, I do not want to hear about how you really swooned over Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee. Answer the question asked, please.

I am not sure exactly when I first hear a Stones song although it was probably “Satisfaction”. However, what really hooked me on them was when I hear them cover the old Willie Dixon blues classic “The Red Rooster”. If you will recall that song was banned, at first, from the radio stations of Boston. Later, I think, and someone can maybe help me out on this, WMEX broke the ban and played it. And no, the song was not about the doings of our barnyard friends. But, beyond that it was the fact that it was banned that made me, and perhaps you, want to hear it at any cost. That says as much about my personality then, and now, as any long-winded statement I could make.

That event began my long love affair with the blues. And that is probably why, although American blues also influenced the Beatles, it is the Stones that I favor. Their cover still holds up, by the way. Not as good, as I found out later, as the legendary Howlin' Wolf’s version but good. I have also thought about The Stones influence recently as I have thought about the long ago past of my youth. Compare some works like John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and The Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” (yes, I know these are later works) and I believe that you will find that something in the way The Stones’ presented that angry, defiant sound appealed to my working class alienation. But enough. I will close with this. I have put my money where my mouth is with my preference. When the Stones’ toured Boston at Fenway Park in the summer of 2005 I spend many (too many) dollars to get down near the stage and watch old Mick and friends rock. Beat that.