For some it is infuriating to see ‘conservative’ people in the US spreading the claims that the Democratic Party is somehow “pro-China.”
Because Biden may have had some business dealings that benefited some US businesses that contribute to Democrats somehow the Dems are under a Manchurian Candidate spell and doing what China’s Communists want.
This ‘thesis’ is like something out of a Marvel comic book. Or, maybe a DC Universe.
If the Democrats are “Pro-China” and following a Communist playbook, some pose logical questions.
New York Times – Non Stop Demonization of China’s Communist Government
Why does the pro-Democratic media feature seemingly non-stop anti-China propaganda. No story about China passes without a negative slant.
Why are the pro-Democratic Party media outlets suddenly changing the story about the possibility of COVID being created by ‘gain of function’ research? China is the prime candidate for the creation of COVID in that case. Why would a media and Democrats who are “controlled” by China change the line after Trump left office?
Why is the Biden Pentagon pushing a low intensity campaign of probing China’s defense perimeter. US warships are sent through the Straights of Taiwan on a regular basis to taunt China and study China’s air defense activation. The ‘reckless’ Trump did not engage in such provocations. Did Putin order Trump to be more peaceful?
There is no internal reasoning to any of this.
Right Wingers seemingly buy into all of the claims that Democrats are “Pro-Chinese Communist” as a counter to the equally bizarre claim the Evil Genius Putin got Trump elected while also getting the UK to leave the EU.
One conservative asks, “We can see the crack-downs on US protesters on January 6. American protesters are held in solitary confinement without charges and no court date. Where does Communist China fit into that? Are the Democrats imprisoning Right Wing Dissidents because the Chinese Communist ordered them to do so? Are people insane? This is like a 1960 John Birch society idea. They thought President Eisenhower was controlled by Russian Communists through his brother who was a double agent. Insane.”
If China’s Communist Party is controlling the US Democrat Party, then why is the US Democrat Party at war with China Communists?
Is Communist China Ordering Biden To Send US Ships To Chinese Waters? Why?
Democrat Secretary of State claiming China is “harassing and surveilling” journalists? Did China’s Communists order him to do that to throw investigators off the scent?
“It is bonkers that American right wing populists can look at the US government, Democrats, and Main Stream Media, and think that China’s Communists are behind the campaign against China.
If the US Democrats are controlled by the Chinese Communists, then these Fox News and Breitbart people need to explain why China is running a smear campaign against itself and trying to start a war with itself.
People who are stupid enough to believe this stuff will honestly get what they deserve.
It’s truly shameful that Tucker Carlson is still pushing this “evil Chinese influence” narrative. I do appreciate that he’s dialed it back a bit, but remember: every time you blame the Chinese for something that is happening in America, you are shifting responsibility from the people who actually did it.
The single issue relating to China that matters for the United States is the trade deals – which were all written and implemented by capitalist for the purpose of maximizing profits. But that issue of trade has been buried under all of this other gibberish.
In March 1921, the garrison of the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt, gateway to revolutionary Petrograd, revolted against the Bolshevik government. The mutineers held Kronstadt for two weeks, until the Soviet regime finally retook it by a direct assault across the ice, at a cost of many lives on both sides. The rebels claimed to be fighting to restore a purified Soviet power freed from the monopoly of the Communists. The Bolsheviks charged that the revolt was a counterrevolutionary mutiny: whatever the sailors’ intentions, it could only aid the forces of capitalist restoration—ranging from avowed democrats to outright monarchists—united behind the White standard of clerical/tsarist reaction. Though militarily repulsed by the Soviet Red Army after nearly three years of civil war, the White Guards and their imperialist patrons remained intent on reversing the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917 and crushing the young Soviet workers state.
Nearly 73 years later, on 10 January 1994, self-selected White Guard heir Boris Yeltsin, president of a now-capitalist Russia, placed his double-headed-eagle seal of approval on the Kronstadt revolt (see “Kronstadt and Counterrevolution: Then and Now,” Workers Vanguard No. 595, 4 March 1994). The fact that Yeltsin, who had led the 1991-92 overturn of the Bolshevik Revolution, “rehabilitated” the Kronstadt mutineers simply confirmed once again whose class interests were served by the 1921 uprising. The Kronstadt mutiny is the center of a great myth, assiduously propagated by anarchists but seized upon by a whole array of anti-revolutionary forces ranging from social democrats to tsarist restorationists. The principal aim of the “hue and cry over Kronstadt” has always been to discredit the Marxists’ struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and in particular to smear Trotskyism, the contemporary embodiment of authentic Leninism.
According to anarchist myth, Kronstadt was the “third toilers’ revolution”—a continuation of the February and October revolutions of 1917—its suppression proof positive of the anti-working-class character of the Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, and of Marxism in general. To wield Kronstadt as an ideological club against Leninism, the anarchists have to insist, against all known facts, that the mutineers of 1921 were the same sailors who had played a vanguard role in 1917 and that they were not linked to the White reactionaries. Yeltsin unwittingly helped drive a nail in the coffin of the Kronstadt myth when, in blessing the mutineers, he also opened the archives for study of the mutiny. This led to the 1999 publication of a huge collection of Russian historical materials by ROSSPEN, the main publishing house associated with the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. The documents in Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda, dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (The 1921 Kronstadt Tragedy, Documents in Two Volumes) (Moscow: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 1999) confirm beyond doubt the counterrevolutionary nature of the Kronstadt rising.
Lenin and Trotsky Told the Truth
Right from the start, the anarchists made common cause with open counterrevolutionaries over Kronstadt. Prominent American anarchist Alexander Berkman’s 1922 pamphlet, The Kronstadt Rebellion, was based largely on a spurious 1921 account entitled The Truth About Kronstadt published by the Social Revolutionaries (SR), bitter opponents of the October Revolution. In 1938, the Kronstadt lie machine was rolled out again—in the form of Ida Mett’s The Kronstadt Commune—this time in an effort to deflect Trotsky’s devastating critique of the role of the CNT anarchist union leaders (in league with the Stalinists) in derailing the Spanish workers revolution. (For more on the Spanish Revolution, see Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain [New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938].) Shortly before his death in 1945, Voline (V. M. Eichenbaum), a leading Russian anarchist in 1917-21, added his authority to the anti-Bolshevik frame-up with an indictment that relied on the mutineers’ own lying proclamations (Voline, The Unknown Revolution [Kronstadt 1921 Ukraine 1918-21] [New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1955]). Today, a resurgent anarchist trend again seizes on alleged atrocities by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in Kronstadt to inflame anti-communist prejudices among young activists in the post-Soviet era.
Right from the start, Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik spokesmen pointed out that the uprising had been embraced with alacrity and even publicly forecast by the counterrevolution in exile; that former tsarist officers in the Kronstadt garrison like General A. N. Kozlovsky figured prominently in the mutiny; that the Kronstadt sailors of 1921 were no longer the “pride and glory” of the workers revolution, as Trotsky had called them in 1917, but a relatively privileged and demoralized layer tied to the peasant villages. In 1938, as he exposed the perfidy of the anarchist misleaders in Spain, Trotsky also shot down the recycled Kronstadt slanders, writing “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt” and “More on the Suppression of Kronstadt.” He wrote scathingly:
“The Spanish government of the ‘People’s Front’ stifles the socialist revolution and shoots revolutionists. The Anarchists participate in this government, or, when they are driven out, continue to support the executioners. And their foreign allies and lawyers occupy themselves meanwhile with a defense…of the Kronstadt mutiny against the harsh Bolsheviks. What a travesty!”
—“Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” 15 January 1938
Trotsky also urged his supporters to undertake a more detailed work. The result was “The Truth About Kronstadt” by John G. Wright of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), first published in the SWP’s New International (February 1938) and then in a longer version in an educational bulletin in 1939. Marshaling the historical evidence then available, including the testimony of “the very people who engineered and led and attempted to extend the mutiny,” Wright methodically demonstrated how the Whites supported the uprising and how the sailors were politically driven by their petty-bourgeois class interests and manipulated by the forces of open counterrevolution. (The longer version of Wright’s article can be found in the collection Kronstadt by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky [New York: Pathfinder, 1979].)
Every serious piece of historical research since has vindicated the Bolsheviks. Notably, this includes pro-anarchist historian Paul Avrich’s Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In our review, we recommended the book as the work of a conscientious researcher, who was compelled to conclude that he could “sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them” (“Anarcho-Libertarian Myths Exposed: Kronstadt and Counterrevolution,” WV Nos. 195 and 203, 3 March and 28 April 1978).
Avrich’s research showed that the principal leader of the revolt, a seaman named Stepan Petrichenko, had earlier attempted to join the Whites, then helped turn a mass protest meeting into a decisive break with the Bolshevik government. After the uprising, Petrichenko fled to Finland, which was under the iron rule of former tsarist general and White Guard butcher Baron Mannerheim. Petrichenko openly joined forces with the émigré White Guards concentrated there and endorsed plans for a “temporary military dictatorship” to replace Bolshevik rule. Avrich also discovered a White Guard “Memorandum on the Question of Organizing an Uprising in Kronstadt” that detailed the military and political situation inside the fortress and spoke of having recruited a group of Kronstadt sailors who were preparing to take an active role in a forthcoming uprising there. Nonetheless, Avrich asserted that there was no evidence of links between the Whites and the sailors before the revolt and echoed the common refrain that had the revolt been planned, it would have been launched a few weeks later, after the ice melted and made a Bolshevik ground assault impossible.
The documents assembled in Kronstadt Tragedy definitively put these objections to rest. The collection contains 829 original documents (with an additional 276, in whole or excerpted, in the footnotes), most never before published. These include firsthand accounts by participants in the uprising, among them mutinous sailors and visiting White Guard emissaries, and secret White reports; memoirs and articles by some of the 8,000 mutineers who fled to Finland after the Bolsheviks retook Kronstadt; and records of interrogation of arrested mutineers by the Soviet Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Contemporary Soviet accounts include Baltic Fleet commissar Nikolai Kuzmin’s 25 March 1921 report to the Petrograd Soviet and the first official report on the Cheka investigation, by Special Commissioner Yakov S. Agranov, submitted on 5 April 1921. It is particularly valuable now to be able to see how extensively the accounts of the mutineers who escaped coincide as to the facts with those who confessed while in Soviet hands.
An extensive introduction by Russian historian Yuri Shchetinov, who has done earlier research on Kronstadt, is quite useful, pointing to disputed questions and summarizing relevant archival findings. The documents were culled from a range of Soviet, White Guard, imperialist, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary and anarchist sources and compiled by researchers from nine Russian archives, including the Russian State Military Archive, the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History and the Central Archive of the Federal Security Services (FSB), the political police. The chief researcher for the collection, I. I. Kudryavtsev, helped prepare materials from the FSB archive and was responsible for the footnotes, indices and bibliography. The name index entry for Trotsky claims he was a “member of French Masonic Lodge, expelled apparently in 1916.” This ludicrous libel, reflective of a counterrevolutionary hatred of the Bolshevik leader, flies in the face of Trotsky’s struggle to root out the pernicious influence of Freemasonry in the young French Communist Party, a historic problem in the French workers movement.
A new book by French historian Jean-Jacques Marie, of Pierre Lambert’s Parti des Travailleurs (PT), seizes on this libel to impugn the collection as a whole, asserting that the “compilation is endowed with an abundant body of footnotes, which bears the imprint of the political police, the FSB (the former KGB), and is marked by an obsession, rampant among the Russian nationalists, with a supposed Masonic plot” (Jean-Jacques Marie, Cronstadt [Paris: Fayard, 2005]). Yet Marie relies on this compilation for the bulk of his own citations! While the FSB is steeped in Great Russian chauvinism, the libel of Trotsky in Kronstadt Tragedy is singular and is not representative of the collection’s editorial work. Marie’s inordinate concern over a non-existent Masonic obsession in Kronstadt Tragedy says more about the Lambertist PT, whose connections with Freemasonry have long been an open secret on the French left. Among these are the close ties between Lambert, long an official in the Force Ouvrière (FO) trade-union federation, and former FO leader Marc Blondel, an open Mason.
For their part, various anarchist Web sites and ’zines, confronted with the mass of new evidence in Kronstadt Tragedy, have turned to a secondhand commentary by Hebrew University academic Israel Getzler (“The Communist Leaders’ Role in the Kronstadt Tragedy of 1921 in the Light of Recently Published Archival Documents,” Revolutionary Russia, June 2002). Getzler elevates the Agranov report to “pride of place,” though it was rushed out only days after the mutiny and without access to any of the ringleaders nor to many of the documents in the present compilation. Getzler then extracts from this initial report one isolated passage in order to claim that Agranov found “that the sailors’ protest was ‘entirely spontaneous’” and that his “findings flatly contradict the official line.” This is sophistry, not scholarship! The Bolsheviks’ “official line” was not that Kronstadt was a White Guard/imperialist conspiracy from start to finish and top to bottom, but rather that it served the interests of and was fully embraced by the counterrevolution. Even the brief passage Getzler cites from Agranov corroborates this, asserting that “the uprising took on a systematic character and was led by the experienced hand of the old generals” (Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy [our translation]).
In fact, as we shall see, the many documents in Kronstadt Tragedy studiously ignored by Getzler do indeed show that, far from being “entirely spontaneous,” there was a counterrevolutionary conspiracy at the heart of the Kronstadt “toilers’ revolution.” They flesh out, in unambiguous detail, the scale and scope of organized White Guard activity in and around Kronstadt, meshing with the anonymous memorandum uncovered by Avrich. Indeed, one of the newly published documents is by the prominent White agent believed by Avrich to have authored that memorandum, counterrevolutionary National Center operative G.F. Tseidler, who boasts how right-wing émigrés from Finland (cloaked as a Red Cross delegation) were welcomed to Kronstadt by Petrichenko and other mutiny leaders. Another report, by a leading White agent resident in Finland, General G.E. Elvengren, not only credits a White Guard organization in Kronstadt with fomenting the uprising but explains why it was launched earlier than planned. Of particular interest in demonstrating a hidden hand behind the uprising are the numerous firsthand accounts that testify to the systematic deception employed by Petrichenko and his allies in order to bring a section of the garrison out with them.
In preparing this article, we also studied a number of other Russian-language materials, including both primary and secondary sources. Among these is a series of articles on the Kronstadt mutiny published throughout 1930-31 in the Leningrad historical journal Krasnaia Letopis’, including an analysis by Soviet historian A.S. Pukhov of how the social composition of the Kronstadt garrison changed between 1917 and 1921. We also consulted with Yuri Shchetinov, who wrote the introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy, and obtained from him excerpts of his earlier book, Kronshtadt, mart 1921 g. (Kronstadt, March 1921), whose publication was halted in 1992 after Yeltsin took the reins of power. All translations from Kronstadt Tragedy and other Russian-language sources are ours.
The Class Character of the Kronstadt Mutiny
In “The Truth About Kronstadt,” Trotskyist John G. Wright punctured the anarchist fairy tale that the Kronstadt rebels were just a mass of undifferentiated toilers fighting selflessly for the ideal of “free soviets.” This notion obscures the distinct—and, at times, opposed—class forces operating. Rejecting a materialist class understanding, anarchists divide the world into powerful and powerless, rich and poor, lumping the peasant small-property holder and the urban factory worker together into a classless “people.” But the peasant is not inherently collectivist and anti-capitalist; rather he is essentially a primitive small businessman who wants low prices on the things he buys and high prices on the things he sells. As Wright observed:
“The supposition that soldiers and sailors could venture upon an insurrection under an abstract political slogan of ‘free soviets’ is absurd in itself…. These people could have been moved to an insurrection only by profound economic needs and interests. These were the needs and interests of the fathers and brothers of these sailors and soldiers, that is, of peasants as traders in food products and raw materials. In other words the mutiny was the expression of the petty bourgeoisie’s reaction against the difficulties and privations imposed by the proletarian revolution.”
— Wright, “The Truth About Kronstadt”
The workers revolution in Russia took place in a backward, overwhelmingly peasant country, creating, in Trotsky’s words, a dictatorship of the proletariat resting on the poor peasantry. The long-term existence of Soviet Russia could only be assured through the spread of socialist revolution to the advanced industrial powers of West Europe and the rest of the world. In the meantime, the support or neutrality of the peasant masses was key to safeguarding the revolution. This meant winning over the poorer peasants with consumer goods, tractors and other manufactured products, ultimately laying the basis for a rural proletariat based on large-scale, collectivized farming.
But in the winter of 1920-21, Soviet Russia lay in ruins after seven years of imperialist war and civil war. The armies of 14 capitalist states had invaded revolutionary Russia. These provided assistance to capitalist-restorationist armies led by former tsarist military commanders Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel, Yudenich and others, who ravaged the country and systematically massacred Jews and Communists, as well as militant workers and recalcitrant peasants. Industry and transport were paralyzed and major cities depopulated, as the starving foraged for food. In the countryside, famine and pestilence on a scale not seen in centuries had driven the villages to the point of cannibalism. All this was exacerbated by an imperialist economic blockade. The policies the Bolsheviks improvised to cope with these calamities were dubbed “War Communism.” At their core was seizure of grain from the peasantry in order to feed the cities and provision the Red Army. Throughout the Civil War, the mass of the peasantry accepted this as a lesser evil than the return of the White gentry.
By the fall of 1920, the main White and imperialist forces had finally been routed. But White troops still occupied the shores of the Black Sea near Georgia; the Japanese army remained in Russia’s Far East until the end of 1922, and Wrangel still commanded up to 80,000 men under arms in Turkey. Then peasant resentment exploded. Shchetinov notes, “Towards the end of 1920 and the beginning of 1921, armed uprisings flared up in the Tambov and Voronezh gubernias, in the Central Volga region, in the Don Basin, the Kuban, and in Western Siberia. Anti-Bolshevik rebels numbered at that time over 200,000” (Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy). These included some among the more than two million soldiers who had been demobilized from the Red Army with the end of the Civil War. In the Ukraine a substantial peasant partisan army, gathered around the anarchist adventurer Nestor Makhno, was now in revolt against Soviet power. As Trotsky observed:
“Only an entirely superficial person can see in Makhno’s bands or in the Kronstadt revolt a struggle between the abstract principles of Anarchism and ‘state socialism.’ Actually these movements were convulsions of the peasant petty bourgeoisie which desired, of course, to liberate itself from capital but which at the same time did not consent to subordinate itself to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie does not know concretely what it wants, and by virtue of its position cannot know.”
— “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt”
These peasant stirrings and revolts provided fertile soil for organized counterrevolutionary agitation and conspiracies.
These conditions directly influenced developments in Kronstadt. While the tsarist army had been overwhelmingly peasant in composition, the Baltic Fleet—with its reliance on engineering and technical skills—had a slim working-class majority in 1917. But as the most class-conscious fighters went off to the front lines of the Civil War or to take over administrative and command positions in the apparatus of the new workers state, they were replaced by more backward and more heavily peasant layers—including, by 1920-21, a sizable number of peasant recruits from the rebellious parts of the Ukraine.
Another factor affecting Kronstadt was the deep division within the Communist Party over where to go from “War Communism” and how to reinvigorate the smychka, the alliance of the peasantry with the workers state. In the months before the mutiny, a sharp dispute broke out pitting Trotsky against Lenin in the so-called “trade-union debate.” Seizing on Trotsky’s wrong-headedness, Zinoviev mobilized his own base in the Petrograd-Kronstadt area against Trotsky, whom he saw as a rival within the party leadership. Zinoviev opened the floodgates of the Kronstadt party organization to backward recruits while encouraging a poisonous atmosphere in the inner-party dispute. The rot in the Kronstadt Communist Party organization was a critical factor in allowing the mutiny to proceed, as Agranov noted in his Cheka report.
Kronstadt Erupts
The Kronstadt revolt began in the wake of workers’ protests that started in Petrograd on February 20 when a fuel crisis forced the closure of major factories. Through a combination of concessions to the workers and arrests of key Menshevik agitators, the government quickly quelled the protests without any bloodshed. But rumors of workers being shot and factories bombarded nonetheless made their way to Kronstadt on February 25.
Delegations of sailors from the warships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol went to Petrograd and saw that these rumors were false. When they returned to Kronstadt on February 27, they did not, however, dispel the lies. Instead, fresh lies were heaped on—including that thousands of sailors in Petrograd had been arrested. Arms were distributed to the Kronstadt sailors. Shipboard meetings on February 28 were quickly followed by a March 1 mass meeting in Kronstadt’s Anchor Square, which adopted a program of demands, and a delegated meeting on March 2 to discuss new elections to the local soviet. Communist speakers at these meetings were cut off.
Baltic Fleet commissar Kuzmin and two other Communist leaders were arrested at the March 2 meeting—supposedly to ensure “true freedom” for the elections! When the delegates balked at a proposal to arrest all other Communists at the meeting, this was met with a dramatic—and utterly baseless—announcement that armed Communist detachments were about to surround the hall and arrest all the participants. What ensued is vividly described in a Communist eyewitness account quoted by Shchetinov:
“In the panicked commotion a vote on something was rushed through. A few minutes later the chair of the meeting, Petrichenko, quieting down the meeting, announced that ‘The Revolutionary Committee, formed of the presidium and elected by you, declares: “All Communists present are to be seized and not to be released until the situation is clarified”.’ In two, three minutes, all Communists present were seized by armed sailors.”
— quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy
In fact, the “Provisional Revolutionary Committee” (PRC) had already “elected” itself and sent messages to the various Kronstadt posts the night before, declaring: “In view of the situation in Kronstadt at this time, the Communist Party is removed from power. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is in charge. We ask that non-party comrades take control into their hands” (“To All Posts of Kronstadt,” 2 March 1921, 1:35 a.m.; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Here was an early taste of “free soviets,” anarchist-style!
Once the mutiny was under way, over 300 Communists were imprisoned; hundreds more fled. Agranov pointed out:
“The repression carried out by the PRC against those Communists who remained faithful to the communist revolution fully refutes the supposedly peaceful intentions of the rebels. Virtually all the minutes of the PRC sessions indicate that the struggle against the Communists still at large, and against those still in prison, remained an unrelenting focus of their attention. At the last phase, they even resorted to threats of field courts martial, in spite of their declared repeal of the death penalty.”
— Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy
It was the commandant of the prison, none other than an anarchist named Stanislav Shustov, who proposed shooting the leading Communists. In his report to the 25 March 1921 session of the Petrograd Soviet, fleet commissar Kuzmin described how the threat of mass executions was nearly carried out. Early on the morning of March 18, Shustov set up a machine gun outside the cell, which contained 23 prisoners. He was prevented from slaughtering the Communists only by the advance of the Red Army across the ice.
A Program of Counterrevolution
As Lenin noted, “There was very little that was clear, definite and fully shaped” about the Kronstadt demands (“The Tax in Kind,” 21 April 1921). They included new elections to the soviets; no restrictions on the anarchist and left socialist parties; no controls on trade-union or peasant organizations; freeing Menshevik and SR prisoners and those arrested in recent rural and urban unrest; equalization of rations; and pivotally, the demand to “grant the peasants full freedom of action on all land as they wish, and the right to own cattle, which they should tend to themselves, i.e., without the use of hired labour” (March 1 Resolution; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Had this petty-bourgeois program of unrestricted trade and opposition to any economic planning actually been carried out, it would have rapidly generated a new capitalist class from among the most successful peasants, artisans and enterprise managers and opened the door to a return of the old capitalists and the imperialists.
The program was carefully crafted with the peasant prejudices of the sailors in mind. The mutineers demanded the abolition of the political departments and Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and of Communist patrols in the factories. The call for “all power to the soviets and not the parties” was simply petty-bourgeois demagogy designed to swindle the masses of sailors into supporting counterrevolution. In practice, it meant “Down with the Communists!” The more far-sighted adherents of counterrevolution understood that if the Communists were driven from power, whatever the slogans, it would be a short step to restoring capitalist rule. In the pages of his Paris-based newspaper, Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) leader Pavel Miliukov counseled his fellow reactionaries to accept the call, “Down with the Bolsheviks! Long live the Soviets!” As this would likely mean only a temporary passing of power to “the moderate Socialists,” argued the shrewd bourgeois Miliukov, “not only the Monarchists but other candidates for power living abroad have no rhyme or reason for being in a hurry” (Poslednie Novosti, 11 March 1921; quoted in Wright, “The Truth About Kronstadt”).
What could the demand for “free soviets” mean in the context of Soviet Russia in 1921? Many of the most advanced workers had fought in the Red Army and perished or been drafted into important administrative posts. With the factories decimated and deprived of their best elements, the soviets atrophied. The regime of workers democracy was preserved by the layer of cadre in the Communist Party.
The revolutionary-minded elements of all the socialist and anarchist tendencies had gone over to the Bolsheviks, either individually or in regroupments. In 1917, the anarchists had briefly enjoyed some influence among the more volatile elements of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison because of their militant posture against the capitalist Provisional Government. After the October Revolution, the best of the anarcho-syndicalists, like Bill Shatov, a Russian American who had been a prominent Wobbly in the U.S., sided with the Bolsheviks in defense of the workers revolution. Those who didn’t turned to criminality and terror against the workers state, from staging armed robberies to bombing Moscow Communist Party headquarters in 1919. The “socialist” parties that had joined the Provisional Government, the Mensheviks and Right SRs, were by 1921 empty shells and lackeys of counterrevolution. The Left SRs, after briefly serving in the Soviet government, joined in 1918 in underground terror against the workers state. The Mensheviks’ posture of abiding by Soviet legality was dropped at every chance of a capitalist overthrow of the Soviet republic.
In Petrograd the remnants of the SRs, Mensheviks and various anarchists banded together in an “Assembly of Plenipotentiaries of the Factories and Shops of Petrograd.” This shadowy, unelected bloc collaborated with the newly formed monarchist Petrograd Combat Organization (PCO), as the PCO itself asserted (PCO Report to Helsinki Department of National Center, no earlier than 28 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). The PCO even printed the Mensheviks’ leaflets! On March 14, the Assembly issued a leaflet in solidarity with Kronstadt that said not one word about socialism or soviets, but instead called for an uprising against “the bloody communist regime” in the name of “all power to the people” (“Appeal to All Citizens, Workers, Red Army Soldiers and Sailors,” 14 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
Despite lies spun by the press of the mutineers claiming mass uprisings in Petrograd and Moscow, even Menshevik leader Fyodor Dan admitted in a 1922 book that “There were no plenipotentiaries” and that “the Kronstadt mutiny was not supported by the Petersburg workers in any way” (quoted in “The Mensheviks in the Kronstadt Mutiny,” Krasnaia Letopis’, 1931, No. 2). “The workers immediately felt that the Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite side of the barricades—and they supported the Soviet power,” explained Trotsky (“Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” 15 January 1938). It is noteworthy that even the wing of the Communist Party that most zealously sought to champion the immediate economic interests of the workers, the semi-syndicalist Workers Opposition, participated in the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising.
Duplicity and Deception
The Agranov report noted that “all participants of the mutiny carefully hid their party physiognomy under the flag of being non-party” (Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium). The mutiny leaders skillfully felt their way. For example, PRC chief Petrichenko pulled back after his proposed call to enfranchise all socialist parties was met with an angry rebuff from sailors at a March 1 meeting preceding the Anchor Square rally. According to Kuzmin, the crowd shouted at Petrichenko: “That’s freedom for the right SRs and Mensheviks! No! No way!… We know all about their Constituent Assemblies! We don’t need that!” (Kuzmin Report, Stenographic Report of Petrograd Soviet, 25 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Petrichenko’s duplicity in calling for “free soviets” was already demonstrated in Avrich’s Kronstadt 1921. Other PRC members were also opponents of soviet power: two were Mensheviks; a third was a member of the bourgeois Kadets, while the chief editor of the rebels’ newspaper, Izvestia of the PRC, Sergei Putilin had been a long-time Kadet supporter. One of the Mensheviks, Vladislav Valk, openly advocated the Constituent Assembly, i.e., a bourgeois parliament. The Kadet on the PRC, Ivan Oreshin, captured the cynicism with which the leaders manipulated the sailors. Writing in an émigré newspaper shortly after the mutiny, he commented:
“The Kronstadt uprising broke out under the pretext of replacing the old Soviet, whose mandate had run out, with a new one based on secret balloting. The question of universal suffrage, extending the vote also to the bourgeoisie, was carefully avoided by the orators at the [March 1] demonstration. They did not want to evoke opposition among the insurgents themselves that the Bolsheviks could make use of…. They did not speak of the Constituent Assembly, but the assumption was that it could be arrived at gradually, via freely elected soviets.”
Oreshin, Volia Rossii (April-May 1921); quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy
The stench of White Guard reaction wafted ever more openly through Kronstadt as the mutiny progressed and the bid to draw in the Petrograd workers with talk of “free soviets” failed. Already on March 4, the commander of the Sevastopol issued a written order that spoke of “long-suffering, tortured and dismembered Russia” and duty “to the motherland and the Russian people” (quoted in Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). By March 15, such language appeared in an official PRC appeal. Addressed above all to the White émigré “Russian people who have been ripped away from a Russia that lies torn from limb to limb,” the appeal stated: “We fight now for the overthrow of the yoke of the party, for genuine soviet power, and then, let the free will of the people decide how it wants to govern itself” (“Appeal by Kronstadters,” 15 March 1921; reprinted in ibid.). The appeal tellingly concluded with talk not of “free soviets” but of the “holy cause of the Russian toilers” in “the building of a free Russia.” This was unambiguously a call for “democratic” counterrevolution. On March 21, three days after its dispersal, the PRC in exile issued an even more blatant appeal proclaiming: “Down With the Party Dictatorship, Long Live Free Russia, Long Live the Power Elected by the Whole of the Russian People!” (“To the Oppressed Peasants and Workers of Russia,” 21 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
Notably, the March 15 appeal was issued by Petrichenko in direct response to the general staff’s demands that the PRC secure outside aid. That same day, the PRC secretly dispatched two members to Finland to seek aid. When, on March 17, Petrichenko and the PRC tried to enforce the officers’ decision that the crews of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol abandon ship, blow up their artillery and flee to Finland, this was the last straw. The vast majority of the crews rose up, saved the vessels and arrested all the officers and PRC members they could get their hands on (cited in Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium).
Imperialists, Tsarist Officers and the PRC
If the Kronstadt mutiny was a “revolution,” it was a very strange one, indeed—supported by the imperialists, the Russian monarchists and capitalists and their Menshevik and SR lackeys! The revolt, observed Trotsky in a 23 March 1921 article, led to an immediate rise on the Paris and Brussels stock exchanges, particularly in Russian securities (“Kronstadt and the Stock Exchange,” Kronstadt by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky). The defeated White émigré forces hurriedly patched together combat units. A former member of General Denikin’s entourage, N.N. Chebyshev, recalled in a 23 August 1924 article in the émigré press: “White officers roused themselves and started seeking ways to get to the fight in Kronstadt. Nobody was interested in who was there—SRs, Mensheviks or Bolsheviks who had become disenchanted with communism, but who still stood for the Soviets. The spark flew among the émigrés. Everybody’s spirit was lifted by it” (quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to ibid.).
Émigré leaders, whose appeals to West European states had earlier fallen on deaf ears, were now embraced. While accepting that France might have given some aid, Avrich argued in Kronstadt 1921 that the Whites were basically spurned, checked by Western diplomatic obstacles. In fact, while France and Britain held back from open participation, they encouraged the small states bordering Russia to assist the mutiny. British foreign minister Lord Curzon wired his representative in Helsinki on March 11 stating: “His Majesty’s Government are not prepared themselves to intervene in any way to assist the revolutionaries. Very confidential: There is no reason, however, why you should advise the Finnish Government to take a similar course or to prevent any private societies or individuals from helping if they wish to do so” (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939 [London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961]). Suffice it to say that deliveries of food supplies to Kronstadt were allowed to proceed without serious interference, as was the concentration of White expeditionary forces in Finland.
In his 1921 Cheka report, Agranov documented the authoritative role played by General Kozlovsky and other bourgeois officers on the general staff. The anarchists have long argued that these officers simply functioned in an advisory capacity, and had been, in any case, appointed as military specialists by the Bolshevik government. Viewed by the mass of sailors with extreme suspicion, the officers certainly kept a low profile. But where they had earlier served under the strict supervision of Communist commissars, now the commissars were in jail, and the generals were on top. Kozlovsky sneered as he seized control from the commissar of the Kronstadt Fortress (V.P. Gromov) at a March 2 meeting, “Your time is past. Now I shall do what has to be done” (quoted in A.S. Pukhov, “Kronstadt Under the Power of the Enemies of the Revolution,” Krasnaia Letopis’, 1931, No. 1). A senior officer arrested in the wake of the mutiny further testified that in daily operational matters, “The Chairman of the PRC [Petrichenko] typically subordinated himself to the decision of the Chief of Defense [tsarist fort commander Solovianov] and did not raise objections to the latter’s operational activities” (Minutes of Cheka Interrogation of P.A. Zelenoi, 26 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
Officers like Kozlovsky provided an invaluable connection to the White émigré forces with whom they had served in the tsarist army. Among the latter was Baron P. V. Vilken, the former commander of the Sevastopol, who was tied to the London-based Naval Organization, a White Guard spy nest closely monitored by the Soviet Cheka Foreign Department. Russian intelligence services have now published the monitored Naval Organization correspondence and money transfers. The first of a series of telegrams described as “proposing necessary measures in support of the Kronstadt mutiny in Russia,” sent on 25 February 1921, instructed an agent to receive “400 Pounds Sterling and send it via two checks to Helsinki, which needs the money in the beginning of March” (Russkaia voennaia emigratsiia 20-x—40-x godov [The Russian Military Emigration 1920s-1940s], Volume One [Moscow: Geya, 1998]).
While “left” apologists for the mutiny have no choice but to acknowledge that the imperialists hailed the uprising, they claim that the mutineers themselves had nothing to do with the imperialists or the Whites. Anarchists love to cite the 6 March 1921 editorial in Izvestia of the PRC that struck a pose of vigilant opposition to the Whites: “Look sharp. Do not let wolves in sheep’s clothing approach the helmsman’s bridge” (quoted in Avrich, Kronstadt 1921). But we now know that two days after this editorial appeared, the PRC, behind the backs of the sailors, welcomed a whole pack of these wolves—including a courier from the SR Administrative Center; one Finnish Special Services agent; two representatives of the monarchist Petrograd Combat Organization; and four White Guard officers, including Vilken.
Vilken and another officer, General Yavit, were formally there as part of a three-man “Red Cross” delegation sent from Finland by National Center operative G.F. Tseidler. According to a detailed report by Tseidler to Russian Red Cross headquarters, a front for the Whites, the delegation was immediately invited to a joint session of the PRC and the general staff officers, where an agreement was reached for the provisioning of Kronstadt. When, Tseidler relates, one PRC member questioned “whether the PRC had the right to accept the proposed aid without first consulting the public that elected them,” as it could be seen as proof of “selling out to the bourgeoisie,” he was overruled with the line that “we cannot have continuous mass meetings” (Tseidler, Red Cross Activity in Organizing Provisions Aid to Kronstadt, 25 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
Further evidence of right-wing machinations behind the backs of the sailors comes from a 1922 article in an émigré newspaper in Finland by disillusioned PRC member Alexander Kupolov. This article caused a furor in White Guard Finland; Kupolov subsequently returned to Soviet Russia, where he was arrested and then released after agreeing to work for the Cheka. Kupolov writes:
“The PRC, seeing that Kronstadt was filling up with agents of a monarchist organization, issued a declaration that it would not enter into negotiations with, nor accept any aid from, any non-socialist parties.
“But if the PRC issued this declaration, Petrichenko and the General Staff secretly worked in connection with the monarchists and prepared the ground for an overthrow of the committee….”
— Kupolov, “Kronstadt and the Russian Counterrevolutionaries in Finland: From the Notes of a Former Member of the PRC,” Put’, 4 January 1922; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy
According to Kupolov, Vilken also offered “an armed force of 800 men”—which the PRC, “taking into account the mood of the garrison, decided by a majority to decline.”
Another PRC member, an anarchist named Perepelkin, told his Cheka interrogator that he had been upset by Vilken’s prominence in the mutiny. According to Cheka Petrograd regional chairman N.P. Komarov, Perepelkin said:
“And here I saw the former commander of the Sevastopol, Baron Vilken, with whom I had earlier sailed. And it is he who is now acknowledged by the PRC to be the representative of the delegation that is offering us aid. I was outraged by this. I called together all the members of the PRC and said, so that’s the situation we’re in, that’s who we’re forced to talk to. Petrichenko and the others jumped on me, saying, ‘When we don’t have food or medicine—it’s all going to run out on March 21—are we really supposed to surrender to the conquerors? There was no other way out,’ they said. I stopped arguing and said I would accept the proposal. And on the second day we received 400 poods of food and cigarettes. Those who agreed to mutual friendship with the White Guard baron yesterday shouted that they were for Soviet power.”
— Komarov Report, Stenographic Report of Petrograd Soviet, 25 March 1921; reprinted in ibid.
Vilken urged the PRC to come out for the Constituent Assembly. Komarov reports asking Perepelkin: “And if on the day after, the baron had demanded of you not just the demand for a Constituent Assembly, but for a military dictatorship? Then how would you have dealt with the question?” Perepelkin replied, “I admit it, I can now frankly state that we would have adopted that as well—we had no other way out.” This was the “third revolution”!
Vilken was to remain at Kronstadt, essentially part of the operational leadership along with Petrichenko and the general staff, until the end. He was even invited to address a special crew meeting on his former command, the Sevastopol, on March 11. Tseidler himself (along with General Wrangel’s political representative in Finland, Professor Grimm) was mandated to represent Kronstadt as the government of the liberated territory of Russia. One of the first acts of the “Independent Republic of Kronstadt” was a radiogram, whose interception was reported into a March 9 session of the Bolshevik Tenth Party Congress then meeting in Moscow, congratulating Warren G. Harding upon his inauguration as U.S. president (cited in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy)!
Writing in 1938, Trotsky stated: “The logic of the struggle would have given predominance in the fortress to the extremists, that is, to the most counterrevolutionary elements. The need for supplies would have made the fortress directly dependent upon the foreign bourgeoisie and their agents, the White émigrés. All the necessary preparations towards this end were already being made” (Trotsky, “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt”). The archives completely vindicate Trotsky.
The Anarchist School of Falsification
As we have noted, current anarchist apologists for Kronstadt make much of the work of Israeli academic Israel Getzler. The Infoshop Web site, for example, features an exhaustively anti-Leninist 100-plus-page tract on Kronstadt that claims, “Anarchist accounts have been validated by later research while Trotskyist assertions have been exploded time and time again” (“What Was the Kronstadt Rebellion?”, www.infoshop.org, undated). Let us see. Getzler pompously declaims that “the question of the spontaneity of the revolt, which has bedevilled the historiography of the Kronstadt movement for six decades, [is] now settled—at least to my satisfaction” (“The Communist Leaders’ Role in the Kronstadt Tragedy of 1921 in the Light of Recently Published Archival Documents,” Revolutionary Russia, June 2002). All this because Cheka commissioner Agranov wrote, on the basis of the very limited evidence available in the days immediately after the mutiny, that “this investigation failed to show that the outbreak of the mutiny was preceded by the activity of any counterrevolutionary organization at work among the fortress’s command or that it was the work of [imperialist] Entente spies” (Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
To read Getzler’s article, you would not know that Kronstadt Tragedy also includes a crucial White Guard report that did not even exist at the time of the initial Cheka investigation. In it, General G.E. Elvengren, Wrangel’s military representative in Finland, categorically asserts that there was an organized White operation at Kronstadt and explains why the mutiny was launched before the ice had melted:
“The key is that the Kronstadt sailors (the local organization connected with the broader organization), upon learning of the beginning of the movement in Petrograd and of its scale, took it for a general rising. Not wanting to passively remain on the sidelines, they decided, despite the agreed upon timetable, to go to Petrograd on the icebreaker Ermak, and take their place alongside those who had already come out. In Petrograd they immediately got oriented and saw that things were not as they expected. They had to quickly return to Kronstadt. The movement in Petrograd had died down, all was quiet, but they—the sailors—who were now compromised before the Commissars, knew that they would be repressed, and decided to take the next step and use the isolation of Kronstadt to announce their break from soviet power and to independently drive ahead their rising that they were thus compelled to begin.”
— Elvengren, Report to Russian Evacuation Committee in Poland, no later than 18 April 1921; reprinted in ibid.
While ignoring the Elvengren document, Getzler quotes a few isolated snippets on spontaneity from the testimony of participants. These are, to say the least, highly selective. Getzler cites Anatoly Lamanov, an editor of Izvestia of the PRC. Lamanov was an important front for the mutiny because he had been chairman of the 1917 Kronstadt Soviet and thus embodied the supposed continuity with Red Kronstadt. After his arrest, Lamanov told the Cheka: “The Kronstadt mutiny came as a surprise to me. I viewed the mutiny as a spontaneous movement” (Minutes of Cheka Interrogation of Anatoly Lamanov, 19 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). This statement Getzler cites. What Getzler does not quote is Lamanov’s admission, a few sentences from the above, that after a March 11 delegated meeting in which Vilken participated:
“I changed my mind about the movement, and from that point no longer considered it to be spontaneous. Up until the seizure of Kronstadt by Soviet troops I thought the movement had been organized by the Left SRs. After I became convinced that the movement was not spontaneous, I no longer sympathized with it. I continued to take part in the Izvestia only because of my fears that the movement would lurch to the right….
“Now I am firmly convinced, that, without a doubt, White Guards, both Russian and foreign, took part in the movement. The escape to Finland convinced me of this. Now I consider my participation in this movement to have been an unforgivable, stupid mistake.”
— Minutes of Cheka Interrogation of Anatoly Lamanov, 19 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy
Before “settling”—to his satisfaction—the question of the mutiny’s spontaneity, in 1983 Getzler similarly trumpeted “hard statistical data” disproving Bolshevik assertions that the social composition of the Kronstadt garrison had changed drastically between 1917 and 1921 (Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]). The Infoshop article claims that Getzler’s “findings are conclusive.” How conclusive? In a footnote, Getzler cites the following source for his evidence:
“See Pukhov, ‘Kronshtadt i baltiiskii flot pered miatezhom’ [Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet Before the Mutiny] for data referring to the year of birth (rather than that of enlistment) of sailors serving in the Baltic Fleet as of 1 January 1921, which suggest that at least some 80% were veterans of the 1917 revolution.”
— Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921
We examined Pukhov’s article. Pukhov did not infer from the sailors’ ages that they had been in Kronstadt in 1917—just the opposite. Pukhov concluded:
“Over the course of barely two years the Baltic Fleet was systematically re-staffed with wayward, dissembling, déclassé elements, which to a powerful degree determined the process of the degeneration of the personnel and the transformation of its social and political profile to the point that, by the beginning of 1921, it was unrecognizable.”
— A.S. Pukhov, “Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet Before the 1921 Mutiny,” Krasnaia Letopis’, 1930, No. 6
Pukhov explained that the proletarian elements of the Baltic Fleet provided a steady “reserve of firm fighters who fought with exceptional courage at all the most difficult stages of the victorious revolution,” sent to “the most dangerous fronts of the Civil War and to the most demanding outposts” of the new state administration. But this reserve had limits, and those who came as replacements were drawn to Kronstadt precisely because it was not near the front lines and offered better food and clothing than did the Red Army. Beginning in 1918, reinforcements for the fleet were recruited on a volunteer basis, through a special Hiring Bureau and also through hiring campaigns organized directly by the ship committees:
“Free access of volunteers to the fleet and the partisan-clique mentality in which the Ship Committees assembled their crews, ultimately led to alien class elements seeping into the fleet…. Together with young workers and old sailors who were rooted in dedication to the fleet and eager to labor for the strengthening of a red, socialist fleet, there frequently also entered high-school and trade-school students, just plain mama’s boys from among the former nobility, the children of speculators, characters with a shady past, and so forth. It is typical of this period that S. Petrichenko, the future ‘leader’ of the Kronstadt mutiny, came to ‘serve’ as a clerk.”
— Ibid.
When the fleet shifted over to conscription, “The older sailors who were now re-conscripted [originally drafted under tsarism] came, in their overwhelming majority, from the villages, where they had already managed to get ‘peasantized’” (ibid.). Finally, as crew shortages climbed to 60 percent in late 1920, the Baltic Fleet began receiving “skilled” reinforcements from the Red Army:
“Consciously or not, the Red Army sent disreputable soldiers. Notable among them were former deserters, the undisciplined, and so forth. That is, the Red Army sent those who were useless to it and unwanted from among the reserve units. And the fleet was obliged to take in these ‘skilled’ reinforcements, because they had a crying need for them.”
— Ibid.
Getzler also asserts, again to hosannas from Infoshop, that of the 2,028 Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crew members whose years of enlistment are known, “Only some 137 sailors or 6.8% were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution.” Getzler’s only proof for this is February 1921 crew lists cited in S. N. Semanov’s Likvidatsiia antisovetskogo Kronshtadtskogo myatezha 1921 goda (The Suppression of the 1921 Anti-Soviet Kronstadt Mutiny; originally published in Voprosy istorii, 1971, No. 3). We examined Semanov’s lists as well; they indicated when the sailors enlisted, but not where they had served in 1917. The evidence indicates that the 1921 crews were overwhelmingly not veterans of Kronstadt 1917. For example, in his unpublished Kronstadt, March 1921, Yuri Shchetinov shows that the crew of the Petropavlovsk was reduced from nearly 1,400 to just 200 by late 1918; the majority of the replacements were not veteran Kronstadters but conscripts—former crewmen of navy, merchant marine and river vessels—who had quit after the revolution rather than serve voluntarily in the newly constituted Red Navy: “Among those mobilized were not a few sailors who had served in the Black Sea and Northern Fleets, where, by comparison to the Baltic Fleet, the influence of SRs and anarchists was notably greater” (Shchetinov, Kronstadt, March 1921).
In the Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy, Shchetinov states categorically: “In the year of 1920 alone, 10,000 sailors and Red Army soldiers, out of a force of 17,000, were replaced by draftees.” And no less an authority than Kadet PRC member Ivan Oreshin, in a 1924 article in an émigré journal, confirmed the “official Bolshevik line” (as Getzler would put it):
“The sailors were already not like those of 1917-1918. The revolutionary lustre had long been gone. They had become lazy and had lost that reckless enthusiasm with which they had dispersed the Constituent Assembly. Many had visited home to the village and had seen with their own eyes the ruinous conditions that the Bolsheviks had brought about. They turned against their own power.”
— “The Kronstadt Uprising and Its Meaning,” 6 June 1924; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy
Finally, we have Paul Avrich making it clear that the mutineers of 1921 were not the red Kronstadters of 1917: “Although the rebels…denied any anti-Semitic prejudice, there is no question that feelings against the Jews ran high among the Baltic sailors, many of whom came from the Ukraine and the western borderlands, the classic regions of virulent anti-Semitism in Russia” (Avrich, Kronstadt 1921). Izvestia editor Lamanov admitted that anti-Semitic poison about the Jews having “murdered Russia” was so rife—and that “quite often authors would bring in writings of this sort”—that he made it his job “to block anti-Semitic propaganda” (Further Minutes of Questioning of Anatoly Lamanov, 25 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). These sanitized Izvestia articles were then held up as “proof” of the mutineers’ revolutionary intentions by Voline and other anarchist apologists who, to use Trotsky’s words, “quote the proclamations of the insurgents like pious preachers quoting Holy Scriptures” (“Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt”).
Trotsky’s Role During the Kronstadt Crisis
Well before Kronstadt erupted, it was clear to the Bolshevik leaders that the regime of War Communism had run its course. After months of discussion, the New Economic Policy (NEP) was formally adopted at the Tenth Party Congress, which met as the mutiny raged. Already in February 1920, Trotsky had proposed replacing forcible grain requisitions with a tax that the government would collect in the form of agricultural products—a “tax in kind”—the core of the NEP. His proposal was then rejected, and Trotsky responded by seeking to implement and extend War Communism with heightened military-administrative zeal, advocating in a factional fashion that the Soviet trade unions merge with the state apparatus to run the economy. Behind this proposal lay the assumption that in a workers state, basic organizations of working-class defense like unions were at best superfluous, and at worst levers for the kind of retrograde economic and bureaucratic resistance he had contended with as commander of the Red Army during the Civil War.
Thus did Trotsky initiate the trade-union fight that rent the party on the eve of the Tenth Congress. Lenin took the fight against Trotsky and his allies into a broader party discussion. As we wrote:
“Lenin was correct to insist that in the concrete conditions then prevailing in Soviet Russia, the trade unions were necessary organs for the defense of the working class, not just in counterposition to the peasant majority with whom it was allied, but also against real bureaucratic abuse by the Soviet state itself….
“It appeared to Lenin that Trotsky, with his previous factional zeal and indifference to protecting the non-party masses against the nascent bureaucracy, was putting himself forward as the spokesman for the growing bureaucratic layer.”
— “Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition,” Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001
Trotsky lost a lot of authority, making himself vulnerable to internal opponents like Zinoviev (and Stalin).
In his July 1938 article on Kronstadt, Trotsky addressed the repeated smear that he personally waded in the blood of the mutineers. Trotsky recalled that he had come to Moscow for the congress and stayed there throughout the Kronstadt events. In fact, Trotsky did leave Moscow for Petrograd for four days beginning on March 5. That day he issued an ultimatum ordering the sailors to surrender unconditionally. He also organized a new command under Mikhail Tukhachevsky for the suppression of the revolt. After Tukhachevsky’s first assault on Kronstadt on March 7-8 failed, Trotsky rushed back to Moscow to rouse the congress delegates. That was the extent of his direct role in putting down the mutiny. Trotsky explained:
“The truth of the matter is that I personally did not participate in the least in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, nor in the repressions following the suppression. In my eyes this very fact is of no political significance. I was a member of the government, I considered the quelling of the rebellion necessary and therefore bear responsibility for the suppression….
“How did it happen that I did not go personally to Kronstadt? The reason was of a political nature. The rebellion broke out during the discussion on the so-called ‘trade union’ question. The political work in Kronstadt was wholly in the hands of the Petrograd committee, at the head of which stood Zinoviev. The same Zinoviev was the chief, most untiring, and most passionate leader in the struggle against me in the discussion.”
— Trotsky, “More on the Suppression of Kronstadt,” 6 July 1938
Zinoviev demagogically exploited Trotsky’s wrong position on the trade-union question to inflame sentiment against Trotsky and his allies—among them Baltic Fleet commander F.F. Raskolnikov. On 19 January 1921, Trotsky participated in a public debate on the trade-union dispute before 3,500 Baltic Fleet sailors. “The commanding personnel of the fleet was isolated and terrified,” Trotsky recalled (ibid.). The “dandified and well-fed sailors, Communists in name only” voted by some 90 percent for Zinoviev’s resolution. Trotsky continued:
“The overwhelming majority of the sailor ‘Communists’ who supported Zinoviev’s resolution took part in the rebellion. I considered, and the Political Bureau made no objections, that negotiations with the sailors and, in case of necessity, their pacification, should be placed with those leaders who only yesterday enjoyed the political confidence of these sailors. Otherwise, the Kronstadters would consider the matter as though I had come to take ‘revenge’ upon them for their voting against me during the party discussion.”
— Ibid.
In “The Truth About Kronstadt,” John G. Wright acknowledges that insofar as the Zinovievite fleet commissar Kuzmin and the other local Communist leaders were blind to the full extent of the danger brewing at Kronstadt, they “facilitated the counterrevolutionists’ work of utilizing the objective difficulties to attain their ends.” But Wright stresses that what was at play was the fundamental counterposition of two class camps: “All other questions can be only of a secondary importance. That the Bolsheviks may have committed errors of a general or concrete character cannot alter the fact that they defended the acquisitions of the proletarian revolution against the bourgeois (and petty-bourgeois) reaction” (“The Truth About Kronstadt”).
Revolution vs. Counterrevolution
The great crime of the Bolsheviks, from the viewpoint of their “democratic” critics, is that they won. For the first time in history, a propertyless, oppressed class took and held power, proving in practice that the proletariat can indeed rule. That is what the “hue and cry about Kronstadt” has always been about.
The Infoshop anarchists sneer at the “‘Leninist principle’ (‘inviolable for every Bolshevik’) that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat is and can be realized only through the dictatorship of the party’” (“What Was the Kronstadt Rebellion?”). Instead they put forth the Kronstadt slogan, “All power to the Soviets and not to the parties.” This attempt to counterpose the interests of the class, organized in soviets, to that of its revolutionary vanguard, organized in a Leninist party, is typical of the crude anti-leadership prejudices of the anarchists. If there was ever an example that proved that workers rule depended on the firm leadership of the communist vanguard—“the dictatorship of the party,” if you will—it was Kronstadt in 1921. The simple fact is that every other tendency in the workers movement, whether Menshevik or anarchist, supported counterrevolution!
In a stable workers state Leninists favor full democratic rights for all political tendencies that do not seek the forcible overthrow of the proletarian dictatorship. That includes recognizing the possibility of the Communists losing a vote in soviet bodies. But the embattled Russian workers republic of 1918-22 was anything but stable, and had the Bolsheviks stepped down to be replaced by social-democratic, populist or anarchist elements, then very soon both the Leninists and their petty-bourgeois opponents would have found themselves facing the White firing squads.
The suppression of Kronstadt gained time for the beleaguered Soviet workers state to revitalize the economy and the working class—and thus recreate the conditions for a vibrant soviet democracy—and to fight for the proletarian revolution to conquer elsewhere. Had the revolutionary opportunity in industrialized Germany two years later resulted in a proletarian victory, this would have been of decisive significance for the future not only of Soviet Russia but of the world socialist revolution (see “Rearming Bolshevism: A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001). Feeding off the defeat in Germany, a bureaucratic layer in the Soviet party and state apparatus usurped political power from the proletariat and its Bolshevik vanguard.
The international character of the proletarian revolution is alien to the petty-bourgeois provincialist mindset of anarchism. In his 1945 diatribe, the Russian anarchist Voline condemns the Bolshevik regime for dispatching the red Kronstadters of 1918 “wherever the internal situation became uncertain, threatening or dangerous” and for mobilizing them “to preach to the peasants the idea of solidarity and revolutionary duty, and, in particular, the necessity for feeding the cities” (The Unknown Revolution). This, cries Voline, constituted a “Machiavellian scheme” to “weaken, impoverish and exhaust” Kronstadt. Voline’s subordination of the interests of the all-Russia—much less, the world—revolution to the supposed integrity of Kronstadt underlines the idiot parochialism inherent in the anarchists’ conception of autonomous “federated communes.”
In our review of Avrich’s Kronstadt 1921, we asked: “What is the anarchist answer to the Allied blockade, flooded coal mines, torn-up railroads and blasted bridges, etc., with the consequence that there was nothing to trade the peasantry in exchange for its grain?” (WV No. 195, 3 March 1978). The imperialists and Whites sought to drive a wedge between the workers government and the vast peasant masses. The Bolsheviks, possessing limited means and no functional large-scale industry, had to make concessions to the peasantry and to small-scale commodity production and trade. But the NEP could only be a temporary retreat—it had its own dangers, as became clear when the emboldened kulaks, the wealthier peasants, rebelled a few years later.
As liberal idealists, the anarchists are masters at evading the concrete material conditions that the workers revolution had to deal with. The Infoshop authors acknowledge, at least on paper, the dire situation facing revolutionary Russia at the time. They glibly assert that the key to rebuilding the country was the participation of the working class and peasantry in “free class organizations like freely elected soviets and unions” (“What Was the Kronstadt Rebellion?”). We have seen already what the anarchists’ “free soviets” would have meant in practice—a return to White rule and a “temporary military dictatorship.”
In “The Tax in Kind,” Lenin exposed the blindness of the left Menshevik Julius Martov:
“Martov showed himself to be nothing but a philistine Narcissus when he declared in his Berlin journal that Kronstadt not only adopted Menshevik slogans but also proved that there could be an anti-Bolshevik movement which did not entirely serve the interests of the whiteguards, the capitalists and the landowners. He says in effect: ‘Let us shut our eyes to the fact that all the genuine whiteguards hailed the Kronstadt mutineers and collected funds in aid of Kronstadt through the banks!’ Compared with the Chernovs and Martovs, Milyukov is right, for he is revealing the true tactics of the real whiteguard force, the force of the capitalists and landowners. He declares: ‘It does not matter whom we support, be they anarchists or any sort of Soviet government, as long as the Bolsheviks are overthrown, as long as there is a shift in power…. As for the rest—‘we,’ the Milyukovs, ‘we,’ the capitalists and landowners, will do the rest ‘ourselves’; we shall slap down the anarchist pygmies, the Chernovs and the Martovs.”
— Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” 21 April 1921
Lenin’s trenchant analysis is complemented by a grudging confirmation from the other side of the class line, Wrangel’s front man General A. A. Von Lampe. Not blinkered by Martov’s petty-bourgeois mystifications, this class-conscious bourgeois sarcastically noted in his diary how the SRs’ The Truth About Kronstadt, was “full of justifications to dispel the thought, God forbid, that the sailors were under the influence of former officers” (quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy). “The SRs don’t understand that in such a struggle, what are needed are severe and determined measures,” he said, concluding: “It seems that, like it or not, one has to come to Lenin’s conclusion that in Russia there can be only one of two powers: monarchist or Communist.”
What the bourgeoisie and their hacks, from the Mensheviks to Infoshop, cannot forgive is that Lenin and Trotsky did apply determined measures against the Kronstadt mutiny. The proletariat owes an eternal debt to the 1,385 Red Army soldiers and commanders who gave their lives, and the 2,577 who were wounded, to defend the young Soviet workers state. The fresh historical evidence collected in Kronstadt Tragedy offers a compelling indictment of the lackeys of counterrevolution who smeared those revolutionary martyrs.
10+ Rare Courtroom Sketches From Most Infamous Trials Where No Cameras Were Allowed
As the courtrooms are being invaded by cameras, the US Library of Congress has decided to share their collection of 10,000 courtroom drawings, which for the last five decades gave the American public a glimpse at the most infamous trials in country’s history.
Illustrations exhibition is called “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration” and is now at the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC, and it features 98 drawings sketched right in the courtrooms as the dramatic events unraveled.
“While artistic styles vary, each artist brings the theater of the courtroom to life, capturing gestures, appearance, and relationships in a way that humanizes defendants, plaintiffs, lawyers, judges, and witnesses,” Sara W. Duke, the exhibition’s organizer told Hyperallergic.
These series includes powerful moments like Charles Manson lunging at the judge or KKK clan member walking away with murder thanks to the all-white jury. It even features an illustration by Howard Brodie that dates back to the 1964 trial of Jack Ruby, who was found guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in custody for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Whether it is a once-beloved celebrity or a reviled terrorist — Americans want access to the legal system. By acquiring, preserving, and making courtroom art accessible to researchers and the public, the Library’s courtroom illustration collection preserves an enduring record of American life and law.”
Take a look at our picks below and if you have the chance visit the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC, or at least their online exhibition for the full list.
In the more than nine months that Charles Manson was on trial for the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, he grew increasingly agitated. On October 5, 1970, he quickly leaped from the defense table, pencil in hand, preparing to stab Justice Charles H. Older. Bill Robles captured Manson’s frenzied energy, which seemingly required all the might of the burly bailiff to restrain him. The pencil, still in motion, flies through the air toward the judge. By all accounts, Older did not even flinch. Walter Cronkite led off CBS Evening News that night with Robles’s drawing.
David Berkowitz had terrorized New York City for a year, killing and injuring young couples out late at night and sending letters from the “Son of Sam” to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin before he was captured. Appearing in court on May 22, 1978, for sentencing, Berkowitz exploded in the courtroom, shouting, “I’ll kill them all,” as guards escorted him out. The judge delayed his sentencing until June 12, when he was much calmer. Rather than face a jury trial, Berkowitz pled guilty. Joseph Papin’s drawing, which captured the criminal’s anguished mental breakdown so vividly, appeared on the cover of the New York Daily News.
Eight members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War argued intended to demonstrate peacefully at the 1972 Republican National Convention but were lured into more violent behavior by government infiltrators. During the trial, two FBI agents were caught using electronic surveillance to listen to a private defense team conversation— perhaps helping the defense, as the veterans were acquitted on August 31, 1973. Aggie Whelan had been sent by CBS to cover the trial. During the pre-trial hearing, Federal Judge Winston Arnow told the court illustrators they were not permitted to draw in his courtroom or from memory. Whelan, though outside the courtroom, sketched anyway and the government found CBS guilty of violating its orders. On appeal, the decision United States of America v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 497 F.2d 102 (1974) reaffirmed the right of courtroom illustrators to work during trials.
By Aggie Whelan [Kenny]. Gainsville [sic] 8, 1973. Pastel and charcoal on blue-green paper laid paper.
#4 Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman in Court
Actor Paul Newman casually sits and reads next to his actress wife Joanne Woodward, who knits. His attorney, W. Patrick Ryan, protects his interests against Westport delicatessen owner Julius Gold, who sued the actor for breach of contract in the manufacture of Newman’s Own salad dressing. Gold argued that he had been promised a percentage of the profits, but that Newman had reneged on the deal. Newman claimed no promise had been made and gave all profits to charity. On June 23, 1988, Judge Howard F. Zoarski of Connecticut Superior Court in Bridgeport declared a mistrial when jurors inadvertently saw information not admitted into evidence. The judge denied the plaintiff, Julius Gold, the right to have his case retried.
By Marilyn Church. Salad Dressing War, June 1988. Colored pencil, water-soluble crayon, and porous point pen on ochre paper.
#5 Trial of Michael Jackson
In 2005, Michael Jackson faced trial in Santa Monica, California, on charges of molesting a teenager. He was found not guilty. After the trial Jackson said, “I haven’t been betrayed or deceived by children. Adults have let me down.” Artist Bill Robles found drawing at the trial a challenge—he endured the “Melville diet” named after Judge Rodney Melville who scheduled only three ten-minute breaks and no lunch. Robles had barely enough time to meet the network news truck to film his drawings before returning inside to draw again.
Lawyer Anthony Amsterdam made a specialty of arguing death penalty cases before the Supreme Court, culminating in the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238. Amsterdam had worked through the NAACP’s Legal and Educational Defense Fund, building up a case that death penalty sentences, while rarely carried out, were handed down to disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Instead of focusing on the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Amsterdam castigated the flawed procedure of jury selection and instruction. Here in one of his earlier cases, Maxwell v. Bishop, 398 U.S. 262 (1970), Amsterdam demonstrated one of the problems with jury selection. In this case, the court found a death sentence cannot be carried out if the jury automatically excluded jurors who voiced general objections to the death penalty.
Edward Coaxum, wearing a surgical mask, sits while his lawyer, Frank Gould, stands before the jury. Accused of stabbing a man to death in an area of East Harlem where drug addicts gathered, Coaxum faced prejudice as a man stricken with AIDS in his 1984 trial. New York State Supreme Court Justice Arnold G. Fraiman permitted nervous jurors to be excused or wear protective clothing. At a time before there were effective treatments for AIDS, Coaxum died before his case could be heard on appeal.
By Marilyn Church. 1st AIDS Case, October 26, 1984. Colored pencil, water-soluble crayon, porous point pen, and graphite on olive Canson wove paper.
#8 Bernie Madoff in Handcuffs
Elizabeth Williams, an artist whose skills were honed by decades in the courtroom, showed her journalist’s sense in U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York in Manhattan. After Bernard Madoff had entered his plea, she lingered long enough to see him handcuffed and led away by officers. Madoff had taken more than $64 billion in assets from investors through his Ponzi scheme. Williams later said of the drawing. ” . . . I knew that was what everybody wanted to see. It wasn’t a great drawing or anything; it was more like a great moment.”
Bobby Seale had not participated in the advance planning for the demonstration, but was arrested and tried with the MOBE members. A co-founder of the Black Panthers, Seale had gone to Chicago as a last-minute replacement for Eldridge Cleaver. Seale, whose lawyer was unavailable due to hospitalization, was denied both a continuance and self-representation. Seale verbally lashed out, interrupting the proceedings. On October 29, 1969, in an extraordinary move, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Bobby Seale bound and gagged. His trial was severed from the Chicago Eight on November 5, 1969. Finding him in contempt, Hoffman sentenced Seale to four years in prison, appealed at, U.S. v. Seale, 461 F.2d 345 (1972). As he was led from the courtroom, spectators shouted “Free Bobby!”
Just days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended for the crime. As Oswald was being moved from the Dallas police station, Jack Ruby (Jacob Leon Rubenstein) shot him on live television. Howard Brodie, having worked for two decades as a newspaper illustrator, called an army buddy who was a CBS executive to offer his services in covering a trial that forbade filming. He became one of the first courtroom illustrators to work for television. This drawing of the empty courtroom depicts the names and positions of the defendant, defense attorneys, judge, district attorney, assistant district attorneys, bailiff, court reporter, jury, and even the spittoon.
Publisher Larry Flynt provoked a lawsuit for damages for satirizing televangelist Jerry Falwell in a fake Campari ad in Hustler magazine. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed in Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), that a parody, which no reasonable person expected to be true, was protected free speech. The justices also stated that upholding the lower courts’ decisions would put all political satire at risk. Alan Isaacman defended Flynt before eight justices, as Justice Anthony Kennedy recused himself. Flynt (in a wheelchair) is isolated due to an outburst during a previous Supreme Court appearance in another libel case.
Abbie Hoffman was a founder of the Youth International Party, also known as the Yippies. He joined the National Mobilization Committee and helped organize the demonstration in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Full of theatrics during the course of the trial, he brought a Viet Cong flag into the courtroom on the day of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, November 15, 1969, and proceeded to wrestle over it with deputy marshal Ronald Dobroski.
On March 10, 1980, in Purchase, New York, police received a call that Dr. Herman Tarnhower, a renowned cardiologist and author of the celebrated The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, had been shot. They arrived just as Jean Harris, headmistress of the exclusive Madeira School in Virginia, tried to drive away. On February 6, 1981, several days after her defense attorney, Joel Aurnou, had called her to the stand, she broke down under the cross-examination of prosecutor George Bolen. Rejecting her story that she had intended to commit suicide when she accidently shot her lover, the jury found her guilty of murder on February 24, 1981. She served twelve years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y.
Unlike his well-publicized criminal trial, which was broadcast on television, O.J. Simpson’s civil trial was a quieter affair. Bill Robles drew the former football star during the civil court case on a day in which several witnesses elaborated on his late ex-wife’s attempts to end his stalking. When Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million to the families of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, he claimed to be broke and so they received comparatively little.
#15 Al Sharpton Reacts to Bensonhurst Trial Verdict
Diane Hawkins, the mother of murder victim Yusuf Hawkins, Al Sharpton, and others react to the verdict that cleared Keith Mondello of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. After the verdict was announced on May 19, 1990, one member of the Hawkins family reportedly shouted, “You’ll get yours.” On the previous day, Joseph Fama was found guilty by a separate jury: judgement affirmed at People v. Fama, 212 A.D.2d 542 (1995). Al Sharpton threatened that, “We intend to move this city like it’s never been moved before” and led marches into Bensonhurst and other New York neighborhoods clamoring for racial justice.
Civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo was shot and killed on March 25, 1965, as she drove African American civil rights marcher Leroy Moton in her car from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama. Four Ku Klux Klan members, Eugene Thomas, William Eaton, Collie Leroy Wilkins, Jr., and Thomas Rowe, Jr., were arrested and tried. Artist Howard Brodie drew the all-white, all-male jury that served at one of the multiple trials. While Rowe, an FBI informant, received immunity for his testimony, Thomas, Eaton and Wilkins, were acquitted in state trials. On December 3, 1965, the three men received ten-year sentences on a federal charge of conspiracy to deprive Liuzzo of her civil rights. As a result of Liuzzo’s death, President Johnson petitioned Congress to increase the scope of the Federal Conspiracy Act of 1870 to include the death of civil rights workers. Her death also helped raise support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Pub. L. 89-110.
Lieutenant Dennis Adler and Prosecutor Cal Rerucha stretch out the chain used in the murder of Matthew Shepard while defendant Russell Arthur Henderson, seated, watches in the Albany County District Court in Laramie, Wyoming. Henderson, along with Aaron James McKinney, lured Shepard to a field on October 6, 1998, savagely beat him, tied him to a fence, and left him for dead. He died of his wounds six days later. Along with the murder of James Byrd, Jr., by white supremacists around the same time, this crime led to passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, 18 U.S.C. §249.
In 1978, as the first “test tube” baby was born in England, John and Doris Del Zio sued Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and Dr. Raymond Vande Wiele for emotional damages in the case of Del Zio v. Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, U.S. Dist. Lexis 14550 (1978). Their lawyer Michael Dennis stands before Judge Charles Stewart, arguing that Vande Wiele, by exposing their fertilized embryos to the air in 1973, had destroyed their property and caused emotional distress. The doctors at Columbia Presbyterian encouraged the Del Zios to sue because they wanted to continue in vitro fertilization (IVF) research. While on August 18, 1978, the jury awarded small damages for the emotional distress, it found that the embryos were not the couple’s personal property.
By Marilyn Church. Test Tube Baby, 1978. Colored pencil, porous point pen, and water-soluble crayon on tan laid paper.
#19 Path to Law Suits against Cigarette Manufacturers
Donald J. Cohn of Webster & Sheffield, a cigarette manufacturer’s counsel, is shown speaking to the jury in Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 683 F.Supp. 1487 (1988), in U.S. District Court D in New Jersey. Presiding Judge H. Lee Sarokin agreed with the defendants that affixing to their product the Surgeon General’s warning that cigarette smoking is dangerous to one’s health fulfilled the minimum requirement for cigarette manufacturers and that the plaintiff’s lawyers could not argue based on the advertiser’s implications that lower nicotine content is safer. Rose Cipollone had died but her family argued it up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Cipollones lost their case, but the justices ruled during litigation that smokers might have other grounds to pursue claims against cigarette manufacturers under state laws.
By Marilyn Church. Cippolone [sic] Tobacco Trial, 1988. Water-soluble crayon, colored pencil, and porous point pen over graphite underdrawing on ochre Canson paper.
#20 Judge on Trial
In 1985, Judge William C. Brennan, who served on the New York State Supreme Court in Queens, was convicted on twenty-six counts of accepting bribes under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Shown here, Brennan and his attorney, Daniel P. Hollman, stand before Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. Brennan appealed his case on the grounds that Weinstein had based his conviction on an unreliable witness, but the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the decision: U.S. v. Brennen, 798 F.2d.581 (1986) He served more than two years at Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania.
After threatening to sue for discrimination, Alec Naiman, shown seated in the jury pool, communicates with his signer while Judge Budd G. Goodman in the New York State Supreme Court asks him questions. Hector Guzman, on trial for a narcotics violation, sits next to his attorney, Oscar Finkel. During jury selection, Finkel argued his client would be denied a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment if one of the jurors were deaf. Judge Goodman, sympathetic to Naiman’s cause, denied Guzman the right to eliminate him from the jury pool for cause: People v. Guzman, 478 NYS 2d 455 (1984). Finkel then used one of his peremptory challenges to exclude Naiman. With the passage in 1990 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Pub.L.101-336, deaf citizens obtained the right to serve on juries.
By Marilyn Church. Deaf Juror, February 17, 1984. Colored pencil, pastel, graphite, and porous point pen on ochre paper.
#22 The Citadel
Shannon Richey Faulkner had won coveted admission to the Citadel in 1993, but after the elite all-male military college discovered she was female, it withdrew her acceptance. She fought in court for two years, eventually winning the right to be admitted as a day student, until the appeals process was completed: Faulkner v. Jones, 585 F.Supp. 552 (1994). In 1994, Pat Lopez drew her sitting next to one of her lawyers, Robert Black, as well as an unidentified lawyer. Judge C. Weston Houck presided over the U.S. District Court in Charleston, South Carolina. In August 1995, Faulkner was admitted as a cadet but quit after just one week as a result of harassment. Nevertheless, other women have pursued admission and today comprise eight percent of the cadets.
In 1970, twenty-one members of the New York Black Panther Party faced charges of conspiracy to bomb several sites in New York City. Their lawyers found it difficult to prepare for their trial before the New York Supreme Court because the defendants were purposefully separated and placed into solitary confinement in seven different jails. Their lead lawyer, Gerald Lefcourt, sued to have them brought together in Queens and ultimately thirteen defendants faced trial together. Justice John M. Murtagh, having knowledge of the Chicago Seven trial, intended to avoid Judge Hoffman’s handling of that politically charged courtroom. The jury ultimately acquitted the Panthers of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971.
#24 Racist Tattoos Cover James Byrd, Jr.’s, Murderer
During the trial of John William King, tattoo artist Johnny Mosley testified about the racist imagery with which King had covered his body while in prison on burglary charges. King had also joined the Confederate Knights of America, a Klan-based group. Out of prison, he recruited Shawn Allen Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer to what he hoped would be the Jasper, Texas, chapter of the group. The victim, James Byrd, Jr., had been hitchhiking home from a party on June 7, 1998, when Berry, Brewer, and King kidnapped him. After beating him, they chained him to the back of their truck and dragged him to his death. Selecting its only African American juror to serve as foreman, the jury returned a guilty verdict of capital murder.
#25 Only One Officer Found Guilty of My Lai Atrocities
Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., flanked by George W. Latimer, his civilian lawyer and an unidentified officer, saluted the president of the six-officer jury. He had just received his sentence to a lifetime of hard labor for his role in the murder of twenty-two My Lai villagers in Vietnam on March 16, 1968: appeal at U.S. v. Calley, 46 C.M.R. 1131. Ultimately President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to house arrest at Fort Benning. Calley was released to a federal parole officer on September 10, 1975. Of the fifteen officers who were charged, only Calley was found guilty of the massacre.
After his extradition from England, Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, faced trial for multiple counts of terrorism, including the taking of hostages and providing material support and resources to terrorists: motion to dismiss charges denied, U.S. v. Mostafa, 965 F.Supp. 2d 451 (2013). The charges included an episode that led to the deaths of two Americans in Yemen, as well as the use of his role as imam at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London to incite acts of terrorism and racial hatred. Elizabeth Williams, while deftly capturing the Egyptian-born leader’s mannerisms, prosthetic arms, and stiff relationship with Mayerlin Ulerio, a paralegal on his defense team, portrays a human face on a demonized figure. Mustafa is now serving a life sentence at the federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
The Black Liberation Army, in an attempt to build a utopian black republic, enlisted separatists who belonged to the radical Weather Underground to help rob a Brink’s armored car in Nyack, New York, on October 20, 1981. They murdered one guard and injured the other. During their preliminary hearing, on September 20, 1982, Judith Clark, Sekou Odinga, Kuwasi Balagoon, and David Gilbert shouted “Long live Palestine!” before they were escorted from the courtroom. Balagoon, Clark, and Gilbert, were tried in state court in nearby Goshen, New York, while Odinga was tried on federal charges in Manhattan. Balagoon died of AIDS a few years after the trial, Odinga was released in 2014, and Clark and Gilbert remain incarcerated.
Defendant Bernhard Goetz, who shot and injured four African American teenagers on a New York City subway in December 1984, sits during his trial before Judge Stephen Crane. Dubbed the “Subway Vigilante,” Goetz found sympathy with the jury who were receptive to his self-defense plea. They found him not guilty of attempted murder and assault. He spent eight months in prison for his unregistered handgun. One teenager who was paralyzed in the shooting, Darrell Cabey, later sued Goetz for damages and the court awarded him ten percent of Goetz’s income.
By Marilyn Church. Bernard [sic] Goetz Trial, 1985. Colored pencil, porous point pen, and water-soluble crayon on gray paper.
#29 Jury Troubled During Robert Chambers Trial
Nicknamed the “Preppy Killer,” even though his mother, a private-duty nurse worked extra shifts to send him to the best private schools, Robert Chambers choked Jennifer Levin to death in Central Park on August 26, 1986. During the course of deliberations, the jury returned to the courtroom several times to hear the court reporter re-read points of testimony to aid in their decision. On March 26, 1988, fearful of a mistrial, the prosecuting attorney, Linda Fairstein, called for a lesser charge, to which Chambers agreed. He committed enough infractions in prison to serve his entire fifteen-year sentence until his release in 2003. He is back in prison serving a nineteen-year sentence on an unrelated drug charge.
In the summer of 1969, Charles Manson brainwashed his followers, whom he called “the family,” into committing gruesome murders, including Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, as well as several others in the Los Angeles area. Courtroom illustrator Bill Robles captured Manson’s vacant stare in November 1970, several months after the defendant had carved an “x” into his forehead: People v. Charles Manson, 61 Cal. App. 3d 102 (1976). Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi later wrote Helter Skelter, a true crime account of Manson and “the family.”
Taiwanese defendants were indicted on conspiracy charges for operating as part of the international gang, United Bamboo, for involvement in gambling, drug trafficking, and prostitution under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The group was also charged with the death of journalist Henry Liu. On August 4, 1986, Houston-based attorney Jan W. Fox questioned Detective Robert Chung, who had infiltrated the gang. Believing they were expanding their narcotics operation in several cities, the gang unwittingly recruited FBI agent Steven Wong and other law enforcement officers, including Chung, into their fold. Ultimately eight members of United Bamboo received sentences ranging from ten to twenty-five years from Judge Robert L. Carter of the U.S. District Court for the South District of New York: appeal at United States v. Chang An-Lo, aka White Wolf, 851 F.2d 547 (1988).
#32 “Deep Throat” Testifies at Mitchell Stans Trial
FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt was not considered the most important witness in the Watergate trial of John N. Mitchell and Maurice H. Stans, who were accused of accepting secret cash donations on behalf of President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee. As Felt answered questions posed by U.S. Attorney John R. Wing on March 15, 1974, courtroom illustrator Aggie Kenny captured his likeness, taking time to note his power tie. In 1974 Kenny, who has had a long career as a courtroom illustrator, won an Emmy for her trial coverage for CBS news, including the Mitchell Stans trial. Not until 2005 did Felt admit to his role as “Deep Throat,” the anonymous source of information about the Watergate cover-up to the Washington Post, and his role in revealing evidence that led to Nixon’s resignation.
Aggie Kenny, while covering Westmoreland v. CBS, 596 F.Supp. 1170 (1984), in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, found time to draw her paint box in this unfinished sketch. Courtroom artists work in situ, creating fully realized art ready for television or news cameras. Although cameras are increasingly permitted into courtrooms, when they are prohibited, artists use the tools of their trade and are ready to capture an energized moment. While perched in a front row seat to human drama, they look for subtle details of body language—how a defendant gulps, a lawyer gestures, a family member looks on in sorrow—sometimes capturing history in the making.
The news media—whether print, television, or digital—hires artists to cover trials where cameras are forbidden. During the trial of automobile manufacturer John Z. DeLorean for cocaine possession with the intent to sell, artist Elizabeth Williams drew a self-portrait with a row of her artist colleagues covering the trial (from left to right): Walt Stewart, Bill Robles, Bill Lignante, Howard Brodie, David Rose, and Elizabeth Williams. Howard Brodie is shown wearing his signature opera glasses affixed to his eyeglasses, which he donned to get a better view of the proceedings.
In 2021, the left have become the establishment, projecting their tyrannical intolerance everywhere. Where backing the right would once have been sneered at, it’s now the only alternative for those who aim to shake up the system.
The progressive entertainment establishment within the rock music industry was shocked, back in the early 2000s, when groundbreaking guitarist Johnny Ramone came out as Republican. How could a great American rocker, who once celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, vote for buttoned-up, conservative GOP squares?
When repeatedly asked by interviewers why he claimed that affiliation, Ramone would explain that it was now the only way to be a radical, a non-conformist, and a troublemaker – in other words, “cool.” Progressives and Democrats had completely taken over his business, demanding every musician, singer, songwriter, producer, agent, manager, etc., toe the ideological line, lest they be blackballed, he said. That left a rebel nowhere else to go but to their enemies.
To flip off the emerging politically correct culture, to offend the ruling establishment, a punk rock icon had to join the Party of Lincoln. The oppression of the left had given him no choice.
I would never compare myself to Johnny Ramone in any fashion, though my progressive friends believe I’m a conservative and attempt to shame me for it. Meanwhile, my conservative friends think I lean progressive and try to ignore it. I very much like it that way, since I never want anyone to believe they know what I’m thinking before I open my mouth or strike a key.
I don’t think in terms of political tribes. If readers will allow me a moment’s pretentiousness, I see the world in terms of freedom and rationalism vs. power and oppression – prisoners and rebels vs. warders and dictators. As the rival parties and their ideological markers jostle for position on a given topic, I follow my instincts rather than their talking points.
That said, the majority of my op-ed work these days leans to the right, and I lay that at the stomping feet of the left. If a journalist’s duty is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, he or she has no real choice but to assault today’s column of institutional progressives. Their power remains largely unchecked, and an intolerant, unquestioning, and tyrannical arrogance is the clear result. Right on cue, rampaging cancel culture steps in to threaten the social standing and livelihood of anyone questioning the ruling party’s dubious wisdom.
So, I attack the left. Like old Johnny Ramone, I’m stuck with no alternative.
If we turn the clock back a couple of years, you’d fine me hurling fireballs at the castle of a sociopath in the White House. It was the endless days of Trump tossing out diseased decrees from atop his Babylonian throne, and I wrote to oppose the man as a bully and a malignant narcissist. As 2021 limps through its summer months, we find progressive philosophies running US government, much of Europe, most of the media industry, and arguably all of the social media realm. Everyone who claims to value freedom needs to acknowledge the warning sirens as such conspiratorial forces gather.
When the rank clouds of absolute power begin to choke out free thinkers, the disease of absolute corruption can never be far behind. Sadly, most of today’s fourth column – an international press that seems more interested in enabling absolute power for its favorite progressive officials than questioning or limiting it – is too busy celebrating the rise of the imperialist leftists to cover their actions and statements objectively.
If the Trump era was dominated by cold absolutism, modern leftist policies remain dangerously naive and driven entirely by emotional, “first-level” thinking. They’re fueled by the “feel good, do it” nature of their politics. That’s a dangerously seductive energy that leads today’s left to a disturbing absolute conviction that everything they conceive, say, or do is the best, absolutely right, and forever legitimatized.
That’s the sort of aspirational dominance that demands the questioning of authority. It calls for some socially and legally allowable rebellion by a free press always looking to protect the rights and wellbeing of the common people. Tragically, the vast majority of international news outlets are entirely in step with the current progressive march.
Such coverage is not journalism. It’s propaganda. Reporters and news outlets around the globe become willing tools of the state when they cooperate and proliferate the messages of one political pole, while consistently attacking the leaders and tenets of the other. The most dangerous side effect of this slavish media co-opting is that the favored party is free to act without supervision, invited to engage in any sort of corruption with impunity.
The only way to fend off such corruption and to protect the citizenry it harms – regardless of which tribe claims the mountaintop – is to pounce on any half-baked policy directive or pre-approved group-think and expose it as dangerous foolishness. My chosen tool is published mockery. You’re free to choose any weapon that best suits your empty hand.
All politics run in cycles. The right rises to stabilize big business economics and strengthen national defense. When those policies cause social agendas to lag, the left rallies and takes back the reins – imposing regulations on the fat cats and juggling wealth distribution anew. Around and around it goes, as two opposite political powers work to undo the policies of their opposite number more eagerly than they toil to generate accomplishments of their own. The duty of whatever rebel press remains is to keep crosshairs on all the players, not just those with the wrong party affiliation.
I would hope writers of any variety feel a need to put out there what they can support as the truth. It’s the best they can do. Beyond that, I would want those same writers to be socio-political rebels. In my perfect yet imaginary kingdom, they would question all authority and never seek to become a tool of oppression.
It’s becoming increasingly lonely in that kingdom, but let’s hope more voices look to shake up those in power whenever possible. For now, until the right seizes power again and puts the target back on its back, keep taking shots at the left.
All the cool kids are doing it.
………………………
As a journalist, John Scott Lewinski hustles around the world, writing for more than 30 international news organization covering news, lifestyle and technology. As an author, he is represented by the Fineprint Literary Agency, New York
No name for crew member charged – No motive or explanation
USS Bonhomme Richard
(AP)
JULIE WATSON Thu, July 29, 2021, 2:17 PM·2 min read
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The U.S. Navy charged a sailor Thursday with starting a fire last year that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard docked off San Diego, marking the maritime branch’s worst warship blaze outside of combat in recent memory.
The amphibious assault ship burned for more than four days. Left with extensive structural, electrical and mechanical damage, the ship was later scrapped. Estimates to replace it ran up to $4 billion.
The sailor was a member of the crew at the time, Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a U.S. 3rd Fleet spokesperson, said in a statement. The sailor was charged with aggravated arson and the willful hazarding of a vessel, Robertson said. No name was released.
No other details were provided, and it was unclear what evidence was found or what the motive was.
SAN DIEGO – Port of San Diego Harbor Police Department boats combat a fire on board USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) at Naval Base San Diego, July 12. On the morning of July 12, a fire was called away aboard the ship while it was moored pier side at Naval Base San Diego. Local, base and shipboard firefighters responded to the fire. USS Bonhomme Richard is going through a maintenance availability, which began in 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christina Ross)
Smoke rises from the USS Bonhomme Richard at Naval Base San Diego in July, after an explosion and fire on board the ship. The Navy announced Monday the ship will be decommissioned.Denis Poroy/AP
The U.S. Navy announced Monday it will decommission, rather than repair or repurpose, the USS Bonhomme Richard because of extensive damage from a fire while the vessel was in port. The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship was docked in San Diego when a fire broke out on July 12. It took five days to extinguish the inferno.
Ultimately, 40 sailors and 23 civilians were treated for minor injuries, according to the Navy. The ship was not so fortunate.
Repairing or repurposing the ship, according to Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite, would be a billion-dollar battle.
“We did not come to this decision lightly,” Braithwaite said in a statement. “Following an extensive material assessment in which various courses of action were considered and evaluated, we came to the conclusion that it is not fiscally responsible to restore her.”
The Navy determined that the cost of restoring the ship could exceed $3 billion and it would take five to seven years from start to finish. Rebuilding and repurposing the ship could exceed $1 billion. The Navy says it could construct a new hospital ship, submarine tender, or command-and-control ship for the same price, or less.Article continues after sponsor messagehttps://300914dd4435ab1a7310948af4af6a57.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
The cause of the fire is still unknown, but NPR previously reported that the Navy questioned a sailor in connection with the incident. The Navy said investigations are ongoing.
The USS Bonhomme Richard at sea in an undated photo.U.S. Navy
The 844-foot ship had an illustrious career over its 20-plus years of service. It participated in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The USS Bonhomme Richard also aided in humanitarian efforts in Indonesia and Japan.
The timeline for dismantling the ship is still being sorted out by the Navy. But the inactivation of the ship will allow systems and components to be removed and used in other ships, the Navy said.
The ship may be gone, but it may only be a matter of time before a new Bonhomme Richard sets sail. The ship that went up in flames in July is the third to bear the name.
The second Bon Homme Richard was an aircraft carrier that was decommissioned in 1971.
But it was the first ship that gave to history one of the most famous statements by a U.S. military commander.
The Duc de Duras, a 900-ton merchant vessel, was donated to the United States by King Louis XVI of France in 1779. The ship was commanded by Capt. John Paul Jones, who renamed it BonHomme Richard after Benjamin Franklin, then serving as U.S. ambassador to France, according to the Navy.
Jones and the BonHomme Richard became known for their defeat of the English warship HMS Serapis at the Battle of Flamborough Head off the coast of England. The BonHomme Richard was gravely damaged and its flag knocked to the deck when the English asked Jones whether he surrendered.
Jones responded by calling out, “I have not yet begun to fight!” He then sent 40 Marines and sailors to the Serapis with grenades and muskets. The BonHomme Richard secured America’s first defeat of an English vessel in English waters before ultimately sinking in September 1779.
HOLLYWOOD, CA—Sony Pictures has released a trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a new Ghostbusters movie that follows the story of the original two. Response to the trailer has been cautious after the disastrous previous attempt to reboot the franchise in 2016. Instead of having a tight script Ghostbusters 2016 simply turned on the camera and allowed the four “funny” actresses from Saturday Night Live ad-lib on the spot. The result was not very entertaining. How are people who are supposed to be acting going to dream up a script while they are on camera? The director never really thought that idea through. He claimed people where laughing all through the movie as they worked. Actual photos show a stone faced crew trying to get through another boring day with big name stars who just aren’t funny.
The movie was a flop.
Sony Pictures vows this movie will be different, though, primarily because they’re not letting any biological women act in the Ghostbuster’s crew.
“We’re not exactly sure why the 2016 reboot failed,” said Sony Pictures spokesman Jeffrey Floyd, “but they did switch the cast to all women in that one. So, just to be safe, we’re not having any women at all in this one. All of the crew members also had to be men who transitioned to women. They know how to act, and boy, are they funny.”
Some say this may be an overcorrection. For example, when Sigourney Weaver, star of the first two Ghostbusters films, asked to have a cameo, the studio informed her that her part had been recast to be played by Caitlyn Jenner. Regardless of the criticism, Sony Pictures is holding firm.
“If we learned anything from the 2016 reboot, it’s that people only want to watch people bust ghosts,” said Floyd. “We have to be careful with these venerated franchises to make sure we give fans what they want. If that means tacking up a ‘No Real Girls Allowed’ sign, so be it.”
Was Lee Harvey Oswald a Leftist? L.H. Oswald went to a lot of trouble to look like a pro-Communist Leftist. The documentation for his actual leftist beliefs is pretty thin. One can watch the videos, and read articles and documents related to Lee Harvey Oswald’s political views and identification as a Communist. The amount of material related to L.H. Oswald’s political beliefs is not very big. L.H. Oswald claimed to be a Communist, but he wasn’t really very interested in Communist ideas.
Was he a Stalinist, or a Trotskyist? That was an important question in the 1950’s and 1960’s when L.H. Oswald publicly claimed he followed communist politics. Or the divide between the tough talking Stalinist / Maoist in the Chinese Communist Party versus the modernizing “Peaceful Co-Existence” Stalinists of the Soviet Union. Apparently L.H. Oswald never spoke a word about this pressing divide in communist and leftist circles. Right Wingers couldn’t understand the debate, and that seems to be where L.H. Oswald got his ‘communist’ ideas.
Oswald did not have many working class experiences when he was young and was the lower class child of a struggling mother. Oswald may have publicly voiced leftist opinions, but he did not seek to join a labor union, or go to work in a factory. Oswald had contact in a youth group with a Right Wing military veteran who was focused on fighting Soviet Communism. All of L.H. Oswald’s supposed ‘communist’ ideas come out of the Right Wing playbook of the John Birch Society conception of what communism was in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
L.H. Oswald was an obnoxious ‘in your face’ communist in the 1950’s America, and then joined the military? That would seem to make more sense for a villain in a Batman comic than a real committed communist. Was L.H. Oswald building up a list of Leftist accomplishments as some kind of ‘deep cover’ to accomplish … what?
L.H. Oswald did not join the American Communist Party, but he felt a political loyalty to move to the Soviet Union? Maybe he was just a self motivated windup idiot, but, where did he get these bizarre ideas, and who thought they might have a use for him?
L.H. Oswald’s writings and audio recordings from his times in the Soviet Union show someone who seems creepy and interested in playing a deep undercover agent, and not a socialist who came to build the Soviet Union and communism. One long piece allegedly written by L.H. Oswald about the socialist cooperation structure of the factory system as he experienced it reads like it was written by someone else as it gets lost in technical detail in a way that just about nothing else L.H. Oswald ever wrote.
When L.H. Oswald left the Soviet Union he made no break with Stalinism or any break with any political belief at all. So, why did he go to communist Russia, and why did he leave? Politics and left wing beliefs don’t seem to have anything to do with his actions. Padding a Left Wing resume as some kind of cover does seem like a plausible motive for L.H. Oswald’s actions.
Once back in the US H.L. Oswald hooks up with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party that was running a defense of Cuba campaign under the group name “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” L.H. Oswald simply set up a branch of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” on his own in New Orleans and began to provocatively hand out leftist leaflets defending the Cuban revolution on the streets. L.H. Oswald’s pro-Cuba office was in the same building as a Right Wing Cuban anti-Castro groups office as well as some other security agents who must have known what L.H. Oswald was doing. The Socialist Workers Party did not have any members in the city or state and had urged L.H. Oswald not to open a public office. But, somehow the low wage L.H. Oswald had money to set up phony Leftist political front groups.
What was L.H. Oswald’s view on the conflict between Che Guevara and the guerilla war style communism as opposed to the Stalinist cold war peace deals with the US and Europe? L.H. Oswald apparently never expressed any opinions on some of the most hotly debated ideas in the communist movement worldwide. Why? Because L.H. Oswald was not a Leftist, or a Communist. L. H. Oswald was not interested in any of these debates about communist strategy. L.H. Oswald seems to have cultivated an image as a Leftist pro-Communist.
While in Texas L.H. Oswald had contacts with some strange people who funded Right Wing causes and it looks like L.H. Oswald drove to a Right Wing general’s house and fire some rifle shots. These are provocative acts that are not what any Leftist would advocate as a way to build a Left Wing movement in the US. No political groups in the US at that time were telling people to do the kinds of things L.H. Oswald was doing in Texas in 1963. L.H. Oswald did not write a pamphlet advocating armed struggle and hand out the leaflets on the street, as he had done in the past. L.H. Oswald wanted action, and especially a reaction. L.H. Oswald seems to have wanted to initiate anti-Right Wing attacks – that would ultimately strengthen the Right Winger attacked.
As to what happened on the day JFK was killed…I’ll leave that to so many others who have dealt with the question. Was Lee Harvey Oswald a useful idiot who walked into a setup, or the central actor who changed so much?
I wanted to address a question that I have not seen adequately addressed – Was Lee Harvey Oswald a Communist? No.
Did the people who arranged the whole thing, if it wasn’t just Lee Harvey Oswald and his lucky shots, get what they wanted? Did the political changes that came after Kennedy was assassinated go the way they wanted them to? Did a Right Wing assassination of a very mildly Liberal president result in a more Liberal Leftist congress that passed a host of progressive Great Society programs? Wasn’t that the opposite of what they killed Kennedy for? Lee Harvey Oswald created himself as a kind of character in a Cold War spy novel, and ended with the kind of drama he always sought. No communists or leftists recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as any kind of leftist after his death…he was alone.
If you are to influence your co-workers to join a union, you’d better already have their respect at work. This doesn’t mean that you must be the absolute best, but that you are a leader and rank among one of the best. This first step is the all-important foundation for your effort, directly or indirectly affecting EVERY other step toward forming a union.
It helps also to be the best liked co-worker. Not that you need to be prom-king/queen popular, but that you are easily approachable, social, and generally kind. In being so, you’ll make your job of talking with your co-workers about a union – which constitutes 95% of the work of organizing — MUCH easier. If your trust is earned as a good worker and friend, you can better expect that your ideas will be not only better received, but kept away from management during the initial stage of secrecy.
2) Contact a union
Having the support of an established union is crucial to your cause. Not only will they supply you with a full-time organizer and materials, but also a lawyer if you are unfairly targeted by management – something that will inspire your co-workers with faith in the project.
Call different unions and plead your case. Talk to an organizer and try to get them to take you on. This isn’t necessarily easy. Unions are taking a big risk every time they attempt to organize a workplace; some don’t organize at all. Before they invest the money in wages that an organizer(s) will be paid – not to mention other resources — they will assess the situation to see if their investment will be realized in the form of a successful union.
Your attitude is crucial to their decision. If they see you as a competent and serious worker who will dedicate a substantial amount of his or her free time in helping organize the effort, they will be more likely to invest. Questions about the workplace environment, the wages of the workers, their grievances, your personal background, the attitude of the bosses, etc., all play a part in the decision of the union.
Also, make sure that the union you’re contacting is the appropriate one for your workplace. Do they represent similar types of workplaces? How serious are they about organizing? Will they help you with the appropriate resources? Many unions keep organizing new workplaces at the bottom of their priority list; finding a union that is serious about organizing, and willing to take you on, is often a rarity in itself.
3) Master the “union conversation”
Assuming that you now have the backing of a credible union and a handy-dandy “union organizer” at your disposal, you are ready to begin. But before you go out recruiting allies, you should have a basic understanding of how to talk to your co-workers about this now-real and serious subject. Co-workers who are close friends will be easy to talk to about the union, and talking to them can be done casually.
Many workers, however, will be firmly against the idea, whether because of misconceptions about unions in general or reservations about confronting authority. Some workers will be scared of being fired; others will be on the fence. Considering these diverging opinions, you have to alter how you talk to these people, but at the foundation there is a science of sorts on how to broach the topic that takes practice to master and is the foundation for any union effort.
Once you get your co-worker alone, outside of work, you’ll be able to talk more openly about the union, why it is necessary, and hopefully, how they can help. It may be difficult to get your co-workers to meet with you privately — a good icebreaker may be: “Some of us are discussing ways to improve the workplace, would you be interested in talking about this over coffee?”
Agitation is key in getting co-workers to commit to something that may get them fired. If your co-worker is at all serious about his or her job, whipping up some passion shouldn’t be difficult. Ask them some general work questions and about their particular job duties. If they voice some grievances, keep them talking about it (agitate!). Ask if they’ve tried to correct the problem themselves. Offer a thought-out solution to their dilemma: the workers acting united with the backing of a larger worker organization — a union! Ask them about the idea, answer their questions (make sure you’ve familiarized yourself with the subject), and most importantly, ask them to get involved.
You only get one shot to have an effective, first union conversation. If done wrong, you could scare a co-worker away for good; if done right, you could have a new ally in your campaign willing to recruit others.
4) Target and recruit leaders
A leader by definition is one who leads others. The leaders at the workplace will eventually become the Organizing Committee of the union. These are the people to approach first. The rationale for doing this is obvious: you are forming a union of workers, and at all workplaces newer or inexperienced workers look for guidance from workplace leaders, and if the union is any good at all, this relationship will find a reflection in the organizing committee. Because workers look for leadership on the job, they will be more likely to respect the opinion of a leader at the workplace about the formation of a worker’s union.
Leave no influential person unapproached (unless they are close to management). Once again, if you yourself are a respected worker, other leaders will be more willing to listen to your ideas. After your co-workers are convinced about the need for a union, it helps to arrange a meeting with your ”official,” paid organizer. This makes the idea become real. Seeing the union hall, hearing old organizing stories, and listening to the advice of a seasoned organizer creates confidence and casts away the conspiracy feeling that naturally comes after initially hearing about the plan.
If you already have co-workers supporting you, it may help to have them talk to a new co-worker, especially if they have a better relationship with them; sometimes it helps to talk to somebody in a group.
5) Solidarity efforts
If your workplace is like most, the workers are divided into specific groups, whether it be the shifts they work, different departments, cliques, etc. Breaking down these barriers to create unity is extremely hard, although absolutely necessary if a union drive is to be successful.
Our workplace was as divided as a workplace could be: we never even saw half of our co-workers because workers from night, day, and swing shifts rarely spoke to one another; the kitchen and reception areas appeared autonomous. It took a concerted, organized effort to reach out to everyone.
At first, this is done by after-work drinks, before-work pancakes, other activities, and at the later stages, on-the-job solidarity actions. Much of the job of organizing can be characterized as “hanging out” before or after work. The friendlier and more cordial your workplace is, the easier it is to form a union. Instigating hang-out time with your co-workers is one of the biggest tasks of organizing a union.
Your employer will continue with the divide-and-conquer strategy even after you’ve gone public. They might give raises to one department of the workplace – as they did with us – while ignoring another. The best way to avoid this pitfall is by having every department of the workplace represented in the organizing committee. This way, concerns from every branch of the workplace can be quickly addressed and ignored departments can be reassured by the group as a whole.
Once the union erupts out of its secrecy stage, “unity actions” become imperative. A single collective action, say, wearing a t-shirt with the union logo, sends a VERY powerful message to management as well as giving all the workers confidence in their new, united strength.
6) Make it your union
It is impossible to organize a workplace without the active participation of the workers. It is by nature a chaotic phenomenon not easily controlled. This is part of the reason that many unions refuse to participate in union organizing at all; the bureaucratic leaders see in it a threat to their privileges — an active, engaged workplace is a direct challenge to the authoritarian bureaucracy that controls many unions.
If the organizer assigned to you is any good, he or she will realize the necessity to unleash the floodgates of creativity and leadership at the workforce, utilizing any and everybody willing to help. Although it is extremely valuable to have the help of a paid organizer(s) and the resources of the union behind them, NOTHING happens unless the workers make it happen at the workplace. The union you approached knows this; it may be helpful to remind them. If the organizer puts you in an uncomfortable position with your co-workers, tell them “no.” If they ask you to do something unreasonable at work, tell them “no” again. Nobody knows your workplace, or your co-workers, like you do. Having a strong, pro-active workplace will make your union stronger since your co-workers will see themselves as the leaders and the local representing them as advisers, as it should be.
There exists a tendency to let the organizer call the shots since they are the experts. This is especially the case in the opening stages since most of your co-workers will not be experienced at all with unions. Changing this relationship is crucial. Our workplace successfully developed leadership with the blessing and encouragement of the organizers, even though at times there existed tension over ideas and strategy. It helped us also to have control over what was discussed at organizing committee meetings, as well as rank and file led “working groups” to create union literature and discuss and implement community outreach. Our organizers were sincere people who understood that developing leadership at our workplace was crucial for victory and even suggested that workers help run the meetings themselves. All of this resulted in “the organizing committee of my dreams,” as one of the paid organizers put it.
7) Keep the ball rolling
Constant progress is crucial for union building for various reasons. The first is the most important: if the union backing you doesn’t see forward motion, they may withdraw their support and resources. No union will pour money into a lost cause; give them reason to be optimistic about your chances for success. Your co-workers are also likely to become impatient if they don’t see results. Talk is one thing, action and real change is another. If the secret, talking and organizing phase doesn’t develop into action soon, your co-workers may give up hope, and who would blame them — they will be sacrificing their free time and expect that their efforts will bear fruit.
This doesn’t mean that there will not be setbacks or stagnation occasionally, but that every attempt is made to press ahead with the campaign, constantly reaching out for more allies and organizing until the prompt yet timely going public occurs.
After going public, the employer will most likely use the time-honored technique of stalling to crush the union — ours hired a vicious union-busting lawyer who employed the tactic quite nicely. It is in the interest of the workers that the union election takes place as timely as possible; this applies with equal force to the bargaining of a contract.
The employer will attempt to set the date for an election as far back as possible. They will challenge the obvious in court and then appeal the decision they lost to eat up time. They will attempt to do so because the longer nothing happens, the more discouragement sets in, the quicker workers give up, quit volunteering, or leave their jobs in disgust.
Our employer challenged us in the courts by demanding our immediate supervisors be allowed in the union. We would have won in court, but in the interest of time, conceded to their demands (now our supervisors are some of our best unionists). This example reinforces step 6: make sure that the workers are fully informed of what is happening in the legal sphere of things and that the Organizing Committee is able to make decisions about which legal tactics are employed.
8) Education
Without an understanding of what is taking place, or what is about to take place, you’ll be powerless to repel the inevitable attacks on the union from your employer once you’ve gone public. The Organizing Committee must become experts on unionism so as to gain confidence from the rest of the workplace. Otherwise, the on-the-job leaders are forgotten and the workers look to the boss for answers to the new, tough questions they’ve never faced before. Workers will go to the Organizing Committee after hearing rumors, threats, and lies from management. If the committee doesn’t have a firm grasp on what is happening, confidence can be shattered. Emergency Organizing Committee meetings may need to be held to address a union-busting tactic by management so that a proper response can be decided on and quickly spread to the rest of the workforce.
After going public, the boss will unleash a torrent of propaganda meant to confuse and scare the workers. The ONLY way to combat this is for ALL the workers to have a prior understanding of the process; you must educate your co-workers before the boss does.
Workers must understand why they need a union, why the boss does not want them to have one, and exactly what the boss will say to scare them away from the idea. The stronger the organizing and education, the more ridiculous the bosses will seem when they try to implement their scare tactics. Indeed, if sufficiently educated, EVERY tactic the boss attempts will only strengthen the union and impassion the workers.
Also, the more your co-workers are educated, the more likely they’ll be to attend meetings and become union leaders themselves, not to mention strong voices that will insure that the paid organizers and union experts remain advisers and not managers.
9) Branch out
The crucial, beginning stages of the union centers around the Organizing Committee, its strengthening in both membership and education, and its preparation for outreach to the rest of the workforce. The transition from a secretive Organizing Committee to an all-workplace union is to be done quickly and efficiently so that every co-worker is talked to in-depth before the boss understands what is happening. If the boss is able to intimidate workers before you’re able to talk to them, it may be too late.
ALL your co-workers must be promptly contacted and talked to, using pamphlets, flyers, and educational meetings both large and individual. During these meetings, signatures can be gathered that expresses the workers’ desire to form a union. If you succeed in getting a large majority to sign and your union is confident and strong, you are ready to go public.
10) Going public
This is simply informing management that you have the necessary support to form a union and that you are scheduling an election with the National Labor Relations Board (all it takes is five minutes to fill out the form). In some occupations or regions, signatures will be sufficient to have your union legally recognized while in others an election is required.
This is often just the beginning, but it marks a transformation in your organizing efforts, as well as in your workplace. All the insincerity of management will be revealed by their stark opposition to your efforts; they will act angry, betrayed, and tearful. The fight that will ensue will be determined by your successes – and continuing successes — on the above nine points. If you’ve managed to make your union strong by being united, educated, and confident, you are much more likely to win the following election and be in a strong position to win a good contract.
A union is only as strong as the active members of the workplace. Enforcement of the contract is necessary and requires engaged and educated workers. Under capitalism — a system divided by owners and workers — ALL union contracts are by nature temporary truces, subject to attack at a later date. Ideally, your co-workers will be educated on the political nature, history, significance, and strength of unions, as well as the political philosophy that best reflects workers interests — socialism.
How many times have you heard that slavery was “America’s original sin”? I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think the idea is that slavery was a uniquely horrible thing that defines the United States and will stain whites forever. It’s one of the few things Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama agree on. There are books about it. Here’s a college course at UC Davis called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin: Part 1.”
The fact is, there has been slavery in every period of history, and just about everywhere. The Greeks and Romans had it, the ancient Egyptians had it, it’s all over the Bible, the Chinese and the pre-Columbian Indians had it, the Maoris in New Zealand had it, and the Muslims had it in spades. But I have never, ever heard of slavery being anyone else’s “original sin.”
About the only societies that never had slaves were primitive hunter-gatherers. As soon as people have some kind of formal social organization, they start taking slaves.
Tlingit and Haida Indians, who lived in the Pacific Northwest, went raiding for slaves as far South as California. About one quarter of the population were slaves, and the children of slaves were slaves. During potlatches, or huge ceremonial feasts, the Tlingit would sometimes burn property and kill slaves, just to show how rich they were. What’s a couple of slaves to a guy who lives in a house like this?
When we bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867, Indians were furious when we told them they had to give up their slaves. The Tlingit carved this image of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator, to try to shame the government into compensating them for slaves.
What were called the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast happily bought black slaves. In 1860, there were 21,000 Cherokee, and they owned 4,000 slaves. And that was just the Cherokee. Many took their slaves with them when they were forced to move West.
Free blacks in the South owned slaves. The fact of having been slaves didn’t stop them from wanting to be slave masters themselves. In 1840, in South Carolina alone, there were 454 free blacks who owned a total of 2,357 slaves. Only about 20 percent of Southern households had even one slave, but 75 percent of the free-black households in South Carolina owned slaves.
Don’t believe me? It’s all in this book by the expert on the subject, Larry Koger of the University of South Carolina. And he demolishes the idea that most blacks bought slaves only to get family members out of slavery. Like whites, some were kind masters and some were mean, but, for the most part, they owned slaves for exactly the same reasons whites did.
He had a plantation of 672 acres along the Mississippi in Louisiana, and close to 100 slaves. Another black slave owner in Louisiana, P.C. Richards, owned 152 slaves. Black slaveowners avidly supported the Confederacy. There are no accurate estimates of the number of slaves held by free blacks at the time of the Civil War, but they would have been tens of thousands.
If slavery is somebody’s Original Sin, it’s sure not ours. Take a look at this map of the slave trade, beginning in 1500.
The thicknesses of the lines represent numbers of slaves. What became the United States imported just 400,000 slaves—about 3 percent of all the slaves who crossed the Atlantic. Look at all the slaves who went to Brazil and to the Caribbean Islands. They needed millions because, unlike American slaveowners who raised slave families, they bought grown men and worked them to death. And let us not forget, virtually every slave on this map was caught by blacks or Arabs.
And look at all the slaves who ended up in North Africa and the Middle East.
That’s millions of them going to Muslim countries at exactly the same time slaves were crossing the Atlantic. And Arabs had been taking black slaves out of Africa, across the Sahara, for 900 years before America was even discovered—and a forced march across the desert was a lot worse than crossing the Atlantic. In this article about Africa’s first slavers—the Arabs—historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that over the centuries, Muslims took about 14 million blacks out of Africa [Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs – as UK Slave Trade Abolition is commemorated, March 27, 2018]. That is more than the 12 million who went to the New World.
And you might ask, where are the descendants of all those Middle Eastern slaves? America has millions of slave descendants. Why don’t you see lots of blacks in Saudi Arabia or Syria or Iraq? Arabs castrated black slaves so they wouldn’t have descendants.
Muslims were even more enthusiastic about enslaving white people. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, by Prof. Robert C. Davis is the best book on the subject. Remember the Barbary Pirates of North Africa? Between 1530 and 1780 they caught and enslaved more than a million white, European Christians. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Arabs took more white slaves south across the Mediterranean than there were blacks shipped across the Atlantic.
Mostly, Muslim pirates captured European ships and stole their crews. In just three years, from 1606 to 1609, the British navy admitted it had lost 466 British merchant ships to North African pirates [Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast Past & Present, August 2001]. Four hundred sixty-six ships in just three years. Arabs took American slaves. Between 1785 and 1793 Algerians captured 13 American ships in the Mediterranean and enslaved the crews. This is a 1804 battle between Arab pirates and the USS Enterprise.
It was only in 1815, after two wars, that the United States was finally free of the Barbary pirates.
Muslim pirates also organized huge, amphibious slave-catching assaults that practically depopulated the Italian coast. In 1544, Algerian raiders took 7,000 slaves in the Bay of Naples in a single raid. This drove the price of slaves so low it was said you could “swap a Christian for an onion.”
After a 1566 raid on Granada in Spain netted 4,000 men women, and children, it was said to be “raining Christians in Algiers.” Women were easier to catch than men, and were prized as sex slaves, so some coastal areas lost their entire child-bearing populations. One raid as far away as Iceland brought back 400 white slaves.
Prof. Davis notes that the trade in black Africans was strictly business, but Muslims had a jihad-like enthusiasm for stealing Christians. It was revenge for the Crusades and for the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492. When Muslim corsairs raided Europe, they made a point of desecrating churches and stealing church bells. The metal was valuable but stealing church bells silenced the voice of Christianity.
It was a tradition to parade newly captured Europeans through the streets so people could jeer at them, while children threw garbage at them. At the slave market, both men and women were stripped naked to evaluate their sexual value. In the North African capitals—Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli—there was a big demand for homosexual sex-slaves. Other Europeans were worked to death on farms or building projects.
Prof. Davis writes that unlike in North America, there were no limits on cruelty: “There was no countervailing force to protect the slave from his master’s violence: no local anti-cruelty laws, no benign public opinion, and rarely any effective pressure from foreign states.” Slaves were not just property, they were infidels, and deserved whatever suffering a master meted out.
For a man, there was a fate even worse than being a sex slave. Hundreds of thousands became galley slaves, often on slave-catching pirate ships. They were chained to their oars 24 hours a day, and could move only to the hole where the oar went through the hull—so they could relieve themselves. If the men were rowing, they fouled themselves. Galley slaves lived in a horrible stench, ate rotten food, were whipped by slave drivers and tormented by rats and lice. They could not lie down and had to sleep at their oars. Many never left their ships, even in port. Their job was to row until they died, and to be tossed overboard at the first sign of weakness.
Mohammed himself was an enthusiastic slave trader. Muslims still take black slaves. As this article points out, Libya still has slave markets, Mauritanian Arabs take black slaves, and there is still slavery in Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan[Libya’s slave markets are a reminder that the exploitation of Africans never went away, by Martin Plaut, New Statesman, February 21, 2018].
And, of course, it was white people who abolished slavery, both in their own countries and, except for a few stubborn holdouts, the whole world. Africans, just like the Tlingit Indians, screamed about all the wealth we made them give up.
If the killing of the Air Force veteran in the Capitol on January 6 was a salvific act, why hide the killer? Why not celebrate him?
What follows describes our oligarchy’s terrible trilemma concerning their narrative of January 6.
Multiple sources—chiefly the U.S government by its efforts to hide him—identify Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael L. Byrd as the officer who killed Ashli Babbitt as she was attempting to climb through a window to enter the House Speaker’s lobby that day. Were this identification incorrect, the certainty that the correct one is surfacing in secretless D.C. reminds our oligarchy of how hazardous are the foundations on which it set the ruling narrative that it narrowly thwarted the supposed “greatest menace to our democracy since the Civil War”—armed, white insurrectionists in the act of overthrowing the U.S. government, by courageous police work and prosecutions.
From Joe Biden to the lowest ranks of the Justice Department and the media, the oligarchy had bet, in the name of national security, it could stonewall for the long run about who exactly did what on January 6. A forlorn bet, especially since the narrative on which the oligarchy rests its right to intimidate its opponents depends so much on affirming the virtuosity of its acts of oppression—foremost of which was shooting and killing Babbitt. But if the killing was a salvific act, why hide the killer?
Most forthrightly Biden could award Lt. Byrd (or someone else) the Congressional Medal of Honor in a solemn Oval Office ceremony and read the citation to the American people.
For the citation’s preamble, the White House need only crib statements over the past six months from the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and just about every civil, military, corporate, and media authority figure in the land. Because if the people who assembled around or coursed through the Capitol on January 6 really were an armed mob organized by enemies of the Constitution and about to overthrow it, then stopping them by placing one deadly shot into the person leading the charge was an act of rare skill and courage, deserving honor and thanks. That’s a preamble the American people already know by heart.
Oh, the Facts!
Medal of Honor citations, however, consist of detailed descriptions of the act being celebrated. They detail the enemy, the circumstances, and the danger that the awardee took upon himself to save others. They explain to Americans as well as to the awardee why all of us should ever be proud of him.
Hence, detail and transparency are essential to the ceremony. Who was the enemy on January 6? Who were the white supremacists, and who organized them? The U.S government has spent countless millions developing databases on white supremacists, whom it officially considers the principal threat to the American people’s security. Surely, it can publish the list it has compiled that shows who endangered what. And if it refuses to do so because those on that list might sue for slander, perhaps that list is not one of facts but of political innuendo.
But the U.S government does know for a fact that certain organizations were involved, somehow, in planning the showiest parts of what happened January 6. And it knows that because persons who at least took part in deciding what the organizations did and did not do—if indeed they did not control those actions—were paid by the FBI and other government agencies.
The so-called “Proud Boys,” often cited as a “far-Right” organization and said to be somehow responsible for January 6, was led by one Enrique Tarrio, an FBI informant. The so-called Oath Keepers, the group most cited and said by government sources to be most involved in that day’s events, is led by one Stewart Rhodes, another FBI asset.
In fact, the Justice Department lists some 15 participants in the event against whom it brings no charges, either for “insurrection” or even for trespassing, because these individuals are paid infiltrators. They work for the FBI or other U.S. intelligence agencies. The U.S. government refuses to expose what these persons did because they did it on the government’s behalf.
Because the government had such a hand—big and unpalatable to Americans—in the events of January 6, it is now impossible for the U.S. government to detail factually who “the enemy” was on January 6 without indicting itself.
That is why the Biden Administration’s Justice Department is holding, without bail in solitary confinement, persons whom it unofficially accuses of “insurrection” but, officially, for the most part, can prove only that they trespassed and interfered with official proceedings.
That is because the alleged intent to overthrow the government, if there was such, came from the FBI’s own infiltrators, who are the only witnesses, the only source of testimony, about the supposed intent of the trespassers. That is why the government tries to drag out “investigations” to intimidate and press detainees to agree to some form of self-incrimination, and does all it can to prevent the events of January 6 from coming into the public adversarial judicial proceedings as prescribed by the Constitution and laws.
Since the government won’t give a credible account about “the enemy” from whom Lt. Byrd (or whomever) saved America on January 6—much less tell the transparent truth—what can it tell us to justify a Medal of Honor?
Perhaps Ashli Babbitt was leading a company of heavily armed commandos, trained and ready to kill or capture our elected representatives? But there is no evidence that the people behind Ashli knew each other or were armed, and none about their intentions. What about Babbitt herself? Was she armed, as a commando? Or did she look like a fearsome ninja? No, she was unarmed. And, weighing 110 pounds, she would hardly trigger physical fears in females of ordinary size—much less in a seasoned male cop, twice her size, armed with a semi automatic Glock—not the standard 9 mm, but the sure-kill .40 caliber kind.
Clearly, whoever in the White House were to be tasked with writing a Medal Of Honor citation would have a hard time.
Sooner or later, however, somebody may be handed that job. Why? Because if killing Ashli Babitt was not an honorable deed, then it was cowardly first-degree murder in the service of a lie. Much of the U.S. oligarchy shares responsibility for that crime, because so many of its members have taken part in covering it up. As usual in Washington, the coverup ends up being far more serious and revealing than the crime. Perhaps Attorney General Merrick Garland will recall that one of his predecessors, John Mitchell, spent time in Club Fed for helping to cover up a far lesser crime.
Between a Rock . . .
But if honoring Lt. Byrd (or whomever) is impossible, throwing him under the proverbial bus may be the only path to preserving some integrity for the “January 6 insurrection” narrative so important to the oligarchy’s plans to retain power.
Byrd’s background lends itself to the scheme. Sure, he’s Pelosi’s boy. But it seems colleagues dislike him—whispering to the media that he left a loaded Glock in a men’s room and bragged that his connections would shield him from the consequences. But even if he were a saint, there is no alternative scapegoat for the government’s misdeeds on January 6.
Yet throwing the scapegoat under the bus is itself problematic if only because, coming so late, after massive stonewalling, it is itself a red flag of a bigger cover up. One so obvious as to be palatable only to the faceless executives at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Its brazenness might well be too much for this world’s Lester Holts.
More important, the effective admission that none of January 6’s demonstrators willfully injured anyone, and that the only willful injurer was a government agent, enlivens the question of what all the other government agents involved in that day’s events were doing. Not only the ones who were trying to manipulate organizations that exist largely because of government infiltrators, but also the Capitol Police who physically attacked and egged on peaceful demonstrators. There is a lot of video on that.
Once the government admits that its most obvious January 6 actor is not worthy of a Medal of Honor, and that it has been covering up something indefensible, by what credible argument can it refuse to release videos of events—and to provide witnesses under oath—about who ordered whom to do what on January 6?
All of the above suggests that the narrative of a white supremacist attempted coup on January 6 will tumble on its makers the moment serious persons push.
The Democratic Socialists of America are holding their convention August 1–8.
Audio of Article – Mp3
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In May 1968, rebellious students in France united with workers for a general strike. They read Marx, dreamed of revolution, questioned gender … Their motto was “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” They knew that the only realistic solution to the problems created by capitalism is to do what bourgeois theorists claim is impossible: overthrow the system in a socialist revolution.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was formed in 1982 by Michael Harrington. His goal for the new organization was to be “the left wing of the possible.” He wrote, “I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism.” Harrington aimed to build a group whose “socialism” was just the illusion of a more humane capitalism, and whose strategy was to push the Democratic Party to take up reforms. Harrington’s strategy of “the possible” meant that socialists would play a role in limiting radical movements and bringing them back into the realm of bourgeois politics. It’s a failed strategy, not only in the fight for socialism but even in the fight for substantive reforms.
Clearly, a lot has changed since the 1980s. But these two frameworks — being the left wing of the “possible” or breaking with what is supposed to be “possible” under capitalism — are helpful to think about the DSA today.
At its (re)birth in 2016, tens of thousands of downwardly mobile young people joined the DSA. This was a product of the 2008 economic crisis, the Sanders campaign, and the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party under Hillary Clinton — and of the capitalist system more broadly.
The spirit was infectious: people awoke to political life and wanted profound change, even “the impossible.” This expressed itself primarily ideologically, not in radical mass actions. In those early years, there were real and deep questions within the DSA. What is the path to socialism? What is the role of elections? What could a revolution look like?
In the past four years, the DSA has answered those questions — in the spirit of Michael Harrington. The DSA has become an appendage of the Democratic Party, focusing almost exclusively on canvassing and phone banking for Democrats. After the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the January 6 debacle, the DSA is less combative than before, and despite having more than 80,000 members, it has failed to play a role in class struggle. Instead, the DSA has come to see class struggle as a way to strengthen electoral work in the Democratic Party.
With a National Convention taking place August 1–8, we should explore the role that the DSA is playing in the current political situation. Some semblance of capitalist normality is back: there are fewer protests and less outrage, while police murders continue and kids remain in cages. Instead of fanning the flames of struggle, the DSA is, in some ways, helping to put out the fire.
But 2020 has shown us that “impossible” scenarios — like mass uprisings in the heart of U.S. capitalism — are not just possible but probable as the capitalist system enters into crisis. The only realistic solution to the crisis is to demand what all reformists claim is impossible: going from revolt to revolution and fighting for a definitive break with capitalism to build a socialist future. This article will attempt to draw lessons from the problems in the DSA to prepare for the battles to come.
The DSA and Capitalist Crisis
The DSA has been around since the 1980s as a small reformist grouping. When Sanders began his presidential bid, the DSA had 5,000 members. By the start of 2019, membership exceeded 50,000, and now it is close to 100,000. This growth is a result of the crisis of capitalism.
Antonio Gramsci used the term organic crisis to describe a time of economic, political, and social turmoil that emerges from the failure of a capitalist project. This is precisely the situation in the United States after the 2008 crash threw the economy and neoliberalism itself into crisis. U.S. imperialist hegemony is on the decline, and China is emerging as a competitor on the world stage. In this situation, as Gramsci says, the “old is dying, and the new cannot be born.” The capitalists and their political parties cannot offer a clear way out of the crisis, and people begin to break away from the leaders and ideologies that they used to follow without question.
Left- and right-wing populism have emerged, with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. With Hillary Clinton’s loss, the Democratic Party stood discredited. A new generation emerged that is skeptical of capitalism and drawn to a vague notion of socialism. The emergence of the DSA is part of these elements of organic crisis. The huge support for socialism among the youth would have seemed impossible even a few years back.
The central task of the Biden administration is rebuild faith in capitalist institutions and restore U.S. imperialist hegemony. Biden’s program is to promote an “America First” capitalism as a way to compete with China, and spending packages are intended to relieve the worst of the economic crisis. Unlike what we hear from Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or even Jacobin magazine, the task for socialists isn’t to coach Biden and the Democrats on how to rebuild capitalist institutions. And it isn’t to divorce minor reforms from their blatantly stated imperialist project. This is a strategy for the “left wing of the possible” — it’s a chauvinist strategy that looks to win reforms for some U.S. workers at the expense of the international working class. And the climate and economic crisis, the rot of capitalism, is increasingly clear, and “the possible” within capitalism is so clearly insufficient.
Socialists should be doing everything possible to deepen the crisis of capitalism, of the bipartisan regime, and of U.S. imperialism; when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” socialists should be aiming to kill the old and provide a political alternative to those radicalized by the crisis. The DSA is doing quite the opposite. It is shepherding this new generation back into the Democratic Party — not to bury the Democratic Party and U.S. capitalist “democracy” but to rejuvenate it with progressive and dynamic political figures.
And the Democratic Party is not just any party. Despite sometimes taking up the language of leftist movements, the Democratic Party is an imperialist and capitalist party. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats have tentacles in working-class institutions like unions as well as in social movements. As the DSA becomes an appendage of the Democratic Party, it is therefore also becoming an appendage of the capitalist state, as are union bureaucracies and nonprofit bureaucracies, working to confine and constrain radicalism by channeling it into a bourgeois party. And while DSA folks do all kinds of theoretical gymnastics to claim that the way toward an independent working-class party is through the Democrats. But this ignores all the previous attempts to form a working-class party, which have been squashed by the Democratic Party and their bureaucratic allies in nonprofits and union leadership.
A DSA That Demanded the Impossible?
“When did you realize you were a socialist?” It’s 2017 and hundreds of new socialists crowded auditoriums and meeting halls to talk about when they realized the system we live in is wrong and that we need to fight to change it. At bars till late hours of the night, we discussed reform or revolution. In reading groups, we pored over Marx’s Capital. Any DSA member would tell you that this wasn’t Harrington’s group anymore. Many people who newly self-identified as revolutionaries found a home in the DSA, and some even argued that the DSA could be built into a revolutionary political party.
While plenty of DSA members identified as revolutionaries, it was difficult to find anyone who wanted to break with the Democratic Party. They disregarded the potential to build class consciousness with independent electoral campaigns and instead sought a shortcut to elected office through alliances with our class enemies. Here, the remnants of Harrington hung in the air, as people said: “The U.S. electoral system is so repressive that we have no choice but to run as Democrats.”
But even this was being questioned. At the 2017 DSA convention, two resolutions were put forward to distance the DSA from the Democratic Party, stating that
we should recognize that the Democratic Party is not our party, even if we sometimes run or support candidates within it. … We should refrain from endorsing or supporting Democrats engaged in political struggles within the Democratic Party. Taking part in such internal Democratic Party fights only disorients our members, leading them to believe that the Democratic Party can be a vehicle for the aspirations of working people. We believe it is important to emphasize this point because the Democratic Party has historically been the biggest challenge to progressive movements.
While the motion failed, it received two-fifths support, indicating that some in the DSA were skeptical toward the Democratic Party and had an initial understanding that the Democratic Party had always acted as the graveyard of social movements.
Jacobin and the Revival of Kautsky
Of course, not everyone in the DSA was new to socialism. Jacobin magazine and those who organized around it were the most theoretically and politically experienced DSA members — folks who had a theoretical and political vision. While most DSA members wouldn’t identify Jacobin as their political leadership, as the most organized members with a clear political vision, they played a hegemonic role, setting the agenda and leading the DSA to focus on the Sanders campaign and other electoral work.
Jacobin claimed the legacy of Karl Kautsky to justify an orientation of building the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Kautsky represented the center of the German Social Democracy (SPD), the biggest socialist organization before World War I. Kautsky tried to balance between the revolutionary Left of Rosa Luxemburg and the SPD bureaucracy that ended up murdering her. Luxemburg described Kautsky’s strategy as “Nothing-but-Parlamentarism,” and Lenin famously wrote State and Revolution as a polemic against Kautsky’s reformist approach to the capitalist state. Yet Jacobin and the DSA are far to the right of Kautsky, who didn’t support capitalist politicians.
The Jacobin wing of the DSA seeks to divorce Kautsky from the SPD nationalist betrayal when the biggest socialist party in the world voted to support its own bourgeoisie in 1914. Luxemburg was one of the clearest voices fighting the SPD’s growing reformism even before this betrayal.
In 1911 the SPD refused to organize a conference about European imperialism in Morocco, claiming that the party needed to focus on domestic issues. This is precisely what Jacobin and the neo-Kautskyist wing of the DSA believe. Eric Blanc even claimed that “some leftists believe that we should not support Bernie because he is running on the Democratic Party ballot line and/or because of his political limitations (e.g. on foreign policy issues or his definition of socialism). This criticism is hardly a serious reason to withhold endorsement.” The message is to focus on domestic issues, to ignore imperialism in order to secure reforms for the U.S. working class. Luxemburg offered a compelling response:
They say that we should restrict our agitation exclusively to matters of domestic policy, to questions of taxation and social legislation. But financial policy … and the stagnation of social reform are organically bound up with militarism, naval policy, colonial policy, and with personal rule and its foreign policy. Any artificial separation of these spheres can only present an incomplete and one-sided picture of the state of our public affairs.
In other words, for Luxemburg, the struggle against capitalism required an understanding of the connection between foreign and domestic policy, and of the global economy as a whole. This lesson applies directly to the DSA, which overlooks imperialism to justify its support for Democrats. Foreign and domestic policy are one; to fight capitalism, one cannot divorce “domestic” reforms from foreign imperialism. But this is precisely the problem that has brought the DSA into the fold of the Democratic Party, especially now with Joe Biden in office, and Democrats running U.S. imperialism.
Yet this was not an overnight phenomena. This question of imperialism brought the DSA into regular conflict with its Kautskyist wing throughout the Trump era.
The Contradictions of the New DSA
The “new” DSA continued to grow throughout the Trump presidency. While elections were part of what the DSA did, in 2017 and 2018, many DSA members would angrily inform you that the DSA did more than elections: there was a lot of local and national activism as well. When Trump was organizing a coup in Venezuela, the national DSA encouraged a national day of action and called on DSA members to protect the Venezuelan embassy. Chapters organized protests to abolish ICE and, in some instances, to agitate for open borders.
At times, the DSA made statements against the elected officials they had endorsed. The New York City DSA leadership criticized Ocasio-Cortez for her endorsement of Cuomo saying, “We reject the illusion that the Democratic Party is, or will become, an institution serving the interests of the U.S. working class.” In New York City, a fight about the endorsement of Cynthia Nixon took place, ending with an endorsement. But a letter signed by well over 100 NYC DSA member included strong statements, like “We believe that our fight for socialism lives or dies by the working class fighting for themselves, not by who sits in the governor’s mansion.”
Sectors of the DSA saw activism, not electoral politics, as their primary project. Yet many activists were willing to look the other way while the DSA built an electoral machine, hoping that the activist wing could peacefully coexist with the Democratic Party.
In reality, this meant making excuses for every contradiction as it emerged. DSA members ignored that Sanders is an imperialist politician who opposes open borders, hoping to at least win Medicare for All. This is the misery of “the possible,” which didn’t even deliver Medicare for All. The Sanders campaign was supposed to be a shortcut to the masses — but it was actually an entirely different road, and this road does not lead to socialism. Rather, the DSA’s electoral work was leading DSA activists to become auxiliaries for the Democratic Party and thus to the U.S. capitalist state.
The DSA was a tremendous help to the Democrats in a moment of massive crisis after the failure of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. People were seeking alternatives, but the DSA led them right back to the Democratic Party with young, progressive “socialists,” from AOC to Rashida Tlaib. This is exactly the opposite of what socialists should do when capitalist parties are in crisis. As Tre Kwon and Jimena Vergara argue, “When it appears the Democratic Party is going up in flames, revolutionaries and socialists should give their all to make the fire burn hotter. They should be pointing towards the absolute need for working-class organizations and a political party independent of capitalists, on the path towards socialist revolution and a classless society.”
Becoming a Democratic Electoral Machine
As the Sanders campaign for 2020 drew closer, there were questions within the DSA about whether to endorse him. The Afrosocialist Caucus wrote a statement asking the DSA to withhold an endorsement due to Sanders’s stance on reparations. In New York City, the Socialist Feminist Group held a panel discussion about the endorsement that I was on. When it came down to vote, there was essentially a tie between endorsing and not endorsing Sanders.
With the Sanders campaign, a slow drift toward the Democratic Party soon became a massive wave. Skepticism toward Bernie didn’t hold against Bernie mania, organized by Justice Democrats and high-profile supporters from Michael Moore to Killer Mike. Without a principled opposition to capitalist parties, the DSA committed itself to a notion of a kinder, reformed capitalism under a Sanders presidency. Comrades who were once critical of electoral work were now canvassing for Bernie every weekend.
And this time was different from 2016. Four years earlier, some people hoped that Bernie would break from the Democrats and launch an independent campaign. In 2020, even ardent Bernie supporters went in with open eyes — aware that Bernie wouldn’t break to form a new party, aware that the game was rigged in Joe Biden’s favor, aware that Bernie would endorse whoever the Democratic Party nominee was, aware that Bernie wasn’t a socialist, and aware that Bernie was an imperialist.
The DSA campaigned for Bernie 2020 without opposition. It mobilized its forces and created an army of phone bankers and canvassers who registered people as Democrats. It justified this theoretically, arguing that campaigning for Sanders was building socialism. Kate Doyle Griffiths highlights the folly of this:
The Democratic Party is oriented toward elections and not toward building labor and social movements, toward politics defined and constrained by a ruling class agenda, not toward building working class power. This is coldly material in the sense that money raised for say, the Bernie Sanders campaign, can’t then be reoriented toward extra-electoral efforts, and neither can internal party apparatus aimed at electing him or other left-wing Democrats — Our Revolution can’t legally be repurposed toward movement building and neither can the tens of millions that working class people donated to Bernie’s campaigns.
The DSA wasn’t building socialism — it built an electoral machine for the Democratic Party.
And as the coronavirus pandemic started, with fear, anger, and small labor walkouts, the DSA was left with an electoral machine in the midst of a Biden election campaign. Since the election, Sanders has become entirely integrated into the new administration as the head of the Senate Budget Committee. In seeking an illusory “kinder capitalism,” he has become a tool of the Biden administration, giving up on the very reforms that justified the DSA throwing all of its weight behind his campaign in the first place. And the “movement” the Sanders campaign and the DSA promised to build was toothless to fight for these reforms in the face of class struggle.
As Democrats were repressing BLM protesters and botching the response to the pandemic, the DSA did not get any closer to a “break” with the Democratic Party. In fact, the DSA is less likely to break now than it was four years ago. As Andy Sernatinger and Emma Wilde Botta explain,
Since 2016, the electoral debate in DSA has been about how to build an independent party. It was taken as a given that the Democratic Party is an obstacle, though the Bernie Sanders campaign opened up the possibility of tactical engagement with the Democratic Party as the socialist movement fought to move past it. Starting in 2020, the terms of the debate have shifted to whether to break from the Democratic Party at all.
Working within the Democratic Party takes on a particularly insidious character under the Biden administration. It means giving left cover to the party that holds the executive and legislative branches. It means fostering illusions that the party controlling the most powerful capitalist state in the world can be a vehicle for change. Meanwhile, the DSA’s army of canvassers is just not built for class struggle.
Failing the Tests of Class Struggle
2020 was in many ways the year of the “impossible,” from the Black Lives Matter movement to the coronavirus. It offered an abundance of opportunities to build working-class power and a fighting socialist organization. It was a test for the DSA’s claim that “we can do activism and elections.” Would the biggest socialist organization in decades in the United States, with elected representatives at city, state, and national levels, show that it could be as useful for supporting class struggle as for electing Democrats?
The answer is clear: the DSA failed every test of class struggle.
The Black Lives Matter uprising was the largest movement in recent U.S. history. It made the United States the most important hub of class struggle in the world during the pandemic. For a moment, the burning of a Minneapolis police station was more popular than either Trump or Biden; transportation workers refused to collaborate with the police; and millions of working-class people began to understand the role of the police as a pillar of structural racism. Largely organized spontaneously and without clear leadership, the movement forced the jailing of Derek Chauvin and put demands to defund or abolish the police on the political map.
The task of socialists is to take the revolts that inevitably break out in this rotten capitalist system and push to turn them into revolutions. In the biggest revolt of our lifetimes, what did the DSA do? None. It was canvassing for Democrats — the same party tear-gassing protesters in the streets. The DSA’s message to people out on the streets was that real change comes from voting and that protests are nothing more than pressure campaigns, not ways of strengthening the muscles and the anti-racist sensibilities of a working class deeply divided by structural racism. The DSA posed nothing nearing a perspective to overcome the U.S. capitalist state.
Individual DSA members were in the streets every day, many of them getting arrested. This isn’t about those individuals. This is about an organization with 80,000 or more members, with chapters in every state of the country, which failed to play any progressive role in the movement. Yes, local chapters, particularly local Afrosocialist groups, organized protests. But this was a far cry from what the biggest socialist organization in the country should have been able to do.
The DSA didn’t use its elected positions or its positions in the labor movement to strengthen the BLM movement. There was no national push to radicalize the movement or to connect the struggle against racism and police violence to the struggle against capitalism.
While the DSA did call to “Defund the police,” the strategy to win this demand was to canvass for local Democrats. It was not to push people to understand, as the 2017 statement at the DSA convention read, that “the Democratic Party has historically been the biggest challenge to progressive movements.” It was to shepherd a radical struggle in the streets into canvassing. On July 16, only three days before the biggest mobilizations of the BLM movement, the NYC DSA sent an email claiming, “If you do one thing this week, it should be this.” Not lead the fight against the police, but rather “get out the vote” for progressive Democrats.
DSA leaders saw the protests as little more than pressure campaigns — not a way to build the strength, organization, and class consciousness of the working class. Take the email the DSA sent about the movement to defund the NYPD on July 12:
Not a single mention of protest, mobilization, or radicalization. Not a single mention that Minneapolis’s promise to “abolish the police” was a cynical lie. To the DSA, electoral work was not meant to strengthen the movement. The movement was meant to strengthen the Democratic Party’s electoral work.
The DSA took less initiative than the longshore workers who organized a port strike, shutting down all the ports on the West Coast. They were less radical than the bus drivers who refused to transport prisoners for police. The DSA played absolutely no role in connecting the BLM movement to the labor movement: they launched no national campaign to get cops out of our unions or to make the “Strike for Black Lives” a real strike rather than a symbolic action. It played no role in making demands on and confronting the union bureaucracy that insisted on symbolic statements, no labor action and prepared the way to spend funds, money and time on electing Joe Biden.
While Eric Blanc claims to want to build a labor party, the DSA didn’t play any role in activating the labor movement around the Black Lives Matter and fighting for anti-racist activism within the working class — the only real way to unite the U.S. working class. While millions of workers were on the streets fighting racism, Jacobin held a reductionist approach of prioritizing “class-wide demands.”
With millions of people in the street, the DSA played no role in organizing forums, meetings, or discussions to organize the movement on a national scale. This meant leaving that political space for organizations that were not socialist and were entirely tied to the Democratic Party. As Haley Pessin explains, “In lieu of organizing activists to better agitate for their demands after the summer uprising, [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation] primarily directed its energy toward mobilizing voters to defeat Trump” and getting out the vote for Joe Biden. Thus, the enormous energy of the BLM movement was funneled into a “get out the vote” effort for Joe Biden. Now, of course, Biden is leading the charge against the demands of the BLM movement, moving to increase police budgets around the country.
This is not the only test of class struggle that the DSA failed in recent years. Though many DSA members are also union members active in their workplaces, the national organization’s orientation toward the labor movement is nothing more than mobilizing to pressure Congress to pass the PRO Act. Rather than building workers’ power — by launching an all-out national campaign in support of the unionization effort at Amazon in Bessemer, for example — the DSA funneled more energy into the Democratic Party and more faith into an administration whose purpose is to dispel the discontent of the last two decades.
Reform, Revolution, and the Misery of “the Possible”
In past conventions, there were lively debates about the direction of the DSA. How should the DSA engage with the working class? What is the path to a mass socialist party in the United States?
This upcoming convention shows a largely passive rank and file, entirely at peace with the focus on campaigning for the Democratic Party. This is evident in the fact that there are far fewer resolutions to be voted on this year than in past conventions: in 2019, there were 15 resolutions per 10,000 members. In 2021, there are four. The DSA is now again aligned with Harrington’s vision of being “the left wing of the possible” — even as the objective situation shows us that it is not possible to solve humanity’s most urgent problems under capitalism.
Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. But if we begin to chase after what is “possible” according to the principles of opportunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesmanlike barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process.
The DSA is a case in point. Eric Blanc argues that the DSA is “winning” because it endorsed many candidates who now hold elected office and because it is growing in numbers. But in the end, by tying itself to the Democrats, the DSA has made itself irrelevant in the only way that matters for socialists: in class struggle. Their “wins” are superficial — they are actually long term losses for a generation of young people who were moving away from a bourgeois party.
But 2020 showed that the “impossible” can happen. The year saw uprisings, global pandemics, and new neofascist movements unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The only realistic response to capitalist destruction and misery is to overthrow this system. The 20th century was full of revolutions, and there is no sign that the 21st century will be different. But the role of socialists is decisive. Socialists need to treat every struggle as a school of war, as Lenin put it, to prepare the working class for revolution. And for this, we need an organization that is a real weapon against the racist, imperialist capitalist system and the parties that hold it up.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) strongly questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci yet again this week following their tense exchange Tuesday over the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul spoke to WBKO this week following the viral clash, which effectively saw Fauci denying his own definition of gain-of-function research.
Dr. Fauci simply refuses to publicly acknowledge is role in funding ‘gain of function’ research with US Federal funds through third party front groups that funded biological weapons research in Wuhan, China.
“I think he has self-interest and not being attached to this research, because more and more of the evidence is pointing towards the virus having come out of that lab, if it did, you can see how moral responsibility or culpability attaches to Dr. Fauci because he had the poor judgment to fund this lab,” Paul told the outlet, adding, “[It was a] mistake to fund the lab in the Wuhan period because I don’t think the Chinese government or military has been very forthcoming”:
He continued:
There are reports that the Chinese military has actually been working on weaponizing viruses. So I think it was a poor judgment. Even as much as a month ago, Dr. Fauci was asking the Judiciary Committee whether he still trusted the scientists and the Chinese scientists. And he says, Oh, of course, he was also asked in 2012, if a bug should escape, if a virus should infect a researcher, escape and become a pandemic, what then? And he said, Well, the science and the research is worth it, even if a pandemic should occur.
One might note that the US has five different biological warfare laboratories. Major countries would be expected to study the weaponization of pathogens. China is hardly unique in this study of war by another means.
“So this to me shows incredibly poor judgment, not wisdom, poor judgment. And really, there’s a possibility we are suffering from his poor judgment,” the Kentucky senator said:
“This research still goes on in the United States, we should want to know, you know if the NIH is still funding this type of research in North Carolina? And in Galveston, do we want this to occur? Are we worried that we could have the worst virus leak out of the lab?” he asked, identifying these as “important questions” and noting Fauci’s decision to attack him rather than answer them.
“So these are important questions, and instead of really answering any of the direct questions I had, it became sort of an ad hominem attack with him simply calling names,” Paul added.
During Tuesday’s clash, Paul grilled Fauci about the NIH funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, citing the Wuhan Virology paper entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses,” which detailed the research. Nonetheless, Fauci became visibly irritated and denied lying to Congress about the NIH funding such research.
“You take an animal virus and you increase this transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain of function?” Paul asked Fauci.
“Yeah, that is correct, and Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about,” he said as Paul interjected.
“This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increase their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function?” Paul asked.
“It is not,” Fauci said.
“It’s a dance,” Paul said, “and you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.”
Paul has since said he will ask the Department of Justice for a criminal referral against Fauci.
“You know, we have laws in Section 1001 of the Criminal Code that says you can’t lie to Congress. So I think there needs to be repercussions,” Paul told WBKO.
“I gave him every chance to retract or modify a statement, it would have been very easy for him to say, well, there is some debate over whether or not this was gain of function. But I tend to decide with those in my administration and said it wasn’t,” he continued.
“He just acted as if there’s no way it can be gain of function, and then call me a liar,” Paul added. “So he really didn’t respond to the specific arguments or whether it’s gain of function or not.”
WORLD—After a century of hard-fought battles for equal rights, the feminist movement has finally achieved its ultimate goal of obliterating women’s sports, relabeling mothers “birthing persons,” and getting women drafted into the military.
“We are so proud of what we have achieved,” said Mandy Chandrilla, a biological man who now identifies as a female feminist. “Women were so oppressed, and we realized there was really no way around it, so we just rendered the term ‘woman’ meaningless and effectively eliminated women as a meaningful category of human altogether. Hooray for feminism!”
Chandrilla then shotgunned a beer and crushed the can on her head in celebration.
According to experts, women can now enjoy soul-crushing corporate jobs, lose in sports to transgender heroes, get shot in battle, grow a mustache, and act as gender-neutral spawning bags for biologically male partners.
Women all over the world are thanking feminism for its tremendous achievement in eliminating inequality by turning them into men. “This is just what we wanted,” said all the women everywhere. “Great job everyone!”
Muhammad Ali, heavyweight champ of the world, and by his own words, “the greatest,” died on June 3 after a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s disease. Despite the vast distance between his political outlook and ours, we hail Ali, arguably the most prominent sports figure of the 20th century, for his courageous refusal to be drafted into the anti-Communist U.S. war in Vietnam and for his struggle against racist oppression of black people at home. After the government changed his draft status in 1966 to make him eligible for induction, Ali famously responded to reporters demanding to know if he would serve if called up:
“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong…. My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor, hungry people in the mud for big, powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me n‑‑‑‑r, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what?… How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
This searing indictment of racist U.S. imperialism resonated not only with the growing movement against the Vietnam War but spoke for a generation of black youth.
For refusing induction, Ali was convicted of draft evasion in June 1967 and sentenced to five years in prison. Though he remained free pending appeal, the racist boxing authorities immediately revoked Ali’s heavyweight title and barred him from boxing in the U.S. Stripped of his passport, Ali was unable to earn his livelihood anywhere else.
Ali’s bold opposition to the war had reverberations among black GIs walking point through the rice paddies of Vietnam. A big reason the U.S. Army lost on the battlefield was that the troops increasingly saw no reason to fight and die, and that was doubly true for black soldiers.
With antiwar sentiment growing and a wing of the American bourgeoisie wanting to cut its losses and get out of Vietnam, Ali’s boxing license was reinstated in 1970. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction by an 8-0 vote. (Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s first black justice, had led the initial prosecution against Ali and recused himself.) After a three-year hiatus, Ali was finally allowed to box again. In 1974, bereft of his trademark speed of hand and foot, an aging Ali upset the heavily favored George Foreman to recapture the title in the “Rumble in the Jungle.” It is a testament to the brutality of this blood sport, whose U.S. origins were in the slaveholding South, that the onset of Ali’s Parkinson’s disease came soon after he retired in 1981—most likely a consequence of the punishment he took in the ring.
The legacy of Ali’s struggles inspired young activists in the 1960s and beyond. As one of our comrades recalled:
“I grew up in a mostly white working-class neighborhood, and I spent a lot of time with my cousins, who lived in a ghetto across the bay. Muhammad Ali was our hero. And he, first among others, was beautiful, black and proud.
“Ali played a big role molding consciousness of myself as a black man different than had been the case for those who came before me. The civil rights struggles and the Black Power movement had changed racist American society—not in any fundamental way—but I did not have the same demeanor as my father’s generation, nor was I expected to by my black friends and family. I did not have to keep my head down, be deferential or say, ‘yessuh.’ Thanks to Ali and others like him, I could be black and proud and not beaten down.”
Ali Feted by Bloodstained Imperialists
It is a slap in the face to those inspired by Ali’s courageous struggles to see his death used as campaign fodder for the same Democratic Party that—under Lyndon Johnson as president—prosecuted him in order to pursue the dirty war in Vietnam. Speaking at Ali’s memorial was Bill Clinton who, as president, carried out imperialist slaughter in Serbia and Somalia and engineered the starvation blockade of Iraq, which caused the deaths of over a million people through disease and malnutrition. President Obama issued a statement saying Ali made him believe that a “mixed kid with a funny name” could become president of the United States. In that capacity Obama rains down death —predominantly on Muslims—the world over and persecutes truth-tellers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for exposing U.S. imperialism’s contemporary war crimes.
Little noted in the mainstream press coverage of Ali’s funeral is the tribute made by Malcolm X’s daughter, Attallah Shabazz—perhaps too much a reminder of the true Ali that the oppressed around the world revered and the racist American bourgeoisie despised. Still known as Cassius Clay, Ali became a marked man in 1964 when, after defeating Sonny Liston to capture the heavyweight title, he appeared with Malcolm X at his side and announced that he was joining the black separatist Nation of Islam (NOI). Shortly after, he was given the name Muhammad Ali by NOI leader Elijah Muhammad.
Ali captured the title at the height of struggles against Jim Crow segregation and a growing polarization within the civil rights movement. His association with Malcolm X was outside the bounds of what was deemed acceptable for a black sports figure in racist America. As young civil rights activists were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the pacifist liberalism and ties to the white ruling class of Martin Luther King, they found in Malcolm X the voice of the angry black ghetto. He was black America’s truth-teller, intransigently opposed to the racist Democratic Party as well as the “white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’,” as he called MLK, Bayard Rustin and others.
The NOI, a conservative religious cult, was opposed in principle to struggle against racial oppression. Malcolm fell into disfavor with Elijah Muhammad with his publicly known aspiration that the NOI abandon this abstention. When, in 1963, he refused to express sorrow after JFK’s assassination, commenting acerbically that it was a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” Malcolm was suspended by the NOI. Malcolm split from the NOI in 1964 and Ali broke relations with him. On 21 February 1965 Malcolm was assassinated in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. “Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life,” wrote Ali in his 2004 autobiography. “I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance.”
Thanks in large part to sportscaster Howard Cosell, Ali was a regular feature on weekend sports shows, giving him a platform to condemn racist oppression and confront the torrent of abuse by the press who, for years, refused to even call him by his chosen name. Cosell continued to stand by Ali in the lean years. Through 1970, the New York Times had an explicit editorial policy of calling him Clay. Robert Lipsyte, a reporter for the Times, recalled apologizing about the insulting policy, to which Ali replied, “Don’t worry, you’re just a little brother of the white power structure.” In the absence of any credible white contenders, the boxing establishment threw at Ali a series of black boxers as their “great hope” to recapture Ali’s crown for the Christian red white and blue. Ali’s most famous response to those fighters who addressed him as “Clay” was when he stood over a prostrate Ernie Terrell during their February 1967 bout demanding, “What’s my name? What’s my name?”
Abandoned by the NOI after he was stripped of his title, in 1968 Ali spoke at 200 campuses throughout the nation in defense of black rights and in opposition to the Vietnam War. This became his prime source of income. Protests against Ali’s conviction took place around the world. When black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the medal podium in the 1968 Olympics, one of their demands was to restore Muhammad Ali’s title. During his long imprisonment on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela regarded Ali as a symbol of hope and courage. For his part, Ali was active in the defense of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a middleweight boxer who was framed on murder charges because of his advocacy of black self-defense. Ali also supported Lauren Mozee and Ray Palmiero, a racially integrated couple victimized for defending their picket line during the 1983 phone workers strike.
Ali truly was the greatest and his greatness had much to do with the fights that he waged outside of the ring. He should be remembered when he was at the peak of his power, when workers and oppressed people throughout the world hailed him for his opposition to racist U.S. imperialism’s bloody war in Vietnam.
Chris Hedges: Kucinich Memoir Is a Moving Account of a Battle Against Corporate Power
Audio of Article – Mp3
When the “boy mayor” of Cleveland took a stand against privatization of public power, the region’s elites deployed every weapon they had, including attempted assassination.
On Aug. 13, 1978, Dennis Kucinich defeated a recall vote. Celebrating at the Bond Court Hotel that night, left to right: Sandy Kucinich, the mayor’s wife; Frank Kucinich, his father; the mayor, Bill Casstevens of the United Auto Workers; Joe Tegreene, mayoral aide. (Tim Culek, reposted from clevelandmemory.org)
“The Division of Light and Power,” by Dennis Kucinich, like Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,”is a gripping, moving and lucidly written account of the hidden mechanisms of corporate power in the United States and what happens when these corporate interests are challenged. It is essential reading, especially as we face an intensified corporate assault, done in the name of fiscal necessity following the financial wounds imposed by the pandemic, to seize total control of all public assets.
Kucinich warns that this assault is more than the seizure of public assets for private gain. These corporate forces, which function as a shadow government in Washington and cities across the country, threaten to achieve a monolithic lock on all forms of power and extinguish our anemic democracy. As Kucinich discovered throughout his career, these corporate forces will deploy every weapon in their arsenal against those brave or foolish enough to defy them. “The Division of Light and Power” is destined to become a classic text for those who seek to understand the corporate coup d’etat that took place in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The new book by Dennis Kucinich recounts his battle with corporate elites to protect a public utility.
“People who say, ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’ don’t know where it is,” writes Kucinich, who battled Cleveland’s big banks and corporations as a member of the city council and as mayor. “You have to find it before you can fight it. City Hall was not only the Doric gray stone temple on East Sixth and Lakeside Avenue in downtown Cleveland. City Hall was the boardroom of Cleveland’s banks, its investor-owned utilities, its real estate combines — and the mob. In Cleveland, City Hall was in the shadows, a giant specter invisible to the people of the city. I brought the invisible City Hall to light, with great consequences for my city, my family, my friends and myself. I was the Mayor and I fought City Hall.”
Kucinich, a diminutive 23-year-old, who was often mistaken for the paperboy when he campaigned door-to door, had just been elected at the opening of the book to be the new councilman from Ward Seven.
Kucinich grew up in Ward Seven in extreme poverty. His family struggled to pay rent and utility bills. They endured evictions and at one point were forced to sleep in their car. Ward Seven was, he recalls, where “I went to high school, where church spires and pipe-organ smokestacks reached to a smudged sky. A neighborhood populated by a steely league of nations who spoke Polish, Greek, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic, Spanish and occasionally English. A neighborhood of narrow streets lined with old men wearing white shirts and suspenders, and old ladies wearing babushkas and carrying shopping bags that dangled just above their socks, paraded up and down the small commercial district on Professor Avenue.”
Because he would not abandon his neighborhood, his people, he was on a collision course with the monied elites who ran the city.
The seasoned politicians in city hall assumed that Kucinich, like themselves, would sell out the voters for his own political and economic advancement. No one thought he was serious about defending those who elected him. They welcomed him to the cynical club of our bought-and-paid-for political class and explained the inner workings of our system of legalized bribery. He was young. He was talented. He would go far, the political hacks assured him, if he did the bidding of the real centers of power.
“These pros knew that every one of the thirty-three Cleveland City Council seats were won with campaign contributions from banks who held city deposits, money from phone, gas, and electric interests, or downtown real estate developers who never lost an election because they always bet on both sides,” Kucinich writes.
“One middle-aged Councilman, an attorney from a neighboring ward, let’s call him Richard, befriended me, confiding, ‘Dennis, there are a lot of legitimate ways you can make money in politics. Nothing dishonest, mind you. Opportunities come to people who hold office,’ he said.
‘Opportunities?’
‘You know, you do favors for people. They do favors for you.’
‘Favors?’ I didn’t understand.
‘Attorneys elected to Council get law business thrown their way. Insurance salesmen get policies. Travel agents book trips for people they help. Real estate guys get commissions from property deals called to their attention,’ he shared. ‘It’s all legit.’ “
A “rotund, cigar-chomping and irascible” councilman named James H. Bell told Kucinich that all he wanted was a little ice cream. “He opened his mouth, lolled his tongue, and with child-like abandon licked an imaginary cone, his diamond pinky ring sparkling in the bar lights,” Kucinich writes. “‘Just a little ice cream. I’m not a pig,’ he repeated. ‘I want what’s mine. Some ice cream.’”
The Rules Were Clear
The rules were clear from the start. Serve the interests of big business and the city’s rich — by granting tax abatements, 99-year franchises, monopolies, and bond financing for big, often unnecessary multi-million dollar projects — and thrive. Defy those interests and face political oblivion.
“City Hall reeked of mendacity, of checking one’s spiritual beliefs at the door like a beat-up coat and entering into circumstances where unseen forces were dictating decisions, demanding consensus, and meting out punishment to those who denied the deal-making, was, after all, politics, the dominion of amorality, where personal advancement relied on pragmatism operating in shuttered light, without the imposition of conscience,” Kucinich writes.
Downtown Cleveland, 2019. (Erik Drost, C BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Once it was clear the elites could not buy him off, they set out to destroy his political career, slander and intimidate him, and, after he was elected mayor in 1977, wreck the city’s finances and finally attempt to assassinate him. The ruling elites play for keeps. And this is why a politician like Kucinich, with integrity and undaunted courage, is an anathema in the deeply corrupted world of American electoral politics where nearly all who flourish, in city, state and national politics, do so because they have a price.
The battle royale, which would see the business elites force the city into default to remove Kucinich from the mayor’s office, centered around the schemes by CEI (Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co.) to crush the public utility, Municipal Light, or Muny Light, founded in 1907 by then-Cleveland Mayor Tom L. Johnson. CEI sought a monopoly so it could jack up rates for the city’s residents. CEI orchestrated blackouts by blocking Muny’s access to back-up power and exhausting the patience of Muny customers to force them into the hands of CEI. The fight to save Muny was, Kucinich knew, more than a fight to protect a public utility.
Johnson said when the founded the public utility, “I believe in public ownership of all public service monopolies for the same reason that I believe in the municipal ownership of waterworks, of parks, of schools. I believe in the municipal ownership of these monopolies because if you do not own them, they will in time own you. They will corrupt your politics, rule your institutions and finally destroy your liberties.”
Statue of former Cleveland Mayor Tom Johnson holding Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty.” (Whomyl, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Kucinich, like Johnson, realized the danger the privatization of public assets present and, unlike most politicians, was willing to sacrifice his political career to protect those, like his family, who struggled under the onslaught of predatory corporations and the rich.
But it was not only Kucinich the business elites targeted. They destroyed the careers of the handful of reporters who attempted to investigate and make public the dirty machinations of CEI and the ruling elites.
Kucinich watched as one honest reporter after another was silenced by his or her employer, beholden to the money and power of advertisers. Kucinich discovered that the press was not only docile, but complicit. He realized he would have few allies in the public arena. When the war against him began in earnest, the press dutifully amplified the lies spun out by the public relations departments of the corporations against Kucinich. The city was saturated with constant news and editorials touting the benefits of privatizing the private utility, although customers with Muny Light had one of the lowest electric rates in the country.
When Steve Clark, the top radio news commentator in Cleveland on WERE radio, for example, decried CEI’s spending over $7 million for promotions and advertising, or about $11 per customer, and announced that CEI had realized a net profit of $40 million, or more than 16 cents for each dollar of operating revenue, at the same time it was demanding a 20 percent rate increase from the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, which would generate an additional $54 million annually for the company, his career was finished. The radio station received at least $70,000 a year from CEI in advertising. The owners did not intend to lose it. Clark was fired.
“News reporters covering the Council meeting were a sketch of supine immobility, a confession of the futility of expression without independence,” Kucinich writes. “If CEI worked to influence editors, the editors in turn would place limitations on their reporters. I could not expect any help from the ‘free press.’”
“I dispensed a long time ago with the idea that my political advancement depended upon currying the favor of newspapers, or by agreeing with their editorial or news policy, which wasn’t really theirs, but that of interest groups they were fronting,” he adds.
The Muny Light Wars
The Muny Light wars exposed the lengths corporate power and the mob bosses, who Kucinich also fought, will go to destroy anyone who threatens their unchecked pillaging. Cleveland was known at the time as “America’s Bombing Capital” because of a war by crime syndicates for control of Cleveland rackets. The city endured 30 mob-related bombings and periodic assassinations. There were also several attempts to kill Kucinich that were narrowly thwarted by luck or timely police work. Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed at San Francisco City Hall while Kucinich was in office. Chapter 28 in his book is titled “City Hell.”
Cleveland City Hall. (cmh2315fl, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The business elites orchestrated a recall election, which he narrowly survived, threw the city into default, orchestrated electrical blackouts, especially during the Christmas holiday, and used a compliant press to blame Kucinich for the chaos they spawned. When Kucinich threw out the first pitch at the Cleveland Indian’s game, forced at that point to wear a bulletproof vest and travel with police snipers, the crowd booed and yelled “kill the bum.” Kucinich was defeated for reelection in 1979, the celebrated political phenom now treated as a national punchline.
(Nearly two decades later, after wandering the political wilderness — and the country — yet still supported strongly by the working class of Cleveland, Kucinich made an unexpected political comeback when he was elected to Congress in 1996. However, in 2010 the Democratic Party machine in Ohio drew up a redistricting plan which moved his Cleveland home address into the Toledo-based district of another incumbent, all but assuring his defeat in 2012.)
Through his besieged two years as mayor, Kucinich was acutely aware that if he capitulated to the sale of the public utility his political future would be instantly assured. He writes:
“My political future would be guaranteed, with the swipe of a pen. The endless calls to sell would end. The media trumpeting the so-called deficiencies of Muny Light would stop their barrage. The equation of the sale of Muny Light with the avoidance of default would end. If I sold the electric system under these intricately-contrived circumstances, the people of Cleveland would never know I did not have to sell. They would be offered a fictional tale of a happy outcome, agreed upon by the media, the business community, CEI, the banks, and the political establishment. It would be the fairy tale of a young Mayor who finally came to his senses and did the ‘right thing.’
But I knew the truth.
The people would end up paying millions of dollars in higher taxes to the city for street lighting and other services. Without competition, CEI would continually raise rates. People in the city would pay millions more in higher electric bills. Yes, the city would have credit. It could borrow money and go deeper in debt. If I agreed to sell, no one in Cleveland would ever know what happened in this boardroom. Today the world’s attention was briefly on the impending default in a major American city. If I sold, tomorrow the big story would be ‘The Escape from Default,’ the bookends of a complete political soap opera. Only I would know that Muny Light was stolen. I would have to conceal that knowledge, as I rocketed to political stardom with my newfound friends. I’d wave from a high platform at ‘the people.’ Unaware, they would think they were the ones who sent me to higher office.”
His enemies did not forgive him once they removed him from office. He and those who worked in his mayoral administration were blacklisted by the city’s elite, often unable to find work. Kucinich was meant to be an example to all who thought of defying the system.
“Most of those who worked for me could not find jobs, blackballed by the Cleveland establishment,” he writes. “Several members of my team had to travel many miles out of town to find work. Most found themselves at a significant financial disadvantage. One, a brilliant city planner who had courageously challenged developers’ schemes to extract millions from the taxpayers, committed suicide. It was my decision, and I paid a price, but regrettably, others also paid.”
“After I left office, I had time to absorb what had happened to me in Cleveland, my ten-year climb to become Mayor, my collision with corrupt interests amidst the highest of hopes for the city,” He writes. “However hard I tried, I could not find a moral to the story. I was shattered, not so much from losing an election, as from the pillorying of the ethical signposts of my life: Right was wrong and wrong was right. The inversion of reality was particularly shocking. The banks, the business and political establishment had now constructed, and the Cleveland media carried forth, a new fictitious narrative. The city on its way to recovery … from me.”
Nevertheless, Kucinich, sacrificing his position as mayor, had indeed, with the support of a grassroots army, saved the city’s public utility.
Near the end of his first term in Congress he was invited to attend a meeting of the Cleveland City Council on Dec. 14, 1998, the eve of the 20th anniversary of the city’s default. The council presented him with a resolution of recognition. It read:
“…Today the City of Cleveland has one of the fastest-growing municipal electric systems in America. Currently, Cleveland Public Power is expanding to provide low-cost electricity to more and more people, providing power for city facilities and streetlights, thereby helping to keep taxes low and encouraging economic development. None of this would have been possible had Mayor Kucinich not refused to sell the City’s electric system on December 15, 1978 . . . now, therefore . . . BE IT RESOLVED, that Cleveland City Council hereby extends its deep appreciation to Dennis J. Kucinich, for having the courage and foresight to refuse to sell the City’s municipal electric system, which has saved the people of Cleveland over $300 million since that time.”
Joseph “Lil Joe” Johnson, whose youthful activism during the rise of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles was an opening chapter in his life-long dedication to socialism, black freedom and Marxist education, died on June 5 at the age of 73. Born in Louisiana in 1948, he came of age in Los Angeles, where his self-education in the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky led him to become a mentor to generations of young radicals seeking a road to socialist revolution.
At a commemoration of Joe’s life on June 27, organized by his close comrade Connie White, she described him as a revolutionary “universalist” devoted to freeing all humanity from exploitation and oppression. Unaffiliated since the demise of the Socialist Collective he organized in the early 1970s, in recent years he became a frequent participant in Marxist study groups of the Internationalist Group/Revolutionary Internationalist Youth. With his boundless and contagious enthusiasm for political reading and debate, he combined the forthright, sometimes angular presentation of his views with dedication to political clarification as essential to revolutionary politics.
On 7 August 2020, comrade Johnson gave the following talk, titled “From Black Nationalism to Maoism to Trotskyism,” to the IG/RIY New York study group. It has been edited for publication, with footnotes and subheads added by The Internationalist.
It’s been a long period since we were recruited in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s. If we go further back, the 1920, ’30s, and ’40s were a transitional period from when blacks had been enslaved, and had then become sharecroppers. Racism was the racialization of relations of production; relations of production between the slave owner and the slaves who worked for them. In the movies they show slavery, black people being beaten and oppressed – but they never show them working. They don’t show them in the cotton fields, in the tobacco fields or in the cane fields. You don’t see the actual relations of production that were going on, where a slave owner owns the person and consequently owns whatever the slave produces.
Black Proletarians and Racial Oppression
Sharecroppers in Georgia, 1907. (Photo: PBS)
I asked a comrade to send you all the song “John Henry.”1
In this song, John Henry is a proletarian, but he had been a slave, or maybe his parents were slaves, and subsequently they had become sharecroppers. With the sharecropping system, it wasn’t feudalism like in Europe. The people, once they were freed or emancipated from slavery, they were no longer property, but they had no land, they would work the land of the former slave owners. Now they would exchange the surplus of their produce in order to keep access to the farm that they tilled with their families. Sharecroppers subsequently, a lot of them started leaving, others had just enough money to leave.
The Ku Klux Klan terror was going on in the 1930s and 1940s – like lynching, as you know, the Democrats didn’t really oppose it and Roosevelt didn’t do anything to stop it. For its part, the Communist Party (CP) had taken up the case of the Scottsboro Boys. A lot of blacks had gone to the Second World War, and before that the First, and when they came back were able to get into another class: the proletariat. So in the 1950s, the black people that lived in the urban centers, the proletarian, working-class, wage-laboring, black proletariat concentrated in the cities, was a different reality than when blacks lived as sharecroppers, working in the countryside, in the rural areas.
As I mentioned, the Second World War brought a lot of black people into the proletariat, like my mother, for example. I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the Charity Hospital. My grandmother was a day laborer, she worked at the home of a white person, I don’t know if they were a slave owner or whatever, but she was a cleaner, she was a maid. And my mother was going into the same occupation. My father, was a lumpen who would beat her and all that kind of sexist bullshit. But his father was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which came about in the early 1800s as a black church.
The interesting thing is that my grandfather’s father was an abolitionist who married the slave woman that he emancipated during the Civil War. Consequently, his son, who was my grandfather, his name was Horace Greeley Johnson. Horace Greeley! My father didn’t understand the significance of that. His father had a master’s degree, he spoke Latin, he was named after the abolitionist Horace Greeley, who worked with the New York Tribune, which Marx wrote for.
Later on, these connections became important to me, not from the standpoint of learning my history going back to African kings or something like that, but just in terms of the class struggles. What I’m trying to say is that the transition from the rural areas into the urban setting was also the proletarianization of black people who lived in these cities, and that in the 1950s it was the urban black people, the working-class black people, the wage-earning black people who formed unions, participated in unions, and who formed the Civil Rights movement. At the same time, you had the NAACP, which was contesting racial segregation and discrimination in the court system.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott started in 1955. It was same there as in Louisiana: the blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and they had no rights, they couldn’t vote, they were not really citizens: if you can’t vote, what kind of citizenship is that? They wanted citizenship, they wanted to break down the racial barriers, they were definitely not into identity politics.
The other tendency at that time was the black racialists and the black petty bourgeoisie in the Nation of Islam. Originally Malcolm X was the articulate spokesman for this movement which was headed by Elijah Muhammad, its so-called prophet leader.
The Nation of Islam made deals – as before them the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey (who called himself the “Emperor of the Kingdom of Africa”) made deals with the Ku Klux Klan. They denounced desegregation. They’d talk about the n-word – I’m not using that word. So the black petty bourgeoisie getting their own business was their objective and they said it was only the “house Negro” who wanted to “integrate with the white man.” Black nationalists, as they called themselves, who didn’t confront the state at all; they didn’t challenge a damn thing. They could say I’m black and I’m proud, and criticize the non-violent confrontation tactics of the Civil Rights movement, and make legitimate criticisms of the Democratic Kennedy administration, but they supported segregation and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan.
The American Nazi Party were invited to a Nation of Islam rally that they attended in their uniforms, where Elijah Muhammad gave a speech; the American Nazi Party praised the Nation of Islam, and the Nation of Islam praised the American Nazi Party. Previously Marcus Garvey had worked with the Ku Klux Klan and praised them as “honest” white folks. At the same time, he attacked the CP, and black Communists specifically, as supposedly wanting to be around the white masters. It sounded militant, but was really reactionary. They didn’t achieve anything.
They lumped all white people together as “the white man.” Like the white cats in the Mississippi Three – the two Jewish men killed by the Klan in Mississippi together with an African American man?2 What white people would black workers work with other than white communists? The Nation of Islam was working for the ruling class by not just keeping black people and white people divided physically but also intellectually and ideologically, so “the white man” was your enemy. That’s what we were taught.
Cold War and Segregation
So this was the situation in which I grew up, in this anti-communist period. The socialization and education in this country was a process of brainwashing Americans about the Communists brainwashing people in Korea; about Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N.; the confrontation between U.S. imperialism versus Cuba and the Soviet Union in 1962 that nearly led to nuclear war; the movies they had.
This anti-communism was very deep and was part of our socialization in the 1950s. The schoolchildren, seven-year-old kids would be in a classroom and all of a sudden a buzzer goes off and we had to jump off our chairs and hide under the desks with our backs to the windows, as if that would protect us from a nuclear attack. They promoted the fear of communism, “Russian aggression” – the kind of shit they’re saying today about China3 – and that communists were basically evil. So it wasn’t just the “white man,” including trade-unionists, but the communists were also supposedly devils.Woman riveter at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California where Joe Johnson’s mother worked during World War II. (Photo: National Archives)
I grew up in the projects, in inner-city South Central Los Angeles. It wasn’t as impoverished then as it is today. My mother came to L.A. from Louisiana, because black people were recruited by the military to come to California because men in the “white working class,” quote unquote,4 were drafted into the army. Since the military needed weapons and equipment, they brought in blacks, including my mother, who started working at Lockheed Aircraft – she became one of those Rosie the Riveter women. It was a different reality from the South. My father also came from Louisiana. They were living in a hotel in downtown L.A., and at first the only skill she had was domestic work, cleaning houses for people. Later my mother moved into housing projects in Watts; I lived in Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts in Watts, Pueblo del Rio. They had “Dogtown”; and in East L.A. it was the White Fence gang’s territory.
At the time, in the black community in South Central L.A., in Watts, Compton – as in Oakland, parts of San Francisco and other places around the country – it was all black people. You would walk down the street, or take a ride, go downtown on the freeway and look right to the left, to the right, and what you saw was black people. There was no integration, it was called de facto segregation. When we thought about white people then, we thought it was like the “Leave It to Beaver” family.5Racist attack by white sailors on Chicanos in East L.A., part of the “Zoot Suit Riots,” in 1943. (Photo: Bettman Archive)
The ghettoization separated working-class blacks and Chicanos.6 There had been the really brutal conflict of sailors versus the “pachucos” in East L.A. during World War Two. There was no conflict at the time between the black and Chicano people, there were the “zoot-suiters,” who were trying to be cool. Then there was the violence originating with a white racist street gang called the “Spook Hunters.”7 The Chicano gangs, the black gangs were basically organizations of working-class youth in South Central Los Angeles, Watts, East L.A., that were fighting each other, selling drugs, etc. And no one really had any money.
Nationalism in the 1960s
So to be a nationalist back in the 1960s, when I was a teenager dealing with nationalism, there seemed to be a material basis for it, when people said “We want black control over the black community.” We didn’t say what “black control of the black community” meant. The Progressive Labor Party then was talking about “community control,” and so were others including the Young Lords Party in Chicago and then New York. It seemed natural that you had these ethnic communities and the consciousness and organizations that we went through. That is because we were working-class and unemployed young people, but consciousness and the organizations weren’t based on our participation in social labor, in social production. What they were then was neighborhood groups.
And like it says in another song I sent out, “Tobacco Road”: “I was born in a dump…. Bring that dynamite and crane, blow it up, start all over again.” So like that song, the idea was saying, OK, we’re going to rebuild the black community and make it as comfortable and decent as possible. Whereas “John Henry” talks about labor as social production. When they were building the railroad, there were workers of every ethnicity, mainly Chinese – they called them “coolies.” And we need each other in the labor process. Class consciousness brings workers together.
After the Watts Riot, the uprising in 1965, nationalism was put on the agenda as something practicable: people were talking about how we want black police to patrol the neighborhood, the slums, talking about a black mayor. I was out in Compton, and I was thinking, “You know, we could have a black mayor of Compton, someone like [Black Panthers] Elaine Brown or Bunchy Carter, and we could have Huey P. Newton as chief of police in Compton – you get the picture. At the time it seemed rational because it seemed possible.
And I read some stuff about ancient Greece and Rome. I read Plato about the polis [ideal city], independent city-states, and also material about kings in Africa. But what practically can we do with this? Can we make Compton or South Central L.A. an independent republic? Would that mean when you travel from Compton to Long Beach, you have to have a passport? That they would have an army? Would it be like the bantustans in South Africa8 – or like Gaza and the West Bank with the Palestinians, or like Native American reservations? When you begin to think about what it means to talk about black control of the black community, it breaks down.
But after Watts in 1965 and rebellions in other cities, you got black mayors: Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Harold Washington in Chicago, the black mayor in [Tallahassee] Florida, etc. They were all part of the Democratic Party. A friend of mine used to say Jesse Jackson is not the representative of the black community in the Democratic Party, but a representative of the Democratic Party in the black community. And we said the same thing about the labor lieutenants of capital, the labor officials who are not representatives of the working class in the Democratic Party, but representatives of the Democratic Party inside the trade unions.
That was the substance, the essence, the reality of the black nationalists with black mayors, black chiefs of police. Empiricism: you change the appearance, the color of the skin. Like my comrade Dedon said, “A change in the color of the skin does not change the essence of the state, which is still the state of the capitalist ruling class.” And so you’ve really got to understand political demographics and class realities.
Malcolm spoke to the resentment of black people. We were dealing at that time based on appearances: you see a man beating a man, that is a empirical observation. The man doing the beating is white and the man being beaten is black. That’s an empirical observation. And also the man who is doing the beating has got on a badge, which gives him the authority to beat citizens, to hurt people, to jail people, to kill people. You do not just empirically recognize authority, that takes a deeper understanding of these relationships.
In the ’60s, I spent a lot of time in the California Youth Authority.9 I was doing stuff there that the staff didn’t like and I was thinking of myself at the time as a black nationalist; I didn’t like white people. Then I said I was a Muslim, I stopped eating pork, stopped masturbating, the whole bit. I was doing time; I was 17 years old. They put me in solitary confinement for about 6 months, like with Geronimo.10
They wanted anybody that had any kind of critical thinking separated from the rest of the population and put in solitary confinement. Although I was not really thinking I was a revolutionary, I was thinking at the time as a black nationalist, which is not revolutionary. Black nationalism had the appearance of being revolutionary but in essence it was reactionary. When I got out, I was strictly a nationalist, thought white people were the problem, the whole thing. I considered myself a follower of Malcolm X. Then he was assassinated in 1965.
Malcolm had been arrested and judged. We were the victims of white racism. And it was all white folks as far as we were concerned then. We didn’t at the time look behind the appearances to understand the relationships: the state as special bodies of armed men – but you don’t see “the state”; you see the police, you see the guards, you see the judges, you see white men oppressing black people. You don’t see the basis of the social relations; it’s something you have to learn, through struggle and through analysis and through study.
Maoism and the Panthers
Protesters rise up against police terror in Watts, Los Angeles, August 1965. (Photo: Associated Press)
During the Watts uprising in ’65, for the first time, the police were backing up – they weren’t moving forward killing us.
In the ’50s we’d had gangs – Bunchy Carter, he was with the Slauson gang; my friend Baba and another friend from the Youth Authority, it was the gangs called the 20s and the Outlaws; there was the Gladiators, etc. But all those gangs dissipated after the 1965 rebellion. I didn’t do any looting; I was 17 years old; I didn’t have any analysis, but we were saying: “Hey, rather than a gang to protect our neighborhood from another gang, let’s organize to protect our people from racist attacks and from police brutality.”
And that’s when the Black Panther Party (BPP) came into existence. Bunchy Carter started it here in Los Angeles.11 At that time I was around a fellow who said he was Malcolm X’s cousin; he looked like Malcolm X, with a little hat and a beard. Malcolm said that a revolution overthrows the system, and he talked about armed self-defense. It seemed to jibe with Mao’s Red Book, where Mao was saying political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. So people associated Malcolm X with Mao Zedong.
In one of the films on the Black Panther Party – I’m not talking about the movie about the cartoon character – they present it as opportunistically purchasing Red Books in order to get money to buy guns. I know that the Panther Party did not buy Red Books to sell them to make money off of what they then called “white mother country radicals” – they bought the Red Books to read.
In terms of Maoist groups then: there was one in L.A. led by Michael Laski, called the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist); and the Progressive Labor Party, they were Maoists; there was the Republic of New Afrika. The Panthers were putting [Maoist ideas] together, and we listened to the recordings of Malcolm X’s speeches and we thought, “Yeah!” But Malcolm didn’t really understand revolution as destroying a particular set of social relationships and ushering in different ones in terms of production and distribution of material objects.
We were for the most part very young, in our late teens or twenties – so don’t judge us too harshly. When we first saw Mao’s book On Contradiction, I thought was about people contradicting themselves in an argument. When I first picked up Lenin’s State and Revolution, I thought it was about the state like the state of California. When Mao was talking about the peasant masses, I thought he was talking about farm workers in Los Angeles County, in Long Beach. When Mao talked about the landowner class, I thought he was talking about people who owned apartment buildings. We were interpreting all this material for ourselves with no knowledge of what they actually were and what they meant objectively, materially.
I was running from the police, they were trying to get rid of me in Compton.12 That’s when I started dealing with the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. I also dealt with the Panthers in Oakland. Masai Hewitt,13 myself and others – we were struggling to understand black nationalism and what it would actually mean to be a “liberated black nation.” The Black Panther Party maintained that the black community was an oppressed nation, but also occupied, that the police were colonial; they called it a “domestic colony.” We watched movies such as The Battle of Algiers, which I encourage people to watch, because it was very important to what we thought it meant to be revolutionaries and the idea of an “armed struggle” for liberation. Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton speaking in Chicago’s Grant Park in September 1969. Three months later he was murdered by Chicago police working with the FBI in infamous COINTELPRO operation. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
The Panther Party, as you know: it was suppressed. We all know about George Jackson, killed in San Quentin. You know about Fred Hampton being assassinated together with Mark Clark. We know about Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the black Democratic mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode, dropped bombs on the MOVE house.14 They started calling the house a bunker. When you hear the media talking about a person’s home as a bunker, you know the bombs are going to drop soon.
The Black Panther Party down on Central Avenue was raided in ’69; I had been dealing with them for maybe a year or so, but I was in East L.A. doing other stuff.15 The reason that the Panther Party on Central Avenue survived, that they came out alive, was because we were able to bring out the community and bring out the press. Geronimo, he was in the building, along with others – Roland Freeman, “Peaches” [Renee Moore], different people. They survived the shoot-out, but a factor in this was that the media was there and consequently a tank wasn’t brought in like in Waco, Texas,16 or aerial bombardment like in the case of MOVE. So the struggle was real.
“In Love with Theory”
Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx
In the intervening period, I had the good fortune that I was always in love with theory. I had already read Plato’s Dialogues, but I also got a lot of help from Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise – he analyzed the scriptures and materialism – as well as Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, as I was trying to figure out what was going on. That’s when I read the Communist Manifesto and it was, “Wow.” Everything became clear. And it’s still clear.
I didn’t have a phone then, so I ran to the telephone booth and got the directory, to get me the phone number for the Communist Party, because the pamphlet was called the Manifesto of the Communist Party. I said, “Hey, I want to be a part of this”; but on the phone they were hemming and hawing and kind of suspicious. But in this group with [Hakim] Jamal and the Malcolm X Foundation,17 I was talking about the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution. I had an idea of what revolution is and that black nationalism wasn’t revolutionary.
So, I came to understand that it’s not about individuals getting rich and improving the conditions of black people in the inner city, it’s about the necessity for what Lenin called the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. From reading the Communist Manifesto and State and Revolution, I was hooked, I was convinced.
In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated and we had the uprisings all over the country, about 120 cities in flames. The music was encouraging too, Bob Dylan, the beginnings of rock and roll anti-war culture, which was developing together with the black liberation movement. I was about 19 years old then, I was not even old enough to see my man John Coltrane, since you had to be 21 to go see him.
In terms of reading, at that point I hadn’t read anything from the SWP.18 Just Mao’s Red Book and stuff from the CP. But reading Marx and Lenin made a big difference: I was able to transition away from racialism, what they called nationalism – though I really didn’t understand class struggle and class consciousness until the 1970s. But I want to emphasize that people wanted to be revolutionaries; we wanted to be revolutionaries, but didn’t know how.
There was a Maoist bookstore in Watts. There was the Communist Party bookstore, Mike Davis was working there at the time.19 The CP bookstore had a lot of good Marxist literature from Progress Publishers, and Laski and his group had Peking Review and some Maoist works, posters and little badges everyone would wear.
The SWP had their bookstore in East L.A. Me and my comrades from Compton would go there and they would direct us to their black literature section, where they would give us books by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and others; nothing wrong with those books. W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folks. But we were not introduced to Trotskyist literature! So we didn’t have a coherent political analysis. We didn’t even know what to analyze, though black nationalism was bankrupt.
Around that time, the students at Carver Junior High School got beat up by the police,20 and I had been driven out of Compton by the police. So I was out in Los Angeles in the underground working with a group called the Black Students Alliance when there was a city-wide student strike protest. Responding to what we saw occur, I repeatedly came into conflict with the Communist Party, because they were always working with the Democratic Party and attempting to water down what we were trying to do. I didn’t understand it in class politics/party terms; I thought of it then as what the Maoists called “Khrushchev revisionism.” I didn’t understand it yet as Stalinism.
A few years later, I happened to go to a conference against the killing of the students at Kent State.21 I saw a poster there saying, “Rebuild the Fourth International.” I knew about Marx and the First International; I knew from Lenin about Karl Kautsky and the Second International; I didn’t know what became of the Third International, but the idea of a new International sounded wonderful to me. I wanted to investigate, what the hell is a Fourth International?
It turned out the poster was for a conference organized by the Workers League, so I had some discussions with Tim Wohlforth.22 He had an analysis of black nationalism from a Trotskyist working-class perspective, and they had a list of books that I was able to hunt down on my own. I took about six months or so out in order to get this Trotskyism thing, reading The Revolution Betrayed, which was difficult because I wasn’t familiar with any of the categories about the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. I read In Defense of Marxism, which I loved, particularly the part called “The ABC of Materialist Dialectics.”
That was because I had already been interested in philosophy, with Mao’s “On Contradiction” plus Plato, Spinoza – and I really wanted to learn something new philosophically, so I really loved that item by Trotsky; not only that, but it was useful! Now I was able to understand and do combat with the Communist Party! I was able to understand the labor bureaucracy, I was able to understand the connections between the CP and the Soviet Union. Trotsky at that time for me was what the doctor ordered, and I needed that.
Later on, the 1980s brought the repressive era of the Reagan administration [starting with] the breaking of the PATCO strike; then the 1990s, beginning with Bill Clinton’s attacks on the singer/rapper Sister Soulja.23 Clinton did this at a rally organized by Jesse Jackson, who had been a Civil Rights worker in Chicago in the 1960s, but in the ’80s ran for president. Jackson was a Democrat, as were most of the former Civil Rights leaders who had participated in struggles with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Martin Luther King, the NAACP; then the so-called Black Congressional Caucus which is nothing but black Democrats, so-called “progressives.”
All of this stuff back in the 1980s was different from the experiences we had in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s when we were actually confronting the state power and the racialized institutions that existed – segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination in jobs and hiring, against not only blacks but also women. You can look back at the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, where the state teargassed and turned water hoses on black children protesters.
So like Marx said in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” theory is a practical thing, it’s not just sitting around and interpreting phenomena; it’s revolutionary. To understand the world and change it requires theoretical investigation and depth of knowledge. What Marx does is like The Wizard of Oz, exposing what is behind the curtain. You hear the wizard’s voice, you see the smoke, but you don’t understand that it’s a show, that there are things going on behind the curtain that you don’t have access to. Almost like the tradition of the ancient Israelites, who carried the “Ark of the Covenant” [supposedly containing the Ten Commandments] behind a curtain; while in ancient Egypt, the priests would carry representations of the gods, but only they had access to the inner sanctum.
So theory, Marxism, enabled me to take a peek behind the curtain. And I’m still peeking behind the curtain.
* * *
Some of comrade Johnson’s comments responding to the question/discussion period:
I just want to point something out, about identity politics, for young people that grew up, say, in the ’90s and thereafter: the motives of identity politics are not the same as the black nationalism of the latter part of the 1960s.
Connie and I were talking about the DSA, Freedom Socialist Party, some group that calls itself Marx21. And there are people talking about “white skin privilege.” The identity people are not the same as the Black Panther Party back in the ’60s and ’70s. Now you’ve got these opportunists on TV, you know the type. They have programs with a black person explaining to the camera how black people feel about police killings, with Al Sharpton and with Cornel West talk about the “black prophetic tradition.” And there are people who get paid to be experts on what it means to be a Negro; they get paid to push identity politics and denounce the working class as a bunch of racist SOBs.
The media in this country don’t tell viewers what’s going on in the world; they tell them what they’re supposed to think about what’s going on in the world. They encourage the bombing and destruction, coups in Latin America, etc. Meanwhile AOC talks about Venezuela.24 You know, these people represent the Democratic Party, and that’s what this identity politics stuff is all about. And as part of it, when working-class people go to the university, white students coming from the working class are made to feel guilt.
So the identity politics people are not the same people as the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, etc.; they don’t have the same interests, they are not of the same class. So much for identity politics…
The movement in the 1960s and ’70s, we had to deal with concrete problems because we were very serious about revolution. We read Lenin, we read Marx. We saw what was going on in Vietnam, with the burning of villages, the picture of the little girl running after being burned with napalm.
We understood that this state will do anything to maintain their power. And with the murder of Fred Hampton and George Jackson, some of us were coming toward an understanding of class struggle. Masai Hewitt and John Huggins and others of us dealt with these questions, and I was basically assigned to work with the Black Students Alliance.
So I was free to do a critical analysis. [Eventually] we found our way to Trotskyism. We had no help. The CP certainly didn’t help us.
In 1969, I had a falling out with the Black Panther Party, when I was giving a speech at their “United Front Against Fascism” conference in Oakland.25 The Spartacist League and the Progressive Labor Party and other Marxist groups were there. But the Spartacist League was being physically attacked for doing a critical analysis of the Communist Party. And I said, “Don’t do that, don’t attack these people.” And I diverted from where my speech was, there in Bobby Hutton Park, and addressed the conflict.
Recall that the Panthers and others who talked about Maoism in the black community did not discuss Mao’s “bloc of four classes” or what a popular front was. To refer to Maoism initially meant political power brought “from the barrel of a gun”; and later on, “serve the people.”
During the civil war in China, Mao’s Chinese Community Party and People’s Liberation Army, based on the peasantry, set up “liberated zones” in which they would organize production, distribution, medical aid, etc. That’s what they meant by serving the people, in the context of guerilla warfare.
Whereas the concept of actually “having power” in black communities was not actually dealt with by the Panther Party or other groups. “Serve the people” meant sickle-cell anemia testing, breakfast for children – all this is good, wonderful stuff. But it ain’t revolutionary. I put it this way around the time of the United Front Against Fascism, it could sound cynical, but what they were calling “socialism by example” became a black militant version of the Salvation Army.
How could the working class come to power? How will we win state power? These were revolutionary concepts that were not dealt with by any of the organizations that I was familiar with in the ’60s. Eventually we did read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, in particular the chapter called “Five Days,” where he talks about how the military ranks were won over to the revolution. What a soviet means; and state power, how you confront and overcome it. But back in the ’60s this wasn’t really discussed, we weren’t really aware of it.
What about the situation today? “Black Lives Matter” is a complaint, about police killing black people; and you hear people talking about “Defund the Police.” The state won’t defund itself! We didn’t have ignorant statements like that, “Defund the police.” And, “Speak truth to power”: what the hell does that mean? There’s nothing revolutionary about speaking truth to power. Revolution is for the working class to become the power! Proletarian revolution would abolish capitalist commodity production and wage labor; it would replace markets and circulation of commodities with “from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs.”
I wanted to mention that in 1919, two years after the founding of the Soviet state, while there was civil war in Russia; Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartakusbund in Germany; troops from France also in mutiny – while the working class was rising up against capital and struggling for power throughout Europe, in America you had the “race riots” against blacks in 1919. They had revolutions, we had race riots.
In his book Black Bourgeoisie (1957), E. Franklin Frazier talked about how racial divisions were used. And blacks were brought into the military. You need to attack racism, but that doesn’t mean black people should be applauding or proud of the fact – like identity politics people – that black soldiers were sent to kill workers in Europe or Japan, or that the Tuskegee airmen were used to drop bombs across the goddamn world.26
So again, identity politics is bourgeois.
In the late ’60s they started talking about black capitalism. And Fred Hampton said, when there was discussion of black and white, and class struggle: We do not fight fire with fire; the best way to fight fire is with water. We do not fight racism with black cultural nationalism; we fight racism with interracial working-class solidarity. We do not fight capitalism by promoting black capitalism; we fight capitalism by producing socialism.27
But in this sense, he was talking about the social programs of the Black Panther Party. Myself and others in the movement at that time, we still weren’t referring to the expropriation of the expropriators and the forces of production; a planned economy – these kinds of discussions were kept from us by the CP and others. And I was in jail at the time. I’ll leave it there. ■
Remembering Lil Joe
At the memorial meeting “Lil Joe Johnson, Celebrating a Revolutionary Life,” 27 June 2021. (Photo: Dat Dang / Facebook)
The following remarks were made by Los Angeles transit worker Joe Wagner, a supporter of the Internationalist Group, at the June 27 commemoration for Joe Johnson.
¡Luchar por el socialismo! ¡Que viva Lil Joe!
I first met Lil Joe at a Marxist study group, almost 20 years ago. The office we would meet at was up a massive fright of stairs. It was work to make it up those stairs, but he was happy to do it. He knew that at the end of the struggle to make it up 77 steps (I counted them), he would be in a room with youth and others that were interested in every word and every carefully crafted sentence that he would formulate.
He was a natural debater. A worldly man who made complex ideas accessible. He loved getting to know the youth and learning as he was teaching complex ideas. Marxism, he would explain in intricate detail, is not a dogma but a guide to action; theory is never to be denigrated. He encouraged the youth to read what he had read. He would say that one’s experience with oppression is not enough to develop a plan to overcome it.
At a recent talk, Lil Joe gave on the lessons of his political development, “From Black Nationalism to Maoism to Trotskyism,” he explained to the youth of today that revolutionary politics did not just come to him, like a premonition, but it was a process of hard struggle and hard theoretical study and debate.
He knew that the ruling class would never, ever allow the exploited and oppressed to be taught in their institutions what it would take to overthrow their rule. So he saw it as his job to seek out the knowledge he needed, to educate himself and then to raise the level of political consciousness of the oppressed. Not just the consciousness that they were exploited as workers or oppressed as an oppressed community but a far deeper level of understanding. The objective that Lil Joe had was to prepare the young worker for the coming to power of the proletariat; the consciousness that the workers should rule and bring all the oppressed up with them.
To his last days, he was reading and studying and analyzing his previously held positions. He was steeled but remained flexible to challenging even his own preconceived notions in the course of debates and happily learning new things.
And all the knowledge that he learned, that he understood, that helped point out the road forward to revolution, he wanted to share it with others, so that the youth of today could likewise get closer to finding the road to revolution. That’s what made him light up with joy: knowing that in Marxist theory he could see a light at the end of the tunnel for humanity and that he had a key role to play in passing on important lessons to the youth of today, who could, armed with that knowledge, better continue forward on that road to liberation.
We must carry forward this fight: let’s continue reading, studying, debating and putting what we learn into action, to follow the revolutionary road to victory. Long live Lil Joe! ■
2. On 21 June 1964, “Freedom Summer” activists James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24) were arrested by police, then “disappeared” and brutally murdered by the KKK in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
3. Comrade Johnson’s views on the “Russian Question” and China had changed sharply from the period when his Socialist Collective merged briefly with the “third-campist” International Socialists in 1974.
4. This is a polemical reference to present-day leftists who claim there is a separate “white working class”; comrade Johnson had circulated among friends and colleagues our article “The Myth of a ‘White Working Class’ – ‘Identity Politics’ at a Dead End,” The Internationalist No. 46, January-February 2017.
5. “Leave It to Beaver” (1957-63) was a TV sitcom purveying an image of white middle-class Cold War “normality.”
6. See the article by Charles Brover, “‘American Apartheid’ By Design,” on the website of Class Struggle Education Workers, which reproduces the federal government housing map of Los Angeles showing in red the areas to which black, Latino and Asian populations were largely confined, hence the term “red-lining.”
7. Mexican American youth who wore a style of clothing known as the “zoot suit” were sometimes known as “pachucos,” and were the targets of racist attacks spearheaded by white sailors in Los Angeles’ so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” of June 1943. (This is the topic of the 1981 film based on Chicano playwright Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit.) Originating in the 1940s, the white racist gang that comrade Johnson refers to sought to violently enforce racial boundaries against African Americans newly arrived in L.A.
8. Bantustans were the supposed black “homelands” that apartheid South Africa set up as reserves of black labor and a means of police-state control.
9. The California Youth Authority was the notoriously brutal incarceration system for “youth offenders” in California, renamed Division of Juvenile Justice in 2005.
10. Los Angeles Black Panther leader Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt (1947-2011) spent 8 years in solitary confinement during the 27 years he was imprisoned on frame-up murder charges as part of the FBI/police COINTELPRO program; in 1997 his conviction was overturned. (See “Geronimo Is Out! Now Free Mumia!,” The Internationalist supplement, June 1997).
11. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter (1942-1969), together with fellow L.A. Panther leader John Huggins (1945-1969), was shot dead on the UCLA campus by members of Ron Karenga’s “cultural nationalist” US (United Slaves) organization in a COINTELPRO-instigated assassination.
12. A letter to the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant (2 August 1968) describes the arrest of Joseph Johnson and two others by Compton police who found them with leaflets by a local “Black Nationalist Party” as well as “some books by Lenin”; it quotes Johnson as attributing the felony charges of assaulting a police officer to “the cops ‘remembering Watts.’”
13. Raymond “Masai” Hewitt (1941-1988) was a leading Black Panther in Los Angeles and a target of a notorious COINTELPRO smear campaign.
14. George Jackson (1941-1971), one of the “Soledad Brothers,” became an influential voice of black radicalism before prison authorities murdered him while he was trying to escape San Quentin prison on 21 August 1971. Targeted by COINTELPRO, Chicago Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton (1948-1969) and Mark Clark (1947-1969) were assassinated by police in a COINTELPRO operation on 4 December 1969. On 13 May 1985, with the approval of Mayor Goode, Philadelphia police dropped an explosive incendiary provided by Regan’s “Justice” Department on the MOVE commune, killing 11 black men, women and children. For more on the MOVE massacre, see “It Will Take Workers’ Power to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007.
15. Four days after the police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, the L.A. Black Panther office on 41st and Central was targeted by the world’s first major raid by a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team. Cops demolished the office, wounded 6 Panthers and arrested 13 in the 8 December 1969 raid.
16. Early in the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, in a siege culminating on 19 April 1993, the FBI, ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) and other federal and state agencies used tanks and other weaponry against the “Branch Davidians” compound in Waco, allegedly in search of illegal firearms, killing 76 members of the religious sect, including 20 children.
17. The Malcolm X Foundation was established by Hakim Jamal (1931-1973), an activist then based in Compton, around 1968.
18. Though it had turned decisively to reformism in the early 1960s, the Socialist Workers Party was still the largest organization claiming the heritage of Trotskyism at that time.
19. Former CPer Mike Davis is a prolific leftist writer and historian; most recently he co-authored Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020).
20. Los Angeles-area high schools and junior highs were rocked by a wave of student walkouts in 1967-69, the best known of which are the 1968 “East L.A. walkouts” or “Chicano blowouts” depicted in the 2006 film Walkout. Carver Junior High was one of the schools where protests involved large numbers of young black (and some white) students. In 1969, Joe Johnson was one of the speakers who made the rounds of schools in solidarity with these protests.
21. On 4 May 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a protest at Kent State University against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, killing 4 students and wounding 9.
22. The Workers League (WL), led by Tim Wohlforth (1933-2019), was the U.S. affiliate of Gerry Healy’s “International Committee of the Fourth International.” Lil Joe became a member of the WL, whose Bulletin (15 March 1971) published his analysis of the Panthers’ split between followers of Huey Newton (1942-1989) and Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998). Joe broke with the Healy/Wohlforth brand of “Trotskyism” over several issues including their support for the 1971 New York police “strike.”
23. In 1981, Ronald Reagan kicked off his first presidential term by firing more than 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), escalating the anti-union offensive of his Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Campaigning for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton gave a speech to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in which he infamously compared Sister Souljah to the notorious Klansman David Duke.
24. Democratic Socialists of America congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chimed in with the rest of the Democratic caucus backing U.S. “democracy” promotion in Venezuela, voting $20 million for the failed coup attempt of 2019.
25. As repression against the Panthers continued to escalate, in July 1969 they held a “United Front Against Fascism” conference in Oakland, a bloc with the CP, Peace and Freedom parties in a largely unsuccessful effort to cement an ongoing alliance with reformist left and liberal forces.
26. The U.S. sent approximately 200,000 black troops, in segregated units, to Europe during World War One; during WWII, 1.2 million African Americans were in the armed forces; the first black flying squadron, known as the “Tuskegee airmen,” was deployed to North Africa, and then to Italy.
Note: No one in Massachusetts talks with a Kennedy accent. No one in the past spoke that way. It is a unique family accent. Perhaps the children of Joseph Kennedy Senior picked up the odd family accent when they were at boarding schools and combined that influence with their mother’s native Boston accent. The Boston, Massachusetts accent of the past was influenced by the Yorkshire accent of the Puritan settlers of the 1600’s, who came from that section of England.
Over the past 14 years Congress has resisted demands that it conduct real in4uiries in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King despite the fact that. according to recent public opinion polls, 69 percent of the population rejects the official version of the King assassination and 60 percent doubt the suspect findings of the Warren Commission on the Kennedy assassination.
Last September a reluctant Congress established the Select Committee on Assassinations. Apparently the Committee never intended to probe too deeply. Malcolm X’s assassination was not even included in the investigation, and none of Congress’s big-name “stars” took part. In fact, the more “prestigious” Senate left the inquiry entirely up to the House of Representatives, some junior members of which no doubt hoped to be provided with the same sort of springboard to stardom which Watergate had been for Howard Baker of Tennessee and others.
There was heavy resistance from the House leadership and even the assassinations’ committee chairman, Congressman Henry Gonzalez. Their hostility was directed at chief counsel Richard Sprague, accused of everything from highhandedness to over eagerness to expand the investigation. Only when he was dumped on March 30 was the House Select Committee grudgingly granted a new lease on life in the wake of a spate of highly publicized “leaks” of new “evidence.”
The new “evidence” includes the testimony of a Dallas cocktail waitress who claims that Jack Ruby introduced her a few weeks before the JFK assassination to one “Lee Harvey Oswald of the CIA,” and that she also just happened to be taking photographs of the famous “grassy knoll” when Kennedy was shot (photographs which were confiscated by two men claiming to be federal agents); and the testimony of a nurse at the Dallas hospital to which Kennedy and Texas governor John
Connally were brought that many bullet fragments were removed from Connally (undercutting the government’s single bullet story). By and large the new “evidence” is no more substantial than previous stories that conflict with the Warren Commission report: they merely rehash the familiar speculations of Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment) and a host of other assassination-conspiracy buffs whose books. lecture tours and Hollywood movies have become a lucrative genre of American popular culture.
Another recent and evidently more sinister revelation deals with the connection between Oswald and George de Morenschildt, a wealthy oil financier and former French intelligence agent. De Morenschildt, who had testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald killed Kennedy, committed suicide on March 29, before he was due to testify to the House committee. Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans has now come forward with his story that de Morenschildt had told him that there was a conspiracy including the FBI, the CIA, Texas oil millionaire H.L. Hunt, Jack Ruby and several Cuban exiles to kill Kennedy
and that de Morenschildt had been the middleman. Of particular significance is that Oswald, who is usually painted as a hopelessly embittered loser, should have had such intimate relations with an international wheeler-dealer like de Morenschildt.
How credible is this testimony? Oltmans also quotes de Morenschildt, who had made several suicide attempts in recent months, as telling him: “Let’s face it. I only made up the story [about Lee Harvey Oswald] because everybody makes a million dollars off the Kennedy assassination, and I haven’t made anything. So now it’s my time.”
Least plausible of all are the rumors suggesting that Castro “hit” Kennedy in retaliation for the infamous CIA attempts on his life or for CIA involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. There is no bourgeois agency which would not be delighted to reveal such a Castroite
plot if such could be demonstrated, and it seems inconceivable that the Warren Commission and J. Edgar Hoover would have passed up such an exquisite opportunity for witchhunting and propaganda if there were a shred of evidence to support this theory of Castro acting in his own self-defense.
Regarding the King assassination, the House committee, in the short time it has been in existence, has listed some 600 “unresolved questions.” One of the most interesting of these is where and how James Earl Ray obtained the money he lived on between his escape from prison in April 1967 and his arrest in London in June 1968. During this period Ray is known to have visited Acapulco, Montreal, Chicago, New Orleans, Toronto, London, Lisbon and Brussels. He also bought a new car, expensive camera equipment and other items. The FBI estimates his total income for the period as $664.34, which he earned as a dishwasher. There has been some speculation that Ray’s money came from bank robberies, but the FBI has never succeeded in linking him with a single robbery or burglary of any sort during this time.
Other unanswered questions involve how Ray was able to engineer a prison escape, why Tennessee authorities did not insist on a full investigation of him and whether the FBI, which had King under close surveillance, knew of the assassination scheme before it was carried out.
Even the Carter administration evidently doesn’t buy the story that Ray acted alone, for Attorney General Bell has said he wanted to personally interview the prisoner. Sprague, meanwhile, reports that Ray has said that a mysterious “Raoul” aided him with “certain weapons and certain money” (New York Times, 12 April).
Finding the answers to these questions after so many years would be difficult even if there were a real determination to leave no stone unturned. Whatever FBI and! or CIA links there may have been to the slayings were likely never explicitly committed to paper and any circumstantial evidence has long since seen the inside of government shredders. Many potential witnesses died years ago-“mysteriously,” as assassination freaks add retlexively–and the living witnesses are aware of the fate of Sam Giancana and John Roselli, who were murdered and had guilty knowledge of CIA-Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro
So for the assassination buffs, it’s back to the campus and talkshow circuits, to pouring over the 27 volumes of Warren Commission testimony, to screening the graphic Zapruder film of JFK’s grey matter being sprayed around.
Dealey Plaza, to filing Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. To the extent that the assassination buffs have explicit politics, they are well within mainstream liberalism. Shocked by Watergate and the events of the 1960’s which it culminated, bourgeois liberals pointed as one to “Black Friday” in Dallas as the date on which “America lost its innocence” and from which an ensuing torrent of violence, vituperation and despair could be dated.
The supposedly cultured and cosmopolitan court (now revealed as sex-crazed) of Jack and Jackie’s “Camelot” was replaced by the “vulgarity” of LBJ. The clean-cut “idealism” of the Peace Corps was superseded by the ever-more radical Students for a Democratic Society, and the docile Martin Luther King by the Black Panthers and ghetto uprisings.
Of course, this myth has been undermined, in its turn, by the same recent scandals which gave impetus to the assassination probe in the first place. Between Kennedy’s presiding over COINTELPRO repression and constant attempts to overthrow Castro and restore capitalism in Cuba, and his tumbles with the various “Fiddles,” “Faddles” and Mafia gun molls, the image of Camelot has faded fast. From Camelot to Carter stretches an unbroken chain of imperialist dictatorship, oppression, terror, spying and slaughter.
But in the absence of a perceived revolutionary alternative to bourgeois politics, the conspiracy industry and the muckraking fad have succeeded only in feeding the widespread cynicism. The
Chilean workers and peasants, over a million Vietnamese, the Attica and Wounded Knee militants and numerous black youth gunned down by killer cops in the northern ghettos.
The full-blown rationalizations for the liberalism ofthe conspiracy mongers have appeared in recent books by aged New Leftists Carl Oglesby and Kirkpatrick Sale, who seek to locate the central axis of social and political struggle in ruling-class clique fights between “eastern establishmentarians” and “sunbelt” nouveaux riches. The conceptual fallacies of these liberal’ theories are countless. That the bourgeois base of the Democratic Party has for decades been an alliance of southern oligarchy and eastern financiers is well established; the aerospace industry, the bulwark of the “sunbelt” economy, is dominated by northern capital; the mélange of forces allegedly implicated in the Kennedy assassination-from Ivy League CIA spooks to Cuban exiles obviously defies facile geographical classification; and “old country lawyer” Sam Ervin and the southern Congressmen on the House impeachment inquiry delivered key blows against Nixon. Oglesby regards the JFK assassination as a “cowboy coup” (with Watergate a “yankee countercoup”). While this is trivially consistent with Kennedy’s and Johnson’s geographical origins, it hardly accounts for the fact that the liberal “Great Society” program was enacted under Johnson, while Kennedy’s major “contribution” to civil rights was the appointment of racist federal judges in the south.
The various conspiracy theories all share the same technocratic, idealist and moralist illusion in the centrality of control over information. This is not to deny that there are capitalist conspiracies, but the capitalist state, like all others, is based on an armed body of men, not on security classification.
Class-struggle militants recognize the importance of exposing capitalist atrocities through propaganda. For example, a central component ofthe defense work of the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee is exposure of the frame-up character of bourgeois justice. We would certainly like to know the real story ofthe murder of Kennedy. While we sent no condolences for the passing ofthis enemy ofthe working class, we are vitally interested in knowing who was behind his assassination, as well as forcing disclosure of the’; murderers of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and other black militants, and exposing what is already known about the killers ofOrlando Letelier and 30,000 Chilean workers and peasants, over a million Vietnamese, the Attica and Wounded Knee militants and numerous black youth gunned down by killer cops in the northern ghettos.
The full-blown rationalizations for the liberalism ofthe conspiracy mongers have appeared in recent books by aged New Leftists Carl Oglesby and Kirkpatrick Sale, who seek to locate the central axis of social and political struggle in ruling-class clique fights between “eastern establishmentarians” and “sunbelt” nouveaux riches. The conceptual fallacies of these liberal’ theories are countless. That the bourgeois base of the Democratic Party has for decades been an alliance of southern oligarchy and eastern financiers is well established; the aerospace industry, the bulwark of the “sunbelt” economy, is dominated by northern capital; the melange of forces allegedly implicated in the Kennedy assassination-from Ivy League CIA spooks to Cuban exiles obviously defies facile geographical classification; and “old country lawyer” Sam Ervin and the southern Congressmen on the House impeachment inquiry delivered key blows against Nixon. Oglesby regards the JFK assassination as a “cowboy coup” (with Watergate a “yankee countercoup”). While this is trivially consistent with Kennedy’s and Johnson’s geographical origins, it hardly accounts for the fact that the liberal “Great Society” program was enacted under Johnson, while Kennedy’s major “contribution” to civil rights was the appointment of racist federal judges in the south
Oglesby’s From Dallas to Watergate: The Yankee and Cowboy War is an explicitly sub-reformist “civics class” call for virtue to triumph over the evil elites who have so recently subverted American democracy. While his concluding slogan is “neither yankee nor cowboy,” for Oglesby the bourgeois factions are the only game in town (this is not only false, it is unfashionable; the “cowboy /yankee” conflict is a late 1960’s concoction, the current version of which is the “trilateral commission” conspiracy). Moreover, this is simply a continuation of hackneyed liberal/ populist/ reformist attempts to single out a few bad capitalists (the “robber barons,” “200 families,” “militaryindustrial complex,” etc.) in order to justify alliances with the “progressive,” “peace-loving,” “democratic” bourgeoisie. This liberalism finds its reflection among the ostensibly Marxist organizations, despite its clear counterposition to a class analysis and the independence of the working class. Sam Marcy of Workers World Party/Youth Against War and Fascism and the psychotic Lyndon LaRouche (aka Lynn Marcus)
of the Labor Committees are the equals of the John Birch Society when it comes to hysteria over ruling-class cliques and conspiracies, with Gerry Healy’s American satellite (the Workers League) and its warnings of imminent fascism not far behind. Certainly there are tactical differences and divisions of varying depths and duration within the capitalist class, and revolutionists must understand and exploit them. But the central axis of social struggle is between the bourgeoi; sie and the proletariat.
The objective conditions are rotten ripe for socialism. Not conspiracy theory muckraking, not “tactical alliances” with the “progressive” bourgeoisie, but the building of the international . revolutionary Trotskyist leadership of the workers is required in order to sweep the exploiters and intriguers of capitalism away. There remain plenty of skeletons in the closets’ of the bourgeoisie. and its hired guns: the FBI/CIA, municipal “red squads,” gusano terrorists, the Mafia and various native pro-fascist organizations. Who knows what would sJi.ther out from under the overturned rocks in a serious and thorough investigation? Ultimately, it is th’ifriumph of the proletariat which will make such an investigation possible and uncover the many unsolved mysteries in the bloody record of international capitalism. As the Bolsheviks were able to finally unravel the countless plots and murders of the Okhrana only after taking state power, so will the working class of the U.S. uncover the real history of American imperialist terror following their establishment of a workers’ state.•
Oliver Stone’s glitzy, star-studded movie about the assassination of John F. Kennedy is dedicated to the youth of America and implores them not to trust the government. For youth tuned in to music videos like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” for a generation that has come of age with “Contragate” and revelations that the government is run by a bunch of corrupt, lying thieves and scoundrels, this film is ripe for the times.
JFK is packing ’em in at the box office … and drawing a blistering barrage from all corners of the bourgeois press. Liberal columnists and rightist pundits are spilling bottles of ink in fury over Stone’s “irresponsible” and “not to be trusted”· whodunit which asserts that JFK’s assassination was a conspiracy planned and executed at the highest echelons of the “military-industrial complex.” But it is Stone’s lying, liberal whydunit that has us Marxists hopping mad.
The movie JFK asserts that the boyish Prince Kennedy was an antimilitarist out to dismantle the CIA, negotiate with Castro and pull American troops out of Vietnam, and that America would be Shangri-La today if not for Kennedy’s unnatural death in Dallas.
Well, gentle reader, as Stone himself might say, “don’t believe the hype.” To get the truth, the real JFK must be exhumed from Oliver Stone’s mountain of myths.
Was Lee Harvey Oswald a lone nut assassin or a patsy for a CIA conspiracy?
As Alexander Cockburn wrote in an excellent autopsy of JFK, the answer to this question “has as much to do with the subsequent contours of American politics as if. he had tripped over one of. Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery.”
Cockburn adds: ”’Get a life,’ Captain Kirk once told some Trekkies. Get some history too. Critics of JFK like Tom Wicker have fretted that ‘in an era when mistrust of govenment and loss of confidence in institutions (the press not least) are wide spread and virulent, such a suggestion [that is that representatives of the ruling elites murdered J.F.K.] seems a dubious public service.’ In fact the dubious public service is to suggest that J.F.K. himself was not a functional representative of those elites.
“The real J.F.K. backed a military coup in Guatemala to keep out Arevalo, denied the Dominican Republic the possibility of land reform, helped promote a devastating cycle of Latin American history, including the anticipatory motions of the coup in Brazil, and backed a Baathist coup in Iraq that set a certain native of Tikrit on the path to power. He presided .-. over Operation Mongoose, inflicting terror upon Cuba. At the very moment bullets brought J.F.K. ‘s life to its conclusion in Dallas, a C.I.A. officer operating firmly within the boqnds of Kennedy’s policy was handing poison to a Cuban agent in Paris, designed to kill Castro ….
“J.F.K. sent in 16,000 advisers [to Vietnam], sponsored the strategic hamlet program, launched napalm and defoliation upon the South and covert terror and sabotage upon the North. He never entertained the idea of a settlement …… -Nation, 6/13 January
Remember Bay of Pigs!
Kennedy was a liberal, militantly anti-Communist Cold Warrior whose “charisma” replaced the fright of McCarthyism and the stodginess o(the Eisenhower years, and served to whip up support for America’s imperialist ambitions abroad. He narrowly defeated then vice president Richard Nixon/ in the 1960 election, arguing that the Republican White House was giving ground tQ Communism. In the televised Nixon-Kennedy debate just before the election, the handsome media sharp Kennedy wiped the floor with the grey dishtowel Nixon. “I have seen Cuba go to the Communists,” raved Kennedy. “I have seen Communist influence and Castro influence rise in Latin America … the balance of power is in danger of moving with [the Soviets}. They made a breakthrough in missiles, and by 1961-2-3 they will be outnumbering us in missiles … I look up and I see the Soviet flag on the moon.”
Just three months into office JFK launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The gusano scum who fled Cuba after the revolution were armed and trained by the Kennedy administration for a botched attempt to bring back the rule of the big landlords, the American sugar interests, and the Mafia with their gambling dens and whorehouses that had flourished in Cuba under the dictator Batista. (Indeed the Mafia served Kennedy in a multitude of tasks-from truly bizarre murder plots to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, to the more mundane hustling of girls into the White House for JFK’s liaisons, to the rustling of votes, for example, in Chicago where an extraordinary number of dead people came back to vote Democrat in the very close 1960 election.)
The ignominious defeat of the gusanos and their CIA handlers at the Bay of Pigs was a victory for the workers and peasants of Cuba and a stinging defeat for U.S. imperialism. Immediately following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fulminated, “Let me then make clear as your President that I am determined upon our system’s survival and success, regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril.” The next year Kennedy brought the world to the edge of nuclear abyss by threatening war with the Soviet Union over missiles placed in Cuba. Khrushchev “blinked” and withdrew the missiles, but with massive Soviet military and economic aid and a lot of courage and determination by the Cuban people, the U.S. was unable to roll back a revolution made, as Castro liked to say, “in the nostril of Yankee imperialism.”
Many American youth who became radicalized in the ’60s traveled to Cuba to cut cane and witness firsthand a revolution that overturned capitalist property relations and, despite. Stalinist deformations, led to a significant increase in literacy and living standards for the Cuban masses. For three decades U.S. imperialism has strangled the Cuban economy with an economic blockade. The appetites of the ruling class to finally crush Cuba are sharpened now that Cuba has been abandoned by its former Soviet ally and protector. Yet Oliver Stone would have you believe that JFK, the man who began the imperialist drive to reconquer Cuba, was offed for being “soft on Communism.”
Remember Vietnam!
The central, most pernicious lie in JFK is Oliver Stone’s myth that Kennedy planned to pull American troops out of Vietnam if he won a second term in the 1964 elections. That is why, in the world according to Stone, Kennedy was tumbled in “a fascist coup d’etat” which brought LBJ to power and kept the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. Where does Stone’s effective and compelling conspiracy demonology lead? S
tone delivers his audience straight back to the quest for a Democratic Party white knight to battle the forces of darkness. In fact one of the most radical conclusions drawn by the generation that was drafted to fight in Vietnam was precisely that this dirty anti-Communist crusade was proclaimed, initiated, escalated and led, not by rightists like Barry Goldwater and the younger Ronald Reagan, but by the great liberal hero of the day, John F. Kennedy. It was the Kennedy boys..- the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara and his whiz kids at the Pentagon (who promised “more bang for the buck” ) – the whole cast of “Camelot” – who began escalating the war in the early 1960s, absolutely confident that they would win and prepared to murder as many Vietnamese as necessary for their objectives.
Kennedy mythologizers have made much about minute changes between National Security Action Memorandum 273, as drawn up by the JFK team in October 1963, and the wording released by LBJ a month later. As “evidence” the nuances have about as much significance as what the nutty JFK conspiracy buffs see in the man along the parade route in Dallas who opens an umbrella, thus “sending a signal” about the lack of air cover during the Bay of Pigs.
JFK vowed, “We are not going to withdraw …. In my opinion, to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia.” The Kennedy-version NSAM 273 stated: “We will adhere to our policy of working with the people and Government of South Vietnam to deny this country to communism and to suppress the externally stimulated and supported insurgency of the Viet Cong as promptly as possible. Effective performance in this undertaking is the central objective of our policy in South Vietnam.”
When Kennedy took office in January 1961 there were 685 American “military advisers” in Vietnam. By the time of his death Kennedy had jumped it up to almost 17,000 “advisers” who actively directed the atrocities being committed against the Vietnamese. Most of these troops were from Special Forces-counterinsurgency units that Kennedy took a special personal interest in. As commander in chief, JFK liked to visit the base, gladhand his men and dress them in the infamous green berets. Central to Kennedy’s war plan was the “strategic hamlet program.” Under “Operation Phoenix” thousands of Vietnamese villagers were forcibly relocated under American guns ‘into concentration camps ringed with barbed wire. Suspected “VC” sympathizers were exterminated. This desperate attempt to behead and suppress a popular revolution ended in defeat. The Vietnamese had something to fight for, and to free their country from capitalist immiseration and colonial bondage they fought heroically until the last American puppet was airlifted off the roof of the Saigon embassy.
The victory of the Vietnamese Revolution, at a cost of two million Vietnamese lives, marked the end of the “American Century.” Their defeat of U.S. imperialism bought the world a big breathing space as the “VIetnam syndrome,” the disgruntled domestic consciousness of that defeat, stayed the hands of U.S. rulers for a while. It took the collapse of Stalinism and the selfremoval of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to American imperialist ambitions, for the U.S. to again rush in and massacre thousands of civilians as was done in the Persian Gulf. Bush marked his bloody victory declaring, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome.”
Democratic Party: We Know Which Side You’re On!
The politics of the Kennedy assassination buffs range from mainstream liberalism to the far-right Liberty Lobby. This is far afield from a Marxist understanding that social change is determined by Class struggle, and not fundamentally by the life expectancy of bourgeois politicians. As we wrote in “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (Workers Vanguard No. 153, 15 April 1977) about the widespread’ disbelief in the Warren Commission’s version of the’ Kennedy assassination: “But in the absence of a perceived revolutionary alternative to bourgeois politics, the conspiracy industry and the muckraking fad have succeeded only in feeding the widespread cynicism. The various conspiracy theories all share the same technocratic, idealist and moralist illusion. in the centrality of control over information. This is not to deny that there are capitalist conspiracies, but the capitalist state, like all others, is based on an armed body of men, not on security classifications …. “
Who knows what would slither out from under the overturned rocks in a serious and thorough investigation? Ultimately, it is the triumph of the proletariat which will make such an investigation possible and uncover the many unsolved mysteries in the bloody record of international capitalism. “ Oliver Stone has been making the rounds at universities and talk shows to defend his film and his liberal vision of how “America lost its innocence.”
Recently hundreds of students stood in line for hours in the Boston winter to see JFK and hear Oliver Stone speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The irony is exquisite-did any of those freezing students wonder just exactly what goes on inside the K-School? A fitting memorial to JFK, the K-School is a major Pentagon think tank, founded by the heirs of Camelot and tied by a thousand threads to the counterrevolutionary schemes (overt and covert) for every Democratic and Republican administration since. Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and his K-School colleague-in crime Graham Allison planned the starvation shock treatments introducing the “free world” to the working masses of Poland and the Soviet Union.
Selling the Democrats as the “lesser evil” is one of the constant refrains of American politics in this century. If the current Democratic leader is an unappetizing SOB like Truman, or you have a field of. nonentities (like the “seven dwarfs” of the 88 election) then they hold up the mythical legacy of FDR or, in this case, JFK. The assassination of John Kennedy was not “the crime of the century.” American entries in that sweepstakes might be the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or napalming of Vietnamese villagers-crimes carried out by these same Democrats. From Kennedy to Bush there stretches an unbroken bipartisan chain of imperialist dictatorship, oppression, terror, spying and slaughter. In antiwar demonstrations against U.S. imperialist aggression from El Salvador to the Persian Gulf, Spartacist protesters have confronted liberal and reformist illusions with our chant and’ signs saying: “Remember Bay o/Pigs! Remember Vietnam! Democratic Party—We know which side you’re on!”
P.S. If you want a Stone flick that tells it like it is, see Salvador-which the New York Times denounced in their TV guide as “irresponsible.”
Mark Wahlberg was raised in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts. As a teenager Mark Wahlberg was involved in numerous attacks on black people and Asian people. He was caught multiple times, and his defiant claims at the time that he was in the right when he attacked outsiders coming into his neighborhood would indicate that Mark Wahlberg was involved in other attacks where he was not caught.
Wahlberg has made strangely worded ‘apologies’ for his acts that were committed when he was in his mid-teens and did not lead to a life as a race terrorist. Wahlberg paints himself as a victim of beer and cannabis and ‘not being a leader.’ Critics point out that many people drink beer or smoke and they do not go out on the street and hit people on the head with clubs because they are Asian. Wahlberg was the leader of many of the racist acts he took part in when he was 16 and 17 years old, which is close to military age.
As a victim of bad influences Mark Wahlberg has asked Massachusetts governors for a pardon for his past criminal convictions.
Mark Wahlberg is leaving out the other attack he made with racist motives. When Wahlberg was 16 he had some run ins with a ten-year-old black boy who had moved into Wahlberg’s neighborhood. He chased the little boy out of a playground one evening with the boys little sister in tears. The next day a third grade class was on a walking field trip when Wahlberg spotted them. He harassed the class and gathered other teens to throw rocks at the integrated group walking down the sidewalk. The woman teacher and aide where helpless against the enraged Wahlberg screaming about ‘black people.’ Finally a passing ambulance stopped and Wahlberg ran away when adult men confronted him. This is one of the incidents Wahlberg used to claim to be a ‘street fighter.’ A pathetic racist coward who attacked little kids and women but was afraid of men who could fight back. In Hollywood this passes as tough.
A victim of one of Mark Wahlberg’s racially motivated attacks as a teenage delinquent in segregated Boston in the 1980s insists he shouldn’t be granted a pardon for his crimes.
Kristyn Atwood was among a group of mostly black fourth-grade students on a field trip to the beach in 1986 when Wahlberg and his white friends began hurling rocks and shouting racial epithets as they chased them down the street.
“I don’t think he should get a pardon,” Atwood, now 38 and living in Decatur, Georgia, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“I don’t really care who he is. It doesn’t make him any exception. If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it I just think it’s wrong,” she said.
Mary Belmonte, the white teacher who brought the students to the neighborhood beach that day, sees things differently. “I believe in forgiveness,” she said. “He was just a young kid – a punk – in the mean streets of Boston. He didn’t do it specifically because he was a bad kid. He was just a follower doing what the other kids were doing.”
The 43-year-old former rapper, Calvin Klein model and “Boogie Nights” actor wants official forgiveness for a separate, more severe attack in 1988, in which he assaulted two Vietnamese men while trying to steal beer. That attack sent one of the men to the hospital and landed Wahlberg in prison.
Wahlberg, in a pardon application filed in November and pending before the state parole board, acknowledges he was a teenage delinquent mixed up in drugs, alcohol and the wrong crowd. He points to his ensuing successful acting career, restaurant ventures and philanthropic work with inner city youths as evidence he’s turned his life around.
“I have apologized, many times,” he told the AP in December. “The first opportunity I had to apologize was right there in court when all the dust had settled and I was getting shackled and taken away, and making sure I paid my debt to society and continue to try and do things that make up for the mistakes that I’ve made.”
Court documents in the 1986 attack identify Wahlberg among a group of white boys who harassed the school group as they were leaving Savin Hill Beach in Dorchester, a mixed but segregated Boston neighborhood that had seen racial tensions during the years the city was under court-ordered school integration.
The boys chased the black children down the street, repeatedly shouting “n—–” and hurling rocks until an ambulance driver intervened. Wahlberg was 15 at the time.
Atwood says she still bears a scar from getting hit by a rock. No one was seriously injured, but the attack left a lasting impression.
“I was really scared. My heart was beating fast. I couldn’t believe it was happening. The names. The rocks. The kids chasing,” Belmonte told the AP.
Wahlberg and two other white youths were issued a civil rights injunction: essentially a stern warning that if they committed another hate crime, they would be sent to jail.
In 1988, Wahlberg, then 16, attacked two Vietnamese men while trying to steal beer near his Dorchester home.
According to the sentencing memorandum, he confronted Thanh Lam, a Vietnamese man, as he was getting out of his car with two cases of beer. Wahlberg called Lam a “Vietnam f—— s—” and beat him over the head with a 5-foot wooden stick until Lam lost consciousness and the rod broke in two.
Documents say Wahlberg ran up to another Vietnamese man, Hoa Trinh, and asked for help hiding. After a police cruiser drove past, he punched Trinh in the eye. Later, he made crude remarks about Asians.
Wahlberg ultimately was convicted as an adult of two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, marijuana possession and criminal contempt for violating the prior civil rights injunction. He was given a three-month prison sentence, of which he served about 45 days.
Trinh declined to be interviewed by AP, and efforts to locate Lam were unsuccessful.
Judith Beals, a former state prosecutor involved in the cases, said Wahlberg’s crimes stand out because he violated the injunction with an even more violent attack on people of yet another race.
“It was a hate crime and that’s exactly what should be on his record forever,” Atwood said.
В 2017 году американский журнал The National Interest опубликовал статью с красноречивым названием: «5 причин, по которым Россия и Китай могут не потопить авианосец США». Автор статьи подробно рассматривает эти причины. Все они, кстати, довольно очевидны.
Первым оказалось (вы верите?), Что «американский авианосец большой и быстрый. . . «Второй -« у него много оружия. . . «Третья причина -« хорошо защищена ». . . ». Четвертая причина – «действует расчетливо. . . «И, наконец, пятое -« американские военные технологии – лучшие в мире. . . ».
Это набор упрощенных пропагандистских клише, которые американская пропагандистская машина вбивает в голову простому западному человеку. Важно понимать, что The National Interest – это не какая-то «желтая» бумага; это аналитический журнал, предлагающий ответственные и профессиональные публикации.
Большой и быстрый гроб с пропеллером
Рассмотрим подробнее, как автор статьи – эксперт и политолог объясняет своим читателям, почему американские авианосцы неуязвимы и непотопляемы. . .
Хорошо, первый тезис. Американский авиалайнер действительно большой и быстрый. Имеет 25 колод; максимальная высота 80 метров; он вытесняет 100 000 тонн воды и может нести 70, а то и 90 самолетов разных типов.
К сожалению, эту прекрасную картину портит одна маленькая деталь: в большую цель легче попасть! Но американцы просто не могут уменьшить свои авианосцы. Причина проста: они безумно дорогие. Переноски должны быть таких огромных размеров просто потому, что, если они будут меньше, их потребуется больше. Гибкость американского авианосного флота в этом случае увеличилась бы, но цена взлетела бы до небес.
Судите сами: современный авианосец обходится США примерно в 13 миллиардов долларов (именно столько стоит новейший «Джеральд Форд»), а авианосное крыло (вариант F-35 для ВМФ) на базе авианосца стоит дополнительно 7 миллиардов долларов. .
Плюс к этому корабли «авианосной ударной группы» – многоцелевые ракетные корабли, эсминцы, оснащенные боевой системой Aegis, и малозаметные ударные подводные лодки. Таким образом, одна такая группа обходится американцам примерно в 50 миллиардов долларов! И, кстати, эти 50 миллиардов долларов никогда не смогут двигаться так быстро, как утверждает «эксперт» в национальных интересах. . .
Но в Америке такие детали никого не интересуют.
Автор не уклоняется от заявления: «Авианосцы постоянно движутся при развернутой скорости до 35 миль в час – достаточно быстро, чтобы обогнать подводные лодки – их обнаружение и отслеживание затруднительно.
В течение 30 минут после обнаружения врагами площадь, в которой мог действовать авианосец, выросла до 700 квадратных миль; через 90 минут площадь увеличилась до 6000 квадратных миль ».
Звучит здорово, но на самом деле ни один американский авианосец не может достичь такой скорости. Максимальная скорость, которую он может поддерживать – в течение ограниченного времени – составляет 30 узлов. Ключевое слово здесь – ОГРАНИЧЕННОЕ время.
Если кто-то думает, что авианосец может сразу после выхода в открытое море разогнаться до 30 узлов (почти 56 км в час) и продолжать гонку на волнах, то он сильно ошибается.
Это невозможно. На самом деле 95% времени американские авианосцы движутся в экономичном режиме со скоростью не выше 14 узлов (около 26 км / час). Когда самолеты взлетают или приземляются на авианосец, его способность изменять скорость или курс серьезно ограничена. Авианосец – это не байк. Если бы этот плавучий аэродром все время вертелся из стороны в сторону, пилоты не могли бы совершить посадку.
Еще одна маленькая деталь: кто даст авианосцу 30 минут, чтобы он смог вырваться из зоны боевых действий? Даже старая советская ракета «Гранит» (заметим, что у американцев ничего подобного до сих пор нет), которой вооружены наши атомные подводные крейсеры типа 949 «Антей», выпущенная с максимальной дальности, достигла цели в считанные секунды чуть больше 500 секунд.
Это означает, что при пуске ракеты американский авианосец успеет уйти от точки обнаружения на максимальной скорости не более чем на 7,5 км. Такая дистанция определенно находится в пределах дальности действия механизма самонаведения «Гранита». Таким образом, ракета достигнет цели и, если не будет нейтрализована средствами ПВО (что маловероятно), уничтожит цель.
Более того, как должен знать американский «эксперт», никто не будет стрелять по авианосной группе всего одной ракетой! Каждая наша подводная лодка «Антей» оснащена 24 такими ракетами. Кроме того, я считаю, что если начальник штаба нашего ВМФ планирует операцию по уничтожению американского авианосца, в этой операции будет задействовано не один «Антей».
Если все 24 ракеты «Гранит» будут запущены одновременно, их будет практически невозможно перехватить. Большинство из них летают на очень малой высоте: они ползают прямо над поверхностью океана. Выше пролетает одна ракета – она направляет всю стаю к цели. Если противник уничтожает управляющую ракету, она немедленно заменяется одной из оставшихся ракет, летящих ниже.
Когда советские инженеры проектировали эти ракеты, они включили в свою конструкцию элементы искусственного интеллекта: ракеты взаимодействуют друг с другом, выбирая цели таким образом, чтобы две ракеты случайно не поразили одну и ту же небольшую цель.
Например, наши ракеты умеют выбирать основную цель, и если этой целью является авианосец, «Граниты» не будут нацеливаться на сопровождающие военные корабли – они будут нацелены именно на авианосец.
Кроме того, у ракет есть и другие маленькие хитрости, которые наверняка станут «приятным» сюрпризом для американцев, например, способность взаимодействовать с Морской космической системой разведки и наведения (NSIG).
Однако похоже, что автор этой американской статьи не подозревает о существовании NSIG. Однако такая система существовала еще в Советском Союзе под названием «Легенда». Его российский потомок – «Лиана», обладающая широкими возможностями по обнаружению и отслеживанию групп американских авианосцев в океане. Эта система способна наводить ракеты на цели даже после их пуска.
Очевидно, что каким бы хорошим ни было вооружение или насколько сложна система обнаружения, нет 100% гарантии, что авианосец будет уничтожен первым пуском ракеты. Однако вероятность того, что всеми имеющимися в нашем распоряжении средствами мы его потопим, довольно высока.
Вооружен до зубов и очень осторожен
Давайте выясним, кто поставляет серьезным американским журналам такой аналитический хлам. Кто этот фантастический американский «эксперт», который без труда вводит своих читателей в заблуждение? Это, кстати, Лорен Томпсон, главный операционный директор Lexington Institute, известной организации. Он также является заместителем директора программы исследований в области безопасности в Джорджтаунском университете, где он преподавал стратегию аспирантам и читал лекции в Школе государственного управления Гарвардского университета.
Мы можем только догадываться, какой стратегии этот знаток стратегического мышления учил своих учеников. Думаю, мы можем оценить качество подготовки государственных служащих на лекции этого выдающегося «эксперта».
Но вернемся к причинам, по которым мы якобы никогда не сможем потопить американский авианосец.
Вторая и третья причины, по словам Томпсона, заключаются в том, что американский авианосец «имеет много оружия и может защитить себя. . . » Кто мог подумать? Действительно, сразу чувствуется, что он имеет дело с настоящим профессионалом, разбирающимся в сути дела.
Авианосец действительно загружен вооружением. Однако Томпсон, похоже, не понимает, что это наступательное, а не оборонительное оружие. Авианосец совершенно неспособен защитить себя! Предполагается, что противовоздушную оборону и защиту от подводных лодок будут обеспечивать сопровождающие корабли.
Лорен Томпсон говорит, что эти корабли многочисленны и хорошо вооружены, и поэтому керри никогда не будут потоплены. Боюсь напомнить, что нападение на авианосец в одиночку тоже не будет!
В советское время для уничтожения одного американского авианосца предназначался целый полк ракетных самолетов Тай-22. Это несколько десятков самолетов. Плюс подлодки, вооруженные крылатыми ракетами. Плюс другие средства нападения и поражения, имеющиеся в распоряжении нашего ВМФ.
История учит нас: 70 лет назад во время Второй мировой войны присутствие большого количества сопровождающих кораблей не помешало японцам потопить многие американские авианосцы. За два года с 1942 по 1944 год они успешно потопили аж 11 штук! Мы должны думать, что наступательные вооружения значительно продвинулись с тех пор.
Например, истребитель-перехватчик Ту-22 М3 (дальний сверхзвуковой ракетоносец – прим. Ред.). Эти советские самолеты проходят основательную модернизацию, и в оснащение этих недавно модернизированных машин Ту-22 М3М войдут, в частности, противокорабельные ракеты нового поколения Х-32. Их почему-то редко упоминают в прессе, но это фантастические ракеты. После старта они поднимаются на 40 км и летят со скоростью почти в 5 раз быстрее звука. Попав на цель, они спускаются на нее почти вертикально.
Сегодня у ВМС США нет оружия, даже отдаленно близкого по своим характеристикам к нашему Х-32. У американцев также нет системы ПВО, способной перехватить эту ракету.
Вот почему особенно важна четвертая причина, которая, как утверждает The National Interest, делает врага неспособным уничтожить американские авианосцы. Что это за причина? Ах да, они «не рискуют». Когда, может быть, лучше вообще не покидать базу и выходить в открытый океан? Это намного безопаснее.
Но если вы там. . . Рисковать или нет, но по пути в зону конфликта с нашим флотом (например, в Северной Атлантике) американские авианосцы должны будут проходить проливы, узкие каналы, где, естественно, будут проходить наши подводные лодки и другие силы. ждать их и, согласно российским обычаям, встречать «хлебом-солью» крылатых ракет, приправленных торпедами, минами и бомбами. . . В любом случае традиционный российский прием авианосцев будет обеспечен!
Будь осторожен или нет, но из Джексонвилля, базы американского ВМФ на восточном побережье США, к нашим берегам (например, в зону ответственности Северного флота с его грив-базами на Кольском полуострове) нельзя попасть в обход несколько известных узких каналов и проливов.
Сами американцы во время холодной войны сооружали в этих местах противолодочные заграждения, чтобы наши подводные лодки не попали в Атлантический океан. Наиболее известные примеры – заграждение по линии мыс Нордкап – остров Медвежий и между Исландией и Фарерскими островами.
Последняя, пятая причина непобедимости американских авианосцев, по мнению Лорена Томпсона, является величайшим достижением его экспертно-аналитического подхода. Причина – очевидный для каждого американца факт, что американцы вообще лучшие в мире и обладают лучшими технологиями, в том числе и военными. Однако это не совсем так. Например, российские технологии создания противокорабельных крылатых ракет однозначно лучше американских. Это знают все, кто что-то знает и чему-то научился. В частности, военные специалисты уделяют пристальное внимание российским гиперзвуковым ракетам нового поколения.
Дальновидные паникеры
Американцы, похоже, не поддаются разуму, но некоторые из их союзников более или менее адекватны. Так, в последнее время в британских СМИ возникла настоящая истерия по поводу новой российской ракеты «Циркон».
Первой подняла тревогу британская газета The Independent. В нем говорилось: «Остановить« Циркон »невозможно. Даже новейшие системы ПВО, которые еще не поступили в ВМС Великобритании, смогут поражать цель только на максимальной скорости 3700 км / час, тогда как «Циркон» может достигать 6000 или даже 7400 км / час ».
Daily Star предложила дальнейшее развитие темы о страшных русских: «Россия производит смертоносные ракеты, способные уничтожить весь Королевский флот одним ударом. Представитель МИД Великобритании считает, что российский «Циркон», который может нести ядерную боеголовку, полностью меняет правила ведения войны на море. Наши авианосцы просто не могли быть размещены там, где у россиян есть эти ракеты. . . »
Другая британская газета, «Зеркало», вела в том же паникерском тоне. В нем было написано: «Российская ракета движется со скоростью, вдвое превышающей скорость снайперской пули. Он может отправить на дно моря самые современные корабли. Специалисты утверждают, что сегодня у нашего ВМФ нет защиты от этого страшного оружия. Появление «Циркона» в российском арсенале делает бесполезными оба наших авианосца стоимостью 7 миллиардов долларов каждый ».
The Daily Mail добавила финальный аккорд к этому паническому хору:
«Россия создала непобедимую крылатую ракету, которая движется со скоростью 4600 миль в час и способна одним ударом уничтожить британские самолеты. Эта смертоносная ракета «Циркон» может запускаться с земли, моря или авианосцев.
Он преодолевает 155 миль за 2,5 минуты. Его появление делает бессмысленным само представление о группировке авианосцев, и нам просто нечем противостоять ».
Американцы, конечно, могли надеяться, что наш «Циркон» представляет угрозу исключительно для британских авианосцев. Независимо от того, что они думают, факты говорят об ином: любая попытка американского флота проверить в реальных боевых условиях, смогут ли русские потопить свой авианосец, скорее всего, очень плохо кончится для США А.
In 2014, when waves of refugees began flooding into western Europe, citizens and officials alike responded with generosity and openness. Exhausted refugees spilled out of trains and buses to be met by crowds bearing gifts of clothing and food, and holding up placards that read “Welcome Refugees.”
Beaten, Raped, Murdered by Afghan Refugee Maria Ladenburger, was a medical student who was found dead on the banks of the river Dreisam, which Freiburg straddles, on 16 October 2016
This was a honeymoon that could not last. Some of the upcoming difficulties had been anticipated: that the newcomers did not speak the local languages, might be traumatized, would probably take a long time to find their footing, and had brought their ethnic, religious and sectarian conflicts with them, causing them to get into battles with each other. All of these things happened but—as Angela Merkel promised—were manageable. “Wir schaffen das.”
But there was one development that had not been expected, and was not tolerable: the large and growing incidence of sexual assaults committed by refugees against local women. These were not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but were vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs or packs of young men. At first, the incidents were downplayed or hushed up—no one wanted to provide the right wing with fodder for nationalist agitation, and the hope was that these were isolated instances caused by a small problem group of outliers. As the incidents increased, and because many of them took place in public or because the public became involved either in stopping the attack or in aiding the victim afterwards, and because the courts began issuing sentences as the cases came to trial, the matter could no longer be swept under the carpet of political correctness. And with the official acknowledgment and public reporting, a weird and puzzling footnote emerged. Most of the assaults were being committed by refugees of one particular nationality: by Afghans.
Mothers with infants have been targeted – A three year old was raped on the Greek Island of Lesbos.
Actually Afghans should not even have been part of the refugee tide, at least not in significant numbers. It was the Syrians who were expected. Afghanistan, a place of lingering and chronic conflict, is no longer on the official refugee roster—that’s reserved for acute political and military emergencies. Still, European authorities and the public were sympathetic, and could understand why Afghans would want to leave a country rife with suicide bombings and empty of opportunity. Also, Europeans held a baseline positive sentiment towards Afghanistan. Many baby-boomer Europeans had, in their hippie days of yore, traversed that country in the legendary VW buses, and retained fond memories of friendly, hospitable people. Later everyone had mourned the loss of the Bamiyan Buddhas and felt for the poor people suffering under Taliban rule. And after that, NATO had been part of the “coalition of the willing.” Europeans were predisposed to be positive towards Afghan refugees. But it quickly became obvious that something was wrong, very wrong, with these young Afghan men: they were committing sex crimes to a much greater extent than other refugees, even those from countries that were equally or more backward, just as Islamic and conservative, and arguably just as misogynist.
This is not an article that has been fun for me to write. I have worked on issues related to refugees for much of my professional life, from the Pakistani camps during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to Yemen, Sudan, Thailand, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Lebanon, Bosnia, Nicaragua and Iraq, and have deep sympathy for their plight. But nowhere had I encountered a phenomenon like this one. I had seen refugees trapped in circumstances that made them vulnerable to rape, by camp guards or soldiers. But for refugees to become perpetrators of this crime in the place that had given them asylum? That was something new. Further, my personal and professional life has endowed me with many Afghan and Afghan American friends, and there is nothing collectively psychopathic about them. They are doctors, shopkeepers, owners of Japanese restaurants, airport sedan drivers, entrepreneurs, IT experts, salesladies at Macy’s—they’re like everyone else. The parent generation tends to be a bit stiff, formal and etiquette conscious. It is impossible to imagine any of them engaging in the sort of outlandish, bizarre and primitive sexual aggression their young compatriots are becoming infamous for. Yet here we are.
A few weeks ago, the Austrian city of Tulln declared a full stop to any further refugee admissions. As the mayor made clear, that decision was aimed at Afghans, but for legal and administrative reasons it could only be promulgated in a global way. That had not been the city’s intention—to the contrary, it had just completed the construction of an expensive, brand-new facility for incoming asylum seekers, which would now, the mayor declared, be given over to another purpose. His exact words: “We’ve had it.” The tipping point, after a series of disturbing incidents all emanating from Afghans, was the brutal gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, snatched from the street on her way home, dragged away and serially abused by Afghan refugees.
And that was just one in a string of outrage-inducing occurrences, all of them going to the account of Afghans.
A while before, in Vienna, a young female Turkish exchange student had been pursued into a public restroom by three Afghan refugees. They jammed the door shut and proceeded to savagely attack her. Grabbing her by the neck, they struck her head repeatedly against a porcelain toilet bowl to knock her out. When that failed to break her desperate resistance, they took turns holding her down and raping her. The young woman required a hospital stay, after which—too traumatized to resume her studies—she fled home to Turkey, where she continues to be depressed and miserable, unable to process what happened and unable, in a conservative Muslim society, to talk about her experience to anybody except one best friend and confidante.
It took a while for the pattern to be recognized because, until recently, western European media deliberately refrained from identifying an assailant’s refugee or asylum status, or his country of origin. Only when the correlation became so dramatic that it was itself newsworthy did this policy change. At that point, it became clear that the authorities had known about, and for political reasons had deliberately covered up, large-scale incidences of sexual assault by migrants. For example, a gang of fifty Afghans who terrorized women in the neighborhood of the Linz train station had been brushed off by a government official with the remark that this was an unfortunate consequence of bad weather, and that once summer came the young men would disperse into the public parks and no longer move in such a large, menacing pack. The public was not amused.
I could write the same report about Sweden, Germany, or any other country of asylum in Europe, but I am focusing on examples from Austria because that’s the European country I come from and know best. So let’s take a look at the Austrian press. This from Österreich, the daily newspaper distributed for free on public transit and thus read, basically, by almost everyone. Front page: Afghan (eighteen) attacks young woman at Danube Festival. “Once again there has been an attempted rape by an Afghan. A twenty-one-year-old Slovak tourist was mobbed and groped by a group of men. She managed to get away, but was pursued by one of them, an Afghan asylum seeker who caught her and dragged her into the bushes. Nearby plainclothes policemen noticed the struggle and intervened to prevent the rape at the last moment.” Page ten: “A twenty-five-year-old Afghan attempted to rape a young woman who was sitting in the sun in the park. Four courageous passersby dragged the man off the victim and held him until the police arrived.” Page twelve: “Two Afghans have been sentenced for attempting to rape a woman on a train in Graz. The men, who live in an asylum seekers’ residence, first insulted the young woman with obscene verbal remarks before attacking her. When she screamed for help, passengers from other parts of the train rushed to her aid.”
Let’s leave aside the reprehensibility of this conduct for the moment and focus instead on its logic or lack thereof. Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought—or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.
Type two words into Google—Afghane and Vergewaltigung—and a cornucopia of appalling incidents unfolds before you. The mentally retarded woman in Linz, kidnapped, dragged to an Afghan refugee’s apartment and raped until she was finally able to escape into his bathroom, lock herself in and, as he battered at the door, crank open the window and scream for help. Incidents like that one point to a cold-blooded predator, with planning and premeditation.
Others are merely baffling. Public swimming pools are confronted with epidemics of young Afghan men who think it a good idea to expose themselves, whipping off their pants and standing there until tackled by the lifeguards and removed from the premises with orders to never return. Let’s be charitable: let’s assume that at some point, one or two of these young men might have heard stories of nudist beaches and thought to join in. But that’s hardly an explanation. Seriously; in a foreign country where your legal standing is tenuous, wouldn’t you cast a quick glance around to ensure that you are not the first and only man thus flaunting his ornamentation, before engaging in conduct that your entire upbringing has taught you to consider unthinkable? Come on!
Plus, within hours or days of their arrival, the Afghan-refugee grapevine educates newcomers as to the ins and outs of navigating the country: what offices to go to and what to say when you get there, where to apply for additional aid, where to find free housing and so on. If they can learn all of that, they can figure out the dress code.
So again: what’s going on? Why is this happening? And why the Afghans? A few competing theories are in circulation.
First: “They get drunk.” One of my interlocutors, a diaspora Afghan who has lived in Vienna for decades and works as a certified court translator and advisor, and thus is intimately familiar with these cases and the persons involved, dismisses this explanation out of hand. Rather, he says, word has gotten out that claiming to have been mentally incapacitated during the commission of a crime—including from alcohol or drugs—counts as an extenuating circumstance. Often, he relates, the defendants will have been inadequately briefed and will put this excuse forward ineptly. For example, they will say that they drank two beers and from these blacked out, remembering nothing of their subsequent actions. This theory also does not explain why Afghans should be more prone to alcohol-induced sexual aggression than other young refugee men from comparable backgrounds.
A second theory hypothesizes confusion caused by a clash in cultural values. These young men, the theory holds, come from a country where women are mere dark silhouettes completely hidden under pleated burqas. Confronted with girls in tank tops and short shorts, they lose their grip on sanity and their hormones run away with them. This theory, in addition to being borderline blame-the-victim offensive, does not hold water. Again, the same reaction should then also be shown by other young men from strict Islamic societies where gender segregation is the norm; why would only the Afghans react this way? And how does it explain cases such as that of the seventy-two-year-old pensioner, out walking her dog when attacked, beaten and raped by a young Afghan? Or the schoolboy, kidnapped and gang-raped in Sweden by a group of Afghans?
Indeed, if we review the pattern of the attacks, we can soon dismiss this theory. Typically, the preferred targets are not what stereotype might imagine, provocatively dressed young women that a confused Muslim from the ultraconservative hinterland misinterprets as promiscuous. No; often, the victims are mothers with small children. I am guessing that to a predator, they appear to be easier targets, because it is assumed they will be handicapped in their ability to fight back, but there may also be some more Freudian dimension that I am missing.
In one recent case that raised a huge public outcry, a woman was out for a walk in a park on an elevation above the Danube. With her she had her two children, a toddler plus her infant in a baby carriage. Out of the blue, an Afghan refugee leapt at her, threw her down, bit her, strangled her and attempted to rape her. In the struggle, the baby carriage went careening towards the embankment and the infant almost plunged into the river below. With her second child looking on aghast, the woman valiantly fought off her assailant, ripping the hood off his jacket, which later made it possible for an Austrian police dog to track him down.
In another incident, two young women were on a midday stroll in the pedestrian zone of a small Austrian town, pushing their babies in prams before them, when they were abruptly attacked by several Afghan refugees, who lunged at them and ripped off their clothing but were apprehended before they could do further damage. It’s clear that such events antagonize the general public. It’s also clear that we can dismiss the “they were drunk and didn’t know what they were doing” theory, as well as “they thought the women were asking for it.”
This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory—the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.
And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.
I see his point. In the course of my research, I encountered thirty-year-olds with family in Austria who were passing themselves off as “unaccompanied minors.” I met people misrepresenting an old traffic injury as proof that they had been tortured. I learned of an Afghan family that had emigrated to Hungary two decades ago. The children were born there and attended Hungarian schools. When the refugee crisis erupted, enticed by news of all the associated benefits, this family decided to take on a new identity and make their way to Sweden on the pretense of being brand-new refugees. Claiming to have lost their papers during their “flight,” they registered under new assumed names and reduced the ages of their children; the mother declared herself a widow. Now ensconced in comfortable free housing along with their hale, hearty and very much alive father—whom they pass off as an uncle—with a monthly welfare check, they are smug parasites leeching off the gullibility of Sweden’s taxpayers.
Western legal systems are meticulous and procedural, operate on the basis of rules and rights and forms and documents, and consider you innocent until proven guilty. It didn’t take the refugees long to figure out how to leverage this to their advantage. “They’ll stand right there, balding, grey at the temples, and insist that they’re eighteen,” an exasperated Austrian prosecutor told me. Having “lost” their documents, the only way to refute even the most patently absurd such claim is through expensive lab tests. If you have no documents and no shame, you can assert just about anything and then lean back and wait for the system to try and prove otherwise. If you are rejected, no problem: you can launch multiple appeals. Once you have set foot in Europe, it will be almost impossible to get rid of you; indeed, you can literally commit murder. If a court finds you guilty of rape, you need only argue that if you are sent home, your conservative society will kill you for the dishonorable act—then you can’t be shipped out, because EU law forbids extradition if doing so puts the individual’s life at risk. And murderers cannot be sent back to countries that have the death penalty or a judicial system known to be harsh.
But we are still left with a mystery. Welfare fraud is one thing: it makes a certain kind of sense, if you have no regard for rule of law or fairness and you are lazy. But why is this current cohort of Afghans making its mark as sexual predators . . . and inept, stupid ones at that? In search of an answer, perhaps we should take a closer look at the victims. We have eliminated improper attire and an unwittingly seductive manner, but might they have any other traits in common to shed light on why they became the targets of such madness? Reviewing them, one word comes to mind: fulfillment. A Turkish exchange student, happy to be advancing her education in industrial design at a good university in Vienna. A girl in a park, enjoying the sunshine. Two friends, taking their babies for a walk. A mother, enjoying a summer stroll with her two children. A contented old lady, out with her pet. Attractive, accomplished, happy, normal people . . . an unbearable sight, perhaps, to—and here I must agree with President Trump—losers. That is what he proposed we should call terrorists, and he is right. These young men, even minus a suicide vest, are losers, which has inspired them to become social terrorists.
The young Afghan attackers are saying, yes, that they have no impulse control, that their hormones are raging, and that they hate themselves and the world—but most especially, that they will not tolerate women who are happy, confident and feeling safe in public spaces. They are saying that they have no intention of respecting law, custom, public opinion, local values or common decency, all of which they hate so much that they are ready to put their own lives, their constructive futures and their freedom on the line for the satisfaction of inflicting damage.
Established middle-class diaspora Afghans are understandably upset and embarrassed to see their nationality thus disgraced by these uncouth newcomers. And yet they are part of the problem. Many of their actions and reactions, however natural or unintended, amount to complicity. They cover up, make excuses for, advise on best ways to wriggle out of consequences, and even directly abet the deceptions, illegal acts and disgraceful manners of friends, relatives and random unknown fellow Afghans.
The reasons for this are many-layered. There is the perceived obligation to be loyal to friends and relatives and countrymen. I think there is also a certain lack of true identification with Western notions of bureaucratic and biographic fact; many, if not most, Afghans currently living in the West have some lies of necessity in their past. Whichever of them arrived first—a father, an older brother—generally had to make up a supposed family name and a birthdate on the fly, because back home, until one generation ago most people did not have a last name and birth dates were not recorded. I know respectable, law-abiding Afghan families where everyone’s birthdays are implausibly sequential—June 1, June 2, June 3 and so forth, because the family member who filled out the immigration paperwork had to make up birth dates and thought it would be easier to remember them this way.
It is also possible that this diaspora community, given the weakness of state institutions in their country of origin, the arbitrariness of its corruption-riddled administrations for centuries, and a certain lack of rootedness that comes from being dropped into someone else’s culture and way of doing things, is fine with a bit of finagling of welfare benefits. They don’t, of course, endorse rape, but here embarrassment kicks in and inspires them to make excuses. “They’re young.” “They’re confused.” “They grew up in Iran, where one learns bad behavior.” Others just disavow them altogether and want nothing to do with them. That’s regrettable, because Afghans who have already made respected lives for themselves abroad are in the best position to discipline and teach the delinquent newcomers, to know what combination of sanctions, pressures and encouragement will be effective.
Complicated problems, to be sure, but why should they concern us here in the United States, beyond mere anthropological curiosity? Well, first of all, these young men are “ours.” They grew up during the years in which we were the dominant influence and paymaster in Afghan society. Since 2001, we have spent billions on an Afghan school system that we like to cite as one of our greatest accomplishments. These young men either attended these schools, in which case the investment in their education has been worse than useless, or did not have access to a school, in which case the money must have been fraudulently diverted. We have also invested many, many millions of dollars on gender programs and rule-of-law programs to convey notions of female equality and human value, and regard for law and order. We have funded radio programs and entire TV stations devoted to this goal, launched poster campaigns and sponsored at enormous cost a large number of civil-society groups purporting to disseminate these values. And here, now, are our “graduates,” rampaging across Europe like the worst sort of feral beasts.
Secondly, the relevance to U.S. refugee policy is sadly obvious. It will require rigorous vetting indeed to weed out such deeply disturbed, degenerate young males whose willingness to be deceptive is so pronounced and whose motives are so irrational.
Which brings me to a final theory being vented in Austria: that these destructive, crazed young men are being intentionally infiltrated into western Europe to wreak havoc: to take away the freedom and security of women; change patterns of behavior; deepen the rifts between liberals, who continue to defend and find excuses, and a right wing that calls for harsh measures and violent responses; to inflict high costs and aggravation on courts and judicial systems and generally make a mess of things.
For the record, I am not convinced that there is a deliberate plan behind this, but I do agree that angry and unstable young men are susceptible to destructive paths. Those paths can lead to ideological extremism and terrorism, or to the formation of gangs and packs that attack, harm and destroy. As we have seen, presently many of their attacks are inept and easily blocked by random civilian passersby. But they will get more skillful over time, and Europe had best develop a defense against them.
What to do? The necessary measures, I think, are obvious.
Anyone convicted of a felony or any kind of sexual crime should be immediately deported, and that consequence should be made known to new arrivals as part of their initial orientation. This is the only way to stop the accelerating problem. (Doing so will, of course, require changes to European law.)
Every arriving refugee and asylum seeker must be subjected to rigorous fact-checking of their story, including validation of their asserted age by lab testing if there is any doubt. Yes, it’s troublesome and costly, but not nearly as troublesome and costly as letting the wrong people in, or putting hundreds of thousands of foreigners permanently or semipermanently on the dole with benefits they are not entitled to. And European countries must share the resultant data with each other, and identities must be linked to fingerprints, not to documents of dubious authenticity or no documents at all.
Members of the relevant diaspora communities must make very clear to the refugees that they do not approve of and will not assist them with their false claims, cheating, bad behavior or crime. They should instead emphasize by their own example, as well as by direct outreach, that a good and fulfilling life is possible in their new homes with hard work, a sincere effort to fit in and a cooperative attitude.
Finally, the Left has to do a bit of hard thinking. It’s fine to be warm, fuzzy and sentimental about strangers arriving on your shores, but let’s also spare some warm, fuzzy and sentimental thoughts for our own values, freedoms and lifestyle. Girls and women should continue to feel safe in public spaces, be able to attend festivals, wear clothing appropriate to the weather and their own liking, travel on trains, go to the park, walk their dogs and live their lives. This is a wonderful Western achievement, and one that is worth defending.
……………………………..
Dr. Cheryl Benard was program director of the Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth and the Alternative Strategies Initiative within the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division. Her publications include Civil Democratic Islam, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, The Muslim World After 9-11, The Battle Behind the Wire – US Prisoner and Detainee Operations, and Eurojihad – Patterns of Islamist Radicalization and Terrorism in Europe. Civil Democratic Islam was one of the books found in Osama Bin Laden’s library during the raid on his compound.
From the “Extraordinary Decade” by Pavel Annenkov – a Russian literary critic, who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century and wrote in his memoires about the meeting of Marx and Engels with Weitling – a preacher of utopian communism.
“…On my first meeting with Marx, he invited me to attend a conference scheduled for the following evening with the tailor Weitling who had a rather large following of workers back in Germany. The conference was being called in order to determine, insofar as possible, the overall mode of operation among the leaders of the workers’ movement. I unhesitatingly accepted the invitation and came to the meeting.
The tailor-agitator Weitling turned out to be a fair-haired, handsome young man, wearing an elegant style of surtout and a coquetishly close-cropped beard, looking more like a traveling salesman than the stem and wrathful zealot I had presumed I would meet. Quickly exchanging greetings, with an added touch of exquisite politeness on Weitling’s part, we sat down at a small green table at one narrow end of which Marx placed himself, pencil in hand and his leonine head bent over a sheet of paper.
Wilhelm Christian Weitling (October 5, 1808 – January 25, 1871)
His inseparable companion and colleague in propaganda, the tall and erect Engels, with his British air of dignity and gravity, opened the meeting with a speech. In it he spoke of the necessity for people dedicated to the cause of trans¬forming labor to expound their common views and establish one overall doctrine which would serve as the standard for all their followers who had neither the time nor the opportunity to concern themselves with theoretical issues.
Engels had not yet concluded his speech when Marx looked up and addressed a question directly to Weitling: “Tell us, Weitling, you, who have made such a rumpus in Germany with your communist preachings and have won over so many workers, causing them to lose their jobs and their crust of bread, with what fundamental principles do you justify your revolutionary and social activity and on what basis do you intend affirming it in the future?”
I remember the actual form of this trenchant question very well because it began a very heated debate among the conference participants which lasted, however, as will be shown, but a very short time. Weitling apparently wanted to confine the conference to the platitudes of liberal colloquy.
With an expression on his face suggesting earnestness and anxiety, he began to explain that his aim was not to create new economic theories but to make use of those that were best able, as experience in France had shown, to open the workers’ eyes to the horror of their situation and all the injustices that had, with regard to them, become the bywords of governments and societies, to teach them not to put trust any longer in promises on the part of the latter and to rely only on themselves, organizing into democratic and communist communes. He spoke at length but, to my surprise and in contrast with Engels’ speech, diffusely, not altogether literately, repeating his words and often correcting them, and experiencing difficulty in coming to conclusions which either were made belatedly or came ahead of the arguments for them. He had a far different audience now than the one that usually crowded around his work bench or read his newspapers and printed pamphlets on contemporary economic practices, and, in consequence, he had lost the facility of both his thought and his tongue.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Weitling likely would have talked even longer, if Marx, his brows angrily knit, had not interrupted him and begun to voice his objection. The gist of his sarcastic speech was that to arouse the population without giving it firm and thoroughly reasoned out bases for its actions meant simply to deceive it. The stimulation of fantastic hopes that had just been mentioned — Marx observed further on — led only to the ultimate ruin, and not the salvation, of the oppressed. Especially in Germany, to appeal to the workers without a rigorous scientific idea and without a positive doctrine had the same value as an empty and dishonest game at playing preacher, with someone supposed to be an inspired prophet on the one side and only asses listening to him with mouths agape allowed on the other. “Look here,” he added, suddenly jerking out his hand and pointing at me, “we have a Russian with us. In his country, Weitling, your role might be suitable: there, indeed, associations of nonsensical prophets and nonsensical followers are the only things that can be put together and made to work successfully.” In a civilized country like Germany, Marx continued, developing his idea, people could do nothing without a positive doctrine and, in fact, had done nothing up to now except to make noise, cause harmful outbreaks, and ruin the very cause they had espoused.
The color rose in Weitling’s pale cheeks and he recovered his genuine, fluent speech. In a voice quivering with emotion he began to argue that a man who had gathered hundreds of people together in the name of the idea of justice, solidarity, and brotherly mutual aid under one banner could not be called a vain and worthless person, that he, Weitling, consoled himself in the face of the day’s attacks with the recollection of the hundreds of letters and expressions of gratitude he had received from every comer of his fatherland, and that his modest, preparatory work was, perhaps, more important for the general cause than criticism and closet analyses of doctrines in seclusion from the suffering world and the miseries of the people.
Marx (on the right), Engels (behind Marx), Weitling (on the left) and Annenkov (on the right, behind Marx, smoking) portrayed by the Chinese artist Gāo Mǎng.
On hearing these last words, Marx, at the height of fury, slammed his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp on the table reverberated and tottered, and jumping up from his place, said at the same time: “Ignorance has never yet helped anybody!” We all followed his example and also got up from the table. The meeting had ended. While Marx paced the room back and forth in extreme anger and irritation, I hastily bid him and his companions good-bye and went home, astounded by everything I had seen and heard…”
En 1296, l’ancien chef de l’État français décédé devint un saint reconnu de l’Église catholique. Le roi Louis Neuvième a déclaré qu’il était inspiré dans toutes ses actions en tant que roi par son zèle chrétien.
Il a combattu dans des guerres contre l’Islam, et il a combattu en France contre le blasphème et le peuple juif. Le blasphème, doutant des enseignements de l’Église catholique, a été sévèrement puni par le gouvernement de Saint Louis. Les punitions pour ceux qui pensaient différemment de saint Louis et de l’Église étaient la mutilation de la langue et des lèvres.
Saint Louis s’est opposé au paiement d’intérêts sur les prêts d’argent comme quelque chose d’interdit par la Bible. Il a également interdit le jeu et la prostitution. Il a dépensé de grosses sommes d’argent pour les « reliques » du Christ et a construit une église spéciale pour les contenir – la Sainte-Chapelle.
Saint Lois a élargi le champ d’action de la police religieuse, l’Inquisition, pour cibler le peuple juif et a ordonné l’incendie de collections de livres juifs, dont le Talmud.
Saint Louis a pris les armes contre les musulmans pour ramener le christianisme au Moyen-Orient et en Afrique du Nord. Il est mort en combattant contre l’Islam en Afrique du Nord.
Une grande partie de ce que l’on sait de la vie de Louis vient de la célèbre Vie de Saint Louis de Jean de Joinville. Joinville était un ami proche, un confident et un conseiller du roi, et a également participé en tant que témoin à l’enquête papale sur la vie de Louis qui a pris fin avec sa canonisation en 1297 par le pape Boniface VIII. Les papes à Rome avaient encouragé les guerres saintes contre l’empire islamique au Moyen-Orient et en Afrique du Nord et le roi Louis a répondu à l’appel.
Louis est né en 1214 d’une mère castillane et d’un père franc. Louis avait 12 ans lorsque son père mourut en 1226. Il fut couronné roi dans le mois à la cathédrale de Reims. En raison de la jeunesse de Louis, sa mère, Blanche de Castille, a gouverné la France en tant que régente pendant sa minorité. Sa mère était une chrétienne fanatique.
La mère de Louis l’avait formé pour être un leader impitoyable et un chrétien intolérant. Elle disait :
Je t’aime, mon cher fils, autant qu’une mère peut aimer son enfant ; mais j’aimerais mieux vous voir mort à mes pieds que de commettre jamais un péché mortel.
Aucune date n’est connue pour le début du règne personnel de Louis. Ses contemporains considéraient son règne comme un co-règne entre le roi et sa mère, bien que les historiens considèrent généralement l’année 1234 comme l’année où Louis a commencé à régner personnellement, sa mère assumant un rôle plus consultatif. Elle a continué à avoir une forte influence sur le roi jusqu’à sa mort en 1252.
Marguerite de Provence
En 1234, Louis épouse Marguerite de Provence. Le zèle religieux de la nouvelle reine en fit une partenaire bien adaptée pour le roi. Il aimait sa compagnie et se faisait un plaisir de lui montrer les nombreux travaux publics qu’il faisait à Paris, tant pour sa défense que pour sa santé. Ils aimaient rouler ensemble, lire et écouter de la musique. Cette attention a suscité une certaine jalousie chez sa mère, qui a essayé de les séparer autant qu’elle le pouvait. Ils eurent onze enfants, cinq fils et six filles. Cette ligne a continué au pouvoir en France pendant cinq cents ans. En 1793, alors que la guillotine tombait sur le roi Louis XVI, l’abbé Edgeworth dit : « Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel !
Saint Louis fait connaître ses actes de charité. Les soldats rassemblaient les mendiants qui étaient nourris à sa table, il mangeait leurs restes, leur lavait les pieds, s’occupait des besoins des lépreux et nourrissait quotidiennement plus d’une centaine de pauvres. Il fonda de nombreux hôpitaux et maisons : la Maison des Filles-Dieu pour les prostituées réformées ; les Quinze-Vingt pour 300 aveugles, hôpitaux de Pontoise, Vernon, Compiégne.[25]
Saint Louis a installé un groupe de l’Ordre trinitaire du clergé catholique dans son château de Fontainebleau. Il choisit des Trinitaires comme aumôniers et fut accompagné par eux dans ses croisades. Dans son testament spirituel, il écrit : « Mon fils bien-aimé, tu devrais te permettre d’être tourmenté par toutes sortes de martyrs avant de te permettre de commettre un péché mortel. En gros, en disant « Suivez les règles de l’église ». A l’époque, le clergé était comme un second gouvernement.
Saint Louis a acheté « la couronne d’épines » prétendument portée par Jésus et d’autres saintes reliques de l’empereur d’Orient à Constantinople. Il envoya deux frères dominicains apporter ces objets sacrés en France, et, accompagné d’un impressionnant train, il les rencontra à Sens à leur retour. Pour abriter les reliques, il fit construire sur l’île de la Seine qui porte son nom, le sanctuaire de la Sainte-Chapelle, l’un des plus beaux exemples d’architecture gothique existant. Depuis la Révolution française, elle est vide de son trésor.
La Sainte Chapelle, parfait exemple du style rayonnant de l’architecture gothique, a été érigée en sanctuaire de la Couronne d’épines et d’un prétendu fragment de la Vraie Croix, fausses reliques du temps de Jésus. Louis les achète en 1239-1241 à l’empereur Baudouin II de l’Empire latin de Constantinople, pour la somme exorbitante de 135 000 livres (la chapelle, en revanche, ne coûte que 60 000 livres à construire). Cet achat doit être compris dans le contexte de l’extrême ferveur religieuse qui existait en Europe au XIIIe siècle. L’achat contribua grandement à renforcer la position centrale du roi de France dans la chrétienté occidentale, ainsi qu’à accroître la notoriété de Paris, alors la plus grande ville d’Europe occidentale. À une époque où villes et souverains se disputaient les reliques, essayant d’accroître leur réputation et leur renommée, Louis IX avait réussi à obtenir la plus précieuse de toutes les reliques dans sa capitale. L’achat n’était donc pas seulement un acte de dévotion, mais aussi un geste politique : la monarchie française tentait de faire du royaume de France la « nouvelle Jérusalem ».
Saint Louis aimait les sermons, entendait deux messes par jour et était entouré, même en voyage, de prêtres chantant les heures. On disait qu’il était très heureux en compagnie de prêtres parlant de la religion chrétienne et de Dieu. Son ami et biographe, le sieur de Joinville, qui l’accompagna dans sa première croisade en Terre Sainte, raconte une anecdote pour illustrer la religiosité du roi.
« Qu’est-ce que Dieu ? » Le roi Louis lui a demandé un jour.
Joinville répondit : « Sire, c’est ce qui est si bon qu’il n’y a rien de mieux.
« Eh bien », dit le roi, « dis-moi maintenant, préférerais-Tu être lépreux ou commettre un péché mortel ? »
Le spectacle des misérables lépreux qui erraient sur les routes de l’Europe médiévale aurait bien pu inciter une conscience sensible à se poser une telle question.
J’aimerais mieux commettre trente péchés mortels, répondit Joinville en toute franchise, que d’être lépreux.
Louis l’a vivement critiqué pour avoir fait une telle réponse.
« Quand un homme meurt, dit-il, il est guéri de la lèpre dans son corps ; mais quand un homme qui a commis un péché mortel meurt, il ne peut pas savoir avec certitude qu’il s’est repenti de son vivant de telle sorte que Dieu lui a pardonné ; c’est pourquoi il doit craindre que la lèpre du péché ne dure aussi longtemps que Dieu est au paradis. »[1]
Les saints livres juifs brûlés
En 1243, à Paris, à l’instigation du pape Grégoire IX, saint Louis ordonna de brûler quelque 12 000 exemplaires manuscrits du Talmud et d’autres livres juifs.
Dans les années 1230, Nicholas Donin, un juif converti au christianisme, traduisit le Talmud, la collection d’écrits juifs sur la religion et la foi juive.
Donin a ensuite porté 35 accusations de discours de haine anti-chrétien dans le Talmud au pape Grégoire IX en citant une série de passages anti-chrétiens détaillés sur Jésus, Marie ou le christianisme.
Pape Grégoire IX
Il y a un passage talmudique, par exemple, où Jésus de Nazareth est envoyé en enfer pour être bouilli dans des excréments pour l’éternité. Donin a également souligné des passages du Talmud qui permettent aux Juifs de tuer des non-Juifs, car les non-Juifs ne sont pas pleinement humains aux yeux de Dieu. Les Gentils ont été mis sur Terre pour servir le peuple juif selon plusieurs sections du Talmud.
L’Église catholique a encouragé le peuple juif à se convertir au christianisme et a récompensé les intellectuels qui sont devenus chrétiens et ont aidé à faire campagne contre le judaïsme. Donin était très ambitieux et avait des visions de s’élever haut dans l’Église. Convaincre les autorités qu’il pouvait prouver que le christianisme était le successeur de Dieu à l’Ancien Testament et les anciennes croyances juives à travers les livres les plus autorisés et uniques aux Juifs était un chemin sûr vers le succès dans l’Église pour un juif converti. En gagnant un tel argument, tous les Juifs se convertiraient on le croyait. Donin espérait utiliser une lecture attentive du Talmud pour montrer la supériorité du Christ et de l’Église. Jésus était le Messie que la Torah avait prédit, selon Donin.
Cela a conduit à la Dispute de Paris, qui a eu lieu en 1240 à la cour de Saint-Louis, où le rabbin Yechiel de Paris a défendu le Talmud contre les accusations du converti chrétien Nicolas Donin. Rabbeinu Yechiel a fait une défense si habile que le roi a convenu qu’il était vrai qu’on ne pouvait pas prouver le christianisme par le Talmud. Le Talmud est un labyrinthe déroutant de commentaires par de nombreux auteurs sans fil conducteur ni récit cohérent. Néanmoins, Donin a déclaré que le Talmud était une insulte au christianisme. Des sections du Talmud ont dénoncé Jésus-Christ comme un faux enseignant et non le Messie que ses disciples croyaient qu’il était.
Par conséquent, en 1243, le roi Louis IX a ordonné l’incendie de 24 charrettes de manuscrits hébreux inestimables. Au Moyen Âge, chaque livre était écrit à la main. Le Talmud à lui seul, dans le format imprimé moderne, compte environ 2 300 pages. Les scribes de cette époque écrivaient à l’aide de plumes d’oie et d’encre manufacturée sur du parchemin (ou du papier vélin qui commença alors à être produit). Le pur travail physique de s’asseoir et d’écrire ce volume de mots à lui seul est ahurissant. Les 24 charrettes représentaient quelque 12 000 volumes. Louis a fait ramasser tous les exemplaires du Talmud qu’il pouvait mettre la main et les a brûlés publiquement
Les Juifs ont été ciblés par d’autres moyens. Lorsque Saint Louis a voulu financer les guerres saintes contre l’Islam, il a confisqué de l’argent à tous ceux qui prêtaient de l’argent avec des paiements d’intérêts – les prêteurs d’argent juifs ont vu leurs biens saisis et les prêteurs d’argent juifs ont ensuite été expulsés du pays. Saint Louis a également ordonné à tous les Juifs de porter un morceau de tissu sur leurs vêtements de dessus afin que tout le monde en public sache qu’ils étaient juifs. Louis IX, d’autre part, était déterminé dans ses efforts pour amener les Juifs à se convertir. La communauté juive de France a mis longtemps à se rétablir après l’oppression de Saint Louis. La France ne redevint plus jamais le grand siège du savoir ni même le grand siège de la tradition juive comme elle l’était du XIe au XIIIe siècle.
« Aujourd’hui encore, la majorité des Juifs de France sont des Juifs séfarades venus d’Algérie, de Tunisie et du Maroc au cours du siècle dernier. Ce n’est pas une communauté juive savante ou particulièrement forte. Elle n’a certainement plus jamais ressemblé à la communauté de Rachi, après que la police religieuse de Saint-Louis ait brûlé le Talmud.
De nombreux pays chrétiens européens exigeaient que les Juifs portent des chapeaux particuliers ou des vêtements particuliers. L’Église catholique voulait que les Juifs soient identifiables. Les règles variaient d’un endroit à l’autre et parfois n’étaient pas strictement appliquées. Mais Saint Louis a changé cela en France. Le 19 juin 1269, Louis IX promulgua un édit général pour toute la France selon lequel les Juifs devaient porter un insigne circulaire en tissu sur la poitrine au-dessus du cœur.
Cet édit est entériné par les conciles ecclésiastiques de Pont-Audemer (1279) et de Nîmes (1284). Certains règlements exigeaient également qu’un deuxième signe soit porté au dos. Parfois, il était placé sur le chapeau de la personne juive, ou au niveau de la ceinture. L’insigne était de couleur jaune, ou de deux nuances, blanc et rouge. Son port était obligatoire dès l’âge de treize ans, selon certaines autorités. Saint Louis ordonna que tout juif trouvé sans l’insigne devait remettre ses vêtements à la personne qui avait dénoncé la personne juive. En cas de récidive, une amende sévère était infligée. Saint Louis recevait des fonds du gouvernement chaque année alors que ses collecteurs d’impôts se rendaient dans les communautés juives pour vendre des badges émis par l’État que chaque Juif adulte devait porter.
Saint Guerrier Saint
Dans le sud de la France, un mouvement religieusement indépendant a été écrasé par une croisade lorsque Saint Louis avait quinze ans alors que sa mère était la dirigeante effective du pays.
La croisade des Albigeois a appris à Saint Louis que les différences religieuses étaient réglées par la guerre. Les opposants religieux au roi pouvaient être attaqués et tués et leurs biens confisqués.
Saint Louis a pris les armes contre l’islam lors de deux croisades, au milieu de la trentaine en 1248 (septième croisade), puis à nouveau au milieu de la cinquantaine en 1270 (huitième croisade).
En 1248, Saint Louis rassembla des forces pour une attaque contre le Moyen-Orient islamique. Pendant six ans, il était en Égypte. Après avoir traversé la Méditerranée, les envahisseurs chrétiens ont capturé le port de Damiette, en Égypte en 1249. Les défenseurs islamiques s’étaient simplement retirés sans lutter pour le petit port sur l’un des nombreux débouchés du Nil vers la Méditerranée. Les envahisseurs français ne savaient pas grand-chose sur l’Egypte ou sur la façon de gérer le climat chaud et l’environnement local. Les chevaliers, les seigneurs et les barons de la haute société avaient l’habitude de bousculer des paysans désarmés et avaient des difficultés dans la vie rude d’un camp militaire dans un pays étranger. Les chefs religieux n’avaient aucune idée de l’assainissement de base ou des micro-organismes qui pourraient se trouver dans l’eau locale. Les soldats ont commencé à tomber malades avec des maladies qui n’étaient pas courantes dans le climat plus froid de l’Europe.
Saint Louis IX pensait pouvoir s’emparer de la capitale égyptienne du Caire. L’Égypte était un État islamique peuplé et la capture du pays pour le christianisme offrirait une ouverture pour prendre Jérusalem et la Terre Sainte du temps du Christ. Le dirigeant musulman égyptien local était malade et mourant et d’autres puissances islamiques faisaient face aux Mongols venant de l’est vers Bagdad. Le souverain égyptien est mort et sa femme est devenue une reine efficace et a organisé des défenses efficaces contre l’armée des croisés. Les eaux du Nil montaient et les forces de Louis ne savaient tout simplement pas comment opérer sur le terrain. La dernière croisade de Saint Louis
Après avoir régné en France en brûlant des livres juifs et en faisant porter des badges aux juifs, Saint Louis voulait mener le combat pour une suprématie chrétienne dans un pays dirigé par des musulmans de l’autre côté de la mer Méditerranée depuis la France – la Tunisie.
Après avoir débarqué une grande force à l’extérieur de la ville de Tunis, les croisés ont commencé à souffrir de dysenterie. Un grand nombre de personnes tombèrent malades et la décision fut prise de se retirer de l’autre côté de la mer. Un traité favorable au souverain chrétien de Sicile a été négocié et la domination islamique a été assurée en Afrique du Nord et en Tunisie.
La croisade est considérée comme un échec après la mort de Saint Louis peu de temps après son arrivée sur les côtes tunisiennes, son armée ravagée par la maladie se dispersant en Europe peu de temps après. Afin de créer des « reliques » sacrées, le corps de Louis a été bouilli afin que les os puissent être récupérés et envoyés dans diverses églises pour les vénérer en tant que lien physique avec le roi mort et bientôt saint. Bien que macabre selon les normes d’aujourd’hui, le transport du corps vers l’Europe n’aurait pas été sain en 1270.
Two Girls, Spanish Harlem, Alice Neel, 1959, oil on canvas
Nearly four decades after her death, American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) has received the major museum retrospective she has long deserved, Alice Neel: People Come First, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Neel painted over the course of six decades, for the most part, until the last 20 years of her life, in relative obscurity. Her vibrant, idiosyncratic portraits are characterized above all by their candor and keen observation, which were at times unflattering but rarely without insight.
Neel’s “Human Comedy,” as she thought of her work, was conceived along the lines of French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s series of interconnected novels (1829–1848) by that title, which depicted every social class. Through choosing sitters among bohemians in Greenwich Village, the working class in Spanish Harlem, labor activists and Communist Party leaders of the 1940s and ‘50s and art world figures of the 1960s and ‘70s, Neel aimed to give a representative portrait of American society in her era. (cont. https://archive.ph/bVCMX ) Archived with paintings …..
Pat Whalen, Alice Neel, 1935, oil, ink, and newspaper on canvas
Not every Merchant-Ivory film is a visually lush period drama based on novels by prestigious writers like E. M. Forster and Henry James, but the most memorable ones are, including The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992). Another in this vein is The Remains of the Day (1993), based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
All these films were produced by Ismail Merchant, an Indian Muslim, and directed by his gay partner James Ivory, an American Protestant. With the exception of Maurice, they were adapted for the screen by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German Jew married to an Indian Parsi.
Yet for all the intersectional diversity points of their creators, there is something “problematic” about these films, for they feed on a deep nostalgia for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized by overwhelming whiteness, patriarchy, sexual repression, and heteronormativity. Of course, all the characters struggle against this world in the name of an old-fashioned, white, and Eurocentric liberalism that is also problematic these days. But it is impossible to overlook that the world they are struggling against is far more attractive than the world they ended up making for us.
The archetypal Merchant-Ivory film appeals to pretty much the same people who love Downton Abbey: overwhelmingly white, predominantly female, disproportionately gay, and very liberal. The average Merchant-Ivory viewer loves to imagine himself or herself as rich, beautifully dressed, and at home in the most glamorous locales, all while being terribly oppressed but also enlightened and virtuous. It is a kind of porn for the NPR/BBC4 set: middle-aged, middlebrow, middle managers in our neoliberal Left-wing oligarchy. But race-conscious whites can also enjoy the nostalgia if they are willing to bracket out the propaganda.
Or, in the case of The Bostonians, they don’t have to, for through some strange twist of fate, this is one of the most anti-liberal, anti-feminist movies I have ever seen. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Reeve, Madeleine Potter, and Jessica Tandy, The Bostonians is based on Henry James’ 1886 novel of the same name, which is a satire of the Eastern Liberal Establishment circa 1875–76 set primarily in Boston but with forays to Cambridge, New York City, and Martha’s Vineyard—pretty much their same haunts today.
It is a world of bossy women and low-testosterone men. All the characters are either rich or the professionals, courtiers, and charlatans who feed off the rich. Mesmerism, spiritualism, homeopathy, and feminism are the current rages in their salons.
The Bostonians focuses on a circle of wealthy suffragettes. Now that blacks have been emancipated and the South put to the sword, feminism is the next great progressive crusade. The main suffragettes are the elderly Miss Birdseye (Jessica Tandy), a gentle soul who lives in a word of high-minded fancies; Mrs. Burrage (Nancy Marchand), a fabulously rich New Yorker with a son at Harvard who hosts radical salons at her Fifth Avenue mansion; and the fifty-something spinster Olive Chancellor, a lesbian and wild-eyed fanatic who is beautifully played by Vanessa Redgrave.
The dramatic conflict of The Bostonians is between Olive and her distant cousin, Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), a Confederate veteran from Mississippi who now works as a lawyer in New York City.
Basil is a writer on topics like honor, virtue, and aristocracy. He is unapologetically conservative, even reactionary. When one of his essays was rejected for being “300 hundred years out of date,” he replied: “On the rights of minorities, I am 300 years out of date. But you see, I haven’t come too late. I have come too soon.” A man after my own heart.
Basil also rejects feminism. He thinks that “for public uses” women are entirely “inferior and second rate.” Instead, he thinks that women are best suited for the private realm of family life. He also mocks the feminist complaint that women are oppressed. Basil thinks women have enormous power as it is, and their desire for equal footing in public would in fact lead to the oppression of men by women. Which raises a question: If men could see this in the 1880s, how did we end up where we are today?
Olive and Basil’s main conflict is not, however, over political philosophy. Instead, they are fighting over a woman: Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter). Verena is the daughter of “Dr.” Tarrant, a spiritualist and Mesmeric healer who never gets too transported to forget to present his bill. Both Basil and Olive meet Verena at a suffragist meeting where she is rolled out by her father and “started up” with some parlor magic to deliver an impassioned oration for women’s equality. It is love at first sight for both cousins.
Olive wants to groom Verena, both as a feminist speaker and a lover. She basically buys Verena from her parents, handing her father a check for $5,000 for the privilege of overseeing her “education” for a year, after which he can expect the same amount. In 1875, that amount was the equivalent of $120,000 today, in a time when the cost of living was far lower. Today, parents hand over that amount to universities for the privilege of having their children seduced and ruined, ideologically and otherwise.
Verena’s education consists of readings, museum outings, and Olive’s wild-eyed orations about dedication and sacrifice for the liberation of humanity—in the lap of embarrassing luxury, to the fey strains of the Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude. Redgrave was really born for this role.
Basil tells Verena “I don’t think you mean what you preach.” Instead, he thinks that she simply has a “sweet nature” that makes her want to please the people around her: her father, Oliver, Miss Birdseye, etc. In short, Verena is exactly the kind of woman he wants for his wife: someone who will be devoted to pleasing him, which of course implies motherhood and child-rearing as well.
But can’t Verena “have it all”? No. Basil doesn’t want a wife who is famous for preaching dangerous nonsense. He wants her to give up politics altogether and devote herself entirely to private life. He asks, “Can’t I make you see how much more natural it is—not to say agreeable—to give yourself to a man, instead of to the movement of some morbid old maid?” Basil is also shrewd enough to know what Olive is after. They didn’t call lesbian cohabitation “Boston marriages” for nothing.
I’ll leave you to discover the twists and turns of Olive and Basil’s struggle over Verena for yourselves. But I should at least tell you that this movie does not follow the model of politically incorrect heroes (Archie Bunker, Tony Soprano) who “grow” over time. The Bostonians wouldn’t be remarkable unless our chivalrous Confederate hero won out in the end, without compromise, his character and principles entirely intact.
Henry James was known for extremely subtle studies of character and psychology. The movie does them justice. The tiniest gestures are revealing and often quite funny. For instance, during one of Dr. Tarrant’s mesmeric healing sessions, he breaks out of his prophetic voice twice to ask an unctuous a weasel of a reporter (Wallace Shawn), “Have you got that, Mr. Pardon?” Another great moment is when Mrs. Burrage tells Olive that she is devoted to the cause of “we poor women” as they are served tea in her sumptuous Fifth Avenue mansion.
Olive and Basil are polar opposites in character as well as in sex and politics.
Basil is unfailingly polite and kind, despite his inegalitarian convictions. But he is always firm and frank about who he is and what he wants. He is not threatened by people who disagree with him, perhaps because he doesn’t suffer from the grandiose delusion that his beliefs are ordained by the God of the Bible or the God of Progress, such that disagreement is equivalent to damnation. This is Christopher Reeve’s best role. He is completely natural and credible. In everything else I have seen him in, he comes off as smug and precious, like an overpraised child.
Olive is rude and supercilious, despite her professed humanitarianism. She is dogmatic about her political views: “He’s an enemy!” she whispers with the same trembling fanaticism that her Puritan ancestors said, “She’s a witch!” Olive is on the side of the angels, so woe to us.
But Olive refuses to take a stand on what she wants in her relationship with Verena. Verena wants to please Olive, but Olive always throws it back to Verena, “I want you to do it because you want it.” Note that she doesn’t want Verena to do what Olive wants, despite what Verena wants. She wants Verena to want what Olive wants—and without the necessity of Olive telling her. There’s a strange sort of narcissism here. Olive is stetting herself up as a sort of idol or oracle and demanding that her worshipper orbit her perpetually, trying to guess what would please her. It is utterly maddening. There’s a real possibility that Olive doesn’t consciously know she’s a lesbian. She may be the last to know.
The Eastern Liberal Establishment of The Bostonians is pretty much recognizable as today’s hostile elite, using their money and connections to launch destructive ideologies into the world, confident that their wealth and power will insulate them from any blowback. But this is an indigenous white Protestant hostile elite, not the Jewish-dominated one that arose in the twentieth century. There is, however, a hint of what is to come. At Mrs. Burrage’s salon, we learn that a Professor Guggenheim will soon deliver a lecture on the Talmud. I wonder if that is in James’ novel or if Ruth Prawer Jhabvala worked it in.
James’ novel received savage reviews from the Eastern Liberal Establishment it lampoons. Which makes me wonder how this movie garnered positive reviews and award nominations. It is a miracle that it was ever made. It is hard to believe that Jhabvala and Ivory didn’t see the humor and the horror in their depictions of characters like Olive, Miss Birdseye, Mrs. Burrage, and Dr. Tarrant. But if they did, would they have dared to make the movie at all?
It is also impossible to believe that they sympathized with the character and philosophy of Basil Ransom, yet here he is on the big screen, both admirable and undefeated. I’d like to think that this is a rare example of liberals being genuinely broadminded about their opponents and critical of themselves. But sometimes, dissident ideas leak into the mainstream simply because our opponents are so smug that they can’t imagine anyone actually taking them seriously.
I highly recommend The Bostonians. It is a nostalgic, escapist feast for the eyes that won’t insult your intellect or your values.
Cross-section illustration depicting a family in their underground lead fallout shelter, equipped with a geiger counter, periscope, air filter, etc., early 1960s. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
Note the men in business suits; ready for work at the bank, ready for their funeral wake.
Home-based nuclear fallout shelters combined everything that magazines needed in the 1960s to attract readers: fear, home remodeling, and the opportunity for producing great cutaways.
Just going into your basement during nuclear attack would decrease your chance of radioactive exposure to 10% of the exposure if you had stayed outside.
By undertaking some pretty major home remodels, all located in your basement and all eventually unused, you could shrink that statistic another ten-fold.
但也有一些有影响力的美国人希望强硬派 Raisi 获胜。 2017 年，后来成为特朗普伊朗问题特别代表的埃利奥特·艾布拉姆斯 (Elliott Abrams) 发表了一篇文章，称 Raisi 是“可以找到的强硬伊朗神职人员”。然后，他概述了自己的罪行，包括在处决数千名政治犯的“死亡委员会”中担任法官，为此他受到了美国的制裁。
出乎意料的是，这份简历得到了莱西，不是艾布拉姆斯的谴责，而是他的认可。 “美国人怎么可能希望他赢？”艾布拉姆斯问道。 “这很简单。 Raisi 是伊斯兰共和国的真面目……当我们对伊朗政权和领导它的人没有任何幻想时，我们会过得更好。”美国从强硬派中受益，因为你可以向世界推销或对抗强硬派。
One of today’s most vexing federal lawsuits is Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which has brought anti-Asian discrimination to the forefront of our discourse. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) contends that Harvard’s “race-conscious” admissions process violates the Constitution by disadvantaging Asian American applicants based solely upon their race, while Harvard argues that campus diversity goals justify its race-conscious process.
Much of the reasoning behind Harvard’s admissions process comes from critical race theory (CRT), a theory of race that actually originated at Harvard University. CRT teaches that America is divided into privileged and oppressed racial groups. All negative aspects of modern society flow from that overly simplistic dichotomy.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
Under the CRT framework, “white supremacy” covers many different phenomena. Everything from blatant discrimination to the existence of English grammar to choosing not to riot are sometimes included under the term. And in the words of “anti-racist” activist and author Ibram X. Kendi, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In order to combat white supremacy—however broadly defined—critical race theorists view “anti-racist” discrimination as the only legitimate response.
However, with the emergence of several racial groups that have come to be just as successful as whites, critical race theorists have come up with the term, “white adjacency.” Robin DiAngelo, author of the now-infamous book White Fragility, defines it this way: “The closer you are to whiteness—the term often used is white-adjacent—you’re still going to experience racism, but there are going to be some benefits due to your perceived proximity to whiteness. The further away you are, the more intense the oppression’s going to be.” According to CRT advocates, Asian Americans are the most “white-adjacent” minority.
What does this mean, in practice? In my new book, An Inconvenient Minority, I tell the story of the many Asian Americans who are harmed by an ideology that penalizes their success. Progressives, I argue, “call out Asians for either trying to be like white people or benefiting from systems that prop up white dominance.” Under the logic of CRT, it also means Asians are complicit in upholding white supremacy. To be “white-adjacent” is to benefit from the systems of oppression upon which America was allegedly founded.
Applying the words of Kendi, then, means that Asians are a privileged group against whom discrimination is justified in order to make room for the “truly” oppressed.
But is the concept of “white adjacency” actually valid? In reality, “white adjacency” is simply a rhetorical tool to discriminate against Asian Americans. It is an implicitly racist concept itself.
The idea of “white adjacency” hinges on the overwhelming success of Asian Americans in this country. It emerges from the fact that Asian Americans have the highest per-capita income, lowest per-capita crime rates and highest rates of college education. In fact, Asian Americans score better on average than whites on all of these metrics.
The problem is that CRT implicitly defines every good societal outcome as “white.” Based on the data, this necessarily puts Asian Americans in a “white adjacent” box that completely ignores their unique cultures and historical struggles. Furthermore, if being rich and successful are necessarily “white” characteristics, the implication is that other races are not, or cannot be, successful, talented or educated. Despite pretending to care about diversity and inclusion, CRT is actually racist in the way it implicitly categorizes groups of people.
Asians are harmed in multiple ways by the “white adjacency” myth. Asian Americans have struggled in this country, as well—let us not forget the Chinese Exclusion Act or World War II-era Japanese internment. Yet, the concept is frequently used to silence Asian Americans when they attempt to explain their own struggles. It also gives universities such as Harvard the required justification to discriminate against Asian American applicants. Asians are an inconvenient minority because their idiosyncratic high performance is a threat to prevailing woke narratives about diversity and the myth of a largely-white hegemony in the Ivy League. As the coastal elite continues to double down on CRT, Asian Americans will continue to be a thorn in their side.
Asian Americans are not “white-adjacent.” They are unique individuals from many distinct cultures. Their individual successes are theirs alone, and belittling those successes as “white-adjacent” is racist in myriad ways. It has to stop.
Kenny Xu is the author of An Inconvenient Minority, which exposes racial discrimination against Asian Americans at elite universities like Harvard and Yale. He is the president of Color Us United, which advocates for a race-blind America.
J’ai eu des ennuis dans les cercles politiques pour un article que j’ai écrit sur le fait de me promener à Boston et de coller des journaux révolutionnaires là où ils ne devraient pas appartenir. Je me voyais comme quelque chose comme le personnage de “The Man and the City” d’Edgar Poe.
Mais, alors que je regardais certains des autres écrits que j’avais rédigés sur mes promenades dans la ville et les gens que j’ai rencontrés et avec lesquels j’ai interagi dans les rues, j’ai commencé à penser à la collection d’histoires russes sur des événements quotidiens apparemment people par Ivan Tourgueniev – Esquisses d’un carnet de chasseurs.
C’est du moins comme ça que je me souvenais du titre. En examinant l’ouvrage, je constate que le titre traduit serait rendu plus fidèlement « Sketches From a Hunter’s Album ». Je me souviens d’un professeur d’université citant un écrivain italien : « Traduction, traître ». Un autre prof a déclaré que lire de belles œuvres littéraires en traduction, c’était comme sentir un beau corps avec des mitaines.
Mais, le livre était dans ma tête. Ou du moins le titre et l’idée de quelqu’un errant dans sa société et découvrant les lieux et les personnes qu’il a rencontrées. Je n’ai pas lu les histoires. Mais j’ai aimé le titre et l’idée et j’avais pensé à rassembler certaines des pièces que j’ai écrites qui pourraient correspondre à ce genre de description. Par exemple, lorsque j’ai rencontré le poète lauréat du prix Nobel Seamus Heaney dans un lycée où j’enseignais le dessin technique. Je ne savais pas qui il était, je me suis amusé à interagir avec lui et à lui donner des limericks pour terminer. Je n’ai découvert qui était cet homme que dix ans plus tard, lorsqu’il est décédé et j’ai reconnu sa photo dans les nouvelles.
Ou quand j’ai rencontré une fille de Donegal dans les rues de Dorchester quand une biche sauvage est descendue dans la rue Ashmont à 5 heures du matin. Je pourrais ajouter l’article que j’ai écrit sur ma participation à un rassemblement pour défendre les droits des immigrants où au début du rassemblement sur Boston Common, une femme plus âgée s’est approchée de moi et m’a dit : « Vous avez de très beaux yeux ». Plus tard, lorsque le rassemblement est arrivé à l’hôtel de ville de Boston, une jeune femme d’un groupe m’a également dit : « Vous avez de très beaux yeux. » Je suis toujours intrigué par cela.
Il y a quelques jours, je marchais à New York en direction d’une réunion dans un restaurant où je pourrais parler avec des amis politiques qui critiquaient certaines des choses que j’avais publiées. Je pensais à mon blog comme à une série de Sketches From a Hunters Notebook.
Alors que je traversais une rue, j’ai vu une boîte de présentation en plastique « journal gratuit » sur le côté avec cinq livres étalés sur le dessus. Littérature abandonnée ? Mon genre préféré. J’ai arrêté et immédiatement le titre qui a attiré mon attention était un livre que j’avais lu au lycée – “The Good Earth” de Pearl S. Buck. Une couverture aux couleurs vives, et lorsque j’ai ouvert le livre, il y avait de bons gros caractères que je pouvais lire facilement. J’ai pensé à prendre le livre pour le lire sur le trajet de retour en bus à Boston. Sous “The Good Earth” se trouvait – “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” d’Ivan Tourgueniev.
Un livre que je tournais dans ma tête depuis deux mois est apparu dans la rue devant moi pratiquement sur un plateau. Je ne crois pas en Dieu, ni aux Dieux, ni aux muses ni à l’esprit de la Littérature… mais quelle étrange évolution.
J’ai pensé à prendre à la fois “The Good Earth” et “Sketches From a Hunters Album”, mais j’étais inquiet du poids sur mon dos. J’avais des kilomètres à parcourir avant de dormir. J’ai trop, trop de livres à la maison et j’ai essayé d’en donner autant que possible au cours des dernières années. Comme les gens me le rappellent, tant de livres que j’aime ou que je veux lire sont en ligne et en gros caractères. Il n’y a aucun besoin pressant de remplir mon appartement de livres, de livres, de livres.
J’ai posé les livres et tourné les pages d’un livre à couverture rigide qui n’avait pas de couverture anti-poussière avec un titre. À travers une page blanche, j’ai vu une grande lettre mince «U» que j’ai reconnue de… je n’étais pas sûr. Puis ça m’est venu en tournant la page. C’était une copie de “Ulysse” de James Joyce. Un roman lauréat du prix Nobel assis dans la rue. Gratuit pour tous ceux qui pourraient s’arrêter pour reprendre le travail. Abandonné sur une boîte à journaux gratuite renversée.
J’ai vu le nom d’une femme sur un ex-libris sur la première page. J’aurais dû écrire son nom, mais je ne l’ai pas fait. J’ai décidé que je ne pouvais pas m’empêcher de prendre les “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” et de les mettre dans mon sac à dos.
Quelques pâtés de maisons plus loin, alors que je me dirigeais vers Lower Manhattan, j’ai vu une pizzeria avec beaucoup de places assises et pas trop de monde. Ils ont offert «Deux tranches de pizza et un coca de 20 oz» pour 5,99 $ (plus taxes). Ce n’était pas aussi bon et offert que les 3,00 $ pour deux tranches et une canette de coca que j’avais passé plus tôt, mais on ne pouvait pas s’asseoir à cet endroit.
Je me suis donc assis devant ma pizza et mon coca et j’ai ouvert les pages de « Sketches From a Hunter’s Notebook » et un savoureux repas de mots, de fromage, de sauce et de sucre. J’avais beaucoup à digérer.
J’ai particulièrement aimé le fait que Tourgueniev ait eu des ennuis pour ce qu’il écrivait, et j’avais des ennuis pour ce que j’avais écrit. Au moins, je ne vais pas être confiné dans le domaine de ma mère en résidence surveillée comme Tourgueniev l’était en 1860 en Russie. Toute arrestation que je ferai sera dans ma tête. Et pourtant, arrêté je suis.
In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers—men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. I think of one in particular, an English teacher to whom I’d brought a piece of freshman writing I’d ginned up only minutes before a mandatory conference. I knew it was junk when I carried it to his desk. He stunned me, growling, “You get the hell out of this office. And don’t come back until you respect yourself and me enough to do serious work.” The upshot—I admired his refusal of my bullshit. I went on to take all his classes. Today, such a teacher would be subject, at least, to sensitivity training and, if an adjunct, fired.
But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push—let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push—depending on whether or not a student’s identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. The job I had been trained to do—help students work with the nuts and bolts of language as writers and readers, as well as help them (in the best of worlds) appreciate the power and beauty of written English—became more and more difficult. Some students considered questioning and criticism racist—and the texts we read and wrote about white. Such thinking expanded, in time, to embrace a variety of identities.
I watched these developments unfold over more than 50 years of teaching—35 years at a small, inexpensive, public college located downtown in my large American city, and later, almost 20 years at the state university located a few miles across town. The small college had opened in the 60s to serve a lower-middle-class to middle-class area, one that included a large black community. It was part of the laudable spread of such colleges, an initiative begun in California. Our charge was to provide opportunity to first-in-their-family college students—to high school graduates who were not ready for and/or could not afford a private college or the state university.
These colleges, both rural and urban, were a classic example of American goodwill and concern for social justice going back to the settlement movement and the founding of Chicago’s Hull House in 1889. Similar movements followed, like the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas, the Muckrakers, and FDR’s New Deal. As the Vietnam War wound down, my colleagues and I began to see vets, Native Americans, and Vietnamese and Hmong refugees. In the next decades we saw an influx of African Americans from cities troubled with violence, like Chicago, Gary, and St. Louis. As I approached retirement, large numbers of Hispanics and a variety of other students from the Global South enrolled. The college took pride in its mix of people from all nations, races, religions, ages, and walks of life. So did I.
When the college opened its doors, I had just received my MA in English from a prestigious university, as well as an induction notice from my Draft Board. Like most Boards, it had become hostile to college students and their deferments. A family friend, who, like my parents, was firmly devoted to civil rights causes, urged me to apply. I would be serving our community—and along the way have a teaching deferment (it was that or Vietnam) and, at long last, income. Following a brief interview with the new Dean one pleasant summer afternoon, I was among the first faculty hired, secure with a salary, healthcare, a good retirement plan, and placement on the tenure track. (How different from the wretched struggles of English graduates to find any teaching position today.)
I was in my mid-20s, and in the first 10 years, I worked hard to learn how to teach. A small, newly minted public college was not my career trajectory. Many of my peers went on to teach in the Ivy League. When I did finish the doctorate 10 years later, doors were slamming. Unwilling to become an itinerant teacher, leaving family and friends and moving about the country with my wife and children seeking will-o-the-wisp tenure prospects, I settled into my work. The teaching loads were excessive, especially for those of us who taught writing. But these were offset by the absence of publishing demands, and a sense of giving valuable help to young people who’d never before considered college an option.
In the mid-70s, we got our first black president. Our faculty was mostly white. Our previous presidents had been white and lackluster. We’d been happy to support the unspoken presumption that a prime qualification for the job would be black skin. The new president was well credentialed, and we welcomed this accomplished black scholar who could offer encouragement to our increasing numbers of minority students. But trouble arrived in the president’s first semester at an all-day meeting with faculty and administration. A friend of the president, a “distinguished black educator,” flew in from Washington, DC to speak to us. We learned that we were failing our black students—that their disproportionately low grades and dropout rates were our fault.
By this time, after a decade of teaching students from minimally educated, working poor families, I was thoroughly familiar with the difficulty of bringing unprepared or unmotivated students of any color or background up to anything like a college level. Many students lacked even middle-school reading competence. Many could not write a complete sentence. Some skipped classes and failed to turn in assignments—or just dropped out. But the college mission was to educate everyone. We were an “open door” institution, with a high school diploma or GED sufficient for admission. We were here to give students the chance none in their families had ever had before, and we believed in our mission. Toward the end of the meeting I raised my hand and asked how, given reading and preparation levels, we could possibly increase grades and graduation rates without lowering standards. “What do you teach?” he asked. “English,” I offered. “You don’t teach English,” he corrected me. “You teach White Studies.”
I had no idea how to respond, so I fell silent. The issue of student competence and standards had been brushed aside to focus on race—on my race and the race of whomever I might assign, discuss, and offer as exemplars. I was no longer a teacher choosing to work with kids whose families had lacked opportunities for many generations—a teacher offering skills (like competence in Standard English) that could ready young people for entry into various careers or further college study. I was just white. I was taken aback. Politically, I had always felt allied with our black students and my few black faculty colleagues. From high school on, I’d hung out with black kids and gay kids, and during my graduate study, a black woman and I had become lovers and lived together for a year, taking in a black friend, a young man, as a roommate—two people who became lifelong friends. Was I now somehow an outsider, even an enemy?
We found that the new president operated by bullying. One afternoon, as the faculty rep for budget, I met with him and his chief administrator to question certain expenditures. I entered the president’s office, shut the door, took a seat, and began to present the faculty position. Almost immediately both men were raging and screaming, their words confused together: “How dare you come in here…” “Patronizing the president in this way…” Astonished, I left the room with my heart pounding. As their invective followed me out the door, the president’s secretary, a black woman, wouldn’t meet my eye. I wondered how often she listened to tantrums like this one. A member of my committee, an older colleague in the Business Department, chortled at my story. “You shouldn’t have gone alone. You were double-teamed. It’s an old game. He makes opposition emotionally risky.” The president’s willingness to foment racial division fit perfectly. To be called a racist in any college, especially a highly diverse inner-city college, was beyond “risky”—it was ruinous.
The next year, the president fired the founder and director of the Business and Secretarial program, a white woman in her late 30s. She could not bring herself to lower standards for spelling, grammar, business English, typing, and (back then) shorthand. These were skills one either mastered or did not master. She could not, in conscience, send out graduates lacking essential secretarial skills, betraying a trust she’d built up over 10 years with local employers. Black students frequently didn’t master these skills. Some made angry complaints.
To remove this teacher, the faculty contract required a less senior faculty member in the program, also a white woman, to go first. The union rallied to their defense. Ultimately, the Chancellor was forced into the fray. The offending teacher found herself reassigned to a suburban school. The less senior teacher continued teaching, but under the constant threat of being found not “supportive” (or worse) of black students. My colleagues and I now found it risky to discuss the achievement problems of blacks openly. We found ourselves self-censoring, privately lamenting the arrival of implicit rules and taboos. The following year, the president left to assume the presidency of another college, where, according to newspaper accounts, racial conflict again swirled around him. His departure, never officially acknowledged as a removal, was handled, as the Chancellor himself later explained privately, “very delicately.”
* * *
The hiring of our first black president was not legally mandated by affirmative action policy; it was embraced as a sensible move, given our increasing numbers of black students. However, affirmative action had a direct bearing on a later search for a director of financial aid, and despite a theoretical demand for competence as well as color in a candidate, the result was a quiet acceptance of marginal qualifications. Within a few years, our new director’s career had been ended by a federal conviction and jail time. He’d persuaded black students, many of whom never attended class, to take out student loans and split the money with them. Eventually, the students were surprised by bills for repayment, didn’t pay, federal authorities were alerted, and the scam blew up.
In time, affirmative action amounted to a policy of “whites not encouraged to apply,” as a colleague found when sitting on a search committee for a tenured English position. We’d been flooded with applicants. Secure jobs in the field were now rare. The committee interviewed only a handful of candidates, one of whom offered clues in his application that he was African American. He got an interview, but the committee was perplexed. He did not look African American. After some carefully worded queries the candidate confessed: “I’ve applied scores of times for a tenured job in English, but never got a single interview. I just wanted to see what would happen.” “You do know,” he added with a wry smile as he was leaving the room, “that we all originated in Africa.”
The privileging of blackness began to affect the curriculum. Protests against any book that used the ‘N’ word were enough to discourage me from teaching Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a classic anti-slavery work I considered essential for the education of any American. I also stopped teaching Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an outcry against Belgian colonialism. Having been told to venture beyond White Studies, I created a course focused on Native American issues, but some students protested because I am not Native American. Politics among faculty, counselors, and administrators began to divide between the PC and non-PC. To side with the favored groups du jour became a badge of honor. I wondered and worried—which of my colleagues might hint to a struggling student that I was, after all, racist, sexist, or homophobic? Would students stop taking my classes?
Inevitably, with the reduction of admission and grading standards, Remedial (soon to be renamed Developmental) English became a large part of our curriculum, along with How to Study. With the arrival of Ebonics, some black students grumbled that they already spoke their own English, and that there was nothing wrong with it. I agreed that there was nothing wrong with it, pointing out that my friends and I also grew up with our own neighborhood jargon—but that neither theirs nor mine would get anyone through college or into a good job. Some students went along, others refused. On one occasion, three young black men in Developmental, who routinely sat in the back talking as I attempted to teach, stalked out the door when I told them to pay attention. Furious, I chased them down the hall, shouting, “Get yourselves back in class or you’ve all just failed!” They kept walking.
No teacher today would dare commit such an outrage. The outcome would be a time-wasting round of meetings with administration and the victimized students focusing on implicit bias, creation of a hostile learning environment, and concerns about safety. It would be no surprise if the use of racial slurs were falsely alleged. The next day, one of the students returned to class and went on to pass. He had received exactly what he needed—a sting of authority that did not tolerate disruption. After class, two sisters from Hong Kong lingered (their father had sent them to America to develop English skills and perhaps gain citizenship before handover to the People’s Republic of China). “We just can’t believe how some American students treat the teachers,” said the eldest. “This could never happen in China.” “I believe it,” I said.
I began encountering students who felt that receipt of a poor grade was simply evidence of my racism. The rules of Standard English were seen as an arbitrary white man’s game designed to hinder blacks, and three sheets of paper filled with rambling thoughts were thought to qualify as an essay. I read theme after theme where students had been neither prepared to think logically and sequentially nor spell and use complete sentences. They had been passed on in English as they moved through grades K-12. Why then, they wondered, was this particular white teacher choosing to roadblock them?
Such expectations made life difficult for students—and for me. Stomach roiling one day, anticipating the worst, I handed back another “D” paper to a 30-something black woman in Freshman Comp. I’ll call her Monica. I knew she might explode—again—and she did. She leapt to her feet, called me a “fucking racist,” and, throwing her paper on the desk, stomped out. The classroom fell silent, students uneasily staring into space or at their books. Stomach tight, hands clammy, wondering what to say, I slowly walked over to pick up her paper, returned to my desk, and decided it was best to limp through the rest of the hour without offering any explanations or defense.
That afternoon, Monica came to my office, still angry, demanding I justify the low grade. I told her that, right then, there was nothing more the two of us should say to each other, but I’d schedule a meeting with both of us and the Dean of Instruction. “It may be helpful,” I added, “that the Dean is African American.” Monica hesitated and suddenly backpedaled, asking me to just say a little more about her paper. I wasn’t actually sure the Dean would support me, so I bluffed. But black students didn’t want to meet with the Dean for conflict resolution. This was exactly why we desperately needed competent and tough black faculty and administration. By the end of the semester, Monica had become my friend. After the last class she gave me a warm hug and thanked me for hanging in with her and teaching her the writing skills she now realized she needed to succeed. She’d already enrolled for my upcoming Comp Two class. I was delighted for her.
Over the years, I had many such experiences, some of which led to deep and genuine connections with students of all colors and origins. When those connections blossomed, they were redemptive—certainly for me and, I believe, for the students. We had gone beyond identity to the ordinary, yet truly extraordinary, relationship of mentor and mentee. I came away with renewed faith that I was doing something that mattered, something that helped my students break through limitations imposed by the lack of personal and economic resources—and students came to know that I wanted the best for them.
Despite the inevitable misperceptions and conflicts, I tried to stay grounded, even maintain a sense of humor—but when teachers absorb hostility day after day (and fear repercussions), the emotional tattering is profound. I remember a tall, wiry black student in my Comp Two night class. I’ll call him John. Counselors were concerned with his volatile, disruptive behavior and a possible mental condition, but they handled him with kid gloves. His essays and verbal class comments were confused and disjointed. He became angry and hostile when I offered critical comments on his papers. How, I wondered, could he have passed Comp One? I did know cases where teachers had passed on a student out of sheer exhaustion—or fear of violence.
One evening I planned to use class time to discuss the drafts of a paper that would become a significant part of the semester grade. I had already marked the drafts, suggesting corrections and revisions. I would return them, and as I met with each student individually, those waiting would discuss their drafts in small groups and give each other feedback. Upon reading John’s draft, I’d found it, as I’d feared, incoherent. It related neither to the assigned nor any other topic. I knew he’d go ballistic if I rejected it outright, so I simply noted on the final page that we’d have to review it further during class. I was apprehensive that our discussion would likely go off the rails, but I hoped I could somehow steer him back toward the assigned topic.
As students worked together, waiting their turns to confer, I invited John to talk. He refused, insisting we meet in my office after everyone had left—an office isolated down a long, dark corridor. By now the building was empty. I declined and invited him again to come up to the desk. Again, he refused, agitated, slamming a book down on his desk, demanding that we meet alone in my office. The students in his small group exchanged uneasy glances, trying to focus on their work. As the conferences went on, I discreetly asked two male students to stay behind, move to a far end of the room out of earshot, and when class was over, walk me to my car. As the class emptied of everyone but my guardians, I again invited John up to the desk. He jumped to his feet and stormed out. The following week he dropped my class, went on to raise alarms elsewhere on campus, and finally disappeared.
Race-related disputes eventually spilled over into scientific and technical curricula. A nursing colleague told me that administration was questioning her and her colleagues’ commitment to diversity—that is, more black students should graduate. Nursing had always been one of our most demanding majors, with students of all colors frequently dropping out. “What are we to do?” she lamented. “Erroneous medical charting? Misunderstanding a care plan? Misreading a decimal point? So dangerous!” At least, I thought to myself, no lives were at risk in White Studies.
A new black faculty member arrived and, without adequate vetting, was assigned to teach evening and weekend classes off campus in distant neighborhood libraries and community centers where no administrative or faculty oversight was possible. Early in his first semester, he held a student hostage in a motel room, where he’d persuaded her to join him after class. He was immediately terminated, but to my utter astonishment, a colleague—a fervent Maoist—came to me insisting that faculty must oppose the firing and demand a second chance. This was the first, but not the last, time I found myself appalled by a willingness to put students at risk in the name of ideology.
Some white women, finding the environment toxic, were leaving to enroll in a suburban college. Sexual harassment was officially unacceptable and receiving heightened attention at the college, but it was riskier to remonstrate with black men, whether students or non-students, than with white. It was especially confusing for young women unused to such hustling. “Celebrate Diversity” posters were prominent throughout the campus. Rebuffs could be met with, “What’s wrong, baby? You racist?” Things worsened, including recruitment of some students into strip clubs and, it was suspected, prostitution. Several faculty women went to our second black president, a man genuinely concerned for students and their success. They begged him to use his position as a black man and our president to combat the harassment. He insisted that these men would ignore him as surely as they would ignore white administrative personnel. The women suggested he beef up security or, if necessary, call in the police—actions only he could take without racial repercussions. He was unwilling to do so, reluctant to assume an authority that only he had.
* * *
Soon, I began to run into abuses of the new disability protections. For example, a Latino student with severe hearing loss took my Comp One course. I’ll call him Jose. In working with him, I’d discovered early elementary school writing ability. His compositions were routinely rewritten by compassionate students in the Learning and Writing Center. I told him I couldn’t pass him based on the work of others, that he must retake the Developmental sequence. He demanded that we meet with the disability counselor. We met, and she insisted that his inability to do college-level writing was the result of a disability. He therefore should be passed. I refused, insisting it would not serve Jose to go on to courses in which he would be unlikely to succeed. Jose, accustomed to being accommodated, flew into a rage, showering me with curses. This was a side of Jose the counselor had never seen. Shocked, she struggled to calm him. Exasperated, I offered to accede to her request if she’d put it in writing. She declined, and Jose stopped attending my class. Later, I learned that the college had expunged his failing grade and registered him, tuition free, in another teacher’s comp course—suggesting, of course, a failure of some sort on my part that the college was obliged to correct.
Inevitably, preferences for students who were not heteronormative were quietly introduced. I’d always gotten along well with gay and lesbian students (the many later iterations were yet to come), debating issues like gays in the military and gay marriage (it is almost unthinkable that any such open debate on identity issues could happen in a college classroom today). After one such discussion, a gay student who had taken all my classes came up as students left the room, rested his hand on my arm, and said mischievously, “Try it. You’ll like it!” He and others had asked me earlier in the year to be the advisor to the Gay Student Association. But later in the semester, this student, now the head of that organization, caught me in the hall and asked me to support a complaint about the black female Dean of Instruction (mentioned earlier). She had refused him permission to post large color posters around campus warning students about AIDS. I asked to see the posters. They were glossy photographs of the naked, muscular buttocks of a white male as backdrop to a large, erect black penis. I tried to explain the nature of public spaces, that it might be offensive to some students, that the college had a daycare for children for whom it would not be appropriate, that the general public walked through campus. He bitterly rejected my explanations, and from then on he avoided me.
This expectation of privilege for the non-heteronormative spilled into faculty matters. Long after male faculty members were being closely watched by an administrator assigned to monitor sexual harassment of students, a male counselor learned that a recently hired lesbian theatre arts teacher was sexually harassing some of the young women in her classes, suggesting that their emotional struggles arose from a refusal to recognize their lesbianism. Students were leaving to enroll elsewhere. The counselor and I went to a male Dean with concerns. The Dean, and later several faculty women, accused us of homophobia, insisting that the charges were fabrications. But, shortly thereafter, several of the young women went on record, filing formal complaints. An investigation followed; the teacher was fired. She hired a lawyer and tied up the college for several years in court, demanding damages. Neither my colleague nor I received any apology from those who had impugned our motives.
As I moved toward the end of my career, Muslim students began enrolling at the college. Demands were made to accommodate prayer. Despite chronic shortages of classroom space, a room was set aside for the purpose—a concession at cross-purposes with our mission as a secular, public institution. Non-Muslim students began complaining that sinks in the men’s and women’s restrooms were being used for foot-washing preparatory to prayer, making them unavailable at certain times, leaving sinks unsanitary and floors wet and slippery. Demands were then made to re-plumb bathrooms for foot washing stations, and any opposition was deemed Islamophobic. I’d hoped the ACLU would file suit to block such use of public facilities for the benefit of a particular religious tradition. I was disappointed.
In the last seven years of my time teaching at our state university, where I’d developed and taught graduate and upper-division credit classes in a specialty I’d trained in since my 20s, I began to face new demands. One afternoon, I walked into class with a copy of that day’s student newspaper. The headline story was about sexual assault on campus. I urged everyone to get the paper and read the article, to be aware of the dangers, and to take the issue seriously. Several students volunteered further details on recent incidents. A young woman interrupted, insisting I should have given a trigger warning. I hesitated, wary of the minefield, but decided to state my position—that trigger warnings blocked the controversial texts and open discussion necessary to any genuine college education. Suddenly she was crying. She grabbed her books and fled the room, insisting she must talk to her counselor at the student health center.
I asked the class to sit together quietly for a few minutes. Slowly, tension began to dissipate. I asked for discussion. Some thought trigger warnings necessary, some thought them inappropriate, most were noncommittal—there was no consensus. We moved on. Reflecting on the incident later, I concluded that the real problem was not the subject matter, but my refusal to accept a new party line. In previous classes, the student had shown no reluctance to discuss difficult issues. Had I agreed with her, no counselor would have been needed. What she did need was a trigger warning that her teacher might, if the question arose, reject trigger warnings.
Most alarming of all, I witnessed physical safety taking a back seat to diversity issues, just as I had seen at my small college years earlier. One day I opened a class by stressing the dangers from a serious outbreak on and around campus of violent muggings (often by armed assailants), sexual assaults, and even an attempted kidnapping. Knowing I was stepping into another minefield, I suggested that a stronger police presence was needed to keep everyone safe. We all knew that virtually all of the perpetrators of these crimes were black. That information was freely available until later in the year when, under strong pressure, the university stopped including race in the reports to students, faculty, and staff mandated by the federal Clery Act (a violation of the spirit if not the letter of that law).
A young white woman objected angrily that to add more police was racist—it would mean racial profiling. I argued that the physical safety of students, staff, and faculty was paramount—that all of us, including minorities, should willingly identify ourselves if it were essential to the physical safety of our peers and colleagues. I urged everyone to walk with heightened awareness of their surroundings and of potential assailants. I told them they were my students and I didn’t want any of them to get hurt. The student got to her feet, shaking her head, and left the room. Even though she and I had had a good relationship and she had been fully engaged with the class, she would return only for the final. I reached out to her several times by email, but received no response.
After class, a few students lingered and thanked me for raising the issue. Had I been brought before administration to defend myself, I would have been told, of course, that I had strayed from the course content and, worse, made my student feel “unsafe.” I had. But I was very concerned indeed about safety—my students’ physical safety. Victims had been threatened with knives and guns, some knocked to the ground and kicked about the head putting them at risk of brain damage. The university administration was downplaying the dangers and hiding the race of perpetrators.
In my last year of faculty meetings, I took a final fall through the increasingly thin ice of college teaching by insisting that I would never, during introductions at a first class (or in later classes), ask students for their preferred pronouns. This was now being urged, not only by administration, but by colleagues. Why, I asked, would I do this when I would never dream of pushing students to volunteer their racial, religious, political, national, sexual, economic, health, or any other orientation or status? I argued that this shifted the focus of the class to a personal issue—and further, that it was not fair to pressure all students to reveal themselves in any way on such a matter, even by their silence or by their embrace of traditional pronoun norms. Any student, of course, who wished to share a preferred pronoun or other personal information was free to do so. My position was clearly unacceptable. Later, I was informed by a colleague that using the term “preferred” was also unacceptable. It implied a choice in such matters.
* * *
I am no longer in the classroom. I won’t see the next generation of ideologues sweep through campuses. However, as the political Left endlessly moves the goalposts after each Pyrrhic victory, I hope the moment will come when a critical mass of faculty and students refuse to play the game. It is difficult to convey the toll taken—semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade—by a teaching environment in which a single criticism or correction or incautious remark can produce an explosion and formal or informal disciplinary proceedings. For almost 50 years, I’ve had to be on the alert, recognizing that conflict with any student other than a heterosexual white male could cost me. Most students wanted to learn. I developed radar for those who didn’t—for those searching after grievance. This sounds exaggerated. It is not. Many students with preferential status now work the system in multiple ways, sometimes with little awareness of the special treatment they receive. This does not serve them well. Students can resent being pushed. They are hamstrung if they construe pushing as discriminatory.
The law of unintended consequences still operates. Enormous burdens are being placed on those teachers helping students struggling against the greatest odds–lack of reading skills, lack of study skills, lack of family support, lack of mentorship, lack of financial help—burdens that actually fall most heavily on K-12 teachers. The supreme irony is that affirmative action, diversity, equity, and inclusion policies do silent damage to the very students in greatest need of help. Those in a favored demographic are assured that their struggles arise from the malign external forces of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. They are offered a false choice: either accept their victimhood as persons without agency who must silently suffer injustice, or throw themselves into the abolition of patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist whiteness. While some students may gain from preferential treatment, everyone loses with the abandonment of the core principle, enshrined in the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, that all are created equal—that rights arise not from membership in any group, but from our common humanity.
Students are being encouraged to blame teachers, curricula, and colleges for lives lived without much opportunity; for lives, in far too many cases, of struggle and suffering—and at the other end of the economic spectrum, for lives lived full of wealth and power, yet empty of meaning or heart. Truly, neither economic inequalities nor spiritual emptiness can be blamed on teachers. The sources lie far deeper. Solutions, if we can find them, lie in more teaching, more learning—not in attacks on the always-fragile institutional understandings that support open inquiry.
To step beyond this fracturing let us reaffirm a radical equality among peoples. Let us seek understanding of ourselves and others in the best art, literature, philosophy, science, religion, myth, tradition, and wisdom available in the cultures of the world. Let us shake off ideology and fearlessly (even exuberantly, as I did with my most memorable teachers) explore. I await the day when colleges and universities brave the inevitable backlash and step decisively away from the politics of identity. Those are colleges I might wish my own grandchildren to attend.
The author is a former English teacher. Gregory Hansen is a pseudonym.
Oliver Stone is in Cannes this year premiering his documentaryJFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which re-examines the murder of President John F. Kennedy using new information that has come to light since the filmmaker’s seminal 1991 picture JFK. Deadline sat down here with Stone to discuss why he felt the need to revisit the assassination 30 years on from his original film, and how the project has made his conscience “feel better”.
As per usual, Stone is candid in his assessment of the current geopolitical situation, and says that “censorship” and “a fear of offending” is clashing with the American Dream. He also delivers a scathing opinion of a few recent award-winning documentaries, and talks about which of his unmade projects he regrets most.
JFK Revisited debuts in the Cannes Premieres program on July 12. Altitude is handling sales. We can also unveil an exclusive clip from the documentary below.
DEADLINE: How does it feel to be back at a film festival premiering a new movie? And showing an old one too.
OLIVER STONE: This was Thierry’s idea. I went to Lyon last year for the first time [for Thierry Fremaux’s Lumiere Film Festival] showing Born On The 4th Of July, and he said, ‘It’s JKF’s 30th anniversary coming up next year, we’d like to celebrate it in France, it’s a special film for us’. I suggested we show the director’s cut, it’s less known.
Kennedy Campaign 1960
DEADLINE: That will be fun late night on the beach, though it’s pretty a long movie…
STONE: It’s three hours and 28 minutes. The original is three hours and 10 minutes. The original already pushed the limits back in 1991, anything above three hours was against my contract at Warner Bros. But they allowed that [the film’s length] to happen without any previews, which was a rarity, because we finished in time.
DEADLINE: That was a show of faith from the studio.
STONE: I don’t think the new management at Warner Bros would touch the film now, or the doc.
DEADLINE: For commercial reasons?
STONE: They always say that but they had to take a chance, Terry Semel and Bob Daly at Warner Bros believed in the film. A three hour-plus movie with a lot of facts. And look at the business we did [$200M+ globally].
DEADLINE: How did the new doc come about?
STONE: Rob Wilson, my producer, said, ‘Let’s make a documentary that shows people there are more facts here’. The film [JFK] was questioned for its legitimacy. But there was also a lot of support. Roger Ebert said, ‘I’m not a historian I’m a film critic, but I can tell this feels right’. It was the atmosphere of doubt that was right.
DEADLINE: The doc sheds some new light on the assassination from documents that are public but haven’t really been in the mainstream before.
STONE: All the original evidence is wrong. Rifle, fingerprints, ballistics, trajectories – wrong, wrong, wrong. And the autopsy was the biggest miscarriage of all.
DEADLINE:Beyond the documentary, is there an endgame here? Is there anywhere else this investigation can go?
STONE: The only thing you have left besides the memory of people, is the final documents. They’ve been redacted. Donald Trump said he was going to release them all and within a few hours changed his mind. There are quite a few. This documentary is the best summation of this case and we still don’t have all the documents.
DEADLINE: Is it a satisfying outcome for you, watching the doc?
STONE: My conscience feels better. It’s easy to attack a dramatization, you have to take some dramatic license.
DEADLINE: It’s a very dense doc, did you ever considering making it as a series?
STONE: We do have a four-hour version. It was, I think, prematurely shown to some of the platforms in North America, and they didn’t want to get involved in it. We’re only showing the two-hour version now, it’s simpler and more linear. We’re doing all kinds of business here in France [Altitude has closed deals for territories including Australia and Spain]. I don’t know where America is going to come down on it. If they don’t show it in America, there is something definitely wrong in the country, something rotten.
DEADLINE: Apparently you only make documentaries now?
STONE: There’s no set rule. I find fulfilment in documentaries because they’re important. I’m working on one about clean energy, and it’s crucial, it matters for the world. We have to change our energy systems. I’ve been working on it with scientists for about a year and a half.
DEADLINE: Do you feel you have more agency over your docs?
STONE: Yes. But even then, I have to struggle to get them on the air.
DEADLINE: What’s the best method of distribution for JFK Revisited? Do you want it to be theatrical?
STONE: Oh I’m not worried about that, I just want to get to a volume of people. All these countries buying separately solves some of the problem. Obviously we could put it on YouTube for the United States, but we’d have to give it away, people have invested money in it.
DEADLINE: In terms of its U.S. home, you want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible…
STONE: Yes it would be ideal if Netflix took it, but Netflix is a strange company, they always talk about their algorithms or whatever.
DEADLINE: They’ve won the documentary Oscar three years out of four.
STONE: At least two of them were propaganda pieces. That shocked me.
DEADLINE: Which ones?
STONE:The White Helmets [which won Best Documentary Short at the Oscars in 2017], that was such a bunch of crap. It has been completely exposed by serious independent journalists. Icarus, this whole doping scandal against Russia is questionable because we never hear the other point of view. The banning of the Russian identity as a nation is all part of an international campaign to delegitimize the Putin regime. This goes deep. It’s really an attack on Russia, it’s as close to ‘warm war’ as you can get.
DEADLINE: Talking generally about politics, how has Biden changed your outlook?
STONE: I voted for Biden. I got into a lot of heat with my Facebook followers. I voted for him for a bit of quiet. I thought Trump was dangerous, he’s a loose cannon, I was worried about the nuclear issue. Biden at least seems to have a modicum of modesty about him. You hope for the best, but Biden’s history does not indicate there will be a major shift in any policy.
DEADLINE: Is it time to make a Trump film or is the wound too fresh?
STONE: I would do it as a comedy or satire, as I did with W. [about George W. Bush]. They’re so partisan about Trump, they say he’s the worst president ever but it’s not true – the worst president was Bush, in terms of his damage to the world, no question about it. But after four years of Trump he couldn’t solve anything, he made things messier.
Unless there’s a real peace candidate who comes into power, America will not change. American has not been the same since Kennedy because beneath the surface the intelligence agencies and the military took over the direction of the U.S. government on the big money issues like national security and strategy. Every president since has been limited in his ability to make significant changes.
DEADLINE: Do you think the JFK assassination could happen in the 21st century? Every person at the parade would’ve been filming it on their phones.
STONE: It would never happen, it was so sloppy in retrospect, so many things went wrong. It would’ve been possible but back then we were ignorant and naïve, we believed whatever the government handout said.
DEADLINE: Does that mean social media has made society more democratic?
STONE: In many ways yes, although they’re banning a lot of people for speaking out and saying ‘outrageous’ things. I think that’s wrong. Alex Jones may be crazy about some things but he may be right about other things. Even Trump being banned is wrong. Censorship has taken over, this fear of offending, of saying something wrong is really against the American Dream.
I used to get on the New York Times editorial page and state a point of view, that hasn’t been true in 20 years. Noam Chomsky can’t really write for anyone mainstream.
DEADLINE: Is that partially because people’s appetites have changed?
STONE: No. It’s directed. An empire in fear of decline is going to become more defensive and sensitive to everything.
DEADLINE: Looking back on JFK, is there anything in that film that you now don’t believe?
STONE: I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m going to watch it again on Sunday, you can ask me on Monday. It’s an important question.
DEADLINE: Let’s end on a fun one. You’ve had plenty of films that didn’t come to fruition, like your Martin Luther King project, what’s the one that got away?
STONE: They all did. Evita was my first love. I was working really hard on it, Meryl Streep was going to do it, the timing didn’t work out. I went back to it with Michelle Pfeiffer years later, almost worked out. Then Alan Parker grabbed it and made a mess of it with Madonna. I had fired her [Madonna].
Martin Luther King I worked on it twice, that was a doomed project because I’m not Black. And then My Lai [about the 1968 massacre] was a heartbreaker, we came so close, three weeks from shooting in Thailand.
DEADLINE: On the flip side, which of your films are you most proud of?
STONE: I’m proud of all of them thankfully. I don’t mean to be an egomaniac. It’s like having a baby. I suppose JFK got the most amount of noise, more than Platoon even, and then Born On The Fourth Of July won an Oscar. I killed myself on all of them. They were passion projects. I never took money to make a movie, I never sold out.
My title here—which would be le siècle volé in French—is a double nudge of la génération perdue of Hemingway: the “lost generation.” It is now not only a generation we have lost, but more than a century; and, as I will show, it was not lost but stolen.
Before we get to who stole it, I will give you a hint. In my last paper we saw John Irving attacking Tom Wolfe. Irving has also recently attacked Ernest Hemingway. Although there would seem to be no connection between Wolfe and Hemingway, there is. It appears Irving may know something we don’t.
My readers may think my last two papers have read like a whirlwind, and they will find the wind gusting even harder here. Charybdis has taken us down and we are now in her inescapable maw. Those who have traveled over to my science site will know that my discovery of the charge field has allowed me to unravel a remarkable number of mysteries in a short time. I have called it the key to every door. Well, I have recently found a similar sort of skeleton key for the mysteries outside of physics. Although my discovery in physics contained a bit of method along with my usual serendipity, I have to admit that here the method was almost entirely lacking. Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information: there is no other way to explain it.
During a break from my physics papers, I was just following my nose on some non-scientific topics. Somehow I came up with a paper on Theosophy and the Beat Generation, and although that was only a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t tell you how or why I hit on those subjects to write about. It dropped into my lap, so to speak. I think someone mentioned Theosophy to me, I realized I didn’t know much about it, and I began researching it. In that research, I saw a red string and I began to pull on it. It unraveled and unraveled, and before I knew it the whole cloak had turned to a pile of yarn. The red string trailed off into another room, I entered that room, and again all the garments and curtains and rugs unraveled. I have been following that red string ever since.
For those of you who have seen the Jodie Foster film Little Man Tate, I recommend you to the math scene, where the floating numbers come together above the head of Tate. That is the way this feels to me. Or for a less cinematic example, think of how a formerly dark room changes when the bright sunlight floods it in the morning: suddenly you can see all the seams in the walls beneath the sheetrock. When I read these pages—whether on physics, art, biography, or anything else—the inessential parts just sort of fade out and what remains are the lies. It is like they are already circled for me. Reductionists would say it is just an ability to sort data, refined over the years by collating massive amounts of both truth and lies—and having a strong sense of how each looks in the complex patterns of language. There may be more to it than that, but whatever the mechanism or inspiration, it is as strange to me as it is to you.
This time I was sent to research Hemingway, though again, I can’t really say why. My recent papers proving that the CIA has been involved in the promotion of Modernism have given me suspicions about absolutely everyone famous in the arts, but logic would tell me that many are far more suspicious than Hemingway. I have never even thought of Hemingway as a Modern, though my research now informs me I was wrong about that. All I knew before today is what is left of my old readings and conversations. We were assigned A Farewell to Arms in my junior year in high school, and I disliked it for many reasons. These reasons match up very well with the reasons John Irving gave in The New York Times in the summer of 2012: he hated the short sentences, the sparse journalistic style, and the macho posing. In addition, I also hated the cardboard characters, the emotionless and humorless
narrative, and the plots that I found to be totally uninteresting. I couldn’t understand then why the novel was so famous or why we were assigned it, and I still don’t. No one has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of it, the explanations I have gotten from teachers, critics, historians, and others all seeming to be some sort of misdirection boiling down to this: it is famous because it is famous. “All those things you hated, other people loved. They loved the short spiky sentences, the ‘muscular prose,’ the ‘Iceberg Style’ where all the important stuff (including, I suppose, the emotion, thehumor, the meaning, and the depth) was all ‘submerged’ and invisible.” When I asked why they loved these things, I got no meaningful answer, just the assurance that they did.
Another reason I disliked Hemingway also matches Irving’s. Like him I got to Hemingway after Dickens. I had already read all of Dickens before I got to my junior year, and loved it. I can still remember pulling Barnaby Rudge off the shelf early in my sophomore year, which led to David Copperfield and the rest. I would have been 14 at the time. Even at that age I never felt inconvenienced by the long sentences or the commas, and I felt at home in their cadence. I also felt at home in the exposition, in which the characters were fully drawn. You knew what they looked like, what they thought, what mannerisms and quirks they had. You knew their bodies, minds, and souls. With Hemingway you got none of that, just flat dialog and a list of facts.
I will be told this is the beauty of the Iceberg Theory: the reader has to build all that himself. It is good for your imagination. It gives you more freedom. It makes the reader more creative. If you don’t know, the Iceberg Theory is a theory someone came up with after the fact as an apology for Hemingway. Maybe Hemingway came up with it, maybe he didn’t. We don’t have his whole life on tape. The Theory is that writing like Hemingway’s only gives you the top layer, suggesting the depths beneath—like an Iceberg, you see. There’s a little bit on top and lot on the bottom.
Problem is, I don’t buy it. They have been saying that about all of Modern Art since the beginning: it may look shallow, uncreative, naïve, and absurd, but it is really very deep. You have to rebuild the hidden depths yourself. Of course you could say that about anything, and it is now said about anything and everything. This is part of the “blurring” we saw in my last paper: blurring of the distinction between high art and low art, or between good art and bad art, or between art and non-art. If you fail to rebuild a magnificent castle on that sandpit, it is your fault, not the artist’s. The artist implied the whole world beneath his toothpick construction or his paste-up words thrown into the air. If you can’t see that, you are just, well, an aristocrat—an outmoded person whose every argument and opinion can be ignored.
Notice that this is why no one could ever show me why Hemingway was great. With the Iceberg Theory, you can’t point to any evidence. The evidence is all invisible and implied. Those depths are there only because you are told they are. There is no evidence for them in the actual writing, but that is immaterial, you will be told. Hemingway is famous, the critics insist the depths are there, therefore they must be. But as with Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, all proof is permanently beyond our reach. As Karl Popper would have put it, Hemingway’s fame is unfalsifiable. The bottom of the Iceberg is unfalsifiable. Since all the words are in the top part of the Iceberg, what do you point to in the bottom part, to prove the depths?
My opponents will claim I am not good at reading between or beneath the lines. I am creatively limited, they will say or imply. But again, they will say that against all evidence. As the easiest answer, we could just pile up all my creations against theirs, and weigh the pile. But for the fuller answer, we would have to study everything I have done and everything they have, as a matter of quality. We could then see how many walls I have seen through and broken through, versus how many they have. I am seeing through a wall right now in this paper, so claiming I cannot see what is there may be the most absurd argument of all, and the most counter to all evidence. Their protestations are just the brick in the wall crying out to the hand, as the hand tosses it aside.
We see more evidence of this by returning to John Irving. Although Irving stated his opinion much more quietly than I have here, he was nonetheless jumped on from all quarters.
Why?
We almost never see anyone contradict the Modern dogma, quietly stating they don’t like something they were ordered to like, but when they do the roof caves in. Why? In a society that was really free and pluralistic—and all the other adjectives we are ordered to place before “our society” in every sentence —John Irving saying he didn’t like Hemingway would not be a news item. No one would care. John would be allowed to say whatever he wanted, especially regarding what he liked and didn’t like. But clearly he isn’t. Why is that? Please ask yourself that question. Why is it so important to those running the media and the world to run interference for Hemingway and Einstein and Joyce and Feynman and all the other canonical ones? Why is negative commentary so frowned upon? This by itself is one of our clues here.
But back to Hemingway. Being more open minded than you probably think I am, after high school I left open the possibility I was wrong. I thought I might be too young to appreciate it. I had already found this to be the case with The Catcher in the Rye, which I also did not like when I was 15 or 16. On a first reading, I thought it didn’t hold up very well after David Copperfield. I can remember thinking, “This is stupid: it all takes place over about three days!” But I reread it in my 20’s and liked it a lot. I ended up thinking it was brilliant. I left open the possibility the same might happen with Hemingway. I thought it might be an acquired taste, like beer. So I waited a few years, drank some beer, learned to like it, found some lovers—which I did not have to learn to like—and generally “grew up.” I even had some fistfights, which should—according to the literature—have led me directly to an appreciation of Hemingway. But nothing doing.
I read For Whom the Bell Tolls in my mid-twenties, and then The Sun Also Rises in my late twenties. I then reread all three books in my thirties, plus To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea (again), The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Green Hills of Africa, and A Moveable Feast. I felt the same thing I felt the first time, except now three times as strongly. Whereas I had only disliked Hemingway in high school, I now despised him. The awful reading experiences, along with decades of hard sell, had not only made me despise Hemingway, but also those people who were selling him.
I was now pretty sure something was either very wrong with the literary world or with me. Based on the evidence at hand, I was fairly sure it was the former. Pretty much everything I had read of 20th century “literature” affected me in a similar way, and I read a lot, so I wasn’t basing my conclusions on prejudice or ignorance. I also read a lot of criticism, trying to understand the opposing view. I had thousands of late night conversations with my brainy friends, trying to get to the bottom of it. But I never did. Not one of the critics or one of my friends ever gave me a reasonable explanation for the fame of Hemingway or of any of his books.
Still, although I will admit to despising Hemingway, I am prone to strong emotions. I have never been interested in tepid responses to anything, so my “despising” Hemingway is not all that extraordinary. There are a lot of famous people I despise much much more: Warhol, Duchamp, Bohr, Susskind, etc. It’s a very long list. So I don’t really know why I jumped on Hemingway today. Probably something to do with the fact that he is so big, so influential, and such a mystery to me. Plus, I already know these other guys are fakes. I have researched them and written about them to the extent they are transparent to me. Whether I can now connect them to Intelligence is almost immaterial. Discovering they were attached to Intelligence couldn’t lower my estimation of them, since it is already at zero.
I think it is easier to hide behind a novel than behind a scientific paper or a work of art. It is not difficult to figure out an Andy Warhol or a Leonard Susskind—or it wasn’t for me. But a novel is much more opaque. Especially a novel like that of Hemingway. The Iceberg Style not only submerges the real content of the novel (supposing it has any), it also submerges the author. In fact, this may be its real purpose.
The first time I saw a Warhol work, I knew he was both a terrible artist and a fake artist. That is, Iknew he wasn’t just bad, he was also manufactured. I didn’t know if he was manufactured by the gallery or the critic or the CIA, but I knew he was manufactured. Same with Susskind. His entire persona was a giveaway. But I couldn’t say the same of Hemingway. I thought it might just be a matter of taste. Maybe he was just bad for me. By my standards, he was a terrible artist, but that didn’t make him a fake artist.
I have to think that is why I never considered him Modern. For me, “Modern” is synonymous with “fake.” A Modern artist isn’t just a bad artist, by which I would mean an artist who can’t create beautiful or meaningful works. He or she is also a fake artist: a person who isn’t even trying to create beautiful or meaningful works, by any possible standards. A fake artist is someone who manufactures himself—or is manufactured by someone else—to look like an artist, with no concern for art by any definition. This pose is created for money, fame, propaganda, or some other non-artistic purpose. Many Moderns pretty much admit this about themselves (see the Dadaists, the Futurists, or just about any artist after 1980), so I am not stating anything extraordinary here.
But Hemingway was never sold this way, and I never imagined it of him. I found him to be a rotten writer, giving me nothing I looked for in a book, but it never occurred to me he might be fake. It never occurred to me he was Modern.
I don’t like to have to go to artists’ bios to figure out their works. I shouldn’t have to. Which may explain why I have never gone to Hemingway’s. If the novel can’t make me feel anything, the novelist’s bio certainly won’t, so why bother? Which is not to say I didn’t know the basic story: the army, the bullfights, the fistfights, the booze, the many wives, the famous people carousing in Paris and Madrid, the later homes in Cuba and Key West. You can’t be a reader in this country and not know an outline of Hemingway’s life. But I had never read his life with any real interest until now. Taking up the question again, I was interested not to finally digest the hagiography, but to look for discrepancies. I was now looking for red flags, and I found them.
The first red flag worth mentioning is found in A Moveable Feast, supposed to be an account of his time in Paris in the 20’s. The book is simply not credible on many—or I should say on most—counts. Just as the easiest example, in an article from American Literature called “Hemingway’s Gender Trouble,” the author admits most of Hemingway’s sexual bragging in the book (and all along) was deflection from real sexual troubles. While we could have guessed that, and while I am not too interested in pursuing Hemingway’s “androgyny”—which I am not sure I believe in—what interests me more is the admission in this article that many other things are false as well. For instance, the clumsy “created” nature of the young Hemingway in A Moveable Feast is well-established as fraudulent (e.g., Hemingway had access to large sums of money during the time he was in Paris, yet portrayed himself as “starving”).**
Pound and other characters in this story do the same thing, but instead of correcting the narrative, the mainstream allows Hemingway’s own story to continue to dominate the public imagination. The lost generation was originally sold as a set of marginal characters, flying by their bootstraps, and the public has preferred to keep that story, since it is more romantic. No one wishes to replace that story with the truth, which is that all these young people were not only privileged, they were fed in a pipeline from one rich connection to the next. Stein was just one of these rich people channeling funds.
In a current update to this story, we find Woody Allen continuing the propaganda with his recent film Midnight in Paris. I consider it by far the worst thing he has ever done, and I thought it before I beganto unwind any of this. For the record, I was once a big Woody Allen fan, and I suppose in some ways I still am. But this latest film is plastic, stilted, and excruciatingly shallow. It looks like it was written and filmed not by Allen, but by a set of cyborgs from Intelligence. Which would explain why it fawns over its old characters like a silly teenage girl. It would also explain why it has by far the highest box office of any Allen film. Since it continues the old propaganda, re-kitschifying what was already kitsch, it was sure to be promoted for all it was worth. [You may consider this aside into Woody Allen a diversion, but I consider it another red flag.]
The third red flag is Gertrude Stein. We are told Stein was an early mentor. What? Why would macho man Hemingway be hanging around the dowdy bald lesbian Stein? In 1922, when Hemingway joined her circle, she had published almost nothing and was not known for her writing. What she had published even her brother Leo called “an abomination” (see Three Lives, for instance). To this day, almost all people who like Hemingway think Stein is awful. Hemingway got his muscular prose from the Kansas City Star’s style guide, not from Stein, so how in hell was she a mentor? To me, she doesn’t look like a mentor so much as a contact. She was wealthy and knew people. But what was she really up to? Who did she know and why?
To find out, I researched her earlier life. I found that she had studied under William James at Harvard (Radcliffe). I thought, Oh Boy, here we go again! James encouraged Stein to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins, and for two years after her graduation from Radcliffe, she did. Why? It is admitted she had no interest in medicine or medical school, so what was she doing? James had wanted to be an artist, but was compelled by his father to go into science. But Stein’s life never reads like that. As a rich girl, she was a free agent. She did what she chose at all times. Knowing her personality, it is doubtful she was compelled by James to do anything. So why would she go to medical school when she had no interest in it? Well, maybe she was at medical school and maybe she wasn’t. To see what I mean, we have to follow up on a thread at Wikipedia, where we are told she spent the summer after graduation at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying marine biology. Again, maybe she was studying marine biology, maybe she wasn’t. Woods Hole is on the extreme southwest corner of Cape Cod, and of course the Ocean Institutes aren’t the only things there. When Stein was there, the homes of the Boston Brahmins were also there, including top executives at J. P. Morgan, Lee Higginson, and Banker’s Trust. Even more interesting is that Woods Hole was also connected to Naval Intelligence. Where you have Ocean Institutes you will also have the navy, for obvious reasons. Remember, Intelligence has been run out of the navy from the beginning, and the Office of Naval Intelligence is still the ranking arm of military intelligence. You can see the link between Woods Hole and Naval Intelligence here, although a little research will yield much more.
Look how short all those guys in the front row are, including James, Freud, and Meyer! This could be a group photo from Wonkaland. We are never taught that, but a photo gives it all away. Freud is listed at 5’7”, but he is clearly less than that here, even with shoes on. Maybe 5’5”, while James and Meyer are 5’3”. I could write a psychology paper on that, and I may. It represents another lie, if nothing more.
We get another clue by pursuing the thread to William James. We find that William James joined the Theosophical Society in 1882, which takes us back to my first paper, which got us into this mess. I have already shown you that the Theosophical Society was founded by Henry Steel Olcott, who was in military intelligence. Why would the pragmatist James be joining the Theosophical Society? In Olcott’s inaugural speech for the TS in 1875, he said,
If I rightly apprehend our work, it is to aid in freeing the public mind of theological superstition and a tame subservience to the arrogance of science.
Although I freely admit the arrogance of science, I still find this statement strange, especially in relation to William James and American psychology. James is often called the father of American psychology, and psychology has wished to be a hard science from the very beginning. If that is so, why would James risk his reputation and the reputation of his entire field by joining a society that was trying to free the public mind from subservience to science? It makes no sense.
I also encourage you to notice that Wikipedia downplays James’ founding of the Society for Psychical Research as well as his membership in the Theosophical Society. We get one short sentence on each.
James’ entire career needs to be unwound, but I am not going to do that here. Instead, let us return to Gertrude Stein. Stein is sold as a great promoter of Modernism, so most would assume she was progressive. Was she? Not at all. It takes very little research to discover her direct links to fascism. She was a vocal supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and was also a supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. She said Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Jewish, she was a collaborator with the Vichy government in France, even translating some of the speeches of MarshallPhilippe Pétain. She also provided an introduction for these speeches, comparing Pétain to George Washington. Remember, this is the Vichy government that deported 75,000 Jews to German concentration camps, where 97% of them died. As late as 1944, Stein said of Pétain’s policies that they were “really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary.” This was in the same year that the Jewish children of Culoz were forcibly removed and sent to Auschwitz. Stein was then resident of Culoz. She continued to praise Pétain even after he was sentenced to death for treason. If, as some have said in her defense, she had befriended Pétain only to save her own skin, why was she still praising him after the war and after he was dead?
Stein also hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. This put her firmly with the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and all the other fascist old families in the US, who didn’t like to see any re-redistribution of money they had already redistributed into their pockets. I can see some reading this and going, “The Kennedys?” Do your research. Joseph Kennedy was one of the great opponents of the New Deal and of Roosevelt.
Stein wasn’t too difficult to unwind, as you see. It took all of one paragraph. I haven’t yet linked her unambiguously to Intelligence, but I have proved she was a fascist. What about the others in her “salon.” One of those said to be closest to Hemingway in Paris at that time was Ezra Pound. Here is what Hemingway said of Pound in 1925:
He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying … he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.
Curious, to say the least. Sounds a lot like a handler, to me. But let us back up. On one of his early trips to Spain in 1906, Pound “just happened” to be outside the Royal Palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso. It gets curiouser and curiouser if we study that assassination attempt. Although the bomber shot himself when captured by police, a man named Francisco Ferrer was tried for conspiracy and incarcerated for over a year. Just five years previously, Ferrer had opened The Modern School (Escuela Moderna) in Spain. Notice that name. The Modern School. Coincidence? After his release in 1908, Ferrer published a book The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School, which was translated into English by Joseph McCabe and published by the Knickerbocker Press in 1913. Even before that was published in the US, the first Modern School opened in New York City in 1911. Although these Modern Schools are now sold to us as Anarchist, they were actually Marxist.
You may still have in your head the old idea that Marxism and fascism are opposites, but besides the many alliances between them we saw in my last paper, I beg you to remember Russia, China, and many other countries where Marxism and fascism go hand in hand. Over and over again, we have seen Marxism used as the door that opens to fascism, and that is what was being promoted here in the US as well. As we will see again here, the Marxists weren’t allied to the Democrats—although the two theories would appear to be linked via the rights of the lower classes. Instead, we find the Marxists allied to the fascists and to the major wealthy families. Although I won’t be able to pursue the idea to its end in this paper, I beg you to consider the possibility that Marxism was created to do just that. Notice that it is a variant theory of the underclasses, promoted to compete with or replace Democracy or Republicanism. It was promoted after 1848, the year the Communist Manifesto was first published. Why is that year important? Well, we have to look at what else happened in 1848: the Republican revolutions in France, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, Hungary and Brazil. While Marx and Engels were writing about a Marxist revolution, the Republican revolutions were already in progress. Marxism was used to splinter and misdirect these Republican movements.
Although Marx himself may not have been involved in this use of Marxism, I will give you a hint about who was. Marx began writing for the New York Tribune in 1852. This in itself should look extraordinary to you, seeing that Marx was already seen as a revolutionary in Europe, having been tossed out of both Germany and Belgium. The Tribune was not a revolutionary paper. It was a mainstream Whig/Republican newspaper of the time, promoting not revolutionaries but people like Abraham Lincoln. Marx’s contact at the Tribune was Charles Dana, another Harvard man. When Dana left the Tribune in 1862, he was immediately appointed by Secretary of War Stanton to be a special investigating agent for the War Department. Does that ring a bell? In my paper on Theosophy, we saw that Henry Steel Olcott was also appointed to be a special investigating agent for the War Department. These agents were what we would now call Intelligence. Henry Steel Olcott, founder of Theosophy, also worked at the New York Tribune in the 1950’s. Olcott’s editor was Charles Dana. After the war, when Olcott was investigating spiritualism for the New York Sun in 1874, guess who his editor was again. Charles Dana. The pieces are coming together, are they not?
[To see them come together fully, you may now read my newer paper on Marx, exposing him as an agent.]
But let us make our way back toward the main line here. We have seen that Marxism was being promoted in the US before the Civil War, apparently by the government itself. As in Europe, this promotion of Marxism was used to splinter, confuse, and misdirect growing Republican sentiment. The rich families in the US were witnessing too much local solidarity with the 1848 revolutions in Europe and South America, and they used Intelligence and the media to weaken this solidarity. We have seen Marxist schools opened by Francisco Ferrer, under the name Modern School. We have seen Ezra Pound mysteriously linked to these Marxists in Spain by 1906 (when he was 20). So let us go back to Pound for a while.
We find that by 1908, he was in London, already hooked up with Yeats. We are told Pound managed this with only his book of poems A Lume Spento, but that is unlikely. It is dreadful, and should be retitled A Spent Mule. More likely is that Pound’s people knew Yeats’ people through the Golden Dawn, an offshoot of Theosophy. Although he arrived in August, by October he was lecturing at the Polytechnic and by January he was attending the literary salons of Olivia Shakespear. Not a bad four months for a 22-year-old popping into London on a lark. That simply doesn’t happen without major strings being pulled, and we may assume that Pound’s grandfather had links to military intelligence. Thaddeus Pound had been Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin and a member of US Congress. His ambitious grandson was probably snapped up by Intelligence while at the University of Pennsylvania.
[Added May 12, 2019: It is also worth remembering that in 1904-5 the Lord Mayor of London had been Sir John Pound, 1st Baronet. He replaced Sir James Ritchie. Pound’s father-in-law was Alfred Victor Allen, related to Alfred Gaither Allen of the US Congress at the same time. Gaither Allen married the daughter of M. S. Forbes of Forbes Brothers Teas and Spice—which of course links us to the East India Company. So this is where Ezra Pound came from. It explains why his welcome in London was so warm.
These Pounds of London were involved in the Merchant Taylors School as well. Also in the City of London, they were masters of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers. They also link us to the Duffs, since Barbara Pound married Daniel Duff, grandson of Col. Alexander Gordon Duff and Eliza Phillips. This links us to all sorts of action, including Vice Admiral Robert Duff, who married his cousin Lady Helen Duff, daughter of the 1st Earl of Fife. Their son married a Morrison (think Jim Morrison). No doubt Col. Gordon Duff links us to Gordon Duff of Veteran’s Today. It certainly links us to the Gordons, Dukes of Gordon, since the name here is a surname, not agiven name. Mary Gordon married Thomas Abercromby Duff in 1825, and there were other Gordon marriages before that. The Duffs also link us to the Grants, Howards, Barclays, Scotts, and Hamiltons. Although the first Pounds in the peerage are very well scrubbed, we can tell by their names that they are related to the Grahams, Herberts, Percys, Russells, Murrays, and Stuarts.
We can definitely link Ezra Pound to the Pounds of London, since he was also an Allen. His Allens came from Norwich, where they are immediately scrubbed at Geni. This tends to happen to Allens, in my experience. Ezra’s 2g-aunt also married a Josiah Allen, obviously Jewish. Ezra was also a DeVere in this line. Also a Rice, Townsend, Sherman, Coolidge, Livermore, King, Lyon, Willard, Clarke, Rogers, Ford, Harding, Adams, Learned, Bigelow, and Gleason. Note all the Presidential names there: Harding, Adams, Coolidge. This is not a coincidence. All the lines on Ezra’s mother’s side go back to Middlesex, MA. Erica the Disconnectrix is there to scrub these pages, as we would expect. She scrubs Ezra’s mother’s father’s surname Weston, and the reason why is clear once we hit Wikitree. The Westons take us almost immediately to the Dunhams, linking us to Obama.
These are the Dunhams of Plymounth, also related to Kings, Hicks, Shaws, Delanos, and Pratts, and they come from Holland. That was all on Pound’s maternal side. On his paternal side, his grandmother is immediately scrubbed, which is a big red flag. Wikitree tells us she was a Loomis. Geni also scrubs Pound’s Macy line, which is informative. Already the paternal line is looking even more Jewish than the maternal. We get Gorhams, then Husseys, then Starrs, then Hawkins in that line, taking us to Essex County, MA, which is Salem. Shubael Gorham takes us to Tilleys then Hursts and Fishers. We also hit Shattucks, Gardiners, Folgers, and Coffins, sending up a flurry of red flags. They are also from Salem. The Macy line also takes us back to Coffins.
Also to Pinkhams and then Russells. The more recent Coleman line also takes us immediately to Folgers and Russells. The Pound line takes us to the Sharps and then the Smiths. This is John Smith of Plymouth, strangely scrubbed at Wikitree. Geni also scrubs him, though we find his wife was a Hinckley. Hinckley was the Governor of Plymouth Colony. This links us to the Dunhams again. This also links us back to the Hands, as in Learned Hand. They came from the Hands of Kent, who married the Kents themselves, of Tonbridge Castle. As for the Smiths, I assume they are the Smiths of Liverpool and Nottingham, Jewish bankers. See Abel Smith and the Baronets Smith, who we looked at later in my paper on the Titanic. As for the Pounds of Piscataway, NJ, Geni doesn’t take them back to England. Wikitree says they came from Yorkshire, but has no information beyond that. Geneanet has only very brief pages on Pound.
But we might try using our eyes for a change, instead of just using them as face ornaments. He always looked Jewish, but we Gentiles don’t know what to look for, apparently. Most of us wouldn’t know a Jew from a jellybean. That is how they run these projects right by us over and over. Pound’s genealogy slaps us in the face with the truth: his anti-Semitic game was just that. A game. Theater. Another sad act in the theater we call the 20th century.]
By the next year, 1909, Pound already had another volume of poetry published, Personae, and it was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Telegraph, the Cambridge Review, and other top papers. I don’t think Keats, Shelley or Byron were noticed that fast by the major London papers. The first two papers gave it glowing reviews even though, as the more honest Rupert Brooke at Cambridge admitted, it was marred by “the unmetrical sprawling lengths” of Whitman. Although they undoubtedly hated Whitman at Cambridge, that was putting it very kindly. In short it was another Spent Mule, published and reviewed only at the request of British Secret Service. There is no other way to explain the meteoric rise of Pound from nowhere in just a year. Pound then became a literary critic in the next year (1910, at age 24), an architecture critic in the next, and then returned to London after a short time in the US in 1911 to write a weekly column for the Marxist journal The New Age.
By 1914, Pound was a contributor at several small magazines, but since he wasn’t the founder or editor of any of them, and still hadn’t hit 30, it isn’t clear how he was able to promote James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to them. Since all his writing was still garbage at that time, it is hard to understand his wide influence. Pound himself admits that Ford Madox Ford was rolling on the ground laughing at how bad his poetry was. It appears from the history of that time that Pound was always shouting, but it is harder to understand why anyone was listening.
Pound simplified his language after 1912, but it didn’t help, as you can see from the excerpt from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly posted at Wikipedia.
Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world’s welter Nature receives him; With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress. The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch; He offers succulent cooking; The door has a creaking latch.
That is from 1920, so Pound has now hit age 35, but that is still dreadful poetry. It has no flow, all three rhymes are forced, and it teeters on the edge of sense throughout.
In 1921, Pound moved to Paris, where he quickly took up with Duchamp and the Dadaists. Remember, Pound was at this time already moving directly toward fascism, and that is admitted in the mainstream literature. Also remember that the Dadaists and Futurists were tied to fascism. They were also stridently anti-art. So what was Pound—supposedly the consummate artist—up to?
Again, we can’t understand without knowing who is behind Pound. The picture above tells us, literally, since the man standing behind Pound is our clue. Yes, we finally have clear evidence in 1924, when Pound secures funding for Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review—which contained works from Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Hemingway. We are told the money came from John Quinn. Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia,
He worked for British Intelligence services before, during and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States.*
Wow. We have, at one swoop, connected Hemingway, Crowley, Stein, Joyce, Ford and Pound to Intelligence, and we have done it without leaving the whitewashed pages of Wikipedia. We also have to look back to A Moveable Feast in a new way. Aleister Crowley makes an appearance in A Moveable Feast, to the astonishment of most people. It is only a cameo, but still. Why would Hemingway mention in 1957 passing by Crowley on the street in the early 1920’s? Of all the things he experienced in that period, of all the things mentioned in “his notebooks saved in old steamer trunks,” why that mention of Crowley? Is Hemingway giving us a hint? Is this why A Moveable Feast wasn’t published during his lifetime? Was the Crowley story changed or edited later? It is known that the book was heavily edited at least twice, once by Hemingway’s wife Mary and once by Sean Hemingway, his grandson. These edits have caused much controversy [see Hotchner] for lesser reasons, so there may be larger controversies still hidden, or forever destroyed by these editors.
Not only was Quinn a member of British Intelligence, he was the organizer and spokesperson of the 1913 Armory Show. He opened the exhibition with the words.
It was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art.
Note that: the Armory show was organized by Intelligence, and the opening words were delivered by an agent. As a corporate attorney, Quinn convinced Congress in the same year to overturn the four year old Tariff Law. Since this law charged a duty on new art coming in from Europe, it would have made it difficult to promote Modernism in the US. He also defended in court the US publishers ofUlysses in 1921. He lost, and the book was banned until 1933. Quinn was also a major supporter of Yeats and Joseph Conrad. I said in my last paper that Yeats looked to me like a dupe, but the case is building against him. I may have to revisit that conclusion. Just because Yeats was talented doesn’t mean he was a dupe. We will see that some agents have had talent in the fields of art they were inserted into, including of course Joyce. In the picture above, Joyce is the talent, Pound is the snowman, Ford is the editor, and Quinn is the money.
Of course, this explains why the Armory Show was exhibited at the Armory. This was the National Guard Armory on Lexington in New York City, built to house the 69th Infantry Regiment (which it still houses). Seems like a strange place to have the first avant garde art show, doesn’t it? Let me just ask you this: is the military normally seen as avant garde or progressive? No, just the opposite. But now that we see that military intelligence was promoting Modernism at the behest of financiers like the Rockefellers, we understand why they chose to place the exhibit at the Armory. It was what they had available. They didn’t have to rent an exhibition hall: they could just use their own.
History has been rewritten to make us think the artists Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn organized the Armory Show, but they were just hired as fronts. Kuhn worked for John Quinn and Wikipedia even admits that. We are told he was his “art advisor.” We are also told that Kuhn “acted as the executive secretary and was delegated as one of the men to find European artists to participate.” Delegated? Delegated by whom? If he were really one of the founders of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), and they were really running the Armory Show, he wouldn’t be “delegated” anything. Curious wording. We can now see he was delegated this task by Quinn.
Why else would the agent John Quinn been given honorary membership in the AAPS? He was neither a painter nor a sculptor, and it should have been seen as gauche (at the least) for an artists association to be awarding honorary membership to Quinn only for his money. As we now see, they weren’t. Most likely, the AAPS was Quinn’s idea from the beginning, and he couldn’t keep his name out of it. We know for a fact that Quinn is the one who incorporated the AAPS.3
He then fronted the organization with the flunkies Kuhn, Pach and Davies. As for the Armory Show, 77 of the foreign works were from his private collection. He was responsible for most of the promotion. He was also responsible for lining up the art critics Frederick James Gregg and Henry McBride.4
This was basically his show, and even when Kuhn and Davies went to Europe to pick up more work, they were just on errand from Quinn.
Quinn “sent letters to his contacts in Europe to announce Arthur B. Davies’ and Walt Kuhn’s trips abroad to coordinate loans from European artists.”3
Although the mainstream books and encyclopedia entries still try to whitewash the Armory Show as the idea of American artists, the New York Public Library admitted in 2013 that it was Quinn’s baby from the start.3
Another way that Quinn promoted the show was by buying works. He and Arthur Eddy were responsible for most sales during and after the show. Since most of the works could then be bought for a song, this isn’t saying that much, but we are led to believe it was a big deal. Total sales were pegged at $44,000. With 1,400 lots and 200,000 alleged visitors, that was not a stupendous sales figure, even for the times, although we are told it was. The rather less stupendous truth is that Eddy, like Quinn, was probably assigned his role as buyer, as part of the government operation.
In Armory Show promotion, we are told that Arthur Eddy was just another attorney like Quinn, but he was much more than that. He was from a very wealthy family from Flint, Michigan, that owned the main newspaper there in the late 1800’s. He then married into a far wealthier family, that of Crapo. Henry Crapo had been governor of Michigan, and William Crapo Durant founded General Motors. Bill was a cousin of Arthur’s wife Lulu. Eddy was then involved in the consolidation of the National Carbon Company, the American Steel Foundry Corporation, the National Turbine Company, the American Linseed Oil Company, and the Bridge Builder’s Society. Again, it is implied that he was involved only as attorney, but again that is not the case. For instance, it is known that he was director of the National Carbon Company5 , which controlled 75% of the carbon market. This company supplied materials for batteries, and was the precursor to Eveready, among other things. So like Rockefeller, Morgan, and the rest, Eddy was a titan of industry.
Another company Eddy was involved in was American Steel Foundries, which was the largest maker of steel castings in the U.S. These castings were used on railroads, in oil fields, on ships and trucks, and were heavily used by the armed forces. Which brings us back to the Armory, which housed the National Guard. Eddy’s company sold steel castings to the army, and then he turned around and bought paintings exhibited at the army’s Armory. Oh, the tangled webs they weave. That is a connection that is never made for you between the Armory and Mr. Eddy, right? You saw it here first.
So, like Quinn, Eddy was not just an attorney who collected art. But like Quinn, his bio has been scrubbed. Why? Probably because Eddy’s forays into art were not based on connoisseurship. Although his interest in art may have begun as genuine (when he was collecting Whistler and Rodin in the 1890’s), by 1910 it is very doubtful it remained so. We now know that the interest in art of these other oligarchs like the Rockefellers was not based on any sort of aesthetics, so our suspicion should fall on Eddy as well, especially given the effort of historians and art critics to hide his identity. If Eddy had really just been an honest collector, why would so many expend so much effort hiding his business connections to this day? Probably because, unlike the Rockefellers, Eddy was directly tied to the Armory Show from day one. He needed to be whitewashed while the Rockefellers didn’t. Also, since Eddy was less prominent than the Rockefellers, and less known after 1920, his scrubbers could have some hope of success.
We are made to think the American artists of the time were in favor of the show, but they weren’t. Since they weren’t avant garde, why would they? Of course Thomas Eakins reviled the show, but even the more “progressive” painters like Robert Henri were angered by many of the European entries. Most of the other American entries were American Impressionists or Ashcan painters—realists of one sort or another, that is. They had nothing in common with Duchamp, Braque, Picabia and the others, and had they known the true lay of the land (Quinn’s Intelligence connections), they would have boycotted the whole thing. But they had no idea the show was manufactured from the ground up, in order to lay the groundwork for the Rockefellers’ takeover of the art market, and the ultimate destruction of art history.
They would have also lynched Arthur B. Davies, who we can now see as a traitor. Even at the time, Robert Henri had some inkling of this, though he had no idea the extent of it. He and Davies were bitter enemies, Henri considering Davies to be a sell-out to the rich. But Davies wasn’t just a sell-out to the rich, he was also a pawn of military intelligence. He wasn’t just a hack who painted whatever the rich told him to paint; he was much worse—like all Modern artists now, he was a traitor to Art herself and all her Muses. He kissed the cheek of Art and collected his thirty silver pieces.
But let us return to John Quinn’s protégé in Europe, Ezra Pound. In 1925, Pound was praising Lenin in This Quarter, so we see him promoting both Marxism and fascism at that time. You should see this as extraordinary as well, since by 1925 Russia was in ruins, being decimated by both the Red Terror of Lenin and the Great Famine of 1921 (caused by Communist policies). Although many original Marxists had soured on Marxism by 1925, Pound’s enthusiasm was just then peaking. And in hindsight we can guess Pound was so enthusiastic because Marxism was doing what it was promoted to do: created havoc and destroy Republicanism. But even that wasn’t enough for him. In 1933 he went to Italy to meet Mussolini—either moving from Marxism to fascism or promoting them both simultaneously—and by 1939 Pound was already raving. In 1940 he began pamphlet writing and radio broadcasts from Italy, though it took him two years to convince those in Rome he wasn’t a double agent. Were they right the first time? Was this all a pose?
We can’t understand the Pound of 1940 without understanding the Pound of 1908 or 1920, and as we have seen, the mainstream material hasn’t helped us do that. We have been misdirected all along. But if Pound was an agent in 1908 and 1920, then only one of two things can explain his behavior in 1940. Either he was still an agent and the whole thing was manufactured; or he cracked, turned on his handlers, and began attacking them.
Although the latter might at first appear to be more likely, since it more easily explains his time at St. Elisabeth’s mental ward, the evidence indicates to me that it is the former. If he had really cracked and turned against Intelligence, the main target of his insane rants would have been Intelligence. Since the main targets of his rants were Jews, capitalism, usury, the armaments industry, and so on, it appears that Pound was simply being used as an Anti. In other words, in creating an Anti, Intelligence has someone act insane and at the same time attack all the things they wish to promote. Those watching this spectacle will naturally think, “That man is mad, and he is attacking Jews, capitalism, and the army. Therefore Jews, capitalism, and the army must be innocent.” Think of it like opposite-day. Remember, Pound as a madman also promoted Hitler and Mussolini during World War 2, from inside Italy. But it’s opposite-day, so this promotion was intended to backfire. Pound was a double agent, and the Italians were simply fools. I will prove that in a moment.
Since Pound had lost his usefulness as a promoter of Modernism by 1925 (Abby Rockefeller and many others were by then doing all that was needed from within the US), he was groomed after that as an Anti. Intelligence didn’t care a fig about Pound’s art, and neither did he, so there was nothing to prevent them from pursuing this new tack. The only thing they had to do is prevent his new assignment from corrupting his previous assignment.
They had to be sure the main promoter of Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway becoming a fascist madman didn’t tarnish the reputations of these writers they had spent so much time polishing. But, as with Gertrude Stein, this was no problem. If Stein’s fascist rantings couldn’t tarnish her own biography, why would Pound’s fascist rantings tarnish the work of Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway? Intelligence was so completely in control of all the promotion and bios —and the readers were so easy to sway—no one would notice anything they weren’t supposed to notice. As we have seen, the information about Stein is up on Wikipedia to this day, but because they stress the positive and downplay the negative, no one is the wiser. Most people won’t digest anything that isn’t forced down their throats several times, so mentioning a thing once is the same as not mentioning it at all.
But if Pound was an agent all along, why did he agree to spend 12 years in a mental hospital? He didn’t. You are assuming that everyone they say is in jail is in jail, and that everyone they say is in a mental hospital is in a mental hospital. You are simply underestimating Intelligence once again. If Intelligence can manufacture half the events of the 20th century, don’t you think they can manufacture someone being in a mental hospital?
Do you have any evidence Pound was in that hospital every day for 12 years, or are you just taking their word for it? Notice, for example, that when Pound was captured in Italy in 1945, he was taken immediately to the Counter Intelligence Corps. That wasn’t standard procedure. Nor was his interrogation by an FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover personally. And although he was now supposed to be a prisoner, we are told he was allowed an interview with a reporter from the Philadelphia Record, in which he said more scripted crazy things. That is completely against all protocol, military and civilian. The only protocol it matches is Intelligence protocol, since the job of Intelligence is propaganda. You can’t create propaganda if you don’t get it in the papers. Anytime you see prisoners being allowed to talk to reporters, you can be pretty sure you are witnessing a manufactured event.
For more evidence the whole thing was manufactured, we find strange court proceedings, whereby Pound was arraigned on the charge of treason, indicted, but never found either guilty or not guilty. He went in front of a jury to determine his sanity, but the charge of treason never went to trial. In normal circumstances, we would expect a trial on the charges for which he was arraigned. If he was determined to be insane, the finding by the jury would then be not guilty due to insanity, or guilty but insane. In either case he would be sent to the mental ward, but the trial would have a determined outcome.
In Pound’s case, no determination on the charges was ever made. Since the trial on the charges never occurred, Pound had no legal record. Not only that, but they never sentenced him to a definite term of detention. He was simply sent to the ward at the discretion of the doctors and the hospital director. Unprecedented. And since he wasn’t sentenced to a term, if he had been caught outside the hospital, he would not have been breaking any sentence or any law. Not only is Pound the only person ever to dodge a treason charge using the insanity defense, he is the only person to dodge a treason trial due to an insanity defense. This huge red flag points directly at Intelligence and government complicity.
We have other later evidence to support this conclusion, including Pound being awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1948 while in the mental hospital. He was awarded the first Bollingen Prize, so it appears the prize was created just so they could give it to him. We are told the prize was funded by Paul Mellon, but we now know Mellon was just a conduit. The prize was established by the CIA.1
The Prize is now awarded from Yale University, and you may wish to remember that a founder of the CIA and graduate of Yale, James Jesus Angleton, had been working with Pound since the late 1930’s (see below). Angleton had published Pound in Yale’s Furioso magazine. The CIA was founded in 1947 and the Bollingen Prize was established in 1948. Curious, no? To give the prize an aura of authenticity, a committee of poetry editors were convened to vote on the award, but the committee was loaded by the CIA.
Karl Shapiro, the editor at the time of Poetry, was the only one to vote against Pound (Paul Green abstained). This is how he put it at the time: “Eliot, Auden, Tate, [Amy] Lowell—all voted the prize to Pound. A passel of fascists.” [Others who voted for Pound included Katherine Anne Porter, Conrad Aiken, and Theodore Spencer.] That denunciation was not hyperbole, either, since these people really were fascists. Pound was an actual fist-pounding fascist, doing radio broadcasts in Italy in favor of Mussolini just three years earlier, and had served less than two years of what would be twelve years in hospital. So you would have to be a fascist to think that giving him a major prize in 1948 was a good idea. The only explanation for it is that these people had already become so dizzywith their new power they couldn’t see anything around them. Either that, or they just didn’t care.
Here are some other winners of the Bollingen Prize, just so you know: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Auden, Aiken, Tate, MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Cummings, Roethke, Frost, Robert Penn Warren, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, John Asbury, Gary Snyder, Donald Justice, Stanley Kunitz, and Mark Strand. Curiously, Karl Schapiro accepted the award in 1969, so his scruples apparently weren’t as strong as he originally implied. I guess he needed the money.
If you ever wondered why poetry is what it is, you now know. It is what it is because the CIA wanted it to be that way. It is remotely possible later poets weren’t aware of the real status of the prize, but Wallace Stevens couldn’t have pleaded ignorance in 1949. And, obviously, Karl Schapiro couldn’t have pleaded ignorance in 1969. Also notice how incestuous the award is, as usual. Those sitting on the committee in one year receive the award the next. Even if the CIA weren’t behind the whole charade, it would just be a group of insiders giving themselves awards.
We have even more evidence that all these people were Intelligence assets in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan. I was alerted to this by a reader. In a February 1952 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan says this: Last year has been spent in going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I’m in a bloody rage at the discovery that the arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn’t make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity…
You may say by secret societies he meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something. But he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence, since he adds, Now that I know the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies I have no intention of participating in it any further, until I know a good deal more. To hell with East and West.
Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952? The CIA, of course. The editor of these Letters reminds us that Wyndham Lewis also complained of the same thing in the same period, mainly in his Time and Western Man.
The editor again tries to make us think this complaint was against Freemasonry, but in this case Freemasonry should mainly be read as code for Intelligence. Maybe the Freemasons were pulling the strings of Intelligence, maybe they weren’t: the important thing is that we now know—via these declassified documents—that Intelligence was the direct puppet master, and that behind Intelligence were the Rockefellers and others. That is bad enough without bringing the Freemasons into it. In fact, we should note that the Freemasons were never interested in destroying art in previous centuries, or turning it totally to propaganda.
Why should they make this one of their top projects in the 20th century? As usual, I read Freemasonry as a diversion away from those we know to be pulling the strings: the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and so on. These families are from the financial sector, anti-aristocracy, and if they are Freemasons, they have turned Freemasonry wildly from its old paths. Remember, Freemasonry is usually traced back to Francis Bacon, among others. Well, Bacon was closely allied to the English aristocracy, and may have been a bastard child of the queen herself. For us to believe the Rockefellers are Freemasons, we have to believe the Freemasons have completely switched sides. I for one don’t tend to believe it.
I have now compiled enough evidence to indicate that these Modernist salons in London and Paris were manufactured or infiltrated by Intelligence, which means that most or all of the artists promoted bythem—including my original target Hemingway—were also manufactured. I haven’t proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I think the chain of evidence indicates it strongly enough to merit a full investigation. It looks very much like Intelligence was already doing by 1900 what it admitted it was doing in the 1950’s with Rothko, Pollock, etc. But this time I have shown you that no one was on “a long leash.” Many of the artists were probably agents themselves, and the others could not have been ignorant of the program.
No one here was promoted on merit, and although that was obvious from the start, it should now be crystal clear. These weren’t the best writers or painters of their time, they were the most salable product Intelligence could come up with at short notice and arm’s length. Many of them were physically attractive or charming (in 30-second bursts), which, as we in the MTV generation know, is 90% of the sale. More importantly, they were sons and daughters of the wealthy and privileged. They were insiders twice, since they were willing to do what was necessary not only from patriotism but from familial obligations. But of course this fatally undercuts any idea that they were Democrats, true Marxists, revolutionaries, or part of any lost generation. The term “lost generation” is perfect misdirection, since these people couldn’t have gotten lost if they had wanted. They were watched over like only the children of the wealthy can be.
I also encourage you to notice the recycling of ideas here. In the 1920’s, you had the Lost Generation. In the 1950’s, the Beat Generation. We have seen that the Beats weren’t beat and the Losts weren’t lost: they were all from privileged families. But both words imply the same sort of manufactured angst. Both generations were coming out of world wars, so there were people beat and lost in those times, but our created heroes weren’t among them. They were sold as cast-off urchins to gain your sympathy, but they were just the opposite. They hadn’t been cast-off, they had been recruited. They weren’t confused, they were selling confusion. They weren’t creative, they were destroying art. They weren’t heroic, they were pathetic. And though some of them photographed well, if you had known them up-close, you would have found them not charming, but disgusting—just like the current batch of over-photographed stars.
Disgusting. Exactly the sort of small, puffed-up man I always thought was behind The Sun Also Rises. I don’t judge his writing based on these photos. No, the photos only confirm what I already suspected from age 15: in these famous books we are in the presence of a myrmidon; we are captured by the tight, restricted imaginings of a desk clerk-cum-artist. This is what happens when the rich boy who should have become a bureaucrat instead becomes a novelist. Sure, he appeals to all the bureaucrat-cum-novel readers, but he destroys the novel in the process.
This tangent needs a whole new paper to address it, but I will suggest quickly a few things you may not have thought of before. First of all, we are always told that Hemingway’s sales figures are very high. We are assured he is very popular. But we saw in my last paper that the same thing is said about Fitzgerald, and it isn’t true. There, we caught the military buying large quantities of his books and distributing them for free. And we now know that Intelligence is promoting Modernism, and has been for a long time.
We know it not just from my paper here, but from that 1995 article in the Independent, where the CIA admitted it, not only with regard to artists but with regard to writers, historians, and critics. Putting these two things together and returning to Hemingway, we see that his sales figures may be manufactured from the ground up, like everything else. If the interbank rates can be fixed (see LIBOR) and the stock market rigged and the mainstream media controlled, why should we believe book sales figures?
What is to stop the government from buying tens of thousands of copies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce and the rest of these bastards every year, and distributing them free to schools, libraries, and other institutions, and using those numbers to prop up sales figures? For that matter, what is to stop them from doing it with David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo and Stephen Hawking and Tom Wolfe and everyone else? Think they can’t afford it? They can. They could afford to actually take delivery of every book sold, and pulp them. But of course they don’t have to do that. They can do what they do now with voting machines: just make the numbers up on the screens.
But even if Hemingway is popular with some demographic, that demographic would be bureaucrats— other myrmidons like himself. This would explain whatever sales figures he does have, since at the college-degree novel-reading level, the US is a nation of bureaucrats. While the female side of thebookstore is dominated by Oprah, the male side is and has long been dominated by books for office workers.
This by itself is enough to explain the death of all art, and it goes a long way to explaining why art was already almost dead before Intelligence began replacing it a century ago. With Hemingway, his overlords were just simplifying the language of the novel down to the level of its targeted readers, so that they could comprehend the propaganda more efficiently. In the 20th century, the point of the novel wouldn’t be to take you on any aesthetic journey or imaginative ride or—least of all—to teach you anything about truth, self-reliance, responsibility, or honor. No, the point of the new art would be propaganda from start to finish.
The artform would be stripped down just enough to get you in and hypnotize you, which is why with Hemingway you get some plodding Jake Barnes story about people with tiny minds trying to do something interesting which they never end up doing. You get the skeleton of a soap opera, and the sentences clicking by like a watch swinging on a chain, and before you know it you are in a trance, ready for Mesmer to plant the seed. Instead of finding these people in the novel you have been attached to becoming larger and more wise, you see them become smaller and smaller, drinking themselves into hospital, swapping lovers, buying things they don’t need, crashing automobiles, shooting one another, and saying things that get stupider and stupider as the story progresses. All so that you, the reader, can come out of the ass-end of the novel smaller and more confused than you were when you went in.
Please take time to trip over my “watch swinging on a chain” metaphor. Yet another entire paper or book might be written on the use of a certain sort of simple declarative sentence and sentence cadence to create a suggestive state. I know that from the very beginning I felt this with Hemingway’s structure. Intuitively I felt something wasn’t right. It now occurs to me that the monotonous subject-verb-object structure, with few commas and fewer parenthetical flowerings, may have been developed to mesmerize the weak-minded.
Also remember that the Intel Agencies are, at bottom, bureaucracies. Counting up all the present agencies yields something on the order of six million mandarins, and a majority of them are men. Intel would only have to buy up these bestseller books and distribute them in-house to account for the reported sales figures. I am not saying all agents enjoy either Hemingway or Don DeLillo, but those agents with taste can simply pass on their bookbags to Joe down the street, who can donate it to the library, which can sell it for 50 cents to someone who then burns it as cheaper than heating oil.
You may also wish to consider the possibility that the novel was destroyed on purpose. Discussions of the novel always seem to go back to Dickens, and both Irving and I did that here. We aren’t the only ones. As a matter of color, characterization, variety, sentiment, and pathos, Dickens is the peak against which all after have been measured.
Problem is, Dickens was also a progressive of the old sort, and all his novels concern social injustice and reform. The timing also leads us in this direction, since we have already seen 1848 as a turning point. That was exactly the time Dickens was writing. His greatest novels came out in the 1840’s and 50’s, and his popularity was very inconvenient for the antidemocratic old families of Europe and the US. By the standards of his time, Dickens was seen to be as strident and opinionated as I am here.
Although the government couldn’t very well forbid novel writing, it could infiltrate the field, and this is the context you should see Ulysses in. Just as Duchamp was trying to destroy the easel painting and the museum work, Joyce was trying to destroy the novel. This was the whole point of minimalism, too, across all fields, and Hemingway is admitted to be a sort of early minimalist, stripping down the complex and flowery sentence structure of Dickens and replacing it with 8th-grade declarative sentences. All of Greenberg’s recommendations to unload conventions worked to the same purpose. With a stripped-down art, you simply couldn’t do as much damage, and this is what they wanted.
All the arts were becoming entirely too popular in the second half of the 19th century, and they were beginning to have a real political effect. The governments therefore had to find a way to replace this real popularity with a sort of fake popularity. Modern art is sold as an art of the people—therefore “popular”—but in fact the people have never had anything to do with it. Modernism wasn’t and isn’t popular, as we can see from attendance at local Modern museums. Modernism is supported only by paid academics.
Even Pop-Art was never popular. These words are only Newspeak. Pop-Art borrowed it forms from popular culture, but it was never popular itself. Most people aren’t impressed by blown-up cartoons or soup-can labels in a museum. But by replacing art that was popular with PopArt, you defused the power of real art. Relevance has been the catchword of the 20th century, but it was inverted like everything else. The art of the 20th century was increasingly irrelevant, on purpose. The novels of Dickens had been far more relevant and powerful, but that isn’t what was wanted by the governors. They wanted art that was called relevant, but which really wasn’t. So they replaced the real thing by an inverted facsimile, and sold it as new-and-improved. But again, this topic could seed a book by itself. Let us return to Hemingway.
We are supposed to be impressed by Hemingway’s stories about the corrida (the bullfight), but only arrested adolescents—of the type who also enjoyed swinging cats by their tails—could enjoy bullbaiting. For myself, I always root for the bull. I would go to the corrida only if I were guaranteed to see at least one overconfident famous person of the Hemingway sort come down out of the crowd and be gored to death. I almost got my wish here:
That’s him directly in front of the bull, we are told. My guess is Hemingway wasn’t even a good boxer. Since all the rest is lies, and since he looks like a slow man with a short reach, we must assume the only men he could beat were other lumbering lummoxes like himself. I also don’t believe he was six feet tall.
Unless both these women are giants for that time, he looks about 5’8”-5’9” and 140-150 lbs—with narrow shoulders and a sunken chest. [It doesn’t really matter, of course, except that it indicates once again that we are in the grip of an illusion.] And he wasn’t “big” later, he was fat. Being fat doesn’t make you a better boxer, it just makes you slower with a bigger head to score points on.
Was he even injured as an ambulance driver during the war? Maybe, maybe not. Although we are told both legs were filled with shrapnel, we get lots of pictures of his legs later on, and we never see any scars.
You may want to sit down, because here comes the clincher. You will say we have no evidence Hemingway ever worked for Intelligence, so this whole paper is push to a conclusion. But we do. It is now known that Hemingway worked for Intelligence in WW2. He not only worked for OSS (the precursor to the CIA), he worked for Navy Intelligence ONI, the FBI, and even worked with the Russian Intelligence agency NKVD (the precursor to the KGB).
How do I know? The CIA admits it on their own website. 2
Of course they try to spin it in their own way, but for my thesis here it doesn’t much matter how they spin it. The admission by itself is fatal to Hemingway, since I can now ask you this $64,000 question: if you can believe Hemingway was with Intelligence in WW2, what is keeping you from believing he was with Intelligence during and after WW1? The time period in question in this paper (the peak of the Stein salon) was only about 15 years earlier than 1941. I have just shown you a lot of evidence that Hemingway was always in Intelligence, and since I have just proved it beyond any doubt for the period after 1941, you may wish to look again at the evidence before 1941. Supposing you weren’t already convinced, I recommend you re-read everything above in light of this admission from cia.gov.
We also have firm evidence of T. S. Eliot’s connections to British Intelligence during and after WW2. What got me started on this whole line of research, remember, is tripping across that article at the Independent, written by Frances Saunders in 1995, which I have referenced in all three recent papers. Well, Saunders published a book† a couple of years later, expanding the research she did for that article. I ordered that book and am now padding out this paper with her research. It turns out Eliot worked with the British Society for Cultural Freedom, which was the British counterpart of Tom Braden’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, which as we have seen was a CIA organization to promote certain Modern artists. Allen Ginsberg, of all people, admitted this in 1978 in a sketch titled “T. S. Eliot Entered my Dreams.” Here is an excerpt:
Ginsberg to Eliot: What did you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA? After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend? Didn’t he tell you his plan to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against the so-to-speak Stalinists?
Eliot: There are all sorts of chaps competing for dominance, political and literary. . .your Gurus for instance, and the Theosophists, and the table rappers and dialecticians and tea-leaf readers and Ideologues. I suppose I was one such. . . .‡
Wow. Not only do we get an indication (from Ginsberg himself) that Ginsberg and Eliot were connected to Intelligence, we get admission of that connection for Ginsberg’s Gurus [Suzuki, Watts, Chogyam Trungpa, Gehlek Rinpoche, Bhaktivedanta Swami, etc.?] and Theosophy. I started my first paper with an analysis of Theosophy, coming to this conclusion with no help from anyone else’s research or commentary, and now I have come full circle.
We also have piles of evidence linking Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams and others to US Intelligence via their relationships with James Jesus Angleton as far back as the 1930’s. Angleton, remember, was chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, but had probably been recruited while at Yale in about 1937. He was one of the founder-officers of the CIA in 1947. It was discovered in 1975 in the Senate hearings that Angleton was in control of CHAOS during the 1960’s—the infamous domestic spying program allied to the FBI’s COINTELPRO. All this information is at Wikipedia, so I am not leaking anything here or doing any deep research. We know he was OSS during the war, stationed in London, so that takes us back to about 1942. We also know he visited Pound in Italy in 1938, just before Pound went “rogue.” Ostensibly he was in Italy as editor of Yale’s Furioso magazine, which published Modern poetry at the time (Angleton also considered himself a poet). But that now looks like a cover. You should find it very curious that a future founder of the CIA should be visiting Pound in 1938.
I also encourage you to notice that Angleton had two children named Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa and Siri Hari Kaur Angleton-Khalsa. They joined the Sikh community near Los Alamos, NM, and became leaders of the movement in the US. This brings us back to my paper on Theosophy and specifically the importation and promotion of Eastern religions into the US for political purposes. You may follow up on this thread if you wish.
Although we have been sold a patchwork of lies, these early characters in the Modern script were at least smart enough to create something that resembled art, which in the first years was helpful. Hemingway was no master of the art form, but at least he could construct a plot—more than most could do after him. Later on, Intelligence realized this residual ability wasn’t a necessary ingredient, since the public turned out to be even easier to control than they thought. Intelligence found it could prop up anyone and anything as art, even mental patients and bums, and within a couple of decades the Agency was simply playing a game to see what they could pass off as art and an artist. They saw this as an indication of their power.
It was found that most people didn’t care about art one way or another, and that even those who claimed to care—even those who claimed to be experts or connoisseurs—usually didn’t. What these fake connoisseurs liked was the society or the attention, so they were easy for Intelligence to buy off.
The very very few who actually cared for art were such an astonishing minority, they could be utterly ignored. It had been thought going in that real art had a large number of protectors, but once the war against art began, this was found to be an error. Almost all previous claims of love, connoisseurship, and patronage turned out to be lip service, since when pressure was applied, it all evaporated. In others words, it was found that real art was already nearly extinct even before the government decided to start strafing it. Though Intelligence was armed for a long war, it didn’t even find a short battle. The greater part of the opposition caved with just a nudge, and those left standing after the first skirmish were already so outnumbered they hadn’t a chance. All that was necessary at that point was to quit publishing them and wait for them to die.
The role of Intelligence in the rise of Modernism has been missed by most people for the same reason I missed it for so long: we forget how far back the Agencies go. Most people know the CIA wasn’t created until 1947, and since it came out of the Office of Strategic Service—which was an agency of the Second World War, we then take Intelligence only back to 1938 or so. But there was Intelligence in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. There was Intelligence in Caesar’s armies and in the armies of Alexander. Like prostitution, it is as old as the race itself. Cain and Abel were spying on one another, and plotting, and before that the snake—the first agent—was watching Eve from the tree, trying to insert himself in the place given to Adam.
Although the evidence for the central role of Intelligence has always been there, it of course hasn’t been promoted, and it has retreated into the shadows. The evidence can even be found in the works of the Moderns themselves, as I showed previously with Burrough’s Naked Lunch. The same is easy to show with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, in which Joyce talks about the British spies in Dublin Castle. And in Dubliners (p. 96), Mr. Henchy “knows for a fact” that half the Radical Nationalists in Dublin are “in the pay of the Castle.”
Who would have thought that Joyce himself was among them, or soon would be? I haven’t (yet) found any evidence Joyce was subverting the Irish causes, but since he was certainly promoting the Modernist causes, he was in the service of one of the main Intelligence programs of his time. Since this program served the rich families at the expense of art history, we see that Joyce is an anti-hero in a different way that you have thought. Although he showed real early talent in both poetry and novel writing, he chose instead to sell out his birthright as a real artist for the money and fame of a bought one. Ulysses is the public record of that sell-out.
As you come down from this paper. . . No, I should say, as you crawl out of the Matrix on your hands and knees, pulling the plugs from your neck and limbs and shaking the cytoplasmic fluid from your hairless body, consider this last problem. Since we are seeing that large parts of history have been manufactured, faked, pushed, and invented, we should ask if anyone is keeping track of what actually happened. What I mean is, since all the mainstream histories you read appear to be false, have the governments at least thought to write down what they have done? Is there some great archive somewhere containing the real history?
Of course the agents will know what they have done recently, but what if we go a couple of generations back, when memories fade? Has the manufactured history simply become the real history, with no one left to tell us the difference? I only ask because at some point in the future, society may decide to go straight, as it were, swearing off the lying and the spying. At that point, our descendants might wish to know what really happened in these centuries. Will they be able to? Or will it require a total recreation from old evidence and logic, like I have done here? If we aren’t keeping this correct record, I suggest we do so immediately. We will look a lot less stupid in the future if they know that the top art of the 20th century was not the best we could do, but only an invention of Intelligence.
Which brings us to another question. Is all of history as corrupted as the last century? How far back could we take my method, and what would we find?
…………………….
*This requires a footnote, since it will assuredly be taken down from Wikipedia at some point. Spence, Richard B.(2008). Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend: Feral House. pp. 54– 57, 60–61. ISBN 978-1-932595-33-8. Already, someone has added a sentence to Wiki saying that there is no evidence Quinn was in British Intelligence. But Spence did not make it up. See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, Revised Edition, Yale University Press, p. 829, where it is confirmed.
**Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Hemingway’s Gender Trouble”, American Literature, Vol. 63, No. 2, Jun 1991. †Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. See p. 103 for just one example. Although I think Saunders’ book is more misdirection, it does contain some good information. To spin information, Intelligence has to give you some, which is bad for them, good for me.
‡City Lights Journal, Spring 1978.
1Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. pp. 34, 250.
2 Reynolds, Nicholas. “Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy.” Studies in Intelligence, volume 52, number 2 (June 2012).
4 McBride began his 36 years at the New York Sun in 1913. That is not a coincidence. He was installed at age 45 in that position with the connivance of Quinn and U.S. Intelligence. One of his first assignments was not only the promotion of the avant garde painters of the Armory Show, but the anti-promotion of the Eight and the Ashcan School. Robert Henri was a prominent member of both.
5 Directory of Directors, City of Chicago, Audit Company of New York, 1902. p. 69
A group of white supremacists marched in front of Philadelphia City Hall Saturday night, 3 July 2021, drawing jeers from onlookers, as well as small scuffles.
Approximately 200 members of the group Patriot Front wore white face coverings, tan khakis, blue shirts and tan hats and waved flags with their group insignias. Most of the marchers carried American flags on long poles; others had signs that doubled as shields.
The group approached from Market Street before walking in front of City Hall around 10:45 p.m. Angry passers by began to yell at the group.
The Patriot Front members chanted “Reclaim America,” and “The election was stolen,” as they marched. A few people could be seen engaging in minor pushing and shoving with members of the group and police said several physical confrontations took place. An NBC10 photographer had his cellphone taken from him by members of the group, before recovering it.
In the video provided by NBC the retreating Patriot Front members seem visibly intimidated by a handful of people pursuing them. Perhaps the right wingers were not aware, or painfully aware, that angry opponents could mobilize simply at the sight of them.
To some it may seem that the author has taken slight leave of his senses; that in obsessive pursuance of now obscure events of mere historical relevance he evidences a strange and incurable critical distemper. Certainly, judging by the mass amnesia – even amongst so-called ‘progressives’ – for these events, such a diagnosis appears well-nigh unassailable. But for those who (to quote ‘V’) ‘see what I see’ then the entire slew of major terrorist attacks starting with 9/11 and continuing on through with those in Bali in 2002, Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Mumbai in 2006…and beyond, can be, indeed must be, viewed in the light of ‘false flag’ terrorism. By which we mean, of course, state terrorism in the service of supporting both US / NATO imperialism abroad, and oligarchic social control and para-fascism at home.
The thesis, then, (and to make it explicit) animating these extended forays into the obscure bowels of mere history, is that false-flag terrorism, far from being some fevered figment of the paranoid political imagination (as so tendentiously characterized by the establishment), or even just an isolated, irrelevant tactical ploy that simply distracts from more ‘substantive’, more strategic, political happenings (as portrayed by many leading progressive pundits), is, in truth, systemic in nature. As such, it is a highly effective pillar of elite policy that is deployed with depressing regularity and with depressingly predictable consequences. It is a time honoured, well-honed tool solidly situated in the political kitbag of every imperial and fascist state. What’s more, as Kevin Barrett forthrightly opines in his introduction to ‘Terror On The Tube’:
‘In the end, the reader of this book will understand that the post-Cold War West is being terrorized not by Muslims, but by the Western state apparatus itself. This is hardly surprising, since we know that it was NATO (under command by the Pentagon) that was carrying out the worst “terrorist attacks” against Europeans during the Cold War, which we now remember as ‘Gladio’.’
And here is author Kollerstrom as he anticipates the usual charges by the usual suspects:
‘Detractors will label us as conspiracy theorists, but this is only name-calling; the government’s July 7th narrative also is a theory about a conspiracy……
Here (my emphasis) we wish to argue that not only is this [false flag hypothesis] reality, but that the peace movement will remain powerless until and unless it apprehends what is going on here.’
Exactly so.
Still, in the instance, curiosity must be assuaged, evidence adduced, and a case presented. The jury is now invited to sit back and buckle up as we dive deep with British historian and political activist, Dr. Nick Kollerstrom, down the rabbit hole of the London transport bombings of July 7, 2005.
A Study in Scarlet
Before embarking on what will turn out to be a complex, if grimly fascinating, detective case, it behooves us, before refining our focus, to first conduct a bird’s eye, aerial survey, so to speak, of a few of the major facts and evidential points of interest.
The bombings that day of the three London subway trains and a bus were horrific. Fifty-two people were killed and 784 injured – many maimed for life. Reports of victims staring in stunned disbelief at the stumps of their blown away legs chill the heart to this day. The official narrative explaining this gruesome atrocity cohered quickly around four young men of Pakistani origin, the infamous ‘Luton Four’, as the perpetrators. The ‘war on terror’ had received a new lease of life. Could there be any remaining doubt that we were facing a ‘clash of civilizations’? Certainly there was none for British Prime Minister Tony Blair who, in meeting with US President George Bush in Gleneagles, Scotland for the G8 summit that very day, quickly scrapped the group’s routine agenda in favour of pontificating in grandiloquent fashion about the need to ‘save our way of life’.
Nevertheless, the official narrative did not cohere quickly, or well enough, to completely obscure some fundamental flaws in its story. Thus, all of the early reports, i.e. within the first two or three days, pointed to the use of military grade, high explosives (such as C4) as the likely material for the bombs. After all, the three underground trains (an above-ground bus was also targeted), weighing in at 27 tons apiece, were lifted right-off their tracks. Such is hard to square with what soon came to be the ‘official’ story of ‘home-made, ruck-sack’ bombs brewed up in a ‘bathroom in Leeds’. Indeed – and as we’ll soon see – a number of Britain and Europe’s top anti-terrorist experts themselves identified the early remains of the bombs, including detonators, as being military grade. The later ‘home-brewed, suicide, ruck-sack’ bomb theory also had the explosions going off, obviously, inside the trains – but virtually all of the injuries were to the feet and legs suggesting strongly that the blasts came from underneath the trains.
Moreover, virtually all of the eye-witness statements concurred that the explosions came from beneath the trains, and that the trains were lifted up. Surely, one would imagine that the critical issue of whether the bombs were inside vs under the trains could have easily been resolved by simply looking at the train carriages themselves. ‘Granted, Your Honour’, however, not only were no members of the press ever allowed to see the exploded trains, and not only were there no more than a mere handful of grainy photos of the remains, but the trains themselves were hidden entirely from public view and then secretly destroyed a year later. When in 2010 an ‘inquest’ into the July 7th bombings (not a true public inquest as we’ll come to see) came to survey this question the confusion was palpable. Again, however, all of the eye-witness statements told of the floors exploding upwards.
The ‘inquest’ also heard eye-witness testimony to the effect that there were multiple holes in the floors of the train carriages, i.e. entirely contradicting the notion of a single ruck-sack bomb per train. Furthermore, despite London being one of the most densely surveilled pieces of real estate on the planet, there was not one single CCTV picture or video of the ‘Luton Four’ on any of the trains or the single bus. Indeed, no credible eye-witness testimony placed them there either (though what their likely fate was is a chilling tale in and of itself – to come). But then, perhaps this is not surprising given how, apparently, mysteriously, none of the CCTV cameras seemed to be working on any of the trains or the #30 bus that day .
As for the alleged chemical explosives supposedly used by the Four, no explosive’s expert could figure out exactly what they had supposedly concocted. In the end, the inquiry was left scratching its collective head and contemplating the fantastic notion that the four amateur bomb makers, with no apparent training in or knowledge of chemistry, had engineered an explosive that was unique in the annals of munitions theory.
Still, one might think that a simple forensic examination of the bodies would have shed some much needed light on all this. What emerged next from the inquiry was, then, in its own way, nearly as great a bombshell as had hit the trains. To wit: there had been no post mortem examinations of the fifty-two victims (the alleged bombers having, apparently, vaporized into thin air). No autopsies at all. No DNA analysis. No testing for bomb residue. Apart from fluoroscopic (i.e. X-ray) examinations of body bags to determine contents, no forensic science was employed – at all. Here we have clearly left the precincts of planet Earth and entered Bizarro-World. For while a certain amount of official bumbling and ineptitude can be expected in any crisis, the failure to exercise even the most rudimentary (and legally demanded) of investigatory technique, not just in the first days, but over the ensuing weeks and months, points in an ominous direction, i.e. criminal cover-up.
These, then, are a few of the many tasty tidbits that, just on the surface, appear damning to the official narrative. As it turns out, they are merely the tip of an evidentiary iceberg.
A Coincidence Too Far?
On July 12th of 2005 the police released information to the effect that they had identified five bodies (of a total of 56), three of which just happened to be those of the alleged perpetrators. Now, granting for the moment that there was an equal likelihood of identifying a victim as a bomber – which is not actually reasonable considering the Four were, apparently, blown completely to smithereens – the chance of this occurring is less than one in eight thousand. Peculiar to say the least. But then, the laws of probability had already been strained far beyond even these incredible bounds when five days earlier, i.e. on the very day of the bombings, it was revealed to an incredulous interviewer on the BBC’s ‘Radio 5 Live’s Drivetime’ programme (about 7:30 p.m.) that a ‘terror drill’ had taken place at the very same train stations and at the very same time as had the real event. Say what?
That’s right. According to one Peter Power, head of British security firm, Visor Consultants, and a former senior Officer of the Metropolitan Police 1971 – 1992, on that very morning he and his team ‘of over a thousand people’ had been running an anti-terror ‘exercise’ that perfectly mimicked both the place and time of the actual attacks! Here are his own words on the matter:
Power: “….at half-past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for, er, over, a company of a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing upright!”
Fancy that. Again, one can do the mathematics on this scenario and, even under the most conservative and stringent of strategic assumptions, the odds of such a coincidence occurring come out to less than one chance in a million. Worthy of further note is that Mr. Power mentions ‘simultaneous bombs going off’. This is curious because the bombs on the actual trains were (virtually) simultaneous (yet another fact suggesting military-style detonation). However, it was not known at the time of the interview that such was the case. Another coincidence? Well, in one sense yes in another, no, for this was not the first time that Peter Power had played out this scenario.
Just fourteen months earlier, on the 16th of May, 2004, for instance, the BBC Panorama program broadcast a docudrama entitled, ‘London Under Attack’ that depicted a terrorist bombing involving – you guessed it – three underground trains and a bus. And, just as in the real event a year later, the explosions were simultaneous, occurred between 8 and 9 in the morning, with the bus attack going off roughly an hour after the train blasts. How prescient. Perhaps a little too prescient, perhaps, was the show’s statement that the event was, “set in the future – but only just”. And as author Kollerstrom relates,
“Peter Power was not only one of a small but select panel of advisors that helped create ‘London Under Attack’, but was one of the commentators throughout.”
On the supposition that both the Panorama program and the ‘security drill’ were, indeed, related to the actual event, two questions immediately arise. First, why would a ‘warning’ of the attack be broadcast prior – to the entire nation – and, second, why would Mr. Power admit to such a ‘drill’ in the first place? We will address both of these in just a bit, but not before we continue our excursion down coincidence lane.
After what has already been said it should not come as much of a shock to discover that the Peter Power ‘drill’ and the Panorama program were not the only two ‘anti-terror exercises’ related to 7/7. There were, in fact, several others – all involving multiple trains and a bus. Perhaps the most noteworthy was the anti-terror drill, ‘Exercise Atlantic Blue’, a UK / US / Canadian collaboration that “featured terrorist attacks on UK transport networks and that coincided with a major international summit.” Atlantic Blue took place April 4 – 8th, 2005, i.e. barely three months before 7/7, and involved over a thousand UK personnel, several times more American personnel (though the American part was codenamed TopOff 3 – for ‘top officials’) and included ‘live action on the ground’. Despite the scale, details about this massive operation are, as Dr. Kollerstrom states, “wholly unobtainable”. One is, of course, reminded here of the NATO anti-terror exercise code-named ‘CMX 2004’ which took place in various European capital cities from 4th – 10th of March, 2004 ending just one day before the equally suspicious train bombings in Madrid on March 11th. One is also reminded here that train bombings were a NATO / Gladio specialty. But we digress.
Apart from these ‘coincidence’ speculations it is, as author Kollerstrom points out, surely a highly disturbing feature of modern life that, where in the past NATO exercises were confined to ships milling about on the sea and such, now the battlefront is seen to be in the heart of major global cities to which thousands of ‘personnel’ are deployed – and yet about which any and all information is kept entirely from the public.
Yet another anti-terror exercise occurred in London just days prior to 7/7. ‘Operation Hanover’, a little known yearly terror drill just happened to take place in this instance on July 1-2, 2005 and involved – three simultaneous attacks on underground trains. Again, the exercise was kept entirely under wraps until the police finally revealed its existence in 2009.
Let us now return to answer the two questions previously posed, i.e. What did Peter Power have to gain by his revelation? And what was the (hypothetical) purpose of the ‘London Under Attack’ docudrama? Regarding the first, author Kollerstrom suggests that Power may not have known that his ‘drill’ was destined to go ‘live’, and that both out of a sense of survival, i.e. holding ‘too much’ information, and to shield himself from future public grilling, he played the early revelation card. And, lo and behold, he was most assuredly rewarded in the second sense as the mainstream media simply dropped the issue as soon as they had heard it, never to breath a word about it ever again. As for the second question, we enter upon more telling territory. Here Kollerstrom invites us to listen to American historian and political pundit, Webster Tarpley:
‘No terrorist attack would be complete without the advance airing of a scenario docudrama to provide the population with a conceptual scheme to help them understand the coming events in the sense intended by the oligarchy.’
And by ‘understanding’ Tarpley is referring principally to the ‘who’ of a ‘terrorist’ attack. It must, after all, be beyond question as to whom to blame, i.e. Muslims, ‘Al Qaeda’ etc. And, again, actual circumstances bear this thesis out completely as both the political establishment and the press never questioned for a second who was responsible for 7/7. Indeed, in the instance, there was never a flicker of doubt, even from the earliest moments, not just amongst the media, but so too amongst the vast majority of the public at large. They knew. They had been taught to know.
But then, what of the ‘drills’ themselves? What part do they (hypothetically) play? Thereby hangs the heart of the tale. Again, we repair to Dr. Tarpley:
‘The principle directly at stake here is that state terrorists wishing to conduct an illegal terror operation often find it highly advantageous to conduit or bootleg that illegal operation through the government military/security bureaucracy with the help of an exercise or drill that closely resembles or mimics the illegal operation. Once the entire apparatus is set up, it is only necessary to make apparently small changes to have the exercise go live…’
And there you have it. For affirmation of Tarpley’s thesis one need only look to the major ‘terror attacks’ of the millennium – and judge to your own satisfaction that ‘anti-terror drills’ shadow each and every one of them like some dark, collective assassin.
The Plans of Mice and Men
Only days after July 7th it was announced at a Metropolitan Police conference that the alleged bombers had caught the 7:40 a.m. Thameslink train from Luton to London. Though never demonstrated, both CCTV video footage and eye-witness testimony were cited as the basis for this determination. Just a few days after that, on July 16th, the police released a CCTV image of the four ‘bombers’ entering Luton station that was time and date-stamped a few seconds shy of 7:22 a.m. This would have allowed the Four to easily catch the 7:40, arrive at King’s Cross station in London en route to their appointment with destiny, and where, according to the police, they were, in fact, caught on camera at 8:26. This latter footage was, again, never shown to the public (a persistent theme in this saga), but it meshed, nonetheless, with the timing necessary for the Four to catch all three (soon to be bombed) trains exiting from King’s Cross. All well and good.
The tiny mar in this neat narrative was – the 7:40 had never run that day. Moreover, apart from the 7:40 train having been cancelled, all of the other trains from Luton that morning had been seriously delayed. In fact, it was Nick Kollerstrom and his colleague, James Stewart, who had, six weeks after 7/7, and on a tip from a regular commuter on those trains, bothered to inquire of the transport authorities for the actual schedules that morning. They discovered that, in truth, no train coming from Luton that day could possibly have allowed the Four to arrive in time for their alleged date with destiny. Indeed, it took the official authorities a full year to acknowledge their ‘mistake’, i.e. despite the ‘eyewitness testimony’, and admit that the Four could not have taken the 7:40, or the 7:48, but must, instead, have taken the 7:25.
But this didn’t really work either as it too was delayed and entered King’s Cross at 8:23 with not enough time (roughly ten minutes) for the Four to get from the King’s Cross Thameslink station to the main King’s Cross station where the alleged CCTV footage had them situated, only three minutes later, at 8:26. No worries, Gov’nor, why not just say, then, that they caught the really early train from Luton at 7:20? Which the authorities promptly did. But to claim that, the official narrative had to then have the Four entering Luton station at 7:15 – trusting, of course, that no one, especially the vaunted free press, would remember, which they didn’t, that the government’s own CCTV pic had them date and time-stamped as entering at 7:22!
This begs the question: If the Four did not arrive in London in time to catch the trains that they were alleged to have bombed, then what did happen to them? A possible answer comes by way of an announcement on the 11 o’clock Radio 5 news that morning that three of the terrorists involved in the bombings had been shot and killed by the anti-terrorist branch of the police at Canary Wharf in the Docklands area of London’s East End. This was later denied both by the police and the news media, but several major newspapers had already got wind of the startling information before it was later expunged (more or less) from the public record. Thus, an independent story appeared in the New Zealand Herald:
‘The New Zealander, who did not want to be named, said the killing of the two men wearing bombs happened at 10:30 a.m. …..Following the shooting, the 8000 workers in the 44-story tower were told to stay away from the windows and remain in the building for at least six hours, the New Zealand man said. He was not prepared to give the names of his two English colleagues who he said had witnessed the shooting from a building across the road from the tower.’
The Herald also reported that:
‘Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper reported an unconfirmed incident of police shooting a bomber outside the HSBC tower. Canadian, Brendan Spinks, who works on the 18th floor of the tower, said he saw a “massive rush of policemen” outside the building after London was rocked by the bombings.’
Yet another report, from the South London News, told of how the police shot a suicide bomber outside the Credit Suisse First Boston Bank, approximately 470 yards away from the HSBC building.
Apart from numerous internet bloggers who affirmed the airing of the Radio 5 news broadcast that morning, Professor Rory Ridley-Duff of Sheffield University weighed in following the broadcast of the BBC’s 2009 Conspiracy Files program about 7/7. Using a Nexis UK News Database search for the period from July 7th to 30th, 2005, Dr. Ridley-Duff uncovered no less than 17 accounts of the Canary Wharf shootings. He further opined that, in his scientific judgement, the account offered up by the BBC program, i.e. the official narrative, fared miserably when compared with the hypothesis put forward by one John Anthony Hill, author of ‘7/7: The Ripple Effect’, the most famous of the online videos examining the bombings that day. We will have occasion, in just a bit, to reference another crucial aspect of Mr. Hill’s findings, i.e. in regards to the bombing of the #30 bus that morning, but for now our attention will focus on his theory regarding the ultimate fate of the four alleged ‘bombers’.
The key, according to Mr. Hill, is the location, for Canary Wharf is home to London’s major media companies. The horrific scenario then unfolds something like this: The Four, having previously been induced, by hook or by crook, to take part in the ‘anti-terror drill’ that morning (evidence for which will arise from the inquest), find, after having arrived in London too late to board their assigned trains, that something is seriously askew (a fascinating instance of which, again, will issue from the inquest). When the bombs eventually do go off (at approximately 8:50 a.m.), the Four – or at least three of them – suddenly realize that those were the trains they were supposed to be on. A sickening feeling washes over them as they twig to the fact that they have been set up as the patsies, the fall-guys, for the ‘terror attack’. What to do? They try to make calls, but that particular area has been blacked out for mobile service (as it really was that morning as confirmed by the police). The three eldest – Mohammed Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Germaine Lindsay – comprehending their predicament, i.e. that ‘suicide bombers’ are not supposed to survive, attempt to make their way to the major newspapers to tell their story before it’s too late. They head for Canary Wharf. Outside of the ‘area’, of course, their phones allow the police to track them – and they are assassinated outside of the HSBC and Credit Suisse buildings. Hasib Hussain, only 18, less worldly-wise, alone and uncomprehending, continues towards his ‘drill’ assignment on the #30 bus.
So sundered are the best laid plans of mice and men – when the Luton transport system has a bad hair day that morning.
The Magical Mystery Tour
We now enter upon the strange case of the #30 bus, the peculiar facts of which were first highlighted by Mr. Hill. According to the official narrative, Hasib Hussain caught a #91 bus (about 9:22 a.m.) from Kings Cross Thameslink station and headed one stop west to Euston station where he disembarked and then boarded a #30 bus which headed back east – and which would have taken him directly back to where he had justcome from, except for the fact that the #30 was, unexpectedly, diverted to Tavistock Square, where it blew up.
As an aside it is worth noting that the police affirmed, unequivocally, that none of the CCTV cameras on either bus were working that day. However, the bus management company, Stagecoach, wasn’t having any of that and insisted, instead, that their cameras were working. They further claimed that, “the hard drive had been recovered from the [#30] vehicle and passed to the Metropolitan Police.” Huh. Also worth noting is that, apparently, the one and only security camera in Tavistock Square wasn’t working either that morning. Hmm…
Given these basic facts, a number of questions immediately present themselves. If, on the one hand, we assume Hussain was guilty then the question arises as to why he would not have simply blown up the #91 bus? After all, he was, allegedly, lugging around a heavy backpack full of explosives. But then perhaps he wanted, for some unknown reason, to blow up the #30. But the thing is, the #30 leaves from King’s Cross Thameslink, as does the #91, and he could have caught it there. Or, if he had wanted to do the deed in Tavistock Square, he could have just stayed on the #91 – as its normal route goes through Tavistock Square – though this destination doesn’t really make any sense since he couldn’t have known that the #30 was going to be diverted to Tavistock Square. It’s all such a muddle. Surely it is possible that he was simply acting completely irrationally and boarding more or less random buses before he got the nerve to pull the trigger so to speak. It’s possible. (It’s also possible that he was not on either bus, but that’s another story – which I’ll leave to the book).
On the other hand, if we assume he was innocent and that he was simply following a script, as say, part of the Peter Power ‘drill’ that morning, then the story becomes rather more coherent. Here, having Hussain catch the #91 makes sense in terms of his being directed to Euston station precisely in order to board that particular #30 bus (registration LX03BUF) that had been pre-rigged to blow up – in Tavistock Square where the failed security camera (and other such arrangements) had been suitably prepared. As if to buttress this theory it was revealed at the 2010 inquest that, in fact, Bus #30 registration LX03BUF had undergone some very unusual maintenance five days prior to 7/7. Thus, as Kollerstrom summarizes the testimony,
“So, the Saturday, prior to July 7th, a maintenance group previously unknown to the depot crew spent twenty hours tinkering with the bus – an unheard of length of time for CCTV maintenance.”
As it did all other matters of critical pertinence, however, the ‘Inquest’ – to which we now turn – passed this telling morsel by without batting an eye.
And Justice for None
Early in the book author Kollerstrom tells us why he decided to write, ‘Terror On The Tube’:
‘The British people have been denied anything resembling a fair inquiry into the events of July 7th, 2005…Instead, there has been an ‘Inquest’, which was a massive, five-month event: it heard evidence concerning how people died. It may have looked a bit like a public inquiry – but it wasn’t one. It gave to the Metropolitan police one more opportunity to tell their story. We heard no intelligent mind evaluating it or asking any questions about it…This book seeks to remedy that defect.’
We have already briefly adumbrated a number of serious anomalies to the official narrative that the ‘Inquest’ examined – and then simply skipped over without the slightest demur, including: the fact that virtually all the injuries were to the feet and legs; the total lack of forensic autopsy; the extensive eyewitness reports of multiple holes in the floors, and of trains lifted upwards; the repeated ‘failure’ of key CCTV video footage, alongside the absence of any film identifying the Four as actually being on any of the vehicles in question; and the utter confusion and irresolution surrounding the type of explosives supposedly used in the attacks. A compelling cast to be sure, but which hardly does justice to the full, rich theatre of the absurd that was the 7/7 Inquest of 2010. Let us then take up the production as it continues its examination of the explosives issue.
Here a small sampling of the summary statements illustrates the general tenor of the proceedings: Clifford Todd, a senior government forensic analyst, weighed in to the effect that the devices were, “unique in the UK and possibly the whole world.” Concerning the Tavistock blast the Inquest was told by Kim Simpson, another government explosives expert, that, “the main charge used did not consist of any previously seen composition…” Testimony in regards to the blast at Russell Square revealed that, “no traces of HMTD or TATP or, indeed, any other explosive was found.” At Edgware Road, “the standard test for organic explosives [allegedly used by the Four] proved to be negative…” And at Aldgate, a question relating to organic explosives elicited the response, “That’s right, we tried to see if we could find that and, in the end, we weren’t successful, so we couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.” And so on and so forth.
Moreover, as a string of experts were to testify in the inquiry, it turns out that the production of TATP – that the Four were alleged to have produced – is not quite such an amateur affair after all, needing special equipment and considerable know-how to produce. Furthermore, it is so dangerously volatile in transport that the likelihood of all four bombers having even made it to their targets without a prior detonation seemed a virtual impossibility. So the TATP theory was quietly dropped, only to be replaced by an equally suspect hypothesis involving a substance labelled ‘HMTD’. It too succumbed to the mortal blows of ‘know-how’ and ‘volatility’.
Now what is really quite bizarre about all of this, is that back on July 12th, 2005, i.e. only five days after the bombings, the police had stirred up huge fanfare over their alleged discovery of a large quantity of explosive situated in a ‘bomb factory’ at 18, Alexandra Grove, Leeds, a substantial quantity of which was then supposedly found in a car parked at Luton Station! By the time of the Inquest, all of this evidential material, and any potential analysis that might have accompanied it, had simply vanished. Equally bizarre was the fact that one Dr. Magdy el-Nashar, a recently graduated PhD in chemistry from Leeds University and who owned the flat at Alexandra Grove, had left the country for Egypt just a few days before 7/7. He had subsequently been detained and then released by the Egyptian authorities, whereupon the British authorities declined to have him extradited for questioning! As Kollerstrom pointedly notes, “It seems the police did not take their own allegations seriously.”
In direct contrast to all this sustained craziness over completely unsubstantiated claims of ‘home-brewed’ explosives, are the well-attested statements of a slew of eminent anti-terror experts who were actually on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. Thus, on July 8th, Vincent Cannistro, former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre told the Guardian that the police had discovered “mechanical timing devices” at the bomb scenes. On July 9th, the police announced that, “High explosives were used in the attacks and were not home-made.” On July 11th, Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick told a news conference that, “All we are saying is that it is high explosives.” Likewise, on July 12th, Christophe Chaboud, the French anti-terror chief who was in London assisting Scotland Yard on the case, confirmed to The Times that, “The nature of the explosives appear to be military, which is very worrying….the material used were not homemade but sophisticated military explosives…” By the time of the Inquest, however, all of these statements had vanished from view as surely had the explosives from the ‘bomb factory’ at Leeds and the car at Luton station.
The lunacy at the Inquest continued. Here we repair to author Kollerstrom as he describes the finding of multiple identity documents supposedly attributed to Mohammed Khan:
‘For five years we’d been told that the I.D. of Khan was found at three different locations: the Edgware Road, Tavistock and Aldgate Station blast scenes. Could the story get any sillier? …The Inquest managed to add a fourth location where Khan’s I.D. was located: Russell Square, the Piccadilly line blast. His mobile phone was located there by the blasted carriage…So we have Her Majesty’s Inquest gravely listening to the four different sites where I.D. of Khan was located: all four of the blast sites. Nobody laughs, nor does a single newspaper journalist express doubt.’
We now briefly return to the ‘instance of something seriously askew’ at King’s Cross station previously alluded to. The Inquest heard testimony from Mr. Fayad Patel, a customer service assistant at King’s Cross, that sometime between 8:15 and 8:45 he was approached by a man he later identified as being Germaine Lindsay. According to Mr. Patel, Lindsay asked to speak to the ‘duty manager’ saying, “It’s something very important.” Mr. Patel replied that he was unable to grant that request because, “Well, we’re busy at the moment because of…the station control.” The latter, it turns out, is only implemented under special circumstances so as to “minimize the flow of passengers”. So, as Kollerstrom notes, something very unusual was already afoot at King’s Cross – before any bombs have gone off. The two continue to ‘rap’ with Lindsay being adamant on seeing, not any old supervisor, but a ‘duty manager’. Kollerstrom sums up the absurdity of this situation:
‘The obvious point here is that the idea of a suicide bomber wanting to approach a station manager to sort out an issue, however serious, is utterly, utterly ridiculous. To any reasonable person this fact alone should prove that Germaine Lindsay was definitely NOT a suicide bomber.’
It does, however, point to the notion that Lindsay sensed something was not quite right. Perhaps he was having doubts about the ‘drill’? And, as Kollerstrom notes, “Patsies need minders. They do not understand the situation in which they are involved and their behaviour must be strictly controlled…” Evidence for the latter possibility came not from the Inquest, but from CCTV film released in 2008. This film had subsequently been elided from government records – but not before members of the public had already downloaded it. The relevant footage relates to:
‘… a Jaguar that drove up and parked in Luton station car park beside the ‘bomber’s’ car on the morning of 7/7, having also appeared on the morning of their so-called ‘dry run’ on June 28th, 2005 – just in the same spot. The Jaguar pulls in beside the bombers’ car and on both days the CCTV footage has been edited to exclude what could be vital evidence relating to the role of the driver of this car in the 7/7 operation. The suspicion is, of course, that this driver would be seen greeting and conversing with Khan, Tanweer and Hussain.’
Let us now exit the Inquest and return through the Looking Glass to briefly inspect the world that 7/7 left behind.
• • •
It is often maintained by certain progressive pundits that whether false flags are fact or fiction is irrelevant to broader strategic concerns. But this clearly cannot be so. Both the assassination of JFK and the 9/11 attacks, for instance, witnessed not just murder, but coup d’état, i.e. the wholesale imposition of a new political order. In the former, ‘Camelot’ was destroyed, the nuclear arms race affirmed, and the Vietnam War stoked and set ablaze. In the latter, the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ was scuttled, the Eternal War ignited and at least half dozen nations were more or less totally destroyed. These two false flag events were, essentially, pivot points in history. And though not all state terrorist acts are of equal moment, all partake in the same end goal: war mongering and imperialism abroad, fascism and social control at home. The thesis herein entertained is, then, not hard to grasp. To wit, if the ‘war on terror’ is an illusion, then the ‘enemy’ is equally illusory – and must be simulated. Such was the case on 9/11, such was the case on 7/7. And unless these are taken seriously as false flags, similar ‘enemy’ attacks will continue to occur.
We have only examined in this (already too long) essay, a scant few of the more outstanding threads of Nick Kollerstrom’s rich and deeply woven tapestry of evidence (and ancillary political context). The reader is implored to examine the whole cloth. We end with one last exhortation, this from the author:
‘Ever wonder why all the hopes and dreams of your youth – about socialism as the sharing of the common-wealth, whereby we could be happy together, yes that’s right be happy – why none of that ever happened? Who stole your dreams away and gave you all these nightmares? Muslim terror groups? Nope, try harder.’
Frederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July Fourth. The Black abolitionist spoke for the enslaved.
Gillian Brockell
“The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration.”
So began Frederick Douglass on the platform of Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y. It was a Monday, the day after the Fourth of July in 1852, and he was speaking to a packed room of 500 to 600 people hosted by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass was about 35 years old (he never knew his actual birth date) and had escaped enslavement in Maryland 14 years earlier.
Although by this time he was world-renowned for his speeches, he began modestly, reminding the crowd that he had begun his life enslaved and had no formal education.
“With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together,” he began, “and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.”
Over the next hour and a half, Douglass made what is now thought to be among the finest speeches ever delivered: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He quoted Shakespeare, Longfellow, Jefferson and the Old Testament. He certainly bellowed in moments, exclaiming and anguishing in others. He painted vivid pictures of exalted patriots and the wretched of the earth.
First, he posited that while 76 was old for a man, it was young for a nation. America was but an adolescent, he said, and that was a good thing. That meant there was hope of its maturing vs. being forever stuck in its ways.
He wove through the familiar tale of taxation without representation, tea parties and declarations of independence. “Oppression makes a wise man mad,” he said. “Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment.”
But his business was with the present, not the past, he said, and here his critique began to build.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
…
The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?
…
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
…
“Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.
“You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill.
“Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn!
“The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on.
“Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”
He also indicted the American church, “with fractional exceptions,” for its “indifference” to the suffering of the enslaved, its willingness to obey laws so clearly immoral. It was a theme echoed a century later by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
The church, Douglass charged, “esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.”The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, its new museum recounts
He turns to the Constitution, and here he defends it and raises it up as a pathway to liberation for the enslaved.
“In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing [slavery]; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? …[L]et me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made?”
That is why, he said, despite the “dark picture” he painted, “I do not despair of this country.”
“There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain,” he says. “I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.”
When he finished speaking and took his seat, “there was a universal burst of applause,” according to one newspaper account. Within a few minutes he had promised to publish his words as a pamphlet.
Douglass was right. The forces that would end slavery in little more than a decade were in operation, and he was one of those forces.
But he couldn’t see what would follow: sharecropping and Jim Crow, redlining and Bull Connor, incarceration rates and George Floyd. Would Douglass still figure us an adolescent nation, with the youthful hope of transformation — or something else?
A statue of famous abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass was torn from its pedestal in Rochester, N.Y., on Sunday, the 168th anniversary of his famous speech “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
According to Rochester police, the seven-foot-high statue was ripped from its base and dragged from Maplewood Park, which is a site along the Underground Railroad in Kelsey’s Landing, where Douglass and abolitionist Harriet Tubman helped enslaved people to freedom.
Rochester police said the statue, a reproduction made of a kind of plastic and finished to look like bronze, had been removed from its base and was found about 50 feet away on the banks of the Genesee River.
Police said the investigation into who is responsible is continuing. No arrests have been made, said Investigator Jacqueline Shuman, public information officer for the Rochester Police Department.
Carvin Eison, project director of Re-Energize the Legacy of Frederick Douglass Committee in Rochester, said the city will replace the monument quickly with another replica that was in storage. “I’ve always said if one goes down ten more go back up,” said Eison, who helped lead Rochester’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of Douglass’s birth.Frederick Douglass statue torn down in Rochester, N.Y.A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was removed from its base in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, the anniversary of his 1852 speech in the city. (13 WHAM)
The attack on the Douglass statue comes at a time when anti-racism protesters across the country are demanding the removal of monuments to slave traders, slave owners and Confederate generals and leaders.
On Friday, at the foot of Mount Rushmore, President Trump railed against protesters who pull down or vandalize Confederate statues. Trump signed an executive order aimed at punishing protesters who destroy monuments on federal property and another creating a national garden monument of American heroes, including Douglass and Tubman.
The following article was published in Workers Vanguard No. 33, 23 November 1973, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/US.
While the “Yom Kippur” war of 1973 is the direct result of the defeat of the Arab states by Israel in the 1967 war, it is more fundamentally the product of the conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism which has torn apart Palestine since the demise of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. To determine what position to take in the present war it is useful to look at the whole process of Balkanization in the Near East which resulted in the formation of a Zionist state side by side with a series of artificial royal states and “republics” led by petty-bourgeois military cliques, all of them (to different degrees) subject to imperialist domination. In particular, we must look at the 1948 war which led to the present state of Israel and the simultaneous expulsions of several hundred thousand Arabs from their homes and lands.
For the Zionists the 1948 war was an “anti-imperialist” war of “national liberation,” the creation of a haven for a people decimated by fascist genocide. For the Palestinian Arabs 1948 was the origin of their “diaspora,” the destruction of their nation, the deprivation of their means of livelihood and their relegation to the wretched refugee camps where they are imprisoned in an enforced state of idleness and subsist on ten cents of UN rations a day. This has resulted in one of the most difficult national conflicts in recent decades with both a Hebrew and an Arab nation competing for the same small territory. The fact that Israel emerged victorious in the first three wars (1948, 1956 and 1967), and thus bears direct responsibility for the tragic plight of the Palestinian Arab refugees, must not blind us to the need to recognize the right of self-determination on both sides as a necessary guarantee against genocide. The struggle for a truly democratic bi-national Palestinian workers state, as part of a socialist federation of the Near East and the product of a united struggle of Hebrew and Arab workers and peasants, cannot simply ignore the national question.
Origins of Zionism
Zionism as a political movement is as much a product of the epoch of imperialism as is its counterpart, fascism. Jews as a “people-class,” to use the expression of the Belgian Trotskyist theorist on the Jewish question, A. Leon, as money lenders and merchants, provided the yeast for the development of capitalism. Those Jews able to transcend the obscurantism of the synagogue and the parsimony of the marketplace were often the leaders of cultural enlightenment. But capitalism in its decline and death agony has no place for the merchant caste of the Middle Ages. Like the proletariat, the Jews “were without a country,” and it was partially because they entered the 20th century unshackled by nationalism that Jews played such a leading role in the proletarian movement, especially its left wing.
Only with the world historic defeat of the German proletariat in 1933 was Zionism transformed into a mass movement. Prior to 1933 Zionism was a tiny sect of petty-bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who were emancipated but not assimilated. The Jews of the Eastern European ghettos, if they identified with any political movement at all, were either Communists or members of the Bund, an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist group with Menshevik policies.
At the end of World War I there were 60,000 Jews in Palestine, many of these living in ancient orthodox communities which were hostile to political Zionism, and 644,000 Arabs of whom 574,000 were Moslem and 70,000 Christian. In order to encourage an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Britain armed and equipped Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, to wage “Holy War” on the Turks. The Levant was carved up in the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty (1916) between Britain, France and tsarist Russia, a treaty which was made public only by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. This treaty gave Lebanon and Syria to France, while Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq went to the British.
The Zionists early realized that they could accomplish their aims of creating a Jewish state in the Arab East only under the sponsorship of somebody’s imperialism. Theodor Herzl, the originator of modern Zionism, had first approached the Ottoman Sultan and German Kaiser where he was rebuffed. After the tsarist Minister of Interior Plehve had organized the Black Hundred pogrom of Kishinev in which hundreds of Jews were massacred, Herzl had an audience with Plehve where he offered him the Zionist method of “getting rid of the Jews.” As Nathan Weinstock says in his Le sionisme contre Israel (Paris, 1969): “The Zionist course and anti-Semitic reasoning are symmetrical.”
Indeed, the Zionists finally got a sympathetic ear from that notorious anti-Semite, Lord Chamberlain, who was at the time British Colonial Minister. Chaim Weizmann, the leading British Zionist and the future first president of Israel, had already succinctly stated the Zionist case for the British bourgeoisie in his November 1914 letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, which stated:
“We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there or more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
This argument was not lost on the British branch of the Rothschild banking family, which was the largest holder of Suez bonds and had become also the most prominent contributor to the Zionist financial arm, the Jewish National Fund. Immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian withdrawal from the war, the British, both in order to mobilize Jewish support behind the war effort and Zionist support behind Britain’s imperial ambitions in the Arab East, issued on 2 November 1917 the Balfour Declaration which promised a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.1
Prior to the smashing of the Ottoman Empire, no Palestinian nation existed as such, at least in the modern sense of a nation. Instead, Arab nationalists living in Palestinian towns considered themselves part of Syria and attended the Syrian National Congress of July 1919. On the basis of Wilson’s fourteen points and promises made to the Arabs by both France and Britain this Congress proclaimed political independence for a united Syrian states (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan) which was to be a constitutional monarchy ruled by Hussein’s son, Faisal.
Thus the “promised land” was simultaneously promised to British imperialism, the Jews and the Arabs. The Sykes-Picot treaty was reaffirmed at the San Remo conference and implemented as French troops occupied Damascus chasing away “King” Faisal. The British gave Faisal the throne of Iraq as a consolation prize, severed Transjordan from Palestine and recognized Faisal’s brother, Abdullah, as the Emir of Transjordan.
Zionism and Colonialism
Prior to World War I, Jewish colonization in Palestine was by religious communities which were hostile to political Zionism. Later colonization by Jewish entrepreneurs, who wished to colonize Palestine in order to exploit Arab labor in the tradition of the French colonization of Algeria and Tunisia, was sponsored by the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. The PJCA was backed by the Rothschilds, was hostile to political Zionism and soon to come into conflict with the latter.
Zionism was motivated by a sophisticated and even “Marxist” understanding of the “Jewish question,” recognizing Jews as a “people-class” whose economic function as merchants and money lenders had become antiquated. But it sought the solution to the “Jewish question” not from the assimilated Jew, Marx, but from the anti-Semite, Proudhon. The Jew was to be liberated from the stigma of the ghetto through the creation of his own ghetto-state. The transformation of the Jew from money lender and merchant to proletarian and farmer would come about in a racially exclusionist closed economy.
Zionism went to Palestine under the slogans of “conquest of labor” and “conquest of land,” well knowing that labor and land were to be conquered from the Arabs. As early as June 1895 Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary:
“The private lands in the territories granted us we must gradually take out of the hands of the owners. The poorer amongst the population we try to transfer quietly outside our borders by providing them with work in the transit countries, but in our country we deny them all work. Those with property will join us. The transfer of land and the displacement of the poor must be done gently and carefully. Let the landowners believe they are exploiting us by getting overvalued prices. But no lands shall be sold back to their owners.”
–quoted from Theodor Herzl’s Selected Works in “The Class Nature of Israel” by the Israeli Socialist Organization
This was an accurate prognosis of the next 55 years of Zionism in the Arab East except that the conquest was neither gentle nor peaceful, nor was the bulk of the land which constitutes the modern Israeli state “purchased,” much less at “overvalued prices,” but it was stolen through outright terror, intimidation and military force. Unlike classical colonialism and imperialism which established settler-colonies to exploit native labor, Zionism colonized in order to displace native labor. The effects of the Zionist “conquest of labor” on the indigenous Palestinians were much more vicious and devastating than the role of the British in Rhodesia, the Portuguese in Angola or the French in Algeria, depriving them not only of national independence but, eventually, of any ties to social production whatsoever.
The so-called twin pillars of Zionist “socialism,” the Histadrut and the kibbutz, were the pride of the “left” Zionists, the old Poale Zion, which at one time actually applied to the Comintern for membership, and the Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard). However, these were the institutional embodiments of the reactionary racialist slogans, “conquest of labor” and “conquest of land.” The Histadrut was founded in 1920 as the “General Confederation of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel” by 4,500 of the 5,000 Jewish workers in Palestine. At the time there were ten times as many Arab workers in Palestine but they were excluded from the Histadrut.
In fact, the Histadrut was not even created to defend the Palestinian Jewish proletariat, but to destroy the Palestinian Arab proletariat! Its first activities were the boycott of businesses (both Jewish- and Arab-owned) which hired Arab labor and the physical intimidation of Jews who shopped in the Arab marketplace and Arab workers who worked for Jews.
The kibbutz was originally set up to make the Jewish community agriculturally self-sufficient but increasingly it more closely resembled a U.S. Army fort in the “Wild West” than an agricultural settlement. As pointed out by Amos Perlmutter in his book, Military and Politics in Israel, the kibbutz provided the foundation for Israel’s modern army and the kibbutzniks provided both the elite for the General Staff and the core of the Defense Ministry. The Haganah was originally the defense arm of the kibbutz, a kind of farmers’ militia.
Prior to the 1948 war most of the land occupied by the kibbutz movement followed the dictum of Herzel and was purchased, generally from absentee landlords at “overvalued prices.” The Jewish Agency, the shadow Jewish government set up under British mandate, stated before the Shaw Commission of 1929 that 90 percent of the lands purchased up to that time came from absentee landlords. While some of this land represented heretofore uncultivated desert and swampland, on much of it, especially in the coastal plain near Haifa, thousands of Arab tenants were evicted to make way for Jewish settlements.
On the one hand this created land speculation and inflation leading to the boom/bust of the 1925-27 period, and on the other hand it created a disenfranchised peasantry and lumpenproletariat in the cities. In the absence of a strong proletarian movement, or even a republican bourgeois nationalist movement, these declassed elements were easily incited by Moslem religious leaders like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem into intercommunal strife against the Jewish communities. Thus the 1929 riots were not between the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew nationalities, but between Moslem and Orthodox Jewish communities. The precipitant to the 1929 riots was a struggle over, of all things, the old “Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem.
Zionism and the Workers Movement
Where Arab and Jewish workers were forced to work together as on the docks of the port city of Haifa, intercommunal strife was held to a minimum, and Arab and Jewish workers often crossed racial/religious lines and gave a deaf ear to their respective clericalist-chauvinist “leaderships” in order to engage in common strike action. But the overall impact of Zionism, in collaboration with British imperialism, was to prevent the development of a united Arab-Hebrew working-class movement, but also to retard the development of a Palestinian proletariat or even a Palestinian bourgeoisie.
Arab Palestine was overwhelmingly rural consisting of poor peasantry or fellahin, a rich landlord class or effendis and a tiny middle class. The effendis were more often than not, like the Mufti, Haj Amin el Husseini, also religious leaders, and were divided among themselves along family lines. Each family organized its own “political party.” Thus the Mufti organized a “Palestine Arab Party”; another rich prominent effendi clan called the Nashashibis (traditional antagonists of the Husseinis) organized a “National Defense Party,” etc. In pursuance of family vendettas they tried to play off the British and the Zionists, but were usually unsuccessful.
Another obstacle to Arab-Hebrew proletarian unity was the treacherous role of Palestinian Stalinism. In its early years the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) had a modest but real influence among Jewish workers. However, it was unable to build up an organization because it correctly told those Hebrew workers it won over to return to their countries of origin and join the revolutionary movement there. (A significant number of Comintern agents in inter-war Europe were former members of the PCP who had followed this advice. Among them was Leopold Trepper, head of the famous “Red Orchestra” Soviet intelligence network in World War II.)
The party from its inception recognized the need to reach the Arab workers and fellahin, but under Stalin’s Comintern, “Arabization” came to mean something else. During the 1929 riots the PCP played an essentially correct role, trying to quell the intercommunal strife, putting the blame on the mandate, defending the Jewish quarters and pointing to the situation in Haifa (where the most conscious workers, both Arab and Hebrew, refused to get caught up in the riots) as a model. However the Stalintern denounced the role of the PCP in the 1929 riots and demanded a purge of all party members who did not “accept the view that the August uprising was the result of the radicalization of the masses.”
This was obviously not popular with the Hebrew workers so the PCP began to publish separate propaganda. For the Hebrew workers they stressed Arab-Hebrew class unity, and to the Arab worker the PCP essentially became a more radical mouthpiece of the Mufti. This laid the basis for the later split in the party into its Jewish and Arab components, the former becoming pro-Zionist, the latter pro-Arab nationalist. Such is the logic of Stalinism and nationalism.
Large-Scale Jewish Immigration
Between 1919 and 1931 some 117,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine. But the harsh life, the hostile environment, the racial/religious tensions, the unemployment and economic crisis of the late 1920’s, caused many to leave after a short stay. Between 1924 and 1931, for every 100 immigrants who arrived, 29 departed. By 1931, the Jewish population was 175,000 out of a total population of 1,036,000 or 17.7 percent.
Without Hitler’s victory in 1933 and the subsequent closing of all borders to Jewish immigration – especially those of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, where Eastern and Central European Jewry would have been most assimilable – Zionism would never have become a mass movement and the “Jewish National Home” in Palestine would never have become a state. The Jewish Agency which purported to represent all Jews, not just the Jews in Israel, did not lobby for opening the borders of the U.S., Britain and the USSR to Jewish immigration. Quite the opposite, it wanted “its” Jews for colonization to Palestine. And this is not only where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin wanted them, but also Hitler.
Before World War II the Jewish Agency and the Nazis came to a meeting of minds on how Eastern and Central Europe were to “get rid of their Jews.” The most “responsible,” “respected,” “prominent” Zionists are only too willing to brag about their collaboration with the Nazis to “save” a few thousand Jews with enough money and the right connections while millions went to the gas chambers. For example, the leading British Zionist Jon Kimche and his brother David (who joined the Israeli diplomatic corps after “independence”) co-authored a book entitled The Secret Roads: The “Illegal” Migration of a People, 1938-1948 (London, 1954) from which it is worth quoting extensively:
“… the only road to large-scale emigration from Austria led through the Gestapo Headquarters and the S.S. Office for Jewish Affairs for which the sumptuous mansion of Baron Rothschild had been requisitioned. There in charge of the ‘Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration’ sat Captain Carol Adolph Eichmann.
“Bar-Gilad [a kubbutz leader] explained that he wanted permission to establish pioneer training camps to train young people for work in Palestine and to arrange for their emigration as quickly as conditions permitted. Bar-Gilad could not know that the man he was talking to was the prime mover behind the plan of ‘Jewish emigration for money.’ Eichmann’s Central Bureau was designed originally for this very purpose. It would receive all Jewish applications for permission to leave Greater Germany. For all those who could pay for the services – and his charges were adjusted to the anxiety of his well-to-do Jews – Eichmann would sweep aside bureaucratic formalities and delays and issue passports and visas and provide the passage… It was a lucrative business for the Gestapo.
“… [Eichmann] supplied the farms and farm equipment. On one occasion he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews. By the end of 1938 about a thousand young Jews were training in these Nazi-provided camps.”
The sense of arrogance and Realpolitik, the supreme qualities of the Zionist self-image of the “new, tough soldier-Jew” which pervades this book were certainly needed “virtues” for members of a Zionist intelligentsia who were soon to become apologists for “their state” born from the cadavers of six million Jews and from the wretched multitude of one million Arab refugees.
The Second World War
Although the leadership of the 1936-39 Arab revolt was clericalist and middle class, nonetheless it was a genuine expression of the Palestinian democratic aspirations. The three demands raised by the revolt were an end to Jewish immigration, the end of land sales to Jews and self-government. The Zionists had always opposed self-government in Palestine, for they realized a genuinely democratic regime would place control of immigration in the hands of the Arab majority. The 1936-39 revolt was primarily launched against the British and not against the Jewish communities. Nonetheless, the Zionists were only too willing to aid the British in order to maintain the protection of the mandate. During this period the Zionists strengthened their economy during the extended Arab unrest. (The revolt started with a middle-class-led shutdown of Arab businesses in protest against Britain’s pro-Jewish policies. This was later followed by guerrilla warfare waged by Arab workers and fellahin.) They also strengthened their army, the Haganah, under the protection of the British in order to collaborate with the British police actions against the Arabs. The Haganah, for example, was assigned by the mandate authorities to guard British pipelines. The strike could not have been broken and the revolt suppressed without the collaboration of the Zionists.
Twenty years of British imperialism in the Near East had, on the eve of World War II, turned many Arab governments pro-Axis. In order to shore up their shaky Arab support the British were quite willing to jilt their faithful Zionist servants. In 1939 they issued another “White Paper” which restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years and thereafter made it conditional on the consent of the Arab majority. Further, the Jews from European displaced persons camps, who had been promised a “haven” in Palestine, were not only surrounded by hostile British forces, pro-Axis Arab governments and coups, but Palestine itself was threatened with German occupation.
At the end of the second imperialist war, Britain, while militarily “victorious,” was in ruins and bled white. A Labour government headed by [Clement] Atlee was swept into power in the General Elections of 1945, assigned by the British bourgeoisie with the thankless task of trying to put back the pieces of the British Empire with as little dismantling as possible. Although the Labor Party was in the same “International” as the Zionist “socialists” and for 11 past conferences had voted for Jewish statehood, nonetheless Palestine was the British “fallback” position in the Arab East, and Atlee and his Foreign Secretary [Ernest] Bevin were determined to hold on with bulldog determination.
Bevin ordered the commandeering of wretched vessels like the Exodus, 1947 of Zionist moviemaking legend, whose overcrowded “cargo” were the desperate survivors of German concentration camps, and this “cargo” either shipped back to Germany or “stored” in specially prepared concentration camps on Cyprus. At the June 1946 annual Labour Party conference, its first since the electoral victory of the previous year, Bevin had a ready response to the waves of vociferous and self-righteous indignation that swept across the Atlantic from the U.S. The U.S. wanted the Jews in Palestine “because they did not want them in New York.” This was, of course, true but equally hypocritical in the mouth of Bevin, for the Labour Government did not want the Jews in London either. At this conference Bevin made it quite clear why he also did not want to admit the remaining 100,000 Jews in displaced persons camps to Palestine: it would cost Britain another army division and 200 million pounds. As Sir John Glubb put it, in his Soldier With the Arabs (London, 1957): “It was a question of how many divisions of troops would have been necessary to fight a three-cornered civil war against Jews and Arabs simultaneously.”
Just as the U.S. rushed in to replace the crumbling empires of the British and French in Asia and the Arab East, so the center of imperialist patronage for Zionism switched from London to Washington. Truman became the champion of the “100,000” not only because he did not want them in New York, but because he knew that Britain could indeed not afford another army division and 200 million pounds for Palestine. It could not even afford having one fifth of its army and the 35 million pounds it required to hold on to Palestine after World War II.
The U.S. wanted to get into the Arab East fast. It was afraid that the USSR was about to pull off another Czechoslovakia in Persia. Furthermore, the British had joined Chaim Weizmann at the White House welfare line, and the U.S. was able to apply enormous economic pressure to England. By the beginning of 1947 the Atlee government had decided to wash its hands of Palestine and turned the questions over to the U.N. Stalin, motivated more by irrational Anglophobia than narrow conservative bureaucratic Realpolitik, lined up with Truman and co-sponsored the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. (The price of Thermidor is that the personal whim of The Leader may sometimes be even contrary to the interests of the bureaucratic caste he represents.) Thus Stalin, who in 1929 purged and denounced the Palestinian Communist Party for not supporting the Arab pogroms and in 1936 made the PCP line up behind the Mufti, in 1947-48 was the most vigorous ally of Zionism. Marshall Plan bribery combined with Stalinist betrayal led to the U.N. partition resolution passed on 29 November 1947. Britain then agreed to end the Mandate by the coming May 14.
1. The Balfour Declaration was published on 9 November 1917, two days after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Editor’s note [from original]: The first part of this article was printed in WV No. 33, 23 November 1973. In the ensuing period the Spartacist League has undertaken internal discussion on the national question as it applies to interpenetrated peoples generally and the Near East in particular. In the course of this discussion, we have reviewed our earlier position on the 1948 Arab-Israel war, which is found in Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968.
The establishment of the Zionist state of Israel was one of the consequences of the dissolution of the British Empire following World War II. Six years of imperialist war in Europe and the Far East had drained the resources of the leading colonial power to the point of bankruptcy, engendering mounting social crisis in England and setting the colonies aflame with independence struggles.
The British working class demonstrated its “gratitude” for Winston Churchill’s “victory” over German imperialism by sweeping him out of office in the 1945 elections. After a generation in opposition, the Labour Party, with Clement Attlee as Prime Minister and Ernest Bevin (a right-winger within the party) as Foreign Secretary, crossed over to the government benches on July 17. Bevin soon made clear the new government’s intention to fully enforce the 1939 “White Paper” on Palestine, which restricted Jewish immigration. Detention camps were established in Cyprus for captured illegal immigrant and additional British troops were dispatched to police the Palestine Mandate area.
Battle Over Immigration
During World War II the Hagannah, armed wing of the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun, a rightist Zionist commando group, made a truce with the British. The so-called Stern Gang, which had a reputation as fascists within the Zionist spectrum, split with the Irgun over the truce and continued guerilla operations throughout the war.
With the end of World War II and Bevin’s moves to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Hagannah and Irgun resumed commando operations. In October 1945 they cut the Palestine railway system in 153 places, totally disrupting traffic. On 20 February 1946 a coordinated attach by the Zionist armed forces hit the Mount Carmel radar station, three RAF airfields (destroying 15 planes) and a multitude of police posts. On June 16, the Hagannah elite force, the Palmach, knocked out all bridges and rail lines that crossed the Palestine border. The British responded by occupying Jewish Agency offices and conducting mass arrests. The Zionists, in turn, retaliated by blowing up British military headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on July 22, killing 80 English, Arabs and Jews.
As the struggle between the Zionists and the British dragged out during the next two years, the Mandate government ordered mass dragnets and arrests, cordoning off whole cities and placing thousands of suspects in detention camps in Palestine. Additional thousands of “illegal immigrants” were confined in the Cyprus camps. The main conflict centered on this question of immigration from Europe.
The prospective Jewish immigrants were hardly the typical picture of fat, arrogant, imperialist-bribed colonialists bred on Kipling’s “white man’s burden.” Rather, they were the wretched survivors of the Nazi occupation who were “liberated” by the Allies only to have their concentration camps converted into “displaced persons” camps. At the end of World War II, these camps in West Germany held over 100,000 Jews, but the outbreak of pogroms in Poland and the Balkans during the summer 1946 swelled the numbers in these camps to a quarter million.
In the United States, the Socialist Workers Party (the Trotskyist Party at that time) campaigned to force the government to drop its racist immigration quota system, which discriminated against Eastern Europeans, in order to permit Jews into the U.S. However, as many scholars have pointed out, “Zionists preferred to see Jewish refugees go to Palestine…” (David Brody, “American Jewry, Refugees and Immigration Restriction,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, June 1956). Far from opposing the discriminatory immigration quotas, Rabbi Wise (a leading Zionist) had testified in 1939 congressional hearings, “I have heard no sane person propose any departure or deviation from existing laws now in force” (ibid.)! The reasons were obvious: if hundreds of thousands of European Jews came to America, then hopes for a Jewish Palestine would be shattered.
U.S. Imperialism Replaces Britain
Shortly after World War II there was a sharp recession, especially acute in England, which bottomed at the beginning of 1947. Domestic social/economic crisis suddenly awakened the Labour government to the fact that it could not longer afford to police the British Empire. In the Mandate area,1England had some 80,000 regular troops and 16,000 policemen, along with the British-trained, British-officered and British-equipped Transjordanian Arab Legion, all of which represented a considerable drain on the budget.
In rapid succession the government announced on January 28 that Britain was leaving Burma, on February 18 that the Palestinian question would be submitted to the UN and on February 20 that His Majesty’s troops would pull out of India no later than June 1948. The next day the British ambassador to the U.S. informed Secretary of State [George] Marshall that England could not continue to supply military aid to Greece.
At the time, U.S. corporations owned 47 percent of the oil in the Near Est. The oil companies were solicitous of Arab “good will” and hence hostile to the aspirations of the Zionists. Secretary of Defense Forrestal went on a nationwide campaign to whip up an “energy crisis” scare in order to build a lobby against partition. The State Department had a large component of Near East “experts” who were pro-Arab and, moreover, had the ear of Marshall.
Why, then, did the U.S. support partition? The international Zionist lobby was strident; but it was certainly not strong enough to get Truman to support a policy counterposed to U.S. imperialist interests in the region. Truman’s desire for the “Jewish vote” in the 1948 elections no doubt played a role as well, though it also was not decisive. He certainly can have felt no sympathy for the thousands of “displaced persons” in Europe or else he would have opened U.S. borders to them.
Stalin evidently supported partition at this point in the conviction that it would further disintegrate the British presence in the Near East. But while the U.S. was moving in to replace the British, it is doubtful that Truman wished to step up the pace (considering the unrest in France and Italy, not to mention nearby Greece). The main interest of U.S. imperialism in the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine was, rather, as a contributing force to balkanizing the Near East and as a lightning rod to deflect the aroused national and class aspirations of the Arab fellahin and proletariat.
Partition
When the UN passed the partition resolution on 29 November 1947 there were some 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs in Palestine. Contrary to the story-book propaganda image of hardy Zionist pioneers hoeing the land on isolated kibbutzim, in fact over half the Jewish population was concentrated in three large cities: 150,000 in Tel Aviv, 100,000 in New Jerusalem and 80,000 in Haifa.
These cities and other were either “mixed” (such as Haifa, which had 70,000 Arab residents) or were adjacent to Arab cities (such as the 70,000 Arabs living next door to Tel Aviv in Jaffa). The proposed “Jewish state” had every major city, including the port cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv and the Arab city of Jaffa, except for Jerusalem which was “internationalized.” Further, the Zionist state would include the best citrus lands (and was expected to pay the Arab state 4 million pounds yearly in consequence).
At the time partition was announced, the Jews owned only 6 percent of the land in Palestine; under the UN approved plan they were to get 55 percent of the total area. The Zionist state would encompass 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs, while the Arab state included some 804,000 Arabs and only 10,000 Jews. No wonder the Zionists rejoiced over partition while the Palestinian Arabs cursed it.
Inter-Communal Conflict
Immediately following the U.N. partition vote inter-communal strife intensified sharply. In “mixed” cities sniping went on around the clock. Between cities, supply convoys were regularly ambushed. 50 Jews and 50 Arabs a week died from this irregular warfare. The Grand Mufti called (from Damascus) for a general strike after the announcement of the U.N. resolution. But it was totally ineffective as the Zionists lived behind the walled fortress of their closed economy. The Mufti also called upon his “Home Guard,” nominally 50,000 strong, to rise up in arms. But the only arms they possessed were ancient firearms of dubious usefulness, and much of their time was taken up by shootouts with other “Guards” who supported effendis antagonistic to the Mufti.
One of the most unfortunate aspects of the inter-communal fighting which followed on the heels of the U.N. partition vote was that it spread even to the few areas, like the Haifa docks and oil refineries, where there had been a long tradition of common Arab and Jewish class struggle. Christmas was “celebrated” in Palestine in 1947 with an orgy of bomb throwing, sniping and ambushes, especially in Haifa and the “no-man’s land” between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, resulting in more than 100 deaths. On December 30, members of the Irgun threw bombs from a passing vehicle into a group of Arab workers standing at the gates of a Haifa oil refinery, killing 6 and wounding 47. Arab workers in the plant then attacked Jewish workers with knives and pickaxes, killing 41 and wounding 15.
Enter the Arab League
The British-sponsored Arab League met in Cairo from December 12 to 17. While each member state truculently denounced the Zionists and championed the cause of the Palestinians and Arab unity, nonetheless each was interested only in how much of Palestine it might carve out for itself – and in preventing its fellow members from carving out too much.
The meeting was called at the initiative of the Iraqi prime minister Salah Jabr, who was the most radical in his rhetoric and proposals, calling for immediate armed intervention. Jabr knew he was sitting on a volcano of social unrest at home and needed the diversion a “Holy War” against Zionism would bring. But he was too late. Following the publication of a new defense treaty with Britain on January 16, huge student demonstrations broke out, followed by workers and unemployed taking to the streets. Consequently, throughout the 1948 Arab-Israel war most of the Iraqi army was tied up in keeping order in Baghdad.
King Abdullah of Transjordan was the sole surviving son of the Sharif of Mecca and dreamed of undoing the historic injustice done to his side of the royal family in the Versailles Treaty. As a first step to reestablishing a Greater Syria under Hashemite rule, he was intent on capturing the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs, especially Jerusalem, the third-ranking “Holy City” of Islam and a suitable site for his throne. Syria, too, may have dreamed of a reborn Greater Syria, yet it had but one poorly equipped division while Abdullah had the crack Arab Legions.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem quire naturally wanted no regular armies to intervene, especially Abdullah’s, for the Hashemite kingdom could only be build at the Mufti’s expense. Instead he wanted equipment for his irregulars. It was finally decided to train and equip some 3,000 volunteers, the “Arab Liberation Army,” under Fawzi el-Kaukji, a veteran of the guerrilla fighting following the 1936 general strike in Palestine and of the pro-Axis military coup in Iraq in 1941.
Such byzantine negotiations could naturally not ignore Zionists. In November 1947, prior to the Cairo meeting of the Arab League, Abdullah had already had a secret meeting with Golda Meyerson (Meir) representing the Jewish Agency, in which he confided to her his plans for occupying those parts of Palestine designated for the Arabs, because “we both have a common enemy who will obstruct our plans – the Mufti.” Likewise, in January 1948 Kaukji met with a Jewish Agency representative at his headquarters in central Palestine and promised neither to attack the Jews nor to come to the aid of the pro-Mufti Palestinian irregulars. While he broke the former part of his promise, attacking several settlements in the Galilee, he scrupulously kept the second part.
Flight of the Palestinian Arabs
While the period of December 1947 to March 1948 was largely marked by inter-communal strife and diplomatic negotiating between the Arab states, the dominant aspect of April and early May was a concerted drive by the Zionists to secure their lines communication and, subsequently, to drive out the Arabs from areas allotted to the Jews under partition. That the Zionist intended at the beginning to carry out such a mass expulsion is doubtful, but they certainly took advantage of the panic which set in among the Arab population.
On April 9 the Irgun launched its notorious massacre at Deir Yassin, killing 254 Arabs, most of them unarmed. The remaining 150 villagers were dumped into trucks and paraded through Jewish sections of Jerusalem. While the Jewish Agency expressed its “disgust” at Deir Yassin in a cable to King Abdullah, nonetheless this atrocity was exploited by the Jewish Agency and Hagannah to induce terror and flight.
In Haifa on April 22 the Hagannah launched a large-scale assault which overran important government buildings and occupied key sections of the Arab quarters. The Hagannah demanded that Arabs turn over all arms, that all non-Palestinians (Syrians, Iraqis, etc.) be handed over for trial and detention, and recognition of Jewish control over the entire city. Instead of submitting to these onerous terms, the Arab population evacuated the city. Three days later the Irgun launched a well-armed attack on the Arab city of Jaffa. While the Jewish Agency disclaimed responsibility for this attack, when the Irgun disintegrated and its advance was stopped, the Hagannah came to its rescue and 70,000 Arabs had to flee.
Thus, even before the proclamation of the Zionist state, the Palestinian “refugee problem” had been created. More than 300,000 Arabs had fled to exile as a result of Zionist terror, inadequate or non-existent Palestinian leadership and (in some places) exhortations by the “Arab Liberation Army” to clear battle areas around the “mixed cities.”
Proclamation of Israel and the Arab Armies’ Invasion
As the last British troops embarked on May 14, the State of Israel was prclaimed by the Jewish Agency leaders. The next day the armies of five Arab states crossed the border into former Mandate Palestine. It is important to have a clear picture of the military situation at this point in order to judge whether the ensuing struggle was, as the Zionists (and Stalin) claimed, a war of national liberation or, on the contrary, a war of national expansion on the part of Israel.
In the first place, British troops were no longer a factor. This meant that, except in the north around Galilee, the only effective military forces in the former Mandate area were those of the Zionists. The Arab Legion, the main opponent of the Hagannah in the early fighting, had to cross the Jordan River and travel some 80-90 miles before making contact with the Zionist forced around Jerusalem. Thus much of the action in the early days of the 9148 war consisted of the Hagannah expanding the area of its control, filling the vacuum created by the departure of the British.
Secondly, the balance of military forces was roughly even. As of May 15 the Hagannah had mobilized approximately 25,000 regulars, who faced 10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 Arab Legionnaires, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis and 3,000 Lebanese, for a total of 27,5000 on the Arab side. The Arab armies were initially better equipped, but the Zionists had the advantage of short lines of communications and tight defense lines in a country the size of Vermont.
Most important of all, however, the Zionist command was (more or less) unified while each Arab army pursued an independent and often contradictory policy. The final Arab invasion plans had designated Iraqi general Nur ad-Din Mahmoud as “Commander of the Regular and Irregular Forces for the Saving of Palestine.” He was supposed to lead a coordinated pincer attack in the north combined with blocking maneuvers in the south, with the objective of capturing Haifa. However, on May 13 Abdullah informed the other members of the Arab League that he was to be supreme commander himself and was not interested in Haifa but Jerusalem. Consequently all plans were changed, throwing the Arab armies into chaos, and a superior military strategy was scotched in favor of one that had as its highest objective making Abdullah king of Jerusalem. As he had repeatedly told the Zionists, Abdullah had no interest in occupying the Jewish districts; not once during the war did he attempt to do so.
The actual fighting during the first four weeks of the war (May 15 to June 11) centered on lines of communication with Jerusalem. Because of Zionist military effectiveness, the lack of coordination of the Arab armies and the main Arab contender’s exclusive interest in occupying the non-Jewish area, the physical existence of the Jewish community in Palestine was never in question during the course of the fighting.
After four weeks of fighting the Arab Legion held Latrun, a strategic point blocking the main road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; however, the Hagannah had managed to bypass the area by building a new road. General Glubb’s Legionnaires had also taken Sheikh Jarrah, a village whose only importance was that it was midway between New Jerusalem and Mt. Scopus. And they had occupied the “Old City” of Jerusalem whose significance was purely religious and symbolic. The Iraqi army took Jenin, from where they did not budge for the rest of the war. The Egyptians took three settlements in the Negev. Militarily, the first round was a stand-off.
The UN-imposed four-week truce lasted from June 11 to July 9 and was used by both sides to resupply their forces. The Arab states expanded their troop commitments by 15,000 men. But it was the Zionists who benefitted most from the lull. Reflecting Russian policy, which considered the Israeli struggle a progressive anti-imperialist war of national liberation, Czechoslovakia delivered substantial members of arms and an entire airfield. From the U.S. and England the Zionists obtained bombers and fighters.
By the end of the truce period Israel had achieved clear military advantage and in the ensuing “Ten Day Offensive” it proceeded to maul Kaukji’s Arab Liberation Army in the Galilee and capture Ramleh, Lydda and adjacent Arab villages in central Palestine. Wherever the Hagannah advanced into Arab territory, the civilian population was expelled and their homes and villages bulldozed and blown up. By the end of October more than 472,000 Arabs had been driven off their land and into exile.
After a second truce which lasted from July 18 to October, the Zionists concentrated on wiping out the Egyptian positions in the Negev and mopping up the Galilee. At the end of the fighting in early 1949, they had occupied all the territory allotted to the Jews under the UN partition plan and, in addition, had taken the eastern Galilee, parts of central Palestine (including the new city of Jerusalem) and parts of the Negev. Egypt took the Gaza strip and Transjordan got the West Bank. Abdullah, despite some battlefield reverses, now fulfilled his lifelong dream and crowned himself King of (a part of) Jerusalem and the (partially) restored Hashemite Kingdom. Not to the outdone, Egypt set up an “Arab Government of Palestine” in the Gaza Strip.
Hebrew Nation in Palestine?
The 1948 war established the framework in which the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflicts occurred. For this reason alone it requires careful study by revolutionary socialists. In addition to the obvious question of what position should be taken by Marxists in this conflict, it raises a number of other important political issues: Were the Jews in Palestine a nation? If so, do Leninists support their right to self-determination? Was the 1948 war an application of this right? And, more generally, what is the significance of self-determination for interpenetrated peoples?
Certainly by 1948 the Jewish-Zionist communities of Palestine had achieved one of their goals, having constituted a distinct national entity. (The point at which this occurred can be placed at the defeat of the 1936-39 Arab general strike and uprising, after which the Palestinian Jews had a functioning closed economy, essentially independent of the Arab communities. This separation laid the basis for the development of the Jewish economy during the Second World War, when the isolation of Palestine compelled the development of entire new industries.) We say this as recognition of an accomplished fact, not implying “approval” of any kind.
Lenin and Trotsky resolutely opposed the bourgeois ideology of Zionism and opposed Jewish settlement in Palestine. But a nation is not a metaphysical moral category; it is a social category with a material content. Stalin’s pamphlet, Marxism and the National Question, written in 1913 when he was still a Bolshevik and under Lenin’s guidance, defines a nation in the following terms: “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” [emphasis in original]. This definition explicitly denied that European Jews constituted a nation. They were considered by Stalin and Lenin to be either assimilated (as in Western Europe) or an oppressed caste (as in Russia and Easter Europe generally).
The Zionists also understood that for dispersed European Jewry, a “people without land,” the formation of a nation was impossible without finding a corresponding “land without people” – or one that could be turned into a land without people through forced expulsion of the native inhabitants. This what they proceeded to do in Palestine, first pushing the Arab fellahin off the land (bought from the feudal landowners), then constructing a closed economy of the Jewish communities and, finally, in 1948 proceeding to conquer the greater part of Mandate Palestine with an army organized prior to Partition, and to expel the majority of its Arab population.
Out of the destruction of European Jewry by Hitler (without whose aid the Zionists would have gone the way of the Shakers and other utopian sects) and at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs, a settler colony was transformed into a nation.
Self-Determination for the Hebrew Nation?
The Hebrew nation came into existence through force and violence, through the suppression, forced expulsion and genocide of other peoples. Communists must oppose this brutal national oppression. Yet once this historical fact is accomplished, we must certainly recognize the nation’s right to self-determination, unless we prefer the alternative, namely national genocide.
The United States itself (as well as good parts of Spanish colonial America) was created through the most brutal, and ultimately genocidal, despoliation of the native Indian population. The wiping out of the aboriginal population was almost total in Uruguay, Costa Rica and Cuba, for example. Should Marxists therefore deny the U.S.’ right to self-determination, for instance during the war of independence in 1776? Do we deny this right to the Spanish derived inhabitants of Latin America? Are we to deny Iraq’s right to self-determination because it suppresses the Kurds; do we deny this democratic right to Nigeria because of the massacre of the Biafrans, or to the Sudan because the Arab north has wiped out hundreds of thousands of blacks in the south? Do we deny the right of self-determination to modern Turkey because it was forged over the corpses of one million Armenians and Greeks? The oppression and massacre of these subjugated peoples were great historic injustices, but this does not transform irredentism into Leninism. Rather, it underlines the necessity to view the national question within the internationalist framework of the proletariat, recognizing that nationalism – the petty-bourgeois ideology which covers the expansionist and genocidal appetites of the bourgeoisie – is incapable of achieving social justice even on the terrain of bourgeois-democratic national rights.
The ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party now denies the right to self-determination to the Hebrew-speaking people of Israel, arguing: “From the point of view of the Leninist concept of the right of nations to self-determination, the key fact is whether the given nationalist is an oppressed nationality or an oppressor nationality” (“Israel and the Arab Revolution,” 1971 SWP convention resolution). It is one thing to distinguish between the nationalism of the oppressors (which is wholly reactionary) and the nationalism of the oppressed (which, although it too is a bourgeois ideology that must be combatted by socialists, is in part an expression of opposition to oppression). But Marxists do not pretend to sit with the gods on high, majestically rewarding the good but oppressed peoples with the right to self-determination and dispersing to the four corners of the world the bad oppressor peoples.
The SWP claims that Leninism recognizes only the claims of oppressed nations to the right of self-determination. This would have been news to Lenin! In his article, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (December 1914) he approvingly quotes the resolution on the national question from the 1896 (London) congress of the Socialist (Second) International: “This Congress declares that it stands for the full right of all nations to self-determination….” To underline the point, Lenin goes on to remark: “The International’s resolution reproduces the most essential and fundamental propositions in this point of view: on the one hand, the absolute direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle. We think that this resolution is absolutely correct….” [emphasis in original]
Under normal circumstances the self-determination of oppressor nations is of course not in question. The demand for self-determination for oppressed peoples means that they should have the same national rights already achieved by already established nations, not that oppressed people are entitled to national rights while “oppressor peoples” are not.
By granting the right of self-determination to all nations, this does not mean that Marxists support the exercise of that right under all conditions. (Lenin compared self-determination to divorce; by recognizing the right to divorce one does not necessarily advocate dissolution of a particular marriage.) Further, when democratic rights come into conflict, it is necessary to subordinate the particular to the general. This was recognized by the then Trotskyist SWP in 1948 in its editorial on “The Arab-Jewish War in Palestine” (Militant, 31 May 1948): “Haven’t the Jewish people the right to self-determination and statehood as other peoples? Yes – but even if we abstract this question from its aforementioned social reality, the fact remains that they cannot carve out a state at the expense of the national rights of the Arab peoples. This is not self-determination, but conquest of another people’s territory.” The SWP vigorously opposed the UN Partition scheme and called for “a joint struggle against the imperialist oppressors on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.”
Self-Determination for Interpenetrated Peoples?
The SWP was, however, vague in its propaganda at the time, and tended to be unable to reduce its correct sentiments to a line on the war. This was not an accident, but flowed out of the complexity of the situation, the scarcity of hard information on the war itself (the bourgeois press’ coverage being largely confined to hysterical propaganda about the plight of the poor beleaguered Jews) and the theoretical dilemma posed by attempting to apply the right of self-determination to interpenetrated peoples.
It was clear that the establishment of an independent nation-state, either by Palestinian Arabs or the Jews, would occur in Palestine only at the expense of the other nation. When national populations are geographically interpenetrated, as they were in Palestine, an independent nation-state can be created only by their forcible separation (forced population transfers, etc.). Thus the democratic right of self-determination becomes abstract, as it can be exercised only by the stronger national grouping driving out or destroying the weaker one.
In such cases the only possibility of a democratic solution lies in a social transformation. For example, the decomposition of the old multi-national Turkish empire precipitated a period of intensified murderous national conflict in the Balkans. The centuries of national hatreds and massacres between for example the Serbian and Croatian peoples exceeded the history of national strife between the Hebrews and Arabs in the Near East. The only basis for the unity of the Serbs and the Croats (and other peoples) of Yugoslavia was the triumph of the partisan armies, against all of the nationalists, following World War II in a struggle which broke the bounds of capitalism and resulted in the creation of a deformed workers state in Yugoslavia.
Under capitalism, the right of self-determination in such a context is strictly negative: that is, against the abuses of national rights of either the Arabs or the Hebrew-speaking population. Thus, had there been an independent armed force of the Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 war, Marxists could have given it military support in the struggle against the expansion of the exclusionist Zionist state and the onslaught of the Arab League armies, which together suppressed the national existence of the Palestinian Arabs. Likewise, had there been an irredentist onslaught of the Arab states which threatened the survival of the Hebrew nation in Palestine, Marxists would have taken a position of revolutionary defensism of the survival of that nation.
Until recently the Spartacist League had held that the intervention of the Arab Legion following Israel’s proclamation of independence transformed the 1948 war into a struggle to defend the survival of the Hebrew people and its right to self-determination. While opposing partition and fighting for the return of the expelled Palestinians, nonetheless we would have called for victory of the Hagannah over the Arab Legion.
The criteria by which we judge such a war have not changed. However, additional revelation of the circumstances surrounding the 1948 war through new factual material, much of which became available only recently, makes it quite clear that at no point in the 1948 war were the Arab armies in a position to challenge the survival of the Hebrew nation. In particular we call the readers attention to the article by Y. Rad, “On the First Arab-Israeli War,” in WV No. 35, 4 January 1974.
In light of this and other material, the SL Central Committee on 16 March adopted the following motion:
“The correct Trotskyist policy toward the 1948 Palestinian War was one of revolutionary defeatism (and exercise of self-defense by specific villages and settlements when under attack) because:
“1) the democratic issue of self-determination for each of two nationalities or peoples who geographically interpenetrate can only conceivably by resolved equitably within the framework of the proletariat in power;
“2) concretely in 1948 – the Zionist-led Jews possessed the social/military organization to achieve and expand their own nation state. The Palestine Arabs were disorganized, ineffectual and betrayed on all sides. With the exception of the battle for Jerusalem, the Trans-Jordan (and British-inspired and backed) war aims were to compete with the Jews for the portioning of Palestine Arabs’ lands. The role of other foreign Arab armies was essentially to posture, seeking to deflect discontent within their states.”
In 1948 the Revolutionary Communist League, Palestinian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, while recognizing the right of the Jews to self-determination, resolutely opposed partition and took a revolutionary defeatist position in the Arab-Zionist war. “This war can on neither side be said to bear a progressive character… It weakens the proletariat and strengthens imperialism in both camps. The only way to peace between the two peoples of this country is turning the guns against the instigators of murder in both camps” [emphasis in original] (“Against the Stream,” reprinted in Fourth International, May 1948). Clearly, a re-examination of the historical evidence confirms the positions held by the Trotskyists at that time – that the survival of the Hebrew nation was not in question. There were no effective forces fighting for the rights of the Palestinian Arab nation; none of the Arab forces fought for the national rights of the Palestinians or against imperialism, but rather against the Zionists and each other in order to carve up the Palestinian Arab nation among themselves and/or divert social struggle at home.
While the imperialist powers certainly had an interest in and intervened to shape the outcome of the conflict, it is not possible to consider the struggle on either side as anti-imperialist. Thus the Israelis were aided by the U.S. and the USSR (diplomatically and, at least indirectly, militarily), while the Egyptians, Iraqis and Jordanians all received British military aid. (On the other hand, not only the Israelis but each of the Arab countries involved was assiduously pursing its own national aims, so that it is likewise impossible to reduce the war to a simple great power conflict.)
Marxists could give military support to neither side in the 1948 Palestine war. Our position for proletarian internationalism requires viewing that war from the necessity of revolutionary defeatism on both sides, counterposing to the victory of either side the perspective of united proletarian struggle, which offers the only possibility for the genuine fulfillment to the right of self-determination – through a socialist federation of the Near East. ■
1. After World War I, Britain governed Palestine, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, under a “mandate” from the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations.
Cover-Up for SL Boycott of Protests Against Racist Police Terror
Spartacist League’s Lockdown Lunacy
For the past eleven months, the moribund Spartacist League/International Communist League (SL/ICL) has maintained a sepulchral silence, save for a single pro forma statement by the SL’s Workers Vanguard on the November 2020 elections to say nothing much had happened during their absence (no mention of the coronavirus pandemic, the massive marches against police brutality or the words “George Floyd”). But now there’s been a second croak from the crypt, in the form of a Spartacist leaflet (19 April) titled “Down with the Lockdowns!” This is a truly bizarre piece of propaganda, at several levels.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, it categorically declares:
“The bourgeoisie’s lockdowns are a reactionary public health measure. Workers must oppose them! Lockdowns may well temporarily slow the spread of infections, but they weaken the fighting ability of the working class.”
So the ICL admits that lockdowns “may” slow the rate of infection, but only to dismiss this. Does it recommend any public health measures to deal with the deadly coronavirus – selective quarantines, emergency hospitals and isolation facilities for those who have contracted the disease or are in danger of infection, anything at all? Nothing. Nor does it even mention that worldwide over 3 million people have died of COVID-19. Frankly, these poseurs who besmirch the name of communism and the Fourth International don’t care. Like so much of what they say they are for or against these days – until the next wild line change – it’s all just words to them. In contrast, public health measures against this modern plague are of enormous concern to the working class.
At one level, these are the ravingsof an outfit that has gone off the deep end. The degeneration of the once-revolutionary Spartacist League and its affiliates has led it to take refuge in its own “alternate reality.” As one former SLer, today a supporter of the Internationalist Group, commented: “Yikes! What has happened to the SL? As I read their article, I couldn’t help but think of our WV headline, ‘The Politics of Crazy’”1 about “the decomposition of the hopelessly bizarre residue of the New Left radicalization. Who is now writing this stuff for the SL? It reads like a sophomoric parody, an anti-Marxist ‘modest proposal’ by a confederacy of dunces, a programmatic flyover of political reality.” That captures it pretty well.
Back in the real world, the SL/ICL’s statement is a disingenuous attempt to excuse its boycott of the massive protests against racist police terror last summer. “Gatherings, protests, travel, strikes, union organizing: all have been restricted or banned,” they write. A little later we learn: “For the last year, the position of the ICL was to accept the lockdowns as necessary. We repudiate this position. It was a capitulation to the ‘national unity’ rallying cry that all classes should support the lockdowns because they save lives.” So the SL “accepted” and evidently obeyed the lockdowns – yet we and millions of people in the United States did not. We certainly didn’t see the SL at mass marches that were attacked by police for violating curfews and bans. Tens of thousands protested racist police murder, hundreds were arrested in NYC for defying curfew, 2 June 2020. SL was nowhere to be seen. (Internationalist photo)
When the first protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop broke out a year ago, they were almost everywhere illegal. The Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, Class Struggle Education Workers and Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas joined hundreds of thousands of others in defying the bans on gatherings and protests. As we remarked to SL supporters at the May Day march in New York City this month, “Look around you. Of all the people here, you are probably the only ones who obeyed the protest bans. And you still have not mentioned George Floyd anywhere.” An SLer responded, “I’m hearing that a lot. Why is that so important?” It wasn’t important to protest? Not for the SL. The Internationalists, in contrast, intervened heavily combatting illusions in the Democratic Party.2
Strikes and union organizing stopped? When an SL supporter on May Day claimed that lockdowns prevented class struggle, an IG activist responded, “What about packinghouse workers who walked out, what about Amazon workers, what about Yakima?” The women workers in the fruit packinghouses in Yakima, Washington struck for health and safety protections and hazard pay during a lockdown in the West Coast epicenter of coronavirus infection. Supporters of the IG and Class Struggle Workers – Portland violated state travel bans to go to the strike lines to support them. Bans and lockdowns didn’t stop the class struggle. But the SL/ICL “accepted” them. And how convenient it is for them to denounce quarantines now that they have been vaccinated. Fruit packinghouse workers, mainly women, courageously struck for safety and hazard pay in Yakima, Washington, the West Coast epicenter of coronavirus infection, defying lockdown orders. (Evan Abell / Yakima Herald-Republic)
The ICL “repudiates” its acceptance of the lockdowns, and now pleads guilty to capitulating to “national unity” appeals. It wouldn’t be the first time, on both counts, capitulating and repudiating. In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when U.S. rulers were making fevered pitches for national unity as they invaded Afghanistan, the ICL dropped its call for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, while slandering the IG as “anti-American” for our refusal to abandon this fundamental Leninist position against imperialist war.3 And then in 2010, the SL/ICL vociferously supported the U.S. invasion of Haiti, buying into the claim that this was “humanitarian aid,” only to, months later, “repudiate” this “capitulation to U.S. imperialism” and admit that our denunciation of their “social-imperialist” betrayal was correct.4
Later on in its unhinged tract on lockdowns, the ICL accuses the Internationalist Group along with several other tendencies of having “embraced the lockdowns, betraying the proletariat.” But since a few lines earlier it admitted that it “accepted” the lockdowns as “necessary,” it is saying that the ICL also “betrayed.” So let’s see if we got this straight: from March 2020 through 18 April 2021, for over a year, the ICL betrayed the proletariat (again), yet it still fancies itself the revolutionary vanguard! In part what’s going on here is that these ex-Trotskyists are trying to cheapen what it means to betray, pretending that everyone does it, so what’s the big deal. But boycotting the massive protests against racist police murder, as the SL did, was a betrayal, whatever its excuse. While petty bourgeoisie stayed home in lockdowns, “essential workers,” many immigrants, were prey to deadly virus, receiving no emergency aid. IG at 14 August 2020 NYC protest demanded equal treatment for excluded workers. (Internationalist photo)
And then there are the facts, which like the horrendous COVID death toll have little meaning for these latter-day Know Nothings. For the record, the lockdowns were hardly an expression of “national unity,” as they were ordered in emergency decrees and were met with considerable opposition from reactionary forces (that the SL/ICL is now sidling up to). More importantly, the ICL’s claim that workers were “weakened” by the lockdowns is made doubly absurd by the fact that for the vast majority of the proletariat, there never was a lockdown. In the United States, transit workers and truckers, rail and dock workers, auto and metal workers, hospital and sanitation workers, meatpacking and poultry plant workers, grocery and deli workers, delivery and agricultural workers – all were kept on the job, in highly unsafe conditions. The same was true in Europe and elsewhere. Those who worked remotely during lockdowns were overwhelmingly white-collar petty-bourgeois sectors.
The ICL’s portrayal of “labor misleaders play[ing] a key role in enforcing the lockdowns” is another fiction. In fact, as we documented, in Michigan plants, the United Auto Workers tops only called on the companies to shut plants after local unions walked out at plants where COVID cases had been reported. Packinghouse workers were directed to stay on the job by a presidential order under the Defense Production Act, yet despite wildcat walkouts by workers the UFCW and RWDSU union leaders did not call to shut down manifestly unsafe meatpacking and poultry plants.5 And what about workers at the Smithfield packing plant in South Dakota where over 1,000 workers got COVID? Were they stronger because there was no lockdown there, because they had to come to work with little or no personal protective equipment? Let the ICL try selling its latest deranged revelations in Sioux Falls, SD.
The ICL statement parrots the complaint of the bourgeois media and politicians – first from Trump and Republicans, then embraced by the Democrats after Biden took office – that “the teachers unions have fought for governments to keep schools shut,” saying this was a “refusal to fight for safe schools.” Actually, in New York the teachers union agreed to school opening plans after threatening to strike if safety measures were not taken. And the Internationalist Group – which the ICL statement falsely claims “embraced the lockdowns” – along with Class Struggle Education Workers called to “Use Union Power to Reopen Schools Safely,” and for “the formation of union-led teacher-parent-student-worker committees at every school to inspect and sign off on reopening plans, and to see that they are rigorously followed afterwards.”6 While some sought to keep schools closed, the IG and CSEW called (here at 3 August 2020 NYC demo) to use union power to make schools safe to reopen with small class sizes, hiring tens of thousands of teachers. (Internationalist photo)
This brings us to the fictitious program that the ICL supposedly puts forward “to defend the health and livelihoods of the working class,” including the call “For Union Control of Safety!” Where did they ever call for this in the U.S., or anywhere – save a mention in a leaflet by their Italian group (never translated) in response to an article by our comrades of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia which demanded, “Trade-union and worker safety committees must shut down production in the case of unsafe working conditions.”7 In contrast to the SL/ICL, the Internationalist Group and supporters in the unions from early in the pandemic widely promoted the crucial demands raised in the call by Class Struggle Workers – Portland (18 March 2020) “For Workers Action in Coronavirus Crisis.”8 This included the call to form “health and safety committees, to be elected at every workplace, both union and unrepresented, to ensure that all safety measures are being enforced for all workers, and that all necessary equipment is available.” Not only did we make specific demands, we fought for them with New England Teamster UPS workers,9 in Los Angeles transit,10 with Yakima fruit packers.11
The IG also issued a leaflet and 12-page special supplement in May 2020 on New York City transit, where 120 active-duty members (and 40 retirees) of Transport Workers Union Local 100 died of COVID, calling for workers control of NYC transit, with detailed demands that class-struggle trade unionists should put forward to protect bus drivers, track and shop workers who were particularly hard hit.12 We also called for round-the-clock subway service to be restored, and adequate shelter provided for the homeless.13 What did SL supporters do about any demands for safety during that time, we would like to know. The fundamental fact is that the phony “program” put forward in the ICL’s statement against lockdowns is a total fraud. They never fought for any of these demands. Again, it’s all just words – after the fact, motivated by the latest round of their own endless internal crises and convulsions.
The SL/ICL’s ex post facto “program” seeks to put a “working-class” gloss on its sharp turn to the right in recent years as it has increasingly oriented to chauvinist forces. This was particularly evident in its support for British exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) fueled by virulent immigrant-bashing,4 and later when the ICL’s “Brexit Now!” line echoed right-wing Tory prime minister Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done!” campaign slogan.15 It is also seen in the ICL’s opposition to calls for asylum for refugees from imperialist devastation, in the Near East or Latin America.16 Now the Spartacist “Lockdowns” leaflet argues that labor/left support for lockdowns “has ceded the ground to the far right, allowing sinister reactionaries and outright fascists to posture as defenders of democratic rights and champions of the ruined petty bourgeoisie.” Fascistic armed militias at Michigan state capitol, 15 April 2020, demanding an end to the lockdowns. (Photo: NBC)
So here is the pseudo-Trotskyist ICL vying with the likes of the fascistic militias that staged an armed assault on the Michigan state capitol to protest lockdowns. Moreover, those protests were explicitly to keep capitalism going and profits flowing. It is not alone. The decrepit remains of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have lately championed “‘deplorable’ workers” (ironically taking up Democrat Hillary Clinton’s sneer about Trump supporters). For example, the SWP’s Militant (2 June 2017) denounced the “breaking up of meetings” of fascists and racists, alibiing this with criticisms of “middle-class left and liberal groups” that “increasingly blame workers – most of whom they consider ignorant, racist, xenophobic and dangerous.” In Portland, Oregon, where in June 2017 the IG and CSWP brought out some 300 union supporters to stop a provocation by the Patriot Prayer fascists,17 the SWP was selling to and discussing with the fascist/racist provocateurs (The Militant, 19 June 2017).
The Internationalist has exposed the liberal/reformist myth that dismisses all white workers who voted for Donald Trump as racists,18 noting (among other things) that many of them had voted for Obama, in many cases twice. But that is very different from contending on the same “anti-lockdown” capitalist political terrain as pro-Trump racists, as the Trumpified SWP does, with the ex-Trotskyist ICL tagging along behind. Moreover, by the time that the ICL called to “Reopen the Economy” and for “increased production,” this was the common program of the entire bourgeoisie. It all gets “curiouser and curiouser,” as Lewis Carroll quipped in Alice in Wonderland (see the trenchant comment by R. Titta on the ICL’s strange evolution below).
One final thing: when asked by an IG supporter (and former SLer) in Los Angeles where the SL/ICL stood on China’s use of massive lockdowns that contained the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, an SL supporter said they did not have a position. So much for the ICL’s empty “defense” of China. In contrast, the IG and LFI have underlined how the Chinese workers state, despite being bureaucratically deformed, was able to marshal resources of a collectivized economy to treat the infected and stop the spread of the deadly virus.19 We have also warned of the mounting imperialist threat of war and counterrevolution from both Republican Trump and Democrat Biden, whom the reformist left worked so hard to put in the White House.
We will leave the last word to the IG supporter, ex-SLer and CSEW member whose comments on the ICL’s lockdown lunacy we quoted at the beginning:
“This abstract mess of an article doesn’t even make sense as an apology for the SL’s abstention from the Black-led protests against racist police repression. Instead, they have adopted the slogan of the fascistic militias – ‘liberate Michigan,’ liberate the working class from rational public health measures.
“I really don’t understand how the SL became so alienated from reality so fast…. I can’t believe that the SL I was a part of would have simply absented itself from the massive street protests against racist police terror and shut down its press in the face of a public health crisis that disproportionately ravaged the working class. Crazy may be a generous characterization of the current SL. More grim, maybe the SL has just given up. What a waste of Trotskyist cadre who once dedicated their lives to revolutionary socialism.” ■
U.S.—Scientists have discovered mounting evidence that critical race theory escaped from a lab in a college humanities department some decades ago. Originally thought to be a deranged conspiracy theory, the idea that CRT escaped from a liberal arts program is now accepted as mainstream consensus.
“While many believed the deadly CRT virus arose naturally out of centuries of systemic oppression, it now appears to have been manmade,” said Dr. Xander Willow of Hillsdale College. “It looks like some Maoist flavored Stalinists who never did a days work in near a working class person or job site where people use physical tools were messing around with some old law textbooks and Stalin’s collected works were experimenting with applying critical race theory to all of life. As we can see, their gain-of-racism research had terrible results.”
While researchers could not trace the virus all the way back to patient zero, scientific evidence indicates the first carrier of CRT was “almost certainly a passionate activists who refused to allow racist thoughts in those around.”
A Frank Bowling work at the artist’s recent Tate Britiain survey.FRANK AUGSTEIN/AP
In a legal claim filed in London’s High Court earlier this month, artist Frank Bowling, whose work has seen a new level of interest, thanks to recent exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and Tate Britain in London, alleged that Hales Gallery owes him a significant sum of money. He also accuses the gallery, which no longer represents him, of withholding more than 100 of his paintings. In response, Hales has accused members of Bowling’s immediate family of having ruined his relationship with the gallery in an attempt co-opt his legacy.
“The feeling that they had taken advantage of me is reinforced by the extraordinary demands they are now making for vast sums of money, while holding to ransom my own paintings,” Bowling said in a statement sent to ARTnews. “I’ve been a practicing artist for more than sixty years, and while I am grateful to all those who have supported me in my journey to recognition, my art works and personal toil speak for my success.”
Frank Bowling
Hales Gallery, which has spaces in London and New York, first began showing Bowling’s art in 2011. According to the claim, which was filed in London on August 18, Bowling terminated his relationship with the gallery in October 2019 because of “serious breaches” of the gallery’s agreement with him.
Bowling’s claim goes on to allege that more than 100 works by Bowling are being withheld and that the artist is owed £1.8 million ($2.4 million) in funds related to sales of his work. Bowling’s lawyer, Tim Bignell, claimed in the filing that the paintings being held by Hales are worth £14 million ($18.5 million). While the claim states that Bowling “believes them to be in Hales Gallery’s storage in London and New York,” it does not specify which works are allegedly being kept away from him.
“Regrettably, Hales Gallery has sought, and continues, to try to resist Mr Bowling’s claim in its entirety,” the suit alleges.
A representative for Hales Gallery did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.
The Evening Standardreported earlier this week that Bowling is being countersued by Hales Gallery, which has alleged that the 86-year-old artist’s sons launched a “concerted campaign” to sour the enterprise’s relationship with Bowling and his wife Rachel Scott. According to the countersuit, the artist’s sons, Ben and Sacha, had tried to “wrestle control” of Bowling’s legacy.
Bowling denied these claims in his statement, saying that they “misrepresent in the nastiest way my personal situation and family life.”
Bowling, who was born in 1937 in British Guiana and is based in London and New York, is known for semi-abstract paintings that allude to histories of colonialism. During the 1960s and ’70s, he made his most well-known series, known as the “Map Paintings,” which feature forms resembling continents transposed onto color fields. In 1971, Bowling wrote a now-famous essay for ARTnews called “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful,’” which focuses the double standards facing Black artists of the era.
The artist’s work has seen a critical revival, thanks in part to appearances in major shows such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 – 1983,” which originated at Tate Modern in 2017 and continues to travel to venues around the world. He is currently represented by New York’s Alexander Gray Associates gallery and Los Angeles’s Marc Selwyn Fine Art.
The claims made in Bowling’s action recall ones voiced in a lawsuit filed in New York earlier this year by artist Howardena Pindell, whose work has sometimes been shown in the same contexts as Bowling’s art. Pindell filed suit against the N’Namdi family, whose galleries formerly showed her work, and she alleged that, by “operating through a maze of business entities,” its members were able to obscure information about the sales of her art.
Full Text: Speech by Xi Jinping at a ceremony marking the centenary of the CPCBy XinhuaPublished: Jul 01, 2021 04:07 PM Comrades and friends,
Today, the first of July, is a great and solemn day in the history of both the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese nation. We gather here to join all Party members and Chinese people of all ethnic groups around the country in celebrating the centenary of the Party, looking back on the glorious journey the Party has traveled over 100 years of struggle, and looking ahead to the bright prospects for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
To begin, let me extend warm congratulations to all Party members on behalf of the CPC Central Committee.
On this special occasion, it is my honor to declare on behalf of the Party and the people that through the continued efforts of the whole Party and the entire nation, we have realized the first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. This means that we have brought about a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty in China, and we are now marching in confident strides toward the second centenary goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects. This is a great and glorious accomplishment for the Chinese nation, for the Chinese people, and for the Communist Party of China!
Comrades and friends,
The Chinese nation is a great nation. With a history of more than 5,000 years, China has made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. After the Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.
To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people put up a courageous fight. As noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Yihetuan Movement, and the Revolution of 1911 rose one after the other, and a variety of plans were devised to ensure national survival, but all of these ended in failure. China was in urgent need of new ideas to lead the movement to save the nation and a new organization to rally revolutionary forces.
With the salvoes of Russia’s October Revolution in 1917, Marxism-Leninism was brought to China. Then in 1921, as the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were undergoing a great awakening and Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the Chinese workers’ movement, the Communist Party of China was born. The founding of a communist party in China was an epoch-making event, which profoundly changed the course of Chinese history in modern times, transformed the future of the Chinese people and nation, and altered the landscape of world development.
Since the very day of its founding, the Party has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its aspiration and mission. All the struggle, sacrifice, and creation through which the Party has united and led the Chinese people over the past hundred years has been tied together by one ultimate theme—bringing about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
To realize national rejuvenation, the Party united and led the Chinese people in fighting bloody battles with unyielding determination, achieving great success in the new-democratic revolution.
Through the Northern Expedition, the Agrarian Revolutionary War, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and the War of Liberation, we fought armed counter-revolution with armed revolution, toppling the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism and establishing the People’s Republic of China, which made the people masters of the country. We thus secured our nation’s independence and liberated our people.
The victory of the new-democratic revolution put an end to China’s history as a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society, to the state of total disunity that existed in old China, and to all the unequal treaties imposed on our country by foreign powers and all the privileges that imperialist powers enjoyed in China. It created the fundamental social conditions for realizing national rejuvenation.
Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people showed the world that the Chinese people had stood up, and that the time in which the Chinese nation could be bullied and abused by others was gone forever.
To realize national rejuvenation, the Party united and led the Chinese people in endeavoring to build a stronger China with a spirit of self-reliance, achieving great success in socialist revolution and construction.
By carrying out socialist revolution, we eliminated the exploitative and repressive feudal system that had persisted in China for thousands of years, and established socialism as our basic system. In the process of socialist construction, we overcame subversion, sabotage, and armed provocation by imperialist and hegemonic powers, and brought about the most extensive and profound social changes in the history of the Chinese nation. This great transformation of China from a poor and backward country in the East with a large population into a socialist country laid down the fundamental political conditions and the institutional foundations necessary for realizing national rejuvenation.
Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people showed the world that the Chinese people were capable of not only dismantling the old world, but also building a new one, that only socialism could save China, and that only socialism with Chinese characteristics could develop China.
To realize national rejuvenation, the Party united and led the Chinese people in freeing the mind and forging ahead, achieving great success in reform, opening up, and socialist modernization.
We established the Party’s basic line for the primary stage of socialism, resolutely advanced reform and opening up, overcame risks and challenges from every direction, and founded, upheld, safeguarded, and developed socialism with Chinese characteristics, thus bringing about a major turn with far-reaching significance in the history of the Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This enabled China to transform itself from a highly centralized planned economy to a socialist market economy brimming with vitality, and from a country that was largely isolated to one that is open to the outside world across the board. It also enabled China to achieve the historic leap from a country with relatively backward productive forces to the world’s second largest economy, and to make the historic transformation of raising the living standards of its people from bare subsistence to an overall level of moderate prosperity, and then ultimately to moderate prosperity in all respects. These achievements fueled the push toward national rejuvenation by providing institutional guarantees imbued with new energy as well as the material conditions for rapid development.
Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people showed the world that by pursuing reform and opening up, a crucial move in making China what it is today, China had caught up with the times in great strides.
To realize national rejuvenation, the Party has united and led the Chinese people in pursuing a great struggle, a great project, a great cause, and a great dream through a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, and innovation, achieving great success for socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.
Following the Party’s 18th National Congress, socialism with Chinese characteristics entered a new era. In this new era, we have upheld and strengthened the Party’s overall leadership, ensured coordinated implementation of the five-sphere integrated plan and the four-pronged comprehensive strategy, upheld and improved the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, modernized China’s system and capacity for governance, remained committed to exercising rule-based governance over the Party, and developed a sound system of intraparty regulations. We have overcome a long list of major risks and challenges, fulfilled the first centenary goal, and set out strategic steps for achieving the second centenary goal. All the historic achievements and changes in the cause of the Party and the country have provided the cause of national rejuvenation with more robust institutions, stronger material foundations, and a source of inspiration for taking greater initiative.
Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people have shown the world that the Chinese nation has achieved the tremendous transformation from standing up and growing prosperous to becoming strong, and that China’s national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability.
Over the past hundred years, the Party has united and led the Chinese people in writing the most magnificent chapter in the millennia-long history of the Chinese nation, embodying the dauntless spirit that Mao Zedong expressed when he wrote, “Our minds grow stronger for the martyrs’ sacrifice, daring to make the sun and the moon shine in the new sky.” The great path we have pioneered, the great cause we have undertaken, and the great achievements we have made over the past century will go down in the annals of the development of the Chinese nation and of human civilization.
Comrades and friends,
A hundred years ago, the pioneers of Communism in China established the Communist Party of China and developed the great founding spirit of the Party, which is comprised of the following principles: upholding truth and ideals, staying true to our original aspiration and founding mission, fighting bravely without fear of sacrifice, and remaining loyal to the Party and faithful to the people. This spirit is the Party’s source of strength.
Over the past hundred years, the Party has carried forward this great founding spirit. Through its protracted struggles, it has developed a long line of inspiring principles for Chinese Communists and tempered a distinct political character. As history has kept moving forward, the spirit of the Party has been passed on from generation to generation. We will continue to promote our glorious traditions and sustain our revolutionary legacy, so that the great founding spirit of the Party will always be kept alive and carried forward.
Comrades and friends,
We owe all that we have achieved over the past hundred years to the concerted efforts of the Chinese Communists, the Chinese people, and the Chinese nation. Chinese Communists, with comrades Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao as their chief representatives, have made tremendous and historic contributions to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. To them, we express our highest respect.
Let us take this moment to cherish the memory of comrades Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and other veteran revolutionaries who contributed greatly to China’s revolution, construction, and reform, and to the founding, consolidation, and development of the Communist Party of China; let us cherish the memory of the revolutionary martyrs who bravely laid down their lives to establish, defend, and develop the People’s Republic; let us cherish the memory of those who dedicated their lives to reform, opening up, and socialist modernization; and let us cherish the memory of all the men and women who fought tenaciously for national independence and the liberation of the people in modern times. Their great contributions to our motherland and our nation will be immortalized in the annals of history, and their noble spirit will live on forever in the hearts of the Chinese people.
The people are the true heroes, for it is they who create history. On behalf of the CPC Central Committee, I would like to pay my highest respects to workers, farmers, and intellectuals across the country; to other political parties, public figures without party affiliation, people’s organizations, and patriotic figures from all sectors of society; to all members of the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Armed Police Force, the public security police, and the fire and rescue services; to all socialist working people; and to all members of the united front. I would like to extend my sincere greetings to compatriots in the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and in Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese. And I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to people and friends from around the world who have shown friendship to the Chinese people and understanding and support for China’s endeavors in revolution, development, and reform.
Comrades and friends,
Though our Party’s founding mission is easy to define, ensuring that we stay true to this mission is a more difficult task. By learning from history, we can understand why powers rise and fall. Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand and gain foresight into the future. Looking back on the Party’s 100-year history, we can see why we were successful in the past and how we can continue to succeed in the future. This will ensure that we act with greater resolve and purpose in staying true to our founding mission and pursuing a better future on the new journey that lies before us.
As we put conscious effort into learning from history to create a bright future, we must bear the following in mind:
We must uphold the firm leadership of the Party. China’s success hinges on the Party. The more than 180-year-long modern history of the Chinese nation, the 100-year-long history of the Party, and the more than 70-year-long history of the People’s Republic of China all provide ample evidence that without the Communist Party of China, there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation. The Party was chosen by history and the people. The leadership of the Party is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics and constitutes the greatest strength of this system. It is the foundation and lifeblood of the Party and the country, and the crux upon which the interests and wellbeing of all Chinese people depend.
On the journey ahead, we must uphold the Party’s overall leadership and continue to enhance its leadership. We must be deeply conscious of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership. We must stay confident in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. We must uphold the core position of the General Secretary on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole, and uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership. Bearing in mind the country’s most fundamental interests, we must enhance the Party’s capacity to conduct sound, democratic, and law-based governance, and ensure that it fully exerts its core role in providing overall leadership and coordinating the efforts of all sides.
We must unite and lead the Chinese people in working ceaselessly for a better life. This country is its people; the people are the country. As we have fought to establish and consolidate our leadership over the country, we have in fact been fighting to earn and keep the people’s support. The Party has in the people its roots, its lifeblood, and its source of strength. The Party has always represented the fundamental interests of all Chinese people; it stands with them through thick and thin and shares a common fate with them. The Party has no special interests of its own—it has never represented any individual interest group, power group, or privileged stratum. Any attempt to divide the Party from the Chinese people or to set the people against the Party is bound to fail. The more than 95 million Party members and the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people will never allow such a scenario to come to pass.
On the journey ahead, we must rely closely on the people to create history. Upholding the Party’s fundamental purpose of wholeheartedly serving the people, we will stand firmly with the people, implement the Party’s mass line, respect the people’s creativity, and practice a people-centered philosophy of development. We will develop whole-process people’s democracy, safeguard social fairness and justice, and resolve the imbalances and inadequacies in development and the most pressing difficulties and problems that are of great concern to the people. In doing so, we will make more notable and substantive progress toward achieving well-rounded human development and common prosperity for all.
We must continue to adapt Marxism to the Chinese context. Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our Party and country are founded; it is the very soul of our Party and the banner under which it strives. The Communist Party of China upholds the basic tenets of Marxism and the principle of seeking truth from facts. Based on China’s realities, we have developed keen insights into the trends of the day, seized the initiative in history, and made painstaking explorations. We have thus been able to keep adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of our times, and to guide the Chinese people in advancing our great social revolution. At the fundamental level, the capability of our Party and the strengths of socialism with Chinese characteristics are attributable to the fact that Marxism works.
On the journey ahead, we must continue to uphold Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents, and the Scientific Outlook on Development, and fully implement the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. We must continue to adapt the basic tenets of Marxism to China’s specific realities and its fine traditional culture. We will use Marxism to observe, understand, and steer the trends of our times, and continue to develop the Marxism of contemporary China and in the 21st century.
We must uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics. We must follow our own path—this is the bedrock that underpins all the theories and practices of our Party. More than that, it is the historical conclusion our Party has drawn from its struggles over the past century. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is a fundamental achievement of the Party and the people, forged through innumerable hardships and great sacrifices, and it is the right path for us to achieve national rejuvenation. As we have upheld and developed socialism with Chinese characteristics and driven coordinated progress in material, political, cultural-ethical, social, and ecological terms, we have pioneered a new and uniquely Chinese path to modernization, and created a new model for human advancement.
On the journey ahead, we must adhere to the Party’s basic theory, line, and policy, and implement the five-sphere integrated plan and the four-pronged comprehensive strategy. We must deepen reform and opening up across the board, ground our work in this new stage of development, fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy, and foster a new pattern of development. We must promote high-quality development and build up our country’s strength in science and technology. We must ensure it is our people who run the country, continue to govern based on the rule of law, and uphold the core socialist values. We must ensure and enhance public wellbeing in the course of development, promote harmony between humanity and nature, and take well-coordinated steps toward making our people prosperous, our nation strong, and our country beautiful.
The Chinese nation has fostered a splendid civilization over more than 5,000 years of history. The Party has also acquired a wealth of experience through its endeavors over the past 100 years and during more than 70 years of governance. At the same time, we are also eager to learn what lessons we can from the achievements of other cultures, and welcome helpful suggestions and constructive criticism. We will not, however, accept sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us. The Party and the Chinese people will keep moving confidently forward in broad strides along the path that we have chosen for ourselves, and we will make sure the destiny of China’s development and progress remains firmly in our own hands.
We must accelerate the modernization of national defense and the armed forces. A strong country must have a strong military, as only then can it guarantee the security of the nation. At the point that it was engaged in violent struggle, the Party came to recognize the irrefutable truth that it must command the gun and build a people’s military of its own. The people’s military has made indelible achievements on behalf of the Party and the people. It is a strong pillar for safeguarding our socialist country and preserving national dignity, and a powerful force for protecting peace in our region and beyond.
On the journey ahead, we must fully implement the Party’s thinking on strengthening the military in the new era as well as our military strategy for the new era, maintain the Party’s absolute leadership over the people’s armed forces, and follow a Chinese path to military development. We will take comprehensive measures to enhance the political loyalty of the armed forces, to strengthen them through reform and technology and the training of competent personnel, and to run them in accordance with the law. We will elevate our people’s armed forces to world-class standards so that we are equipped with greater capacity and more reliable means for safeguarding our national sovereignty, security, and development interests.
We must continue working to promote the building of a human community with a shared future. Peace, concord, and harmony are ideas the Chinese nation has pursued and carried forward for more than 5,000 years. The Chinese nation does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes. The Party cares about the future of humanity, and wishes to move forward in tandem with all progressive forces around the world. China has always worked to safeguard world peace, contribute to global development, and preserve international order.
On the journey ahead, we will remain committed to promoting peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit, to an independent foreign policy of peace, and to the path of peaceful development. We will work to build a new type of international relations and a human community with a shared future, promote high-quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative through joint efforts, and use China’s new achievements in development to provide the world with new opportunities. The Party will continue to work with all peace-loving countries and peoples to promote the shared human values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom. We will continue to champion cooperation over confrontation, to open up rather than closing our doors, and to focus on mutual benefits instead of zero-sum games. We will oppose hegemony and power politics, and strive to keep the wheels of history rolling toward bright horizons.
We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.
We must carry out a great struggle with many contemporary features. Having the courage to fight and the fortitude to win is what has made our Party invincible. Realizing our great dream will require hard work and persistence. Today, we are closer, more confident, and more capable than ever before of making the goal of national rejuvenation a reality. But we must be prepared to work harder than ever to get there.
On the journey ahead, we must demonstrate stronger vigilance and always be prepared for potential danger, even in times of calm. We must adopt a holistic approach to national security that balances development and security imperatives, and implement the national rejuvenation strategy within a wider context of the once-in-a-century changes taking place in the world. We need to acquire a full understanding of the new features and requirements arising from the change to the principal contradiction in Chinese society and the new issues and challenges stemming from a complicated international environment. We must be both brave and adept in carrying out our struggle, forging new paths and building new bridges wherever necessary to take us past all risks and challenges.
We must strengthen the great unity of the Chinese people. In the course of our struggles over the past century, the Party has always placed the united front in a position of importance. We have constantly consolidated and developed the broadest possible united front, united all the forces that can be united, mobilized all positive factors that can be mobilized, and pooled as much strength as possible for collective endeavors. The patriotic united front is an important means for the Party to unite all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, both at home and abroad, behind the goal of national rejuvenation.
On the journey ahead, we must ensure great unity and solidarity and balance commonality and diversity. We should strengthen theoretical and political guidance, build broad consensus, bring together the brightest minds, and expand common ground and the convergence of interests, so that all Chinese people, both at home and overseas, can focus their ingenuity and energy on the same goal and come together as a mighty force for realizing national rejuvenation.
We must continue to advance the great new project of Party building. A hallmark that distinguishes the Communist Party of China from other political parties is its courage in undertaking self-reform. An important reason why the Party remains so vital and vibrant despite having undergone so many trials and tribulations is that it practices effective self-supervision and full and rigorous self-governance. It has thus been able to respond appropriately to the risks and tests of different historical periods, to ensure that it always remains at the forefront of the times even as profound changes sweep the global landscape, and to stand firm as the backbone of the nation throughout the process of meeting various risks and challenges at home and abroad.
On the journey ahead, we must keep firmly in mind the old adage that it takes a good blacksmith to make good steel. We must demonstrate greater political awareness of the fact that full and rigorous self-governance is a never-ending journey. With strengthening the Party politically as our overarching principle, we must continue advancing the great new project of Party building in the new era. We must tighten the Party’s organizational system, work hard to train high-caliber officials who have both moral integrity and professional competence, remain committed to improving Party conduct, upholding integrity, and combating corruption, and root out any elements that would harm the Party’s advanced nature and purity and any viruses that would erode its health. We must ensure that the Party preserves its essence, color, and character, and see that it always serves as the strong leadership core in the course of upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.
Comrades and friends,
We will stay true to the letter and spirit of the principle of One Country, Two Systems, under which the people of Hong Kong administer Hong Kong, and the people of Macao administer Macao, both with a high degree of autonomy. We will ensure that the central government exercises overall jurisdiction over Hong Kong and Macao, and implement the legal systems and enforcement mechanisms for the two special administrative regions to safeguard national security. While protecting China’s sovereignty, security, and development interests, we will ensure social stability in Hong Kong and Macao, and maintain lasting prosperity and stability in the two special administrative regions.
Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China. It is also a shared aspiration of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. We will uphold the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus, and advance peaceful national reunification. All of us, compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, must come together and move forward in unison. We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence,” and work together to create a bright future for national rejuvenation. No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Comrades and friends,
The future belongs to the young people, and our hopes also rest with them. A century ago, a group of young progressives held aloft the torch of Marxism and searched assiduously in those dark years for ways to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Since then, under the banner of the Communist Party of China, generation after generation of young Chinese have devoted their youth to the cause of the Party and the people, and remained in the vanguard of the drive to rejuvenate the nation.
In the new era, our young people should make it their mission to contribute to national rejuvenation and aspire to become more proud, confident, and assured in their identity as Chinese people so that they can live up to the promise of their youth and the expectations of our times, our Party, and our people.
Comrades and friends,
A century ago, at the time of its founding, the Communist Party of China had just over 50 members. Today, with more than 95 million members in a country of more than 1.4 billion people, it is the largest governing party in the world and enjoys tremendous international influence.
A century ago, China was in decline and withering away in the eyes of the world. Today, the image it presents to the world is one of a thriving nation that is advancing with unstoppable momentum toward rejuvenation.
Over the past century, the Communist Party of China has secured extraordinary historical achievements on behalf of the people. Today, it is rallying and leading the Chinese people on a new journey toward realizing the second centenary goal.
To all Party members,
The Central Committee calls on every one of you to stay true to our Party’s founding mission and stand firm in your ideals and convictions. Acting on the purpose of the Party, you should always maintain close ties with the people, empathize and work with them, stand with them through good times and bad, and continue working tirelessly to realize their aspirations for a better life and to bring still greater glory to the Party and the people.
Comrades and friends,
Today, a hundred years on from its founding, the Communist Party of China is still in its prime, and remains as determined as ever to achieve lasting greatness for the Chinese nation. Looking back on the path we have travelled and forward to the journey that lies ahead, it is certain that with the firm leadership of the Party and the great unity of the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, we will achieve the goal of building a great modern socialist country in all respects and fulfill the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.
Woman riveter at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California where Joe Johnson’s mother worked during World War II. (Photo: National Archives)
Racist attack by white sailors on Chicanos in East L.A., part of the “Zoot Suit Riots,” in 1943. (Photo: Bettman Archive)
© ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images People talk before the start of a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021.
© Cannes
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