The Code of Silence.

It's been an interesting day of reading the paper. If you checked the Post today, you'd see a big story about people putting their pets to sleep at home. You'd see a story about another Tea Party Kool Aid Drinking induced Government Shutdown that's on the horizon.

Speaking of which, how in the hell did the Tea Party get to wield so much influence? Their rallies tend to be small affairs (I can tell you that more people marched on May Day from Malcolm X Park a few years back than have attended most Teabagger rallies...but the PLP marches get zero coverage), but I suppose they make good media with their frequently misspelled vaguely or outright racist placards that often threaten some form of violence. I suppose having deep pocket puppet masters is also handy, since they can funnel money to their brain-dead candidates who would have little reach if not for the complicit media.

So I'm looking through the paper, seeing these stories, reading a little bit about the protests in Greece, the possibility that a dissident army is forming in Syria.

Not a peep about another protest happening much closer to home in what you might call a major U.S. city. Apparently, NYPD has been entirely successful in cordoning off the area and preventing out-of-state media from entering to cover the story. Luckily we have foreign media, whose correspondents must have been trapped in the city and can now cover the story...until NYPD manages to discover their means of transmitting stories. Whatever the reason, the Post apparently is unaware of these protests.

I myself have recently discovered this amazing underground site called "youtube.com." It's pretty revolutionary because you can upload your own videos and other people can see them. Technology like this could be used to get information past the censors. If the Post and other outlets ever find out about this phenomenon, they may be able to cover stories even if their correspondents can't get through the intense police security apparatus.

Here's a sample from You Tube of the NYPD putting down a group of extremely dangerous and obviously threatening women. It's a good thing the cops had mace...I'm sure those women were about to charge:

I'd be proud to count Bill Ayers as a co-worker.

Hell, I'd even be proud to number him among my friends, if of course we had ever crossed paths or had to work together in those ways that would draw us together as friends, which we haven't. I've never met the man in real life or fake life, and even if I had in fake life, I haven't yet devalued friendship to the point that I consider something like a facebook contact or knowing someone's name equivalent to being a "friend."

Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground (aka the WUO, aka The Weathermen -- don't get on my case about the name changes and timeframe, ok), an organization that carried out symbolic bombings against property -- the key point that all reports on the WUO seem to leave out is that the WUO took great pains to ensure that their bombings did not cause physical harm to living people. In fact, the only three people to die from WUO bombs were WUO members. They were not carpetbombing civilians in Cambodia. They were not firing on unarmed college students.

What do you do to stop a war? Do you try non-violence only? Or do you go with Malcolm X's dictum of "by any means necessary"? In the face of continued oppressive violence -- when it's obvious that you are functioning within an economy of violence -- does it not make sense at some level to respond in a way that "brings the war home" as the Weathermen (and SDS) put it?

The answer, for me, is maybe. It's not an absolute; you have to contextualize, historicize. That's exactly what Thoreau did between his widely-known essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) and his lesser-known and later "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859).

In the former essay, Thoreau is committed to what we understand as traditional non-violent means:

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

In fact, he calls this resistance a "peaceable revolution." Yet as a decade rolls on and it seems that the state has no interest in stopping slavery -- as slavery seems destined to roll through the newly acquired territories -- Thoreau changes his tune. In his impassioned response to John Brown's failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, for which John Brown and his Black and white comrades were condemned to die, Thoreau makes clear that there are limits to non-violent responses:

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.

Thoreau is clearly advocating intervention "by force" on the side of abolition. Furthermore, he makes clear throughout the essay that a government that countenances the violence of slavery should be met with violent resistance. Does this make Thoreau a terrorist sympathizer? Or is Thoreau simply following true to the doctrine that some Americans subscribe to that holds that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government."

Again, there's nothing universal about it -- it's situational (I mean the document discusses a pattern that "evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism," not the actual reduction to a state of absolute despotism -- there's plenty of room for judgement calls), and I'd argue that in the face of the overwhelming unethical violence of chemical warfare, carpet bombing, and domestic assassination, it's utterly hypocritical to judge symbolicly placed, non-injurious bombings on the level of terrorism.

That stance does not open the door to defending every newspaper kiosk thrown through a Starbucks window or the assassination of executives of companies whose hired help executes labor activists.

R.I.P. Milton Wolff

Milton Wolff, the last living commander of what's popularly known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, died on January 14th in Berkeley, age 92. Wolff, a avid communist, and many other Americans like him viewed Franco's fascist rebellion in Spain as a threat to human progress and volunteered for the Republic's International Brigade. While the Spanish government was aided somewhat tepidly by Stalin's Soviet Union, and the western democracies refused support, Franco's fascists were heavily supported by Mussolini and Hitler, the latter of whom especially saw the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for his military equipment and tactics. Both fascist governments sent official military "legions" to Spain, and it was Hitler's Luftwaffe that devastated Guernica, leading to Picasso's memorable painting:

This same painting now hangs in the United Nations building in New York, where it was covered up while Colin Powell lied to the UN General Assembly about Saddam Hussein's military capabilities (remember the "artist's renditions" of mobile chemical weapons trailers, none of which were ever found?). What a shameful moment for our country.

For his vision of Franco's fascist rebellion as a precursor to the tide of fascism that would sweep over Europe less than a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Wolff and his comrades were labelled "premature antifascists," a term that identified and ostracized communists or Leftists for agitating against Hitler and Mussolini while the United States government and businesses were still doing business with them.

In later life he continued to fight for the Left, "prematurely" agitating for the end of segregation and leading a drive to purchase ambulances for the Sandinistas, who were fighting the drug-running and US funded -- and oh the slippages between US government activity and drug-running, oh, yeah, arms for hostages, too -- Contras, whose major tactic was to destroy schools and hospitals.

Another man's done gone, as Woody wrote.

Seriously, give yourself five minutes to read this interview.

I'm just throwing this link out there: a great interview with Angela Davis in the Guardian today. I know it's an ancient book now, but her Women, Race, and Class (1981) rocked my world.

Here's a small quote from the interview:

The advancement of the likes of Powell and Rice within the Bush administration, argues Davis, exemplifies a flawed understanding of what it means to tackle modern-day racism. "The Republican administration is the most diverse in history. But when the inclusion of black people into the machine of oppression is designed to make that machine work more efficiently, then it does not represent progress at all. We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions. But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder. When people call for diversity and link it to justice and equality, that's fine. But there's a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change."

But read the whole thing yourself. It covers a lot of ground.

The company you keep, yet again.

It's been a while since I've written about the mercenaries the US is using in Iraq in lieu of a proper accountable armed force, but now they're back in the news. Blackwater, the war profiteering mercenary "business," have been caught a little too red-handed this time in their "civilian shoot-em-up" games, and the US government, the current employers of this mercenary force, is feeling the heat to separate themselves from this gang of thugs.

Not since the days of privateers on the open seas has the US been so dependent on these bottom-feeders of the world's tragedies, and days were when the term "mercenary" had a pejorative connotation, as the British employed their German mercenaries, the Hessians, against the U.S. in the Revolutionary War. Under the Bush Administration, anything goes, though, in this vain bid to secure the oil fields, as even Alan Greenspan now admits is the origins of the Iraq War (I would argue that a good bit of Bush's eagerness to invade also came about through his ridiculous family vendetta against one-time ally Saddam Hussein -- gotta teach those dogs that bite their masters a lesson...). Hey, Billy Bragg (did I mention he was playing the Birchmere October 22?) could have told him that about five years ago:

A single spark can start a prairie fire...

It's been a long struggle (mainly because I couldn't find reading time), but I finally put another book behind me. Back in the heady days of late April, I picked up Dan Berger's Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. My interest had been piqued by a Russell Banks novel I'd had read, The Darling, and the book looked damn good, having come out only a year ago.

It's a valuable book, but it never captivated me, mainly because it seemed that Berger kept coming back to the same phrasing to discuss the events. For instance, I'd read that Weather used Osawatamie to communicate with the aboveground movement and then about fifteen or so pages later I'd read that Weather used Osawatamie to communicate with the aboveground. The book is very well-researched, though, and it's not as if Berger simply repeats himself, because he clearly moves through the various twists and turns of the Weathermen, from their inception as part of SDS, to their move underground, to their subsequent dissolution, and finally to their legacy.

I'd have liked to have seen more of their actions seen in the context of their cultural milieu. Berger does a great job of setting out what Weather hoped to accomplish with their bombings and their communiques, but he gives very short shrift to discussing how their actions were seen by those outside the movement. For instance, during the SDS split, it would be interesting to get some Progessive Labor perspectives, especially since they come off as villains. And how exactly were Weather's actions during the 1970's perceived in the mainstream press, in less radical Left organizations, etc. (some attention is given to one or two figures from the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army, but again that gets back to my repetition critique: it seems the same figures are used over and over to talk about outside influences/influencing).

So the book didn't grab me and compel me to read it; it's still a great contribution to a growing field of literature on the 1960's and 1970's Left, and Berger also finishes strongly by linking the Weather Underground to a new generation of activists and issues, most notably the prison industrial complex in the United States.

Now that it's cold again, let's remember Saturday...

Saturday was a beautiful day, which was a good thing, because if it had been as cold on Saturday as it was on Friday (and as it was again on Monday), we wouldn't have ventured out with the kids to the anti-escalation, anti-war rally down on the Mall (though it's also highly doubtful we'd have hit the indoor car show either). We're coming up on the 4-year anniversary of Bush's Boondoggle, and there's no end in sight, despite Bush's assertion (repeated faithfully by the Washington Post this morning) that the Iraqis are "showing initiative," although it's unclear on what that really means. After all, the big news story from Iraq this weekend was the thwarting of an attempt by insurgents to take out the top Shiite clerics, and now it seems to turn out that this was a wacky cult -- meaning it's more like the ATF suppressing the Branch Davidians in Waco than it is a clash between the government and "insurgents."

At any rate, the march was tremendous, even though the little one got tired of the slow pace and we had to bail out and watch most of it. Here are some photos, first looking west toward the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, where the rally was held:

Then looking east toward the Capitol.

I don't trust crowd estimates, because the government usually lowballs and the organizers usually inflate, but the Mall from the West Wing of the NGA to the East Wing of the NGA was packed with people, and there was spillover on the lawns adjacent, as well as on Museum steps:

Apparently, the Freepers, a truly sad lot who during the American Revolution would have been Tories and then would have argued against every single one of the amendments that became the Bill of Rights, held a counter-rally that netted around 40 wackjobs. If military recruiters were smart, they'd have been at that counter-rally looking to pick up a few new recruits (or re-enlist a few). Although no doubt most of them, like our tough-talking VP, "Five Deferment Dick" Cheney, would have told the recruiters they "have other priorities."

Marching for peace.

The weather couldn't have been better for a day of peace marching. This
was easily the most vibrant march since before the war started (nothing
yet has beaten that amazing time in NYC when we shut the Avenues down
while Powell spun his lies to the UN...unfortunately we couldn't stop
this debacle before it started.)

I think the audacity of the Bush regime not simply to ignore, but
actually to contravene the will of the voters, the bipartisan Iraq Study
Group, and the military leadership has woken some people up to the
absolute moral bankruptcy of this administration.

We can march, and we can make speeches, but if the people we've elected
to represent us won't listen, then what? How many times must we march?