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May
Day Edition
May 1, 2003
Against Defeat, Laughter
May Day at Kut
and Kienthal
By PETER LINEBAUGH
Inasmuch as the historian's craft
depends on written records, then the answer to the question posed
in the title of V. Gordon Childe's classic book about the Tigris
and Euphrates, What Happened in History? is well answered in
the title of another classic book on the same subject by Samuel
Kramer, History
Begins at Sumer,
because that's where writing began. With the American 'liberation'
of Iraq and the subsequent destruction of the library of Baghdad
and its museum of antiquities, we could say, therefore, that
history while not quite coming to an end has become impossible
to write. However, there are other sources of knowledge of the
past, such as song and story, flora and fauna, with which we'll
have to make do, not to mention what we remember. Baghdad scholarship
survived the sacking by Genghis Khan and there is no reason to
think that it will not persist after the burning of the books
by the U.S.A.
Still...Following the
planetary mobilizations of February15 and March 22, on the one
hand, and this barbaric devastation of Iraq on the other, we
don't feel exactly like dancing around the Maypole. We need that
history which seizes hold of "a memory as it flashes up
in a moment of danger." While the storm from paradise blows
us into the future, the angel of history turns its face to the
past, commemorating, remembering: May Day and the Haymarket hangings:
May Day and the 8-hour day struggle: the May Days of soixante-huite:
May Day and the struggles against apartheid: May Day and the
central American solidarity movement. We do not smile. While
the Americans are wrapping the cradle of civilization in its
winding sheet, the angel of history stops at May Day 1916 and
the terrible siege, surrender, and slaughter at Kut on the Tigris
river.
Every May Day story has
its point, and Rosa Luxemburg expresses mine: "The brilliant
basic idea of May Day is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward
of the proletarian masses, the political mass action of the millions
of workers," she wrote on the eve of the Great War, and
wasn't it so just last month, March 22, and the month before,
15 February, when we millions around the planet autonomously
stepped  forward? And why did we autonomously step forward?
Peace in Iraq. Yet, Red Rosa said that "The direct, international
mass manifestation: the strike [was] a demonstration and means
of struggle for the eight-hour day, world peace, and socialism."
Peace, yes; but we left aside the 8-hour day and socialism. Is
that why we failed to stop the war?
In the spring of 1916
at Verdun two million men were engaged in massive mutual holocaust;
there were 676,000 losses. In Mesopotamia, tens and scores of
thousands of sepoys of the Indian Expeditionary Force 'D,' on
behalf of the British Empire, disembarked at Basra at the beginning
of the war, with the strategic objectives: 1) securing the oil
supply from Persia, 2) protecting the main corridor to India,
and 3) preventing a jihad combining Arab, Afghan, with a rising
in India. We could sum it up, as Connolly did, "the capitalist
class of Great Britain, the meanest, most unscrupulous governing
class in all history, is out for plunder." A fourth objective
emerged on the sly. British government in India wished to annex
Mesopotamia, but British empire in London preferred to operate
from its lair in Cairo than Delhi.
The lure of Baghdad proved
irresistible to General Townshend, the commander. Foolishly (for
the Persian refineries were already secured) he led the re-named
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force up the Tigris River extending
his lines of communication far beyond the powers of his base
to supply it with food. Repulsed before reaching Baghdad, he
was forced to retreat a hundred miles to Kut. There followed
a four months siege, a humiliating defeat, and surrender on the
eve of May first 1916. Parallel with this narrative of disaster
ran two sub-plots, a) the soldiers' resistance, and b) the orientalizing
derring-do of Lawrence of Arabia and the charming wiles of Gertrude
Bell.
Townshend found keeping
up morale "the most difficult of all military operations"
and one in which the British soldier is "very prone to get
out of hand." They arrived and dug in at Kut after two days
of forced marches, and then suffered heat, exhaustion, floods,
disease, famine. The Indian battalions had practically become
"armed bands." The bulk of the troops were Muslim.
Seditious pamphlets in Urdu and in Hindustani tempting the troops
to rise and murder their officers, join their bothers the Turks,
who would pay them better and provide grants of land. One sepoy
did attempt to shoot his officer, several deserted, and twelve
to fourteen soldiers cut off their trigger fingers. Many were
from Punjab. Dysentery claimed fifteen dead a day, and twenty
from starvation. Townshend complained about the "trans-border
Pathans." He wanted them returned to India. They refused
to eat horseflesh, and though he mixed Hindu and Mohammedan on
picket duty and outpost work, he could not break their solidarity.
Altogether, seventy-two deserted.
Moberly, whose three
volumes on the Mesopotamian campaign provides the official history,
explained: since the Pathans were without private property, the
British promise to assure rightful succession to their property
in the event of their being killed was without effect! Behind
this logic were imperial fears of mutiny and commonism. Against
these, terror was the traditional remedy. The Arab inhabitants
of Kut would not sell their food. Townshend asked headquarters
for gold, and explained, "I could not flog 6,000 people
into taking paper money. All I could do was to keep them in good
behavior by shooting one now and then pour encourager les autres
when spies, etc., were caught."
Gertrude Bell was the
first woman to win a First in Modern History at Oxford. Her grandfather
was a rich British industrialist, supplying one third of British
iron. She danced, she rode horse, she spoke Arabic, quoted Milton,
archaeologically discovered cities, charmed imperious egos. She
became the silken agent of English guile. Gertrude Bell wrote
from Military Intelligence's Arab Bureau, next to the Cairo Savoy,
"It's great fun." In Cairo Lawrence intrigued to encourage
the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Gertrude Bell was
dispatched to India. The disaster at Kut put a decided damper
on its ambitions. "I hate war; oh, and I'm so weary of it--of
war, of life," as she sighed from Basra, in March 1916 during
the frightful heat. That was the month that the British government
began to pay Sharif Hussein £125,000 gold sovereigns a
month, a deal she helped set up.
Gertrude dallied with
Lawrence, "We have had great talks and made vast schemes
for the government of the universe. He goes up river tomorrow,
where the battle is raging these days." A month after the
surrender, indeed, the Arab revolt began. Lawrence was able to
write a scathing report on the Indian army's operations in Mesopotamia.
The English political officer, "Cox is entirely ignorant
of Arab societies," plotted Lawrence. An obstacle to the
Arab revolt--Indian ambitions for the cradle of civilization--had
been discredited. "The most important thing of all will
be cash," quoth his instructions. In April Lawrence was
authorized to offer the Turks £1,000,000 to quit the siege
of Kut, though he doubled it, Khalil Pasha rejected it scornfully.
In March Lawrence read
Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, several parallels
may be made--the thirst ("Water, water, everywhere/Nor any
drop to drink"), the sun, the heat, the loneliness, the
guilt of the mariner for his responsibility in the wanton murder
of the crew. What sights had Lawrence seen in Kut? Who were the
starving and wasting men? The English were from Dorsetshire and
Norfolk, depressed agricultural counties, hardy specimens of
the English proletariat whose experience was depression. There
were Punjabis, Pathans. The Inland Water Transport Service employed
in its Mesopotamian contingents men from the British West Indies
Regiment, the Nigerian Marine Regiment, the West African Regiment,
the Coloured Section, the Egyptian Labour Corps. Lawrence saw
starve the motley international of an imperialist army.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Lawrence, clearly, would
have his limitations as an imperial servant: though it was oil
they craved, in his master's view empire was not slime!
February 1916 finds Gandhi
speaking in Karachi. Having returned to India the year before
he vowed to be silent for a year, and only recently had he begun
to speak out. Truth and fearlessness were his themes, as only
they could remove the demoralizing atmosphere of sycophancy and
falsity. However, these salutary results required not--spitting.
Self-restraint was the necessary condition to national liberation,
he taught, "when we conquer our so-called conquerors."
Earlier that month, however, despite not--spitting, he created
a furious row with a speech at Benares Hindu University. "It
is necessary that our hearts have got to be touched and that
our hands and feet have got to be moved"--the doctrine of
satyagraha was activist or nothing. "In her impatience India
has produced an army of anarchists," he continued. "I
myself am an anarchist but of another type." He contrasted
himself to the anarchist terrorists responsible for the bombing
campaign which before the war had annulled the British partition
of Bengal. "I honor the anarchist for his love of country.
I honor him for his bravery in being willing to die for his country;
but I ask him: Is killing honorable?" Just as the argument
in front of the students was promising to get interesting, Miss
Annie Besant, the English liberal, interrupted, "Please
stop it." Later she explained she had noticed the CID taking
notes, "I meant to do him a kindness and prevent the more
violent interruption which would probably have taken place, had
I remained silent." More slime.
Gandhi may have overlapped
with Gertrude Bell in Karachi, but where Gandhi derived nourishment
from the people, she pitied them: "Swollen with wind and
the rank mists we draw" is the phrase she remembers in April
from Milton's Lycidias. It is from a passage about corruption
between leaders and led which begins with what? the slime of
Wolf Blitzer from the desert? a Pentagon briefing? Ari Fleisher?
What recks it them? What
need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.
Not a glimmer of proletarian creativity could allay the view
of people as sheep. Milton at any rate went in dialogue with
the Levellers and Diggers of his day, while Gertrude Bell used
Milton as an another code of ruling class mutual recognition.
She did not draw the
parallel to the experience which the surgeon at Kut remembered,
namely, that the cats became bolder as food became scarcer and
they began "with privy paw" to lurk about the windows
and doorways of the surgery. Major Barber, the English saw-bones,
was not pleased by his first impression of Kut, "Approaching
from the east, almost the first thing that caught the eye was
a gibbet." He spent days with stretcher-bearers, bhisties,
and women water drawers. The soldiers called the place "Messypot,"
he tells us. Night-time shelling they called "the hate."
He cursed war and the economic necessities that bring it about.
Famine advanced. Then came the slaughter of the beasts--a thousand
horses, mules, camels, all except the officers' chargers, and
Townshend's dog whose daily walk counted among Barber's duties.
He composed a menu, reflecting the class of the rank and file.
Potage aux Os de Cheval
Sauterelles Sautés
Starlings en Canapé
Filet de mule
Entrecote de Chameau
For Major Barber May
Day 1916 was the arrival of the hospital ship with jam, swag,
and bubbly.
In 29 April after a siege
of four and a half months General Townshend lowered the Union
Jack and burned it. 23,000 soldiers had been killed in four futile
attempts to relieve the siege; then on the eve of May Day 13,000
were taken prisoner. "It was one of the great mistakes in
British military history," writes Barker, The Neglected
War: Mesopotamia, 1914-1918. The prisoners? Captain Shakeshaft
observed them ragged, barefooted, dying of dysentery. "One
saw British soldiers dying with a green ooze issuing from their
lips, their mouths fixed open, in and out of which flies walked."
Many were contracted to railway construction for a German company
working in Turkey. Altogether the British empire lost 40,000
casualties, concludes Moberley.
If in America the capacity
to inflict terror in Iraq while simultaneously denying it is
called Liberation, in England it goes by The Stiff Upper Lip.
Gertrude Bell and General Townshend didn't let the side down.
Despite having had her black silk gown rifled by pilfering hands
at the Delhi P.O., she cheerfully wrote referring to the mulberries
and blossoming pomegranates, "Even Basra has a burst of
glory in April." As for General Townshend, he concluded
the Terms of Surrender with this: "Finally, I asked Khalil
Pacha to send my faithful fox-terrier "Spot" down to
the British force to my friend Sir Wilfred Peek, so that he might
reach home. He was with me in the Battles of Kurna, he was at
Ctespiphon and in the retreat, and he killed many cats during
the defense of Kut. He reached England safely, and I met him
on my return to my home in Norfolk."
Gertrude Bell would become
known as "the uncrowned queen of Iraq," after the British
took Baghdad in February 1917. She wrote in words that could
come Ms. Robin Raphel, slated to run the Iraq trade ministry,
or Ms. Barbara Bodine, awaiting her assignment in Wolfie of Arabia's
Iraq, "we shall, I trust, make it a great centre of Arab
civilization, a prosperity; that will be my job partly, I hope,
and I never lose sight of it." James Connolly explained
on St Patrick's Day 1916 "The essential meanness of the
British Empire is that it robs under the pretence of being generous,
and it enslaves under pretence of liberating." Hence, the
flash song of liberation grates on the scrannel pipes of wretched
straw which we know are there not to sing songs but to suck up
you-know-what.
In "Mesopotamia--1917"
Rudyard Kipling wet his whistle, cleared his throat of anything
that might grate, and definitely raised his voice to express
grief and a very healthy specific --class hatred:
They shall not return
to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
Shall we only threaten
and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By their favor and contrivance of their kind?
Mercifully, Kipling leaves
God out of it. Plus, he demands justice, not oil, to compensate
for the sacrifice of the young. Kipling told one half of the
story. The other half remains to be told. Is it too late for
the Subaltern Studies historians to recover the oral tradition
of the POWs who fled, deserted, and escaped from Kut? Some people
were ready to answer Kipling's two questions.
They met in Switzerland,
a center of internationalism (financial, artistic, and revolutionary)
but unconnected by Internet or al-Jazeera or Robert Fisk, with
the disasters between the Tigris and Euphrates. Their remedy
for war and famine which only anti-capitalist revolutionaries
can provide was offered up from the Alpine village of Kienthal.
Two such different ecologies, different elevations, different
temperatures, different flora and fauna, at Kut and Kienthal
would be hard to imagine, and yet as human communities both in
1916 retained links with a non-industrial commons--the booleying
of the high pastures in the latter, the marsh Arabs on their
reeds and islands in the former. The previous September anti-imperialist
socialists had secretly and bravely met at Zimmerwald. The work
of such intrepid souls as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg resulted in
the Kienthal Manifesto of May Day 1916. The manifesto was preceded
by debate and discussion.
Rosa Luxemburg published
her "Junius" pamphlet in the spring of 1916, as if
with Bechtel Corportion and Baghdad in mind. "Business is
flourishing upon the ruins. Cities are turned to rubble, whole
countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole populations
into beggars .. thus stands bourgeois society as a roaring beast,
as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating
culture and humanity." As for the proletariat, "no
pre-established schemas, no ritual that holds good at all times
shows it the path that it must travel. Historical experience
is its only teacher; its Via Dolorosa to self-liberation is covered
not only with immeasurable suffering, but with countless mistakes."
None were bitterer than
she over the betrayal of July 1914 when the so-called representatives
of the European international proletariat voted with their national
belligerents, sending millions of fellow workers to slaughter
one another. She noted that socialism is "the first popular
movement in world history that has set as its goal, and is ordained
by history, to establish a conscious sense in the social life
of man, a definite plan, and thus, free will." But it does
not fall like manna from heaven. She posed a choice: "either
the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture
and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration,
a vast cemetery. Or, the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious
struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism
and its method: war." Amid the slaughter of Verdun and the
starvation of Kut, she returned to an axiom of history: human
beings make it, the conscious historical action by conscious
historical will. They did not pretend that peace was patriotic,
nor that they could win without struggle.
Lenin gave a speech in
Switzerland in February 1916. He quoted The Appeal to Reason
of 11 September 1915. Eugene Debs said, "I am not a capitalist
soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to
the regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular army
of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight from the
ruling class I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that
war with heart and soul, and this is the world-wide war of the
social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any
way the ruling class may make necessary." Gloden Dallas
& Douglas Gill, The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the British
Army in World War I (Verso 1985) write that a year later, also
on 11 September, the English recruits in France mutinously demonstrated.
In Mesopotamia the soldiers organized themselves to return home,
when ordered up country against the local population. One of
the veterans remembered, "We refused saying that we had
not enlisted for this purpose & as there was always trouble
there, we should have had difficulty in getting back. We stood
our ground & gained the day"
Lenin welcomed "The
Junius Pamphlet," although he argued the necessity of wars
of national liberation. In Zürich during the spring of 1916
Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism which
would be used in the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century--China,
India, Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam. He studied the growth of monopolies
and cartels; he studied finance capital: "It spreads its
net over all countries of the world." He observed its dynamics:
1) "the more capitalism is developed the more desperate
the struggle for raw materials," or 2) "imperialism
is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction."
He explained how the proletariat drew rank mist and became swollen
with wind. Super-profits from plundering colonies enabled the
metropolitan working classes to become opportunist and susceptible
to nationalist appeals, permitting the betrayal of the trade
unions and socialist parties. "It has grown ripe, overripe,
and rotten," Lenin wrote. He noted its two fundamental weaknesses,
a) it bribed its lower class into acquiescence, and b) its armies
were recruited from subject peoples.
Lenin lived around the
corner from the Caberet Voltaire where the artists and musicians
in the spring of 1916 thought up the name Dada for an art to
cure the madness of the age. Ed Sanders in volume one of his
beautiful America: A History in Verse (Black Sparrow, 2000),
described an evening there,
--a holy, mind-freeing
rinse of nonsense
to laugh away
the stench of the trench
a Rinse heard as far away as
San Francisco
If theirs was the rinse,
Lenin gave the scrubbing. Lenin quoted Cecil Rhodes, "if
you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."
This precisely was the pivot point: how to turn imperialist war
into civil war. Here was the transition from defense to offense.
Rosa Luxemburg too argued against the siege mentality in favor
of armed, free people on'amove. You study Lenin and Luxemburg
in that year and you do not find sectarian bitterness or the
irreconcilable differences of gender antagonism. Among the many
things Luxemburg and Lenin agreed on that year was denunciation
of the Social Democrats for refusing to intercede on behalf of
a comrade in the Cameroons who faced a death sentence for organizing
an uprising against the war. These are comrades denouncing war,
condemning betrayal of the official opposition, analyzing imperialism,
praising the creativity of the working-class, and they search
the world to find it.
From these discussions
came the Kienthal May Day Manifesto of 1916. If Kut describes
a progenitor of our problem, then Kinethal describes a solution.
It's words apply to us. Addressed to workers of town and country,
"You have only the right to starve and to keep silent. You
face the chains of the state of siege, the fetters of censorship,
and the stale air of the dungeon. They try to incite you to betray
your class duty and tear out of your heart your greatest strength,
your hope of socialism."
"The governments,
the imperialist cliques, and their press tell you that it is
necessary to hold out in order to free the oppressed nations.
Of all the methods of deception that have been used in this war,
this is the crudest. For some, the real aim of this universal
slaughter is to maintain what they have seized over the centuries
and conquered in many wars. Others want to divide up the world
over again, in order to increase their possessions. They want
to annex new territories, tear whole peoples apart and degrade
them to the status of common serfs and slaves."
"Courage! Remember
that you are the majority and that if you so desire the power
can be yours." By May 1916 Dubois and James Connolly had
found the desire and the courage. It consisted of a) defense
against terrorism and b) offense against imperialism.
DuBois had recently written
that "Africa is the prime cause of this terrible overturning
of civilization," World War. He wrote "the white working
man has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting 'chinks and
niggers.'" Having invaded Haiti, Santo Domingo, Mexico,
and Nicaragua, the U.S.A. grew rank with terror and racism. Marcus
Garvey of Jamaica arrived in New York in the spring of 1916,
asking DuBois to chair his meeting. Dubois called for a revolution,
"democracy in determining income is the next inevitable
step to democracy in political power." When the Easter rebels
were called fools, DuBois appealed to the heavens, "would
to God some of us had sense enough to be fools!" May Day
at DuBois' The Crisis was entirely occupied in the struggle against
lynching. It inveighed against the terrorism in the U.S.A. The
April issue was against the lynching of six men in Georgia, while
the next issue, on "The Waco Horror," reproduced the
most searing photographs of the century, the charred stumps of
mutilated, burned, and hanged Texas proletarians.
James Connolly reiterated,
A Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight! He discovered the war
profiteers. He analyzed the economic incentives for joining up
(unemployment + cash for women who sent their husbands to war).
He berated the union bureaucrats and praised the Dublin dockers
and London seamen. He recalled British robbery of Irish common
lands, and in that stroke of genius which operates by observing
the obvious he noted that "the spirit of adventure"
must be counted a revolutionary force. He doubted that the political
leprosy of militarism could be excised without the red tide of
war. Opportunities are for those who seize them, and so, on to
Easter.
The rule of insurrection
is audacity, audacity, audacity! So, despite the capture on Sunday
of Roger Casement and the loss of the arms he was shipping from
Germany, the Easter Rising commenced anyway on Monday, 24 April
1916, asserting the right of the men and women of Ireland to
its ownership, in the oft-reprinted proclamation. Though crushed
in less than a week, its reverberations thrilled the oppressed
from Jamaica to Bengal. In Dublin Connie Markievicz was second-in-command
at Stephen's Green. The Easter rising seized buildings about
the town which communicated with one another by means of bicyclists.
To her disappointment she was spared execution owing to her gender,
and instead awakened on May Day in her cell at Kilmainham Gaol
to the sound of rifle reports as her comrades were executed by
firing squad. They removed her to prison in England where she
amused the bread-and-water gang by extensively reciting from
The Inferno, as well as her own words:
Dead hearts, dead dreams,
dead days of ecstasy,
Can you not live again?
Nay, for we never died
Joe Hill, the song writer,
was shot on 19 November 1915. James Larkin came over from Dublin
for the funeral where they sang his popular, "The Rebel
Girl,"
There are women of many
descriptions
In this queer world, as every one knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes.
These are blue-blooded queens and princesses
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearls:
But the only and Thoroughbred Lady
Is the Rebel Girl.
The proletarian revolution
is not the restoration of matriarchy, though it definitely entails
the defeat of patriarchy and Hausfrauiszierung (to use the phrase
of Maria Miess). And we can easily understand, given the leadership
of the women of the planet on the great days of February 15 and
March 22, that the term 'proletarian,' etymologically speaking,
meant the women or breeders of empire, but now taking steps to
realize our planetary power as a class.
We have looked back with
the angel of history--at the low siege, surrender, and slaughter
at Kut, and at the high Alpine manifesto of proletarian internationalism
of Kienthal, and still the wind blows us into the future, which
the ruins of the libraries of Baghdad and the bleeding of funds
for the municipal libraries in the USA, have not yet destroyed,
for we take the treasures with us. The coincidences of May Day
(Kut and Kienthal) like the coincidences of September 11 (mutiny
and terror) are not magic, though they need to be discovered;
they arise merely from probabilities. May Day is one day in 365.
11 September is another rotation of the planet. As the earth
rotates prior to our revolution, these are the constants: imperialism
and the struggle against it, capitalism and the struggle against
it, capital punishment and the struggle against it. Meanwhile,
against the slime, Gandhi said clean up your act.
Against the flash song,
Lenin offered economic analysis. Against terror, DuBois offered
unflinching truth. Against the swollen wind and rank mist of
patriotism, Red Rosa offered the International. Against all the
odds, James Connolly offered audacity. Against defeat, Joe Hill
offered laughter.
We learn from Franklin
Rosemont's magnificent Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of
a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles Kerr, 2003)
that the cremated ashes of Joe Hill were put in envelopes and
sent to every IWW local in every country of the world --Latin
America, Asia, Africa, Europe --and were released to the breezes
on May Day 1916. For the followers of the sky-gods, Jahweh and
Allah, we laugh with Joe Hill,
You will eat, bye and
bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
As for the dirt-gods,
Mammon and Moloch, not having mopped them up, we have not yet
earned our laugh.
Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at Bard College. He is the author of the London
Hanged and The
Many-headed Hydra. He can be reached at: linebaugh@counterpunch.org.
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