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Early 21st Century Holocausts

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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Alexander Cockburn's East Coast Tour: "Is There a Left Left?"

Today's Stories

October 16, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize

Uri Avnery
The Mother of All Pretexts

October 15, 2007

Gary Leupp
Response to an Angry Marine

Andy Worthington
A Gitmo Detainee Finally Gets a Break

Heather Gray
Al Krebs, a Fighter for Family Farmers

John Walsh
Blacks Turn Against the War: Why Won't Liberals Join Them?

Joshua Frank
Nobel Gore?

Dave Lindorff
Slaughter of the Innocents in Iraq

Matt Vidal
Squaring the Circle on Children and Health Care

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Mess

Sen. Russ Feingold
The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program

Johnny Barber
The Balm of a Peace Process Infuses the War on Terror

Website of the Day
The Real Gore

October 13 / 14, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Al Gore's Peace Prize

Wajahat Ali
Privatizing Terror, Outsourcing Diplomacy: an Interview with P. W. Singer

Jeffrey St. Clair
A Half Mile of Hell

Ralph Nader
Impeachment, Cowardice and the Democrats

David Heleniak
Gitmo at Home

Laura Carlsen
Plan Mexico and the Billion Dollar Drug Deal

Brian Cloughley
The Flat Drug World

Richard Rhames
Here Come the "Bankrupted Social Security" Scamsters, Again

Ron Jacobs
For the Sake of a Future

Fred Gardner
The Overrated Importance of Being "On Message"

John Ross
The Betray Us Flap

Russell Hoffman
Another Pro Nuker Wins the Peace Prize

Missy Beattie
Will Someone Please Give Lou Dobbs a Lobotomy?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Buknatski and Ford

Website of the Day
"Psychokiller", the Blackwater Version


October 12, 2007

Cindy Sheehan
Leadership Void

Brendan Cooney
Washington's Holocaust Deniers

Alan Farago
Gore Still Lost Florida

Jan Oberg
Gore's Peace Prize, a Grand Misjudgment

M. Shahid Alam
The Mercenary State: Pakistan's Killer Elites

David Macaray
Lies About Teachers and Unions

Julia Kendlbacher
Urban Legend, We Love Our Forest People

Peter Rost, MD
Drug Money and the Clinton Campaign

Website of the Day
Nader Live: "Things are a Lot Worse Than We Thought"


October 11, 2007

Al Giordano
Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World?

Saul Landau
Killing for Profit: Blackwater in Iraq

Jacob G. Hornberger
The Failed Legacy of Interventionism

William S. Lind
The Iraq Mirage

Joshua Frank
Big Sky Rebels

Josh Mahan
Colorado River Blues

Pat Williams
Where Are You, Paul Wellstone?

 

 

October 10, 2007

Michael Yates
Travels Across Greenspan's America

Gary Leupp
Spreading Awareness or Smearing a Religion?

David Macaray
How Wal-Mart Can be Beaten

Alan Farago
Corruption and the Law of Intended Consequences

Tom Clifford
Homeless in Their Own Land: Iraq's Deepening Refugee Crisis

Col. Douglas MacGregor
Washington's War

Sunsara Taylor
Nooses at Columbia

George Wuerthner
Behind the Bovine Curtain

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Indigenous Peoples' Day

Michael Dickinson
Forgetting Lennon's Birthday

Website of the Day
Paying for War

 

October 9, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Blinded by Ideology: Cato, Trade and Outsourcing

Andy Worthington
Fourth Whistleblower Rocks Guantánamo

Alan Farago
The Fall of Florida's Largest Land Developer

Brian Eno
Exporting Democracy with Missiles

David Rovics
The RIAA vs. the World

Farzana Versey
Two Lovers and the Funeral of Secularism

Andrew Buncombe
and Omar Waraich
Musharraf's Landslide

Website of the Day
Romney and the Wheelchair Bound Medical Marijuana Patient

 

October 8, 2007

David Macaray
Lesbians for Hillary? or Teamsters for Hillary?

Jeff Ballinger
Nike, Steroids and Marion Jones

Brian Eno
This Ban Won't Stop Us

Christopher Brauchli
Translating Bush

Louay Safi
End the Disgrace of Guantánamo

Matt Reichel
Homocide by Cops at the Phoenix Airport

Dave Lindorff
Finally, A Good Day for the Constitution

Thomas P. Healy
The Politics of Mercury Pollution

Martha Rosenberg
E. Coli Spreading Slaughter Allowed to Stay Open

Richard Rhames
A Democrat's Lament

Website of the Day
Not All Italians Love Columbus

 

October 6 / 7, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
A Rainbow Over a Graveyard

Norman Finkelstein
Jeffrey Goldberg's Prison

James Bovard
Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners?

Patrick Cockburn
The Invasion of Afghanistan, Six Years Later

Jeffrey St. Clair
At Disaster Falls

Ralph Nader
Where Are the Lawyers of America?

Ray McGovern
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

Saul Landau
A River Runs Through It

Ben Tripp
Bring on the Next War!

Terry Lodge
The Grateful Dead Body Parts Delivered to Your Door Reform Act

Seth Sandronsky
Market Mystification and the Liberal Virus

Kevin Funk / Steve Fake
Divestment and Darfur

Missy Beattie
In the Custody of Bush and Cheney

Website of the Weekend
Snoop Dogg vs. Bill O'Reilly

 

October 5, 2007

Andy Worthington
The Anonymous Victims of Guantánamo

David Macaray
De-Skilling America's Labor Force

Lee Sustar
The Democrats and Iran: Can They Sink Any Lower?

Dan La Botz
Cincinnati Six Years After the Killings and the Riots

Aaron Hess
Hate Week Comes to Campus

William A. Cook
Unmasking AIPAC

Website of the Day
Range of Memory

 

October 4, 2007

Uri Avnery
The Power of the Israel Lobby

Dave Marsh
Dick Cheney, a Eulogy

Valerio Volpi
How Italy Became a Launching Pad for the US Military

Cecilie Surasky
Dissenting at Your Own Risk

Dave Lindorff
Remaking Iraq, as Vietnam

Norman Solomon
Sputnik, 50 Years Later

Laura Carlsen
Costa Rica and CAFTA: Memo Reveals Manipulation Scheme

Walter Brasch
When Compassion Fails: Bush and the Children's Health Act

Ben Terrall
Haitian Human Rights Advocate Kidnapped

William S. Lind
Beyond the OODA Loop

Website of the Day
Musicians in Handcuffs

 

October 3, 2007

Vijay Prashad
Gang of Four

Anita Sinha
Black Ties and Bulldozers in New Orleans

Winslow T. Wheeler
Posturing at the Petraeus Hearings: Where was the Oversight?

Sharon Smith
The Kucinich Quandary

Jeff Leys
Our Bonhoeffer Moment

Sen. Russ Feingold
We Must End This Tragedy

Mohamad Bazzi
Playing Into the Hands of Ahmadinejad

Brenda Norrell
A Cry from the Top of the World

Robert Weissman
No Sex, Still a Scandal at the IMF

Website of the Day
Jena by Mellencamp

 

October 2, 2007

Ibrahim Warde
Logical Lies About Bin Laden's Wealth

Gary Leupp
"I Hate All Iranians": Frank Talk from a Defense Dept. Official

David Macaray
The Hunt for a Blue November: In Pursuit of the Labor Vote

Conn Hallinan
Religion and Foreign Policy

John Ross
The Great American Chess Match

Alan Farago
Ripping Off Miami's Poor

Sonja Karkar
The Right to Exist: States or People?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Meteor and the Mahatma

Website of the Day
Grandin on Che's Legacy

 

October 1, 2007

Al Giordano
The Clinton Campaign's Reckless Race for Big Money Donors

Paul Craig Roberts
From Burma to Iraq: Hypocrisy Rules the West

Moshe Adler
The Crimes of Microsoft

Ingmar Lee
My Kayak Journey Down the Wild Pacific Coast

John V. Walsh
Ahmadinejad is Not My Enemy

Norman Solomon
Political Science and Truth of Consequences

Roger Burbach
Historic Victory in Ecuador for the Left

Ramzy Baroud
The Politics of Assassination

Stephen Lendman
The Maestro of Misery: Greenspan's Dark Legacy

Susie Day
Honey, I Shrank the Military!

Website of the Day
Letters from Fort Lewis Brig

 

September 29 / 30, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back?

Uri Avnery
So What About Iran?

Andrew Cockburn
Iraq's WMD Myth: Why Clinton is Culpable

Jeffrey St. Clair
Through the Gates of Lodore

Wajahat Ali
The Good, the Bad and the Iraqi

Andy Worthington
The Curse of the Military Commissions

Don Santina
Ethnic Cleansing in San Francisco

Ralph Nader
Free Lunches, for Corporations!

Fred Gardner
The Man Behind the MoveOn Ad

Seth Sandronsky
The US Economy Since 1980

Gideon Levy
The Children of 5767

William S. Lind
A Ticking Bomb

Reza Fiyouzat
An Anti-Imperialist Case Against a Nuclear Iran

Richard Rhames
Wag the Tail, Frag the Dog

David Michael Green
Buyer's Remorse: Their Purchase, Our Regret

Zach Mason
Hate and Hope in Herndon

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ali, Davies and Suss

Website of the Weekend
Domestic Crusaders

 

 

September 28, 2007

Kathleen and Bill Christison
The Teflon Alliance with Israel

Roberto J. González /
David H. Price

When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents

Saul Landau
September, the Cruelest Month in Chile

Tom Clifford
Burma by the Numbers

Christopher Brauchli
Of Toxic Almonds and Bad Beef

Martha Rosenberg
Spinning Suicide Statistics

Dave Zirin
Soldier in Winter: John Carlos Speaks Out on the Jena 6

Laray Polk
Bush Library or Lockbox?

Binoy Kampmark
When Reagan Turned Brown

James McEnteer
Hell, Columbia: an Academic Hotshot Introduces a Petty Tyrant

Website of the Day
Concerned Anthropologists

 

September 27, 2007

Alan Farago
Housing Market Crashes and Burns

Andy Worthington
A Bad Week at Guantánamo

Jonathan Cook
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?

William Hughes
Billy Graham, a Prince of War Exposed

Ray McGovern
Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy

Ron Jacobs
Joe Biden's Plan to Chop Up Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Quit the Party! Join the Mass Resignation Movement!

Joshua Frank
Pruning the Green Party

Anne Dachel
The CDC, Vaccines and Autism

Website of the Day
The God-O-Meter

 


September 26, 2007

Bill Quigley
HUD's Home Wreckers

Paul Craig Roberts
A Pandemic of Police Brutality

Jeff Kisseloff
Still Smearing Alger Hiss

China Hand
Is China the True Target of Financial Sanctions Against Iran?

Behzad Yaghmaian
At the Gates of Paradise

Sonja Karkar
The Quality of Mercy in Gaza

Mike Ferner
Interrupting the Empire, 30 Seconds at a Time

Col. Dan Smith
Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Learn

Clifton Ross
Bollinger's Barbarous and Ignorant Speech

Brenda Norrell
A Meeting of Indigenous Peoples in Caracas

Website of the Day
The Smearing of Jean Maria Arrigo, a Psychologist Opposed to Torture

 

September 25, 2007

Nicole Colson
On the March Against Racism

Uri Avnery
Foam on the Water

Brendan Cooney
Ahmadinejad on Broadway: Free Speech? Arrest Him!

Harry Browne
Bruce Springsteen Comes Home ... to Hell

Marjorie Cohn
The Drift Toward War with Iran

David Macaray
The UAW-GM Strike: the Long Knives are Already Out

Ralph Nader
Hypocrisy and Inverted Priorities in Congress

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger, the Climate Change Hypocrite

Anthony Papa
Perverted Justice & America's Drug Laws

Christopher Ketcham
All Politicos Now Classed as Sexual Deviants

Website of the Day
John Waters on Free Speech

 

September 24, 2007

George Ciccariello-Maher
Racist Violence from Jena to Oakland

Saree Makdisi
The War on Gaza's Children

David Keen
Action-as-Propaganda: Learning About the Iraq War from Hannah Arendt

Sherwood Ross
Just How Powerful is the Israel Lobby? Only Cheney Knows for Sure

Ron Jacobs
Greenspan's Open Secret

Donna Saggia
The Cult of the Military and the Decline of Democratic Values

Mike Ferner
Free Speech Takes a Capitol Beating

Malini Johar Schueller
Norman Hsu is a Model Minority

Monique Dols
and Dylan Stillwood
Ahmadinejad and Columbia

Website of the Day
The Promotion


September 22 / 23, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Jennifer Loewenstein
Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Injustice in Jena: Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism

Jeffrey St. Clair
Going Down in Dinosaur: Oil, Dams and Whitewater (Part One)

Alan Farago
Genuflecting to China

Brian Cloughley
Of Hate, Hubris and Atrocities

Robert Fantina
The Deadly Pattern of US Imperialism

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Land Tenure and Resistance in New Mexico

Jason Hribal
Fear of an Animal Planet

David Rosen
Slugger Sex: Athletes, Violence and Male Sexuality

Mike Whitney
The Era of Global Financial Instability

John V. Walsh
Who Will Lead a Filibuster of the Iraq War Spending Bill?

Dave Lindorff
Why Aren't We Banning Blackwater Here?

David Michael Green
Hiding Behind a Camouflage Skirt

Fred Gardner
Claudia Jensen (Look Back in Anger)

Cassandra Jones
Support Our Mercenaries

Roger van Zwanenberg
Pluto Press Under Attack by Israel Lobby

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Davies and Ford

Website of the Weekend
"For the Bible Tells Me So"

 

September 21, 2007

Karim Makdisi
Letter from Lebanon

M. Shahid Alam
A History of Violence

Alan Farago
Who Will Buy My House?

Joshua Frank
The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus

Dave Zirin
Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Short History of Lending and Borrowing

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein
Mass Health Care Failure

Ben Terrall
The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi

Steve Fournier
Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here

Frederico Fuentes, et al
Voices in Defense of Bolivia

Website of the Day
Sabra and Shatila, Remembered

 

September 20, 2007

Kathleen Christison
Whatever Happened to Palestine?

Zoltan Grossman
An Endless Occupation?

Paul Craig Roberts
As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed

Stan Cox
and Wes Jackson
Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet

Russell Mokhiber
AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead

Charles Modiano
Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power

Raymond J. Lawrence
Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion

Brendan Cooney
Body-Snatched Nation

Website of the Day
Mind Control for Breakfast

 

September 19, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By?

Paul Krassner
The Power of Laughter

Sgt. Martin Smith
The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq

Seth Sandronsky
Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own?

Claud Cockburn
Looking back at the Great Crash

Victoria Buch
Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer

Robert Weissman
Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger

Mike Ferner
Can We Talk?

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water

Website of the Day
Housing Cost Calculator

 

September 18, 2007

Mike Whitney
U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel

Alan Farago
Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It

John Ross
America's Great Wall:
Where Will the Workers Go
When They Finish It?

Ron Jacobs
Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md.

Alex Doherty
Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible?

September 17, 2007

Marjorie Cohn
Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom

Paul Craig Roberts
Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be

Ricardo Alarcón
The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era

Marc Levy
Fake Vets Chasing Fame

Eva Liddell
In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like

Website of the Day
Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel

Sept. 15-16, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The General Came to Washington

Vicente Navarro
How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy

Mike Whitney
Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch

Herman Mindshaftgap
Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future?

Ellen Cantarow
Girls! Music! Palestine!

Jordan Flaherty
K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D.

Zachary Hurwitz
Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development

September 14, 2007

Debbie Nathan
New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator"

Franklin Lamb
Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later

Patrick Cockburn
Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha

Farzana Versey
The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon

Alan Farago
This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption

Hank Edson
Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache

September 13, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official

Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot
The Barksdale Nukes

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last

Michael Baney
Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past

Dr. Susan Block
Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern?

September 12, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
American Economy: RIP

Stan Goff
The Petraeus Report

William Blum
When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It.

Manuel Garcia
Forgetting 9/11

Debbie Nathan
Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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October 16, 2007

Parables of the Dung Beetle

Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize

By PETER LINEBAUGH

After awarding it to Harold Pinter, an East End Jew, the Nobel prize for literature has fallen to another outsider of the English establishment, Doris Lessing, born in Persia, raised in Zimbabwe, a school drop-out. The newspapers tell us that Doris Lessing in her book The Golden Notebook foreshadowed the Women's Liberation movement. Or, they tell us she was a Communist. Neither is right. She helped to found the New Left. She took the 'angry young men' of the 1950s theatre critics to also include 'angry young women.' We might say they were angry persons. She embodied ideas in men and women with other problems too, such as appointments to keep, marriages to get out of, jobs to find.

Cross with the women's libbers in 1971 she wrote a preface to The Golden Notebook to explain. Her book was about cracking up. "The point is," it began, "that as far as I can see, everything is cracking up." The novel is set in 1956/7. This was the annus mirabilis for the New Left. The fact is the Communists were cracking up, and she was glad of it. The Cold War had put dichotomies in people's heads that could only be sorted out by various kinds of crackings up. She had left the Communist Party by then, but that doesn't mean she'd left Marxism. "I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world mind, a world ethic." She wrote novels of ideas, which the pompous Harold Bloom senses, but in accusing her of political correctness he stumbles, as she and her comrades, more than anyone else, ridiculed this Stalinist phrase.

She helped form the New Left sitting on the editorial board of The New Reasoner: A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism along with its editors John Saville and E.P. Thompson who had led critical discussions from within the British Communist Party throughout 1956, sending out mimeographed pages of 'revisionism' from Halifax in Yorkshire. Expelled from the Party, they roared back with a multitude of voices in The New Reasoner. The New Left was born from the shell of the old.

Doris Lessing wrote in the second number of The New Reasoner, autumn 1957, a story called "The Day Stalin Died." Well, on that day (5 March 1953) she had to take her niece and sister shopping, other appointments had fallen through. Mother and daughter bickered constantly until pacified by mutual snobbism to cabbies, bus-drivers, and conductors. They end up up top a double-decker bus. Just as they are getting settled and as the bus resumes its motion, two middle-aged people in the midst of some private quarrel come lurching up the bus stairs. Apparently, they're lodgers in the same rooming house. She accuses him of destroying her goldfishes, or at least in causing a fungus to ruin their pond. After taking separate seats and going back and forth a few times, he concluded, "There are all those little fishes in the depths of the sea, all those little fishes. We explode all these bombs at them, and we're not going to be forgiven for that, are we, we're not going to be forgiven for blowing up the poor little fishes." His companion responds "I hadn't thought of that" and she joins him at the same seat.

That was fifty years ago, and it's, like, totally off the wall. What do the poor little fishes have to do with Stalin? In the arguments of the day, absolutely nothing. It's not apocalyptic, and if anything you can hear the comrades complaining of petit-bourgeois animal-loving or hopelessly benighted Christianity, "forgiven" indeed! Here's the sympathetic imagination extended to the oceanic depths, quarrels resolved. An ecological perspective provided by a man and a woman, by an ordinary man and an ordinary woman. And the bombing? Didn't that lead to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Aldermaston marches, and the famous semaphore peace symbol? Where on earth did Doris Lessing learn to listen to people on the bus?

The New Left is ignored by the Times and by Bloom. To us, big letter C Communism came to an end in 1956, not 1989 or 1990. The Golden Notebook came out in 1962 the same year as The Port Huron Statement, that collective SDS manifesto giving us "participatory democracy" and "anti-anti-communism." Both phrases await a thorough airing as ideas. Democracy requires actual equality hence it is incompatible with capitalism; communism requires participation by all hence it is incompatible with Cold War stances. To be a communist fifty years ago was to participate in an international debate Poland, Hungary, Halifax, Alabama. The New Leftists began by philosophical opposition to mechanistic determinism, and they did so in the name of free human agency. This was the source of their infamous moralism (Oh, where is it now!) . It was the moralism against the color-bar, the moralism against the electric chair (after the Rosenbergs, at the time of Caryl Chessman), the moralism against the atom bomb, the moralism against alienation and automation, the moralism against the Establishment and Money. But didn't the New Left just lead to bombing and destruction?

Cathy Wilkerson has published a beautiful memoire, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (Seven Stories Press 2007). The comparison is with Icarus who was confined in the labyrinth along with his father, Daedalus or "cunning workman". To escape, he made them wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, Icarus plunged into the sea. Death by fire greeted three of her young comrades in the townhouse explosion of March 1970 when 18 West 11th Street in Manhatten owing to clumsy bomb making went up in flames. The house belonged to Wilkerson's father. She escaped.

Two parts Quaker, four parts Regis Debray and Franz Fanon, she speaks for many who made the rapid transitions from the Civil Rights movement, to the student movement, to anti-war activity, to going underground in support of Third World guerrillas. This was one of the New Left trajectories, soaring intensely over history: the moral emphasis on commitment, the solidarity against human suffering all around the world, the growing consciousness of patriarchal structures, and all the while being penetrated or stalked by the sly, murderous schemes of the federal, state, and municipal governments called COINTELPRO which had been ordered to "neutralize" SDS.

Her memoire contains the thoughtfulness, the retrospective reflections, and the clarity that she and not only she but the entire movement longed for. The Weather Underground in 1970 issued a "Declaration of a State of War" to destroy the empire by armed revolution. Cathy Wilkerson went ahead with it despite the fact that her questions went unanswered: what is revolution? what are the short-term and long-term goals of the war? Some of the answer was there already in Doris Lessing. The rest needs our attention.

Wilkerson quotes The Port Huron Statement, "We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. We oppose the depersonalization that reduced human beings to the status of things. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence Men have unrealized potential for self-evaluation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity." These are the themes, this is the tone of the New Left on both sides of the Atlantic.

We hear them in an essay by E.P. Thompson called "Agency and Choice" published as a discussion piece in The New Reasoner of 1958. He had written "An Epistle to the Philistines" to those social-democrats and Communists alike who were infected by philistinism. They complacently settled for the appearance of things and apathetically absorbed received opinion. "Although the forms of infection are very different, it produced in both a common symptom: the denial of the creative agency of men, when considered not as political or economic units in a chain of determined circumstances, but as moral and intellectual beings, in the making of their own history; in other words, the denial that men can, by a voluntary act of social will, surmount in any significant way the limitations imposed by 'circumstances' or 'historical necessity'."

In the same New Reasoner Christopher Hill wrote on the interest which Marx and Engels expressed in moral questions and in humanism. They opposed "mechanistic determinism in the name of the free activity of man." They complained of the egotism that had separated him from community, bourgeois man had become pre-occupied in self-interest and in the dominance of his own will. Hill quotes them against dogmatism, "we should help the dogmatists to reach a clearer understanding of their own principles." Lessing does this. Dogmatists console with illusions says "the young Charles" as Hill calls Marx. "To demand that man should abandon illusions about their condition is to demand that a condition that needs illusions should itself be abandoned." Yes, that's a racial, patriarchal, class society.

Doris Lessing is a white woman of British settler parents who took her to grow up in Rhodesia in the era of African independence movements. She wrote the lead article in the same issue of The New Reasoner called "The Sun Between their Feet." Her story was set in the Native Reserve. It was desolate, hot, but traces of human activity were available to the careful observer, old mounds like Irish ringforts or the mounds of the Ohio Hopewell people, Bushman paintings under the boulders, signs of raids for cattle and women. Now we could call it a commons, scrub cattle strayed there.

She wrote a story evocative of the heat, evocative of the past, and suggestive; a story of a pair of dung-beetles and their struggle, having cut off and formed into a ball, a portion of cattle-dung, to maneuver it up a hill to gather grass and dust, the better for the incubation of their eggs. She spent the day observing their efforts. Observing their failures, and observing their efforts again. The beetles scrambling up the steep slope, slipping back; scrambling up the steep slope, slipping back again; scrambling up the steep slope . But they have their accidents. The action is vivid, up mountains, dreadful disasters, falling into lakes, nearly drowning, hair-raising escapes, &c. The pair of beetles suffer it all.

Eggs will be hatched in the dung-ball. It must be placed on a gentle slope, so that in rolling down it will accrue a sheltering, protective coat of dust or sand, and then come to a stop in a suitable place for hatching, the sacred beetle holding the sun between their feet. The only thing Communist about the story is the absence of private property. It could be an allegory but it reads as that kindly, matter-of-fact nature observation that produced Darwin, only you can't imagine any of Darwin's correspondents lying down on the desert all day in the equatorial sun lazily eyeing a pair of beetles. "Sacred beetles, these: the sacred beetles of the Egyptian scarabs, holding the symbol of the sun between their busy stupid feet. Pompous, busy, silly beetles, mothering their ball of dung again and again up a mountain "

The hieroglyphic image of the beetle means "to come into being." The sun was imagined to be this ball pushed from one side of the sky to the other by a divinity with dung beetle powers. Is there an Hegelian message of transformation and renewal? Was it a critique of 'the couple,' somehow a disavowal of the nuclear family, the futility of making children in an overpopulated world? In the 1950s existentialism was the rage in the cafés where the key text was 'the myth of Sisyphus.' Cathy Wilkerson quotes Carl Sandburg at the beginning of her book and this is perhaps the explanation of the allegory,

The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for footholds.

The New Left was anti-imperialist. C. Wright Mills and Cuba and Doris Lessing and Africa. Bandung conference of the non-aligned nations and the Montgomery bus boycott, these were the events of 1956 in addition to Khruschev's "secret speech" about Stalin and the Hungarian uprising. So, besides the cracking up of Communism, she expressed the cracking up of empires, and the cracking up of Jim Crow.

I think Jonah Raskin helps provide a key to the story. Jonah took on the English literary imperialists writing The Mythology of Imperialism (1971), a brilliant critique of Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, and Joyce Cary. "The myth perpetuated by imperialist culture is that revolutionary artists are poor artists," Raskin concluded. He began his book quoting Nazim Hikmet, three of whose poems appeared in The New Reasoner along with "Agency and Choice" and "The Sun Between their Feet."

Orient!
The soil on which
Naked slaves die of hunger.
The common property of everyone
Except those born on it.
The land where hunger itself
Perishes with famine!
But the silos are full to the brim,
Full of grain --
Only for Europe.

What was so astonishing about this poem from 1925 was its generosity, for it proposed an alliance, I give you my hands We give you our hands The sansculottes of Europe; Let's ride our horses together, Look The halting-place is near The day of freedom nearer still.

These thoughts are needed to understand Lessing. She was born in Persia, an English banker's daughter. Was she not Oriental? Sans-culottes and naked slave alike are invited to feast upon the brimming silos.

Jonah Raskin asked Doris Lessing at Stony Brook, "You seem to feel that history is a series of explosions." At the time Jonah had just plastered the New York subways with 'wanted posters' for 'Trains' Trilling, the noted Cold War literary critic at Columbia University. The NYPD rewarded him with a vicious beating. Lessing answered Jonah's question. History is a series of explosions, and explained, "I feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself, and in people around me. That's what I mean by cracking up. It's as if the structure of the mind is being battered from the inside." The police were kicking down student's doors at night and arresting them. "You and your generation need a calm to negotiate the rapids," she told Jonah.

Cathy Wilkerson became a Weatherman, in the splits of 1969 when the Maoist Progressive Labour Party and the RYM II and the Weathermen dissolved the old SDS in the fireworks of sectarian fission. The "white youth of Babylon will resort to force to bring down imperialism." Ever afterwards, force could not be accepted as part of political discussion without automatically assuming violence and violence was identical with cruelty, consequently a whole dimension of political discourse from the time of Machiavelli on, the analysis of forces, was lost. And the conscious building of forces. Instead another paralyzing dichotomy was formed, violence versus non-violence.

When you examine coolly a list of the Weatherman bombings you're struck by the absence of human casualties and by the apposite nature of their anti-imperialist, anti-prison targets. They were neither assassinations, attentats, nor acts of terror; these were acts of sabotage. The wooden shoe (sabot) was brought in the spirit of putting our bodies on the machine, as Mario Savio had warned in 1964 at Berkeley, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

The Weatherman they were demonized, and a problem, one might say a dialectical problem with demonization is that it tends to create a purity in the heart, a feeling of lightness of being, an almost florescence of virtue, among those doing the demonizing such that a kind of ache develops between the shoulder blades as if wings yearned to sprout. Here's the origin of the peace pansies, the pwogs, the goody-goody two-shoes and that entire angelic spectacle whose ineffectuality, became the target of Afflicted Powers as well as Midnight Notes. The self-policed demonstration was the result. The ritual of the arrest became de rigeur. At best the demonstration was transformed into the festival.

As editor of New Left Notes Cathy Wilkerson wrote against of the "false privileges" of the university education where students majored in Individualism and minored in Amorality. The university of the day, at least the elite white universities, "dehumanized its participants by allowing creativity and initiative only in service of a system that offered increased income for the few, at the expense of the many." As Jonah Raskin wrote, "We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive." In the spring of 1968 she describes the revolt at Howard University against "the plantation curriculum." She recounts from the same spring the massacre at South Carolina State in Orangeburg when thirty-three black demonstrators were shot by the police and three killed. True, Fred Hampton before he was assassinated by the Chicago police, asleep in his bed, had warned the Weathermen, "the primary task of radicals was education."

Thompson "A number of factors have conspired to induce a sense of impotence in the individual in the face of historical events; men feel themselves to be victims of vast technological changes or of international accidents which they cannot influence, powerless before great bureaucratic institutions, in the state machinery and in the labour movement, and before commercial mass media which manipulate peoples' minds and debase their responses. Historical determinism, in Western capitalist society, does not take the form of a proclaimed philosophy buttressed by the organs of the State; instead, it enters in the disguise of slavery to expediency." Expediency is a wall of "experts" who enclose a field called "realism."

Calling himself now "a Communist dissident" it was "to re-awaken an appreciation of the community of aspiration among working people East and West" There's another argument there. He says "working people" and you thought the Marxist communist would say "working class." He went to work on that, publishing five years later The Making of the English Working Class. Instead of saying "revolution" he says "the community of aspiration". Certainly, this has affinities with the "beloved community" of early SNCC, though not perhaps with that world mind, that world ethic which Lessing found in another tradition of Marxism.

Cathy Wilkerson does not call her book Flying Too Close to the Sun. Now and then the heat begins to scorch. "We threw ourselves into the possibility of remaking ourselves as more effective tools, for humanity's benefit to the point of sacrificing our own humanity and certainly losing, in the process, our individual voices." The wax softens. This is a long way from the moments of 1957 described by Doris Lessing in The New Reasoner. "In the end, we would lose sight of the potentially resilient qualities of people and of our own movement, qualities like flexibility, compromise, forgiveness, creativity, intellectual rigor." The wax drips. COINTELPRO or the FBI's counterintelligence program steeped in the acid of dirty tricks and stinking in the perfume of received opinion successfully rotted away the whole cloth of the liberation movement within SDS. They contributed, perhaps decisively, to the atmosphere of nastiness that made any kind of correct politics impossible, or even friendly interchange between him and her, between a black person and a white person.

In another proclamation of the Weather Underground, it declaimed that "the white youth of Babylon will resort to force to bring down imperialism." Thirty-seven years later and we must reverse it, white and black youth of imperialism resorted to force to bring down the actual historic and archaeological site of what was once Babylon, hundreds of thousands killed in Mesopotamia, four million exiled from Iraq. These are not deeds of Pharoah. The Old Testament vocabulary, that Yahweh-talk, has got to go, whether it is from William Blake and the radical English protestant antinomianism, or from the songs of the great Bob Marley. That geography of Babylon, Jerusalem, Zion does not contain a revolutionary road-map.

Once again it became time to listen to the voices on the bus, and to observe fishes and beetles and other creatures. So, a salute to Doris Lessing, winner of that prize for literature named after the man who invented dynamite, Alfred Nobel.

* * *

A last word about the dung beetle. Led by Marie Dacke of the University of Lund, Stockholm, a team of beetle watchers announced in 2003 that they had discovered that Scarabaeus zambesianus (the African dung beetle) was capable of navigating at night merely by the polarization of moonlight. The beetles' goal evidently is to make as straightaline getaway as possible from the shitpile, surrounded, as it is, by lurking thieves. It was the great French entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, who discovered in the 19th century that the helpers were not helping at all but trying to steal the ball. Hence the necessity of a quick exit from the scene. Male and female having found a hatching place, they then mated underground, the subsequent brood secure for a time inside the warmth and nutrients of the excremental truffle.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. Linebaugh's new book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, will be published in February by the University of California Press. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com







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