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Today's
Stories
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
March 20 / 21, 2004
What Would Lilburne Do?
Intolerable
Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In Love's free state all powers
so levelled be
That them affection governs more than awe.
William Davenant
In 1638, John Lilburne was put on secret trial
by the Star Chamber of Charles I. His crime? The writing and
distribution of seditious pamphlets that skewered the legitimacy
of the monarchy and challenged the primacy of the high prelates
of the Church of England. He was promptly convicted of publishing
writing of "dangerous consequence and evil effect."
For these intolerable opinions, the royal
tribunal sentenced him to be publicly flogged through the streets
of London, from Fleet Prison, built on the tidal flats where
Fleet Ditch spilled out London's sewage, to the Palace Yard at
Westminster, then a kind of public showground for weekly spectacles
of humiliation and torture. By one account, Lilburne was whipped
by the King's executioner more than 500 hundred times, "causing
his shoulders to swell almost as big as a penny loafe with the
bruses of the knotted Cords."
The bloodied writer was then shackled
to a pillory, where, to the amazement of the crowd of onlookers,
he launched into an impassioned oration in defense of his friend
Dr. John Bastick, the puritan physician and preacher. Only weeks
before, Bastick's ears had been slashed off by the King's men
as punishment for publishing an attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury,
an essay that Lilburne had happily distributed far and wide.
Lilburne gushered forth about this barbaric injustice for a few
moments, before his tormentors gagged his mouth with a urine
soaked rag. After enduring another two hours of torture, the
guards dragged him behind a cart back to the Fleet, where he
was confined in irons for the next two-and-a-half years. This
was the first of "Free-Born" John Lilburne's many parries
with the masters of Empire.
While in his foul cell in Fleet prison,
Lilburne was kept in solitary confinement on orders of the Star
Council, his lone visitor a maid named Katherine Hadley. Somehow
the maid was able to sneak pen, paper and ink past the Fleet's
guards to the young radical. According to Lilburne's own description,
he was "lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands
and legges," when he began to write furiously, penning a
gruesome account of his mock trial and torture, The Work of the
Beast, and a scabrous assault on the Anglican bishops, Come Out
of Her, My People. These pamphlets were smuggled out of Newgate,
printed in the LowLands and distributed through covert networks
across England to popular acclaim and royal indignation.
Oliver Cromwell, then a Puritan leader
in the House of Commons, took up Lilburne's cause, giving a stirring
speech in defense of the imprisoned writer. It swayed Parliament,
which voted to release Lilburne from jail. Lilburne emerged from
the grateful to Cromwell, but not blind to the general's dictatorial
ambitions: he would later pen savage attacks on Cromwell and
his censorious functionaries.
Soon Lilburne joined the Parliamentary
Army, fighting with distinction against the royal forces in numerous
clashes, including the battle at the Edgehill, the first major
encounter of the English Civil War, before being captured at
Brentford on 12th November, 1642. Once again he faced trial,
this time at Oxford, for "taking up arms against the King."
Lilburne was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But his
friends in Parliament rose to his defense, threatening similar
reprisals against Royalist prisoners. A prisoner exchange was
arranged and Lilburne was on the loose again, leading soldiers
into battle against the king's troops, eventually rising to the
rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
But in 1645 Lilburne abandoned the Cromwell's
New Model Army, known for singing the Psalms as they clamored
into battle, after he was told that he must swear to the Solemn
League and Covenant, Cromwell's equivalent of a religious loyalty
oath to the Presbyterian church. Lilburne, an Independent, hated
oaths and had defied the Star Chamber, in his first prosecution,
by refusing to take the oath ex officio, which he argued violated
the ancient right of habeas corpus.
But by now, Lilburne was plotting a more
profound insurrection aimed at democratizing the army, as well
as the rest of the nation. Why, he asked, should soldiers be
expected to fight in a war declared by legislators for whom they
could not vote? Why, he asked in the halls at Westminster, weren't
the soldiers paid more? Why weren't the families of the slain
compensated?
"Every free man of England, poor
as well as rich, should have a vote in choosing those that are
to make the law," Lilburne wrote. "All and every particular
and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world,
are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority
and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion
or magisterial power one over or above another." Jefferson
sounds cautious beside Lilburne's exuberant prose.
These were the opening shots of the Levellers,
aimed, in the words of one observer, "to sett all things
straight and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom."
It would be, in Lilburne's view, a new kingdom, without a king
or a House of Lords or even land lords.
The Leveller movement began as a rebellion
within a rebellion, spreading from the Army to persecuted religious
sects to farmers and working class people. It was a movement
energized by writers, headlined by Lilburne, Richard Overton
and William Walwyn, and the pamphlets flew off the presses, with
more than 2,100 different tracts being printed in 1645. This
prompted the repressive acts known as the Ordinances, which suppressed
public assemblies, outlawed meetings of Antinomians and Anabaptists,
prohibited preaching by lay preachers, and imposed strict censorship
of the press. Cromwell's notorious Committee of Examinations,
essentially Parliament's version of the Star Chamber, was tasked
with investigating "scandalous" writing, destroying
independent presses and arresting writers, publishers and vendors
of documents deemed seditious. These were the oppressive laws,
which prompted Milton to write the Areopagitica. Milton's passionate
polemic, one the great defenses of a free press, was mild compared
to the furious denunciations that poured from Lilburne's pen.
These testy impertinences landed Lilburne
in Newgate again, this time on charges of libel. But 2,000 leading
Londoners signed a petition on his behalf and public riots in
his defense prompted his quick release. The experience only served
to sharpen his resistance to Cromwell, who he saw as a dictatorial
sell-out to the forces of Empire (not unlike, say, John Kerry),
and the leading agent of state oppression. He fired off a threatening
public letter to Cromwell, which darkly concluded: "rest
assured if ever my hand is upon you, it shall be when you are
in your full glory."
Lilburne and his Leveller cohorts started
an underground paper called The Moderate. The title was something
of a joke. After all the Leveller platform seems downright pinko
by our constricted standards: they wanted to outlaw monopolies,
eliminate taxes on the poor, impose term limits on members of
Parliament, eliminate all restrictions on the press and religious
worship, universal suffrage and assure trial by juror for all
defendants.
But Lilburne was far from the most radical
spirit in those topsy-turvy days. He was outflanked to his left
by Gerrard Winstanley's Diggers and by the Seekers, Ranters,
Antinomians and militant fen dwellers, the Earth First!ers of
their time.
Like Tom Paine, he opposed the death
penalty, speaking out against the execution of Charles I. "I
refused to be one of his (Charles I) judges," Lilburne wrote.
"They were no better than murders in taking away the King's
life even though he was guilty of the crimes he was charged with.
It is murder because it was done by a hand that had no authority
to do it."
Cut to 1649. Lilburne is imprisoned once
more in the Tower of London, along with four of his Leveller
cohorts, including the brilliant polemicist Richard Overton.
This time they'd attacked Cromwell head-on, accusing him of being
a reactionary force roaming the land with secret police threatening
all dissenters. "If our hearts were not over-charged with
the sense of the present miseries and approaching dangers of
the Nation, your small regard to our late serious apprehensions,
would have kept us silent; but the misery, danger, and bondage
threatened is so great, imminent, and apparent that whilst we
have breath, and are not violently restrained, we cannot but
speak, and even cry aloud, until you hear us, or God be pleased
otherwise to relieve us." The charge was treason.
His wife Elizabeth, herself a forceful
agitator for peace and the rights of women, wrote an urgent pamphlet
in his defense, titled A Petition of Women. The prose still resonates,
perhaps more now than it has in 300 years. "Would you have
us keep at home in our houses, when men of such faithfulness
and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends in the Tower,
are fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by
soldiers, to the affrighting and undoing of themselves, their
wives, children, and families? Are not our husbands, our selves,
our daughters and families, by the same rule as liable to the
like unjust cruelties as they?" Elizabeth got 10,000 people
to sign a petition on Lilburne's behalf.
He was soon released. But arrested again
within the year. This time for denouncing Cromwell's genocidal
raids on Ireland. But the jury refused to convict him and Cromwell
had him banished from England. Lilburne spent a few months in
Holland writing incendiary pamphlets before sneaking back into
England. He was soon discovered and arrested on charges of treason
once again. Again the jury refused to convict. But Cromwell refused
to release him, shuttling Lilburne from the Tower, to the Mount
Orgueil, a dank Norman castle in Guernsey, and finally to Dover
castle. One of his guards described Lilburne as being tougher
to handle than "ten Cavaliers."
While locked in Dover castle, Lilburne
fell under the spell of the Quakers, and became a radical pacifist,
writing that he had finished with "carnal sword fightings
and fleshly bustlings and contests." His pen never stopped,
though. The pamphlets continued to flow until his death in 1657.
Lilburne refused to be a martyr. He faced
the beast, endured prisons and tortures that would give even
an inmate at Guantanamo the chills, and remained defiant and
upbeat. He lived the life of an escape artist, who could talk
himself into and out of trouble, almost effortlessly. His mind
ran in overdrive and so, apparently, did his mouth. His friend
Harry Marten, the regicide, quipped: "If the world was emptied
of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and
John with Lilburne." And so it should be.
I first encountered the writings of John
Lilburne in 1981 during a series of lectures on Milton and the
radicals of the English revolution delivered by the great British
historian Christopher Hill, author of The
World Turned Upside Down. Hill was stalking other game in
those lectures, but his energetic asides on Lilburne and his
band of Levellers pricked my interest. Here were puritans who
detested imperial ambitions and believed in unfettered free speech
and absolute equality. A far cry from Nathaniel Hawthorne's band
of vicious prudes, not to mention the neo-puritans, like Falwell
and Robertson, then in the ascendancy.
Lilburne had long fallen out of favor
with American historians and his writings were difficult to track
down. I ended up devouring them at the stark library of Georgetown
University (the meager library at American University, where
I went to school, is a international scandal), overlooking the
Potomac River and the gloom-stricken Lincoln Memorial. In those
days, the chill shadow of Reagan loomed over the Republic and
Lilburne's polemics on freedom and repression, gripped me like
an urgent voice from the grave.
It's strange, but perhaps instructive
of our current historical amnesia, that Lilburne's reputation
has fallen into such neglect in the US, for his anarchic style
seems more in line with the rambunctious spirit that animated
the American revolution than the dour pontifications of John
Locke, whose writing gets all the press clips these days.
So why do I reprise the moldering life
of John Lilburne now, at this perilous moment in the life of
the Republic? Well, for starters, the forces that Lilburne confronted
"with violent and bitter expressions" have coalesced
once again (not that they ever really dissipated, mind you) and
threaten to impose their preemptive will upon the living creatures
of the world. What are these forces? Militarism, religious bigotry,
official censorship, prosecutorial inquisitions and torture,
imperial expansion, monopolists, land grabbers, misogynists and
those who buy and sell the earth and humans, too. In short, the
whole sick crew.
When you survey the wreckage of the Bush
imperium, it's very easy to become overwhelmed by darkness of
the times, submerged in the remorseless riptide of blood and
official violence. But even facing methods of torture and imprisonment
that would unnerve an inmate of Guatanamo, Lilburne never surrendered
to defeatism. His writing remains infused with radical purpose,
a radiant call from across the centuries for collective resistance.
As you steel yourself to confront the
new imperialists, ask yourself: what would Lilburne do?
Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature,
is just out from Common Courage Press.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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