#title Ramparts Magazine - September 1969
#author Various Authors
#authors Eldridge Cleaver, Seymour Hersh, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-01-08T06:16:24
#source Ramparts Magazine (San Francisco), Volume 8, Issue 3, September 1969, ISSN 0033–9164. <[[https://archive.org/details/sim_ramparts_1969-09_8_3][https://archive.org/details/sim_ramparts_1969-09_8_3]]>
#topics environmentalism, pollution, Ted’s reading interests & influences, lifeboat ethics, half-finished error-correcting, SDS, 1960s, Black Panthers, Labor, United States, poetry,
#date September 1969
Ramparts Magazine (San Francisco), Volume 8, Issue 3, September 1969, ISSN 0033-9164
Ramparts Magazine Inc.
Scheer, Robert, ed.
70p., stapled wraps, 8.25x10.75 inches
** Picasso's Erotic Engravings
Pablo Picasso, the pre-eminent artist of our time, commenced work on a series of engravings that he predicted would become “my most sought-after-and possibly scandalous- work.” They were to be a series of pictures portraying every aspect of sexual pleasure. Picasso had wanted to create such a series for over 65 years, he confided to Aldo Crom- melynck, his engraving-press printer, and he intended it to stand as “an abiding celebration of life itself.”
For nearly seven months Picasso worked in a creative frenzy at his studio in Mougins, France, turningout as many as four engravings in a single day, often with as many as six variations of each. “Ole!”, “Bravo!”, “Magnifico!”, he would exclaim as each new engraving was pulled from the press, and so ecstatic was he over the quality of the work that on several occasions he summoned friends from as far off as London and New York to view the work in progress. Finally, on October 5th. he bundled the engravings together, inscribed them with the title “347 Gravures,” and announced “Ya!” (“It is finished!”).
The engravings Picasso had created are. collectively, his masterwork, a fitting climax to the career of a man whose dedication, both in personal life and work, has been to the sensual. “Without the awakening of ardent love, nolife-and therefore no art has any meaning,” Picasso is quoted by his biographer, Roland Penrose, as saying. And nowhere in the prodigious, 20,000-piece oeuvre of this fertile genius has ardent love been more beautifully-or joyfully-portrayed. Throughout the engravings voluptuous majas surrender themselves, lustful
satyrs disport, and troupes of swooning acrobats perform in a circus of love. Picasso’s irrepressible love of mischief is in evidence, too, in scenes of grandees cuckolded, harems invaded, and models seduced by lecherous painters. The last theme is the one most often repeated in the series, with the painters puckishly made to resemble Rembrandt, Raphael, and, of course, Picasso himself. (Picasso’s life-long friend. Max Jacob, has said, “Picasso would much rather be remembered as a famous Don Juan than an artist.”) All in all, Picasso’s “347 Gravures” reflect such consummate craftsmanship, timeless subject matter, and sublime inspiration as to ensure their place as the greatest art treasure of the 20th Century.
If the artistic value of “347 Gravures” is considerable, its commercial value is perhaps even greater. The engravings, which have been printed in a limited edition of 50 sets, have fetched a price of ten million dollars. This is more than has ever before been paid for a work of art. Moreover, because of rumors that circulated throughout the art world concerning the superexcellence of the engravings, all 50 sets were subscribed to even before Picasso had finished making them!
Art critics who have seen the engravings have been positively apostolic in their praise. “These etchings reach the zenith of man’s creative power. They rank with ‘Hamlet,’ Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment.’ That is to say. they are classic,” says Robert Glauber, of Skyline. LIFE: "Picasso’s most trenchant exploration of sex and sexuality...As never before, the master seems bent on describing that idyllic state wherein the spirit and flesh are one.” Herald-Tribune (Paris): “A major undertaking -amazing...extraordinary...staggering...incredible. Picasso’s brilliance conquers all.” TIME: “A virtuoso performance." Armand St. Clair, Revue de Paris: “Mesmerizing...If I had a choice among all the works Picasso has produced, I would take this one without hesitation.” Franz Schulze, Chicago Daily News: ‘What a difference between Picasso’s view of sex and the sniggering, guilt-ridden American pornography
of today.” Brian Fitzherbert, Nova: "Ona again, Picasso demonstrates his astoundir: power of regeneration.” Harold Joachim. Cm ator of Prints, Art Institute of Chicago: “A- tonishing...A compelling testimony of Picasso amazing energy and power of invention at th; age of 87.” Harold Haydon. Chicago Sun- Times: “A great surprise package...Unparallele: for sustained interest and quality.” Piem Cabanne. Plexus: “The Last Will and Testamer. of the father of modern art.”
is with great pride therefore, and humility, that the editors c Avant-Garde announce that their magazine hi been chosen as the medium through whir Picasso’s monumental new work will be sho« to the world. Picasso’s Paris representative, th Societe de la Propriete Artistique, has appointed Avant-Garde as the sole prosceniu? for presentation of the quintessence of “34' Gravures.” Mindful of the awesome respond bility that this singular honor imposes, th; editors of Avant-Garde have spared neithe: expense nor effort to ensure that “347 Gr. I vures" receives the premiere it deserves.
To begin with, an entire issue of Avar: Garde-64 pages-will be devoted exclusive! to this one subject. The issue will carry n advertising. The world’s foremost graphic dt signer. Herb Lubalin, has been retained i design this special issue. Costly antique pape: stocks and flame-set colored inks will be use: throughout. The issue will be printed by time consuming duotone offset lithography and wl be bound in 12-point Frankote boards, fa permanent preservation. Ail in all, this lavish!) produced issue of Avant-Garde will more close!- resemble an expensive art folio than a magazine The editors of Avant-Garde are determine that their presentation of the quintessence o: Picasso’s “347 Gravures” will be a landmark not only in the history of art. but in pub lishing. as well.
Copies of this special collector’s edition of Avant-Garde will not be offered for sale to the general public. They are being given away-free -as a gift to all new subscribers to Avant-Garde.
In case you've never heard of Avant-Garde, let us explain that it is the most beautiful-and daring magazine in America today. Although launched only two years ago. already it has earned a reputation as the outstanding showcase for the exhibition of creative talent. This reputation stems from Avant-Garde’s editorial policy of complete and absolute freedom of creative expression. Avant-Garde steadfastly refuses to sacrifice creative genius on the altar of "morality’’ (the motto of the magazine is "Down with bluenoses, blue laws, and blue pencils”). Thus, the world’s most gifted artists, writers, and photographers continually bring to Avant-Garde their most uninhibited-and inspired-works. Avant-Garde serves-consist- ently-as a haven for the painting that is “too daring." the novella that is “too outrageous.” the poem that is “too sensuous,” the cartoon that is “too satirical,” the reportage that is “toographic.’’the opinion that is“too candid,” the photograph that is “too explicit.” Avant- Garde is proud of its reputation as the wild game sanctuary of American arts and letters.
In addition to Picasso, contributors to Avant-Garde include such renowned figures as Norman Mailer. Arthur Miller. Andrew Wyeth. Kenneth Tynan, Dan Greenburg. Phil Ochs. Allen Ginsberg. Dr. Karl Menninger, Carl Fischer. Paul Krassner, Andy Warhol, Eliot Elisofon. Warren Boroson. Peter Max, Richard Avedon. John Updike, Roald Dahl, Art Kane, Charles Schulz, Bert Stern, Richard Lindner. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, S.J. Perelman. James Baldwin, Alan Watts, Salvador Dali, Terry Southern. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ashley Montagu, William Burroughs. Paul Goodman. Kenneth Rexroth. Harper Lee, Jean Genet, and Marshall McLuhan.
Critics everywhere have spent themselves in a veritable orgy of praise over Avant-Garde. "Reality freaks, unite! Weird buffs, rejoice! Avant-Garde has arrived bearing mind-treasures of major proportions.” says the San Francisco Chronicle. “Avant-Garde is guaranteed to shake the cobwebs out of the mind.” says the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “An exotic literary menu...A wild new thing on the New York scene.” says Encounter. "Avant-Garde is aimed at readers of superior intelligence and cultivated taste who are interested in the arts, politics, science and sex,” says The New York Times. "The fantastic artwork, alone, is worth the price of the magazine.” says the News Project. “A field manual by the avant-garde, for the avant-garde,” says New York critic Robert Reisner. "Avant-Garde’s articles on cinema, rock, and the New Scene are a stoned groove.” says the East Village Other. “Off-beat. arty, sexy,” says the New York Daily News. “It’s the sawn-off shotgun of American critical writing," says the New Statesman. “Its graphics are stylish," says TIME. "Avant-Garde is MAGAZINE POWER!"sayspoet HaroldSeldes. "Wow! What a ferris wheel! 1 was high for a week after reading it,” says the pop critic of Cavalier.
Subscriptions to Avant-Garde ordinarily cost $10 per year. In conjunction with this special Picasso erotic engravings offer, however, we are offering tenmonth introductory subscriptions for ONI. Y S5! This is virtually HALF PRICE!! To enter your subscription (five issues)—and obtain a copy of the Picasso erotic engravings folio ABSOLUTELY FREE-simply fill out the adjacent coupon and mail it with $5 to: Avant- Garde. 110 W. 40th St., New York. N.Y. 10018.
But please hurry, since quantities of the Picasso folio are limited and this offer may be withdrawn without notice.
Then sit back and prepare to receive a subscription bonus par excellence, and your first copy of an exuberant new magazine that is equally devoted to the love of art and the art of love.
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AVANT GARDE WISHES TO THNK THE FOLLOWING, MUSEUMS AND GALLERY FOR THEIR COOPERATION IN PREPARING THE SPECIAL PICASSO ISSUE THE AHI institute u« Chicago galirk louise turns iparisi. the art gallery o* ONTARIO ITORUNTOI KUNSTMAUS iZuRIChi AIAOEMIE OER KUNST* (BERLIN!
Avant-Garde
110 W. 40th Street
New York, N.Y. 10018
I enclose $5 for a ten-month subscription to the exuberant new magazine Avant- Garde. I understand that I am paying virtually HALF PRICE and that I will receive-ABSOLUTE/. Y FREE-a copy of the magnificent art folio containing Picasso’s erotic engravings.
NAME
ADDRESS
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©AVANT GARDE 1968.
RMA-16
*** Contents | ~~
Leading Articles:
292
Ramparts
VOL. 8, NO. 3 SEPTEMBER 1969
[Page 24] Eco-Catastrophe! [Page 29] Cleaver
[Page 36] Rocky’s Mall
[Page 40] 20,000 Guns
Herein:
Symposium: One, Two, Three ... Many SDS’s 6
by Paul Glusman, David Horowitz, Paul Booth & Todd Gitlin
Advertorial : On Howard Gossage 21
by Dugald Stermer
ARTICLES:
Eco-Catastrophe! 24
by Dr. Paul Ehrlich
Three Notes from Exile by Eldridge Cleaver 29
1] A Note to My Friends
2] An Open Letter to Stokely Carmichael
3] On Meeting the Needs of the People
Rocky Builds his Dream House 36
by W. David Gardner
20,000 Guns Under the Sea 40
by Seymour Hersh
The Prisoner 50
by Donald Duncan
Poetry: Tyrannus Nix? 45
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ephemera 62
*** Contributors | ~~
Editor: Robert Scheer
Art Director: Dugald Stermer
Executive Editor: Peter Collier
Managing Editor: David Kolodney
Associate Editor: David Horowitz
International Editor: Eldridge Cleaver
Assistant Managing Editor: Jan Austin
Assistant Art Director: Mary Morhoff
Manuscript Editor: Sheila Daar
Research Editor: Robert Cunningham
Editorial Assistants: Janis Chan, Anne Dowie. Sally Greenawalt, Barbara Lampert, Barbara Patrick, Cathy Stone
Assistant Editors: Michael Ansara, Harvey Cohen, Donald Duncan, Art Goldberg, Susan Lydon, Marcus Raskin, Dan Schechter, Stephen Schneck, Stanley Sheinbaum, William Turner, Lee Webb
Contributing Editors: Jean Lacouture, Southeast Asia; Judy Feiffer, Paul Krass- ner, Elinor Langer, Sandra Levinson, Jack Newfield, New York; Richeile Dassin, Paris; Jessica Mitford, Oakland; Lothar Menne, Frankfurt; Monique Maurer, Munich; Sonia Orwell. London; Harold Lipset, Criminology; Farrel Broslawski, Los An- Seles; Deborah Green, Seattle; Carl Ogles- y, at-large
Publisher: Frederick C. Mitchell
Controller: Robert Kaldenbach
Associate Publisher: Marc Stone
VP, Circulation: Dinny Zimmerman
Stephen Robinson (Business Manager), Norman Hirsch (Assistant Business Manager), Donald Hughes (Circulation Manager), Nancy Tibbon (Western Advertising Manager), Charles Rudnick (Office Manager), David Dobkin (Office Man), Carrie Welch (Telephone Lady), Millie Eley (Bookkeeper), Margot Lind (Administrative Assistant)
Board of Directors: Peter Collier, Norman Eisner, Gerald Feigen, David Horowitz. Robert Kaldenbach, Edgar Lockwood, Frederick Mitchell. Stewart Mott, Stephen Robinson, Robert Scheer, Dugald Stermer, Stanley Sheinbaum, Marc Stone
EDITORIAL ROOMS AND MAIN BUSINESS OFFICE
495 Beach Street
San Francisco, California 94133
Telephone: 415-441-4151 _\
by Ramparts Magazine, Inc. c
Indexed in Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature
IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE: ELDRIDGE CLEAVER ON CHARLES GARRY
Back volumes available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan
All rights reserved.
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Ramparts is published monthly by Ramparts Magazine. Inc. Main Offices: 495 Beach Street. San Francisco. California, telephone 441-4151. New York Offices: 250 E. 65th St., Apt. 4C. New York, N.Y., telephone TE 8-1830. Subscription Rates: $8.50, one year; S15.00, Iwo years in USA and possessions. Foreign rate: $9.50. one year; S17.0O two years. Foreign Airmail rate: Mexico. Central America. Caribbean Islands. $17.00; Europe, South America, Africa (bordering the Mediterranean), $21.00; Far & Near East, USSR, Australia & remainder of Africa. $26.50. Single issue. 75 cents. Copyright ©1969 by Ramparts Magazine. Inc. All rights reserved. Manuscripts: Unsolicited manuscripts submitted to Ramparts should be sent with return postage and self-addressed envelope. Ramparts editors assume' no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Second copies should be retained by writer. Editorial and Advertising Correspondence: All editorial and advertising correspondence should be mailed to 495 Beach St.. San Francisco. California 94133. Subscription Correspondence: All subscription correspondence should be mailed to Ramparts. P.O. Box 452, San Francisco. California 94101. Send both new and old address (enclose recent magazine address label, if possible). Please allow six weeks for change of address. Second-class postage paid at San Francisco. California, and at additional offices. Printed in the USA.
Cover Photograph by Jeffrey Gholson
** What is Psychology Today?
At last! A magazine that bridges the information gap between responsible psychology and the educated publicl Today all of us—the executive, the salesman, the housewife, the teacher, the clergyman, and the teen-ager consistently (and often knowingly) use this thing we call psychology.
However, many of the solemn scientific truths you learned about psychology only yesterday in college are sheer myths today. In the information explosion, no field is moving faster than psychology. New and exciting discoveries which affect you deeply and personally are yielding themselves up on an almost daily basis.
Before the appearance of Psychology Today magazine, these new findings were not available in a lively, accurate monthly magazine. All that is changed. Now there is a magazine about psychology, with articles written by world-renowned experts in psychology, religion, education, child development, philosophy—the total human condition. Current and coming articles include:
The Grim Generation Does ESP Exist? Russian Psychology Love and Will Nude Marathons Mrs. Oedipus Is Man a Machine? Learning Under Drugs Hormones and Sex The Robot Problem Adult Play Therapy Body English
After the Group Encounter Are Leaders Made or Born? The Sickness of Corporations Psychology of the Japanese Samurai The Reform of Mental Hospitals Immunization Against Persuasion The Dangers of Group Therapy Fantasies While Breast Feeding Homosexuality Reconsidered The Psychiatrist’s Power Student Activists
The Icarus Complex
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ONE,TWO, THREE...MANY SDS’s
(< Meetings also should not go on too long.” —Chairman Mao
More Mao Than Thou
The Chicago coliseum is what the creator of the word “dank” had in mind. A cave in the soot brick of South Wabash Avenue, its bare cement walls enclose a constantly unpleasant, humid atmosphere appropriate to the roller derbies and wrestling matches which the coliseum normally hosts. Naked light bulbs suspended from a high ceiling reveal cracked paint, rusted pipes and a once painted frieze hanging from a dark, encompassing balcony.
Here, the only place in the Midwest that would have them, delegates from hundreds of chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met for the organization’s ninth annual convention. When it was over and the smoke had cleared, there were two groups of equal size, each denouncing the other and claiming to be the “real” SDS.
Since the uprising at Columbia University in April of last year, SDS has gained prominence as the largest and most militant nationally-based left student group in the country. In the last year, the hottest in history for the nation’s campuses, the 70,000-member organization has played a major and highly visible role in campus protests against complicity with the war in Viet-Nam and in actions aimed at opening universities to excluded third world youth.
Yet SDS was not the entire movement. In fact it wasn’t even the largest part of the movement. Blacks, chicanos, and other third world groups have played much larger and riskier roles than has SDS. In many parts of the country the whites who were involved in the anti-war and draft resistance movements were in no way affiliated with SDS. The demonstrations around the Democratic Party Convention last year were organized without the participation of SDS, although some members did join in at the last minute.
But SDS is a prime target of the reaction. Senator McClellan’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee conducted a public investigation of the organization and identified “leading” members around the nation; Attorney General Mitchell has announced his own investigation. All over the country SDS members face jail sentences for political actions. In Chicago, the National Office (NO) was raided on the pretense of a fire alarm. When no fire was found, police ransacked the place and arrested everyone there on charges of “interfering with an officer.” The convention itself had to be postponed two weeks when campus after campus turned down requests for the use of their facilities. SDS is on the nation's shit list.
Finally, the National Office was able to rent the Chicago Coliseum, five blocks away from last summer’s battle in front
of the Hilton. There, faced with all kinds of questions and problems concerning repression and the direction SDS would take for the next year, the various factions got together and threw Red Books at each other.
What wasn’t discussed in Chicago was much more relevant than what was. No one spoke to the realities. No one tried to analyze the crisis of American imperialism, currently threatened by liberation struggles abroad and by its own deft destruction of the American Dream at home. The increasing militarization of the country was ignored. No one presented a perspective on how the movement would function in a police state. The economic condition of the nation—inflation, tight money and a surtax falling on those least able to afford it— was never discussed.
Finally, mundane questions like: “How can SDS keep from isolating itself on the nation’s campuses?” “How can it relate to returning Viet-Nam war veterans?” and “How should it approach resistance people, pacifists and other less militant movement people?” were not only unanswered, but unasked. Women’s Liberation, the role of students, the role of workers, the Black Panther Party, and the anti-war movement, when discussed, were used as weapons in the final ideological showdown between the two main factions—the Progressive Labor Party and the National Office—or as afterthoughts.
From its birth, sds has been a wide-open organization, excluding no one, holding to no fixed ideology or “line,” and not binding local chapters to a national policy. SDS’s openness has led to its free-swinging image. It burst on the scene in 1960—bright, new and full of hope. Left, but not saddled with the sterile Stalinism of the Old Left, SDS projected the qualities of an organization which would frame its revolutionary theory according to American experience and would be much more likely to succeed in America than would a left run from the Kremlin.
After nine years, though, things have become much more serious, and the left needs more than just looseness. SDS has become engaged in some major fights, and members are taking considerable risks in a country where building a park is a capital offense. Members want an organization behind them with discipline and an idea of where it is going. SDS has not provided this; in some areas it has served as little more than a debating society.
The Progressive Labor Party (PL), on the other hand, is a disciplined Marxist-Leninist organization run on democratic- centralist principles. PLers claim to be Maoists and revolutionary communists. In 1966, after its attempt to build a mass anti-war organization (the May 2nd Movement) was called off, PL began to work within already existing SDS chapters.
The Jimi The Mothers VanDyke Jethro Tull Neil Young The Kinks The Everly Joni Mitchell Fats Domino The Fugs The Grateful The Hendrix Of Invention Parks Brothers Dead Pentangle
Experience
Mail to: Record Show Room 208 Warner/Reprise Records Burbank, California 91503
Send the special albums Checked below
,0; □ A copy of Record Show. I enclose $2.
A copy of Record Show and Songbook.
. I enclose $4.
(Checks should be made payable to
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Records.)
This offer expires August 1,1970.
28 Concerned Record Artists Join In Creating A Revolutionary New Album
All of the artists pictured above — plus such as Peter. Paul & Mary. Theodore Bikel, Randy Newman. Bert Jansch. John Renbourn, Sweetwater. Doug Kershaw. Pearls Before Swine, and more — have joined in a unique album project.
They have put together an extraordinary double stereo album called
THE 1969 WARNER/REPRISE RECORD SHOW
Two records. Four sides. The very best of what these artists are currently and will be offering on Warner/Reprise (which means that a lot of the stuff on the album is. as of this writing, still unreleased — over a dozen tracks from upcoming Warner/Reprise albums).
Under normal conditions, this two- album set would sell for 59.96.
But the artists in our Record Show are not normal artists. They want their new recordings heard. Widely. And to get that done, they are willing to give up all their royalties on this album. (Just as long as Warner/Reprise doesn’t make anything either.)
So here's the deal: The 1969 Warner/ Reprise Record Show will only be sold by mail (no middle man). Warner/Reprise tosses in deluxe packaging. And you. the record buyer (who we fervently hope will be encouraged to pick up more of what you hear at regular retail prices) can get
a copy of Record Show for the below cost price o\ TWO BUCKS
Actually, this is a promotion in which everybody wins. You get an extensive taste of new Hendrix, new Pentangle, new Jethro Tull, new Van Dyke Parks, new Randy Newman, etc. The artists on Record Show, and subsequently Warner/ Reprise, win some new friends.
We know this is how it works because earlier this year we offered—a bit hesitantly—the first of these revolutionary albums. It was called
THE 1969 WARNER/REPRISE SONGBOOK
This was also a two dollar, two record set, with over 40 songs by 26 impoltant artists (including the first U.S. release of Jimi Hendrix' "Red House," which subsequently turned up over the summer in his best-selling Smash Hits album).
Songbook began as just a nice thing to do for our friends. But the people who got ahold of it wrote in to tell us differently:
Really liked the records. Have since purchased The Pentangle's Sweet Child and The Everly Brothers' Roots. Kindly send me five order forms for friends. I hope you people do well. You seem fairly straight.
J.C.I.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
That was for Songbook. The Record Show is even finer, deluxer, and more provocative.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Frankly, we don't plan on selling more than a couple of thousand copies of Record Show. Mostly because this offer sounds too good to be true. And we know that naturally suspicious people will probably pass thi.s ad by.
Which is really a shame.
Because if you do mail in your $2 (or 54 if you also want a copy of the earlier and all-different Songbook set), you'll soon have a collector's item on your phonograph. (That concept we toss in for you prestige-lovers.)
Each copy of Record Show has bound into it a few pages of pictures and background about the artists on the album. This way you'll learn the story behind such nifties as
• JONI MITCHELL'S Carnegie Hall debut (and hear some of it on Record Show).
• VAN DYKE PARKS’ extraordinary Moog synthesizer commercials for the 1970 Ice Capades (also on Record Show).
• Tracks from as yet unreleased albums by FRANK ZAPPA, LORRAINE ELLISON. THE KINKS ...
We could, you realize, go on and on . ..
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
The 28 artists in Record Show are convinced you’ll find their double album more than you expected. We are, too. To try to get on your good side and. possibly, move more than two thousand albums, we hereby offer you this (unnecessary) guarantee: If you don't find Record Show worth every penny, return the album to us within 10 days and we ll send you back your two bucks.
Via air mail.
To facilitate this, they set up a front group, the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA). Their purpose was to influence SDS policy and to recruit cadre for the party.
For a variety of reasons, the WSA appealed to a number of SDSers. To students who were looking for a militant, disciplined organization, who were tired of hassling and squabbling with fellow leftists, who generally saw a need to relate to the working class or who wanted all questions of ideology answered for them at the outset, PL was a welcome influence. As a result. WSA drew many SDSers from places like Harvard. Boston, Yale. New York. Berkeley and San Francisco State.
PL considers itself to be the most advanced revolutionary communist party anywhere in the world. This means they've got all of the answers, and anyone who has even a slight disagreement with them is either a “racist” or an “anti-com- munist.” The NLF is “selling out" the Vietnamese people and the U.S. anti-war movement by negotiating with the U.S. All nationalism is reactionary. The Black Panther Party is nationalist; therefore, it is reactionary. The Panthers’ breakfast for children program is bourgeois reformism because the food is “donated” by capitalists. Open admission demands of third world groups should be opposed because going to college will make third world people less revolutionary . Most PLers, however, go to college themselves.
The “line” on nationalism came down only a few months ago. At San Francisco State, PL had labeled anyone who dared criticize the Third World Liberation Front strike demands in any way as “racist.” But when the word came that the line had changed, PL turned around and denounced more than half the TWLF demands. PL has bitterly attacked SDS support for third world actions at Queens College. CCNY and Columbia. At Berkeley, PL denounced the People’s Park effort as a bourgeois grab for privilege, stealing free parking space from the workers.
PL did bring the question of the working class into SDS, an addition which the SDS National Office at first welcomed. PL’s perspective sharpened debate. But as PL’s strength grew, and as it interfered with SDS’s actions around the country, the NO began to view it as a real threat. Instead of attacking PL on the basis of its practice, however, the National Officers tried to prove that they were the real leftists. The NO became more Maoist than PL. In two years SDS went from discussions of anti-draft unions to pseudo-Maoist debates on the right of the black colony to secede after the revolution!
So the national office formed the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM). which promptly split into two RYMs and presented the convention with two instant theories, mostly taken from thin air. Although the two positions got at bits of reality here and there, their main purpose was to engage and defeat PL in fierce ideological combat.
RYM 1, led by Inter-organizational Secretary Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers and several others, presented a resolution entitled, “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” (They didn’t credit Bob Dylan.) You didn’t need a weatherman, but you needed super-human stamina to read through the ten thousand words of left-cliche prose, and you still wouldn’t know which way the wind was blowing unless you left the coliseum to check. Then you'd have to stand in line to be searched on your way back in.
The “weatherman” proposal begins with a quote from Lin
Piao which states that the main contradiction in the world is between imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it. The main battles, the proposal argues, will be outside our borders. We. as revolutionaries, should see ourselves as part of the world proletariat, their representatives, a fifth column within the U.S. The older white workers are too bought-off to play a vanguard role. (Besides, they are only a drop in the bucket in the world scheme.) The youth are less bought-off, and should be organized in support of third world movements. Much of the proposal is an answer to PL; much is infantile Marxism. Some, however, is good in that it relates to young people; but even then it speaks only of youth acting in support of. or “tailing” behind, movements of others.
The RYM 2 proposal immediately appeals to the reader because it is shorter than “weatherman.” Backed by SDS National Secretary Michael Klonsky and Marv Treiger of the Revolutionary Union (RU). a Bay Area Maoist group, it also has the advantage of speaking to practice. It proposes a revitalization of the anti-war movement, new efforts to reach the industrial proletariat, and a new level of militancy in the movement. But RYM 2. like “weatherman” and PL, sees only an auxiliary role for young people.
The proposals themselves, although hardly works of revolutionary art, were on a much higher level than was the floor debate. Most of the interchange was grim chanting, as if invoking the patron saint of one's faction would serve to win over the other faction.
PL would chant: “Mao, Mao, Mao-tse Tung,” to which the RYM people would grimly reply: “Ho. Ho, Ho Chi Minh.” It was deadly serious business, with both sides waving Red Books in the air and pounding chairs on the cement floor to accent the chants. When not chanting “Mao,” PL was always smashing something. “Smash Racism,” “Smash Revisionism." and “Smash Opportunism" were among their favorites.
One of the first crucial votes was on the question of the agenda. It was important only in that it showed the relative strength of the PL-WSA faction in the convention. The NO didn't limit its efforts against PL to ideological struggle. Il also tried manipulation, which is not so horrible in itself, but the manipulation attempted was so blatant that it drove people into PL’s arms. PL responded by charging that it was “persecuted" and denied free speech. (PL usually opposes free speech, which is “liberal.”) The convention turned out only a little less democratic than the 1968 Democratic Convention.
The NO denied PL the use of New Left Notes to publish its resolutions, and denied them the use of the SDS mimeo to pul out leaflets. The chairman and security squad were both loyal to the National Office.
The NO's agenda proposed that most of the time be taken up by panels—a plan which would enable them to pul forth a coherent RYM line, while limiting the PL speakers. PL proposed a counter-agenda with fewer panels and more workshops. (Workshops were more democratic.) Klonsky replied that workshops gave each of 80 different sects a chance at the innocent new members who couldn’t look after themselves and was booed. The PL agenda won. Panic set in. Suddenly the differences between "weatherman” and RYM 2 vanished. PL, the arch-enemy, had won its first vote.
Later the NO won a vote (by nine people out of 1100) to let a RYM member who had worked with the Red Guard in China Speak to the body. Al this point, John Levin, a 6'5”,
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250-pound PLer from S.F. State ,got up to the mike and accused the RYM 2 speaker of having been kicked out of the Red Guard for cowardice. RYM people stood up, waved the Red Book, banged chairs on the ground and chanted: "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Dare to struggle. Dare to win.” A comrade walked up to Levin and whispered, “Do the one about the red flag against the red flag. John.” Levin waited until the noise level dropped; then, dramatically pointing at the Ohio- Michigan group which had led the chanting, stated solemnly, "Chairman Mao teaches that there are those among us who would wave the Red Book to oppose the Red Book!" Cheers of "Mao” went up from the PL section.
This sort of thing took up three days—the shouting, the rhetoric, a few near fist fights and the bitter, nearly equal division of SDS into two groups which clearly hated each other so much that they could not work together.
Once I walked outside to get something to eat at a nearby snack bar. A worker (a real worker!), potentially sympathetic to the movement, sat down next to me and asked me what was going on in the convention. He had read about the fight in the newspapers, but couldn’t understand it. What could I say? I mumbled something, and managed to change the subject. It was a dillerent world—the real one outside—from the one SDS had constructed inside the coliseum, blocked olf by cement and security guards.
Finally, after three days, the split came. It was during a debate over a resolution on racism. Illinois Panther Defense Minister Bobby Rush had asked for and received permission to speak. He denounced PL and, in a somewhat arrogant intrusion into the affairs of SDS, practically demanded its expulsion. (Earlier a Panther had been booed when he made some remarks about “pussy power” and said that women had a strategic position in the revolution—on their backs.) Rush was booed; PLer JetT Gordon took the mike and denounced the NO for manipulating the Panthers into coming on stage. That was hardly likely; the manipulation had been the other way around.
The chanting then grew to a frenzied level. Mark Rudd stood up and asked for an adjournment. “We’ve degenerated to faction fighting, shouting slogans, and chanting. No one's mind is being changed and no real discussion can take place. We [the NO] have approached the situation badly and made many mistakes. We need time to talk things over among ourselves.” But the crowd was out for blood and voted down the adjournment, two to one.
Then Bernadine Dohrn led a confused walk-out. At first perhaps a quarter of the crowd followed her. Then it became clear that one had to choose sides and that to remain was to side with PL. Eventually, half the people went into another wing of the coliseum. Though nobody knew it yet. SDS was “ousting” PL. Just like Trotsky ousted Stalin.
The splitters met as a group and in caucuses for 24 hours. Freed from the necessity of unity-in-the-face-of-PL. the factions flowered. Some independents didn’t like the NO or RYMs any better than PL. This included the Independent Socialist Club which can’t relate to Mao (or any successful revolutionary), and SDS groups such as Boston, Brooklyn, Madison, S. F. State Joe Hill Caucus, Berkeley and Stanford. All had been involved in significant actions during the year and didn’t see how any of the theories being expounded
related to the real world. All but Stanford faced strong PL chapters in their areas and were in favor of dealing with PL on the basis of its practice, and not its adherence to abstract principles. But this was only a quarter of the splitters. The majority was in the “weatherman" group, whose nucleus was in the Ohio and Michigan regions, geographically close to the convention and the National Office.
On Saturday night the body passed a motion by Bill Ayers of Michigan that PL be excluded because it didn’t support the NLF. North Viet-Nam, North Korea, Cuba, China, and (yes!) Albania—also because it didn’t support black and third world movements in the U.S. The motion expelled PL. not because of its actual sabotaging of local SDS projects, but because of its positions on what, to Americans, are largely abstract questions. Now anyone who doesn’t support Albania is out of SDS! Some people in the convention undoubtedly had never even heard of Albania.
Later that night, the convention met as a unit for the last time. The splitters stood up in the aisles, separated by the security squad from the PL-WSAers. Bernadine Dohrn read the resolution expelling PL and was booed by the PLers. “Shame, Shame. Shame,” they chanted, pointing at Bernadine. No one took the obvious cue to identify the source of PL’s politics and chant. “Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!” at them.
The RYM people then walked out. to find that their tires had been slashed (by the workers?). Meanwhile Jeff Gordon announced to the PL-WSA crowd. “We’ve just taken over the most important organization in America!” This might be true, but the only ones left to be taken over were themselves. They then walked out to find that the vandals hadn't appreciated the subtlety of the debate and had slashed their tires too.
On Sunday, the splitters again met separately. A statement of principles was submitted which, while agreeable to both RYMs, was totally unreadable. It supported revolutionary movements and armed struggle within and outside the U.S., condemned male chauvinism and anti-communism, and called for socialism. It didn't have the excuse of being an internal document; phrased in Maoist jargon, it would have gone out as the oflicial statement of SDS. In one of the most hopeful actions of the convention the delegates refused to pass the resolution with only two hours debate.
Finally, as delegiites were already leaving, something real was discussed—but almost as an afterthought. SDS, which had too long ignored the anti-war movement (after practically starting it with the 1965 march on Washington), called for an anti-war, pro-NLF demonstration to coincide with the Chicago Eight trial. It was the first national action called by SDS in four years. Mark Rudd (who describes himself as a “symbol of the movement") was elected National Secretary, Jeff Jones is the new Inter-organizational Secretary and Bill Ayers is educational secretary, completing a "weatherman” sweep of national offices.
There are things happening in the United States in 1969 that Marx didn't foresee in 1869, that Lenin didn't deal with in 1917 and that Mao didn’t predict in 1949. So why are their works the ultimate and final authority in our revolution?
As the pressure mounts in the movement and people seek the easiest path, there is a tendency to slip into dogma- abstract, unintelligible, and obscure—as opposed to theory
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B. A1kim. Comprehensive, handsomely illustrated. archaeological introduction to the Turkish peninsula from prehistoric times to the fantastic neolithic city of Catal Htiyuk. Anatolian antecedents of Minoan civilization, the city of Troy, development of the Hittite culture, etc. 158 photos, 61 full color. Pub. at $ 10.00. Now Only 3.98
7208. LIFE 8 TIMES OF FREDERICK DOudtASS. Cte sic autobiography of the runaway slave who became Lincoln's advisor and one of America's greatest Negro orators and writers; incl. his impressions of John Brown. Garfield, et al. Pub.at $6.95.Only 2.98
7218. THE PICTURE BOOK OF SEXUAL LOVE. By Robert Harkel. 187 photos, 16 in full color, illustrate this manual of sexual lovemaking; arranged in conjunction with textual elucidation of pre-coital stimulation, building of passion, various coital positions. more; sale restricted to customers 21 yrs & over. 8%" x 11". Only 14.95
7108. FODOR GUIDE TO EUROPE 1968: 34 Countries. Complete travel coverage for 34 countries from Portugal to the Soviet Union, Iceland to Cyprus by every means of transportation: all the tips and hints you need for an excitingly successful, fun-filled vacation. Over 900 pp; photos & maps.
Pub. at $7.50. Special 1 98
7096. FODOR GUIDE TO GREECE 1968. Ancient and modern Athens, Delphi, Odysseus’ Ionia, the home of Alexander the Great and more—all the facts necessary to a successful tour of ancient Greece and a fun filled modern vacation. Photos & maps.
Pub. at $5,95,Only 1 98
HAROLD MACMILLAN MEMOIRS
7049. WINDS OF CHANGE 1914-1939. Rich, fas cinating portrait of the vicissitudes of British life from Queen Victoria's Jubilee through WW I. which saw Macmillan in action at Loos, Ypres, and at the Somme, then the darkening thirties in Parliament with Lloyd George, Churchill & Eden—and Munich. 584 pp. 25 photos Pub. at $10 no I'cry Special 1 98
7048 THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945 Personal, remarkably fresh account of how WW II was fought and won on the political front, with Macmillan front and center as Churchill's deputy with FDR. Ike. de Gaulle, Alexander. Tito, in Casablanca, Algiers, Italy. Greece and London. 623 pp; 25 photos.
Pub. at $11 95. {’cry Special 1.98
9i2."ENCYCtOPjDIA OF THE ARTS kd by ^
Runes and H G. Schrickel. 1064 page compendium of all the arts of all times and places, presented by more than 100 leading authorities. Thousands of definitions of terms and techniques, plus informative biographical and historical summaries.
Orig. $15.00. Only 2.77
7093. FODOR GUIDE TO BRITAIN * IRELAND 1968. Handy vacation guide with full details of what to see for those who stick to the big cities and for those intriguing country side trips; info on guided tours, shopping, hotels, restaurants, museums, much more. Photos & maps Pub at $5.95. Only 1.98 7089. Five Volumes: SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE- TUNG. Trans from the Chinese, with explanatory Notes. Definitive US edition collecting Mao’s most important pronouncements on the Revolutionary Civil War (1926-36), the War against Japan, and the 2nd Revolutionary Civil War (1945-49). 1,799 pp. Pub at $25 00 5 Pols, Only 9.98
P135. Dali: INVENTIONS OF THE MONSTERS.
Surrealistic masterpiece with Dali’s famous flaming giraffe, browns predominate with burnt orange and gold highlights; printed in the Netherlands. 24" x 15'." image area.
Pub. at $7.50. . Only 2.98
7086. THE GRAPHIC WORK OF FELICIEN ROPS Su Krb collection of graphics by the Belgian erotic ntasist. Felicien Kops, whose work charmed and shocked during la belle epoque—247 REPRODUCTIONS. each of which anticipates and surpasses Beardsley in power, in vividness, in irony and satire, and perhaps in decadence; Notes of Rops' life by Lee Revens. 9'//' x 13". Pub. at $20.00 Only 12.95 7073. STEICHEN: A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY. By Ed ward Steichen. Steichen’s own choice of 234 memorable photographs, the dramatic summation of his 69 years in the world of photography and a breathtaking gallery of personalities, still lifes, war pictures. theatre scenes, more. 234 photos in the finest b/w gravure, duotone St full color; 10" x 1114".
Ona. $19.50. New complete edition 9.95
7072 MAN & HIS SYMBOLS. By Carl Jung, Jolande Jacobi, et al The meaning of dreams, of the dream- symhols common to all mankind, and of the com munication’ these symbols carry individually to each person; the world-famous Swiss psychologist’s last great work, in which he and his closest associates explore the life of the unconscious for the general reader. Over 500 Illus. 146 Full Color; 8)4" x 11". Orig. $14.95. New complete edition 5.95 7069. BRIDGE TO ASIA: The Greeks in the Mediterranean. By H. H. Miller Superb guide to the Greek colonies along Asia Minor, recreating the many centuries and cultures of Troy, Ephesus. Lesbos, the Ionian*, Dorians, Phrygians, Persians, the two Hellenistic kingdoms, much more. 250 photos, some in color. Pub at $8 95. Only 3.98
7066 JULY 1914 Selected Documents on the Outbreak of the First World War. Ed. by I Geiss. Germany’s leading scholar-historian of WW I origins offers extensive commentary on these nearly 200 documents, most never seen outside state archives, that chronicle a world touched by compulsive pride, falling clumsily into war through the pathology of anxious monarchs. Pub. at $6 95. Special 1.98 4667. ROGET'S THESAURUS of Words and Phrases. Authorized, revised edition of the indispensable book for everyone who wants to find the right word at the right time. 700 pp.. hardbound. Special 1.98
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6835. CICERO AND THE ROMAN REPUBLIC. By F. R. Cowell. The long and eventful history of the Senate and the Roman People told as a human story, seen in a perspective and setting provided by Cicero; covers every aspect of Roman life at every social level. 56 gravure illus: 15 charts. Special 198
7517. STAUFFENBERG, The Architect of the Famous July 20th Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler. By J. Kramarz, Intro by H. R. Trevor-Roper. First comprehensive biography of Count von Stauffenberg. an invaluable record of the only active resistance during the Nazi regime—4 years in the planning.
Pub. at $5.95. Special 1.98 4171. THE WORKS OF LEWIS CARROLL. Intro, by R. L. Green. Marvelous Carroll anthology—includes the “Alice” books with the 92 original Tenniel illustrations, the two Sylvie and Bruno stories. The Hunting of the Snark, the complete short stories, and essays on such subjects as theatre, math, vivisection, plus puzzles, games, letters, more. 1,130 pp.
Special import 1.98
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A whimsical fantasy.
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MOMENT OF TRUTH.
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255. REDON: VASE OF FLOWERS. On artists’ canvas—silk screen from the Louvre in soft golden browns, red. yellow, green & blue. 19" x 26" jj|
302. PICASSO.
FAUN WITH LEAVES. Silkscreen on artist canvas. Fantasy in hlack & white. 18" x 24".
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299. DAUMIER.
MAN OF LA MANCHA. Silkscreen on artist canvas. Don Quixote in magnificent full color. 18" x 26" Pub. Q $15. Only 5.95
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245 MONET RED POPPIES
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Impressionist masterpiece of figures strolling through a summer field of red poppies. 19" x 24".
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531. Set of Four Beautiful, brilliantly colored collotype posters. Each 20" x 28" Aristide, Bruant, Moulin Rouge, Jana Avril and Divin Japonis.
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528. BEN SHAHN.
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deduced from concrete conditions and applicable in real programs. Theory should serve to expand the base of the movement, to make it more relevant, militant and effective in actual practice. It should not be formed to score points off someone less “pure.” Such internal faction fights can derail the movement and insulate it in a false world.
SDS—all of it: PL and both RYMs—left out any mention of white youth as a revolutionary force for themselves. Yet, among whites, that is what is happening. Why should they be only a tail on someone else's movement, a white auxiliary to the Black Panthers? One would think the Panthers would prefer allies who are in it for themselves and not guilt-ridden successors to the civil rights liberals who left when things got hot. Moreover, if I want to suffer for my guilt, I'll join the Catholic Church. Most young people in the movement are in it for themselves; otherwise they wouldn't be risking long jail terms and—as in the People’s Park struggle—getting shot.
RYM may have some potential now that it no longer needs to be artificially banded together around a forced ideology in order to defeat PL. There is a chance that a genuine youth movement can be built. It won’t be if RYM continues in the direction it recently took in an NYU post-convention battle with PL (rocks thrown, a fire hose used, ten wounded, police called in to restore order). Such actions, if they become the norm in left politics, will only isolate the left in a shell of its own creation, and will never succeed in building a movement whose militancy is directed against the real enemy.
— PAUL GLUSMAN
Paul Glusman is an activist at U.C. Berkeley and M as a leader in the recent People's Park struggle.
** Hand-Me-Down Marxism and the New Left
The rafters of the Chicago coliseum had hardly ceased to reverberate with the chants of the rival factions, when the ghost of Karl Marx was being heaped with blame for the SDS debacle. “Alas,” mourned establishment pundits in ill-concealed triumph, “the New Left has finally gone the primrose way of the Old. Marxism has at last cursed it with factional wars and historical irrelevance. The apostles of ultra-democratic revolution and ‘power to the people’ (the most incendiary notion in the modern world) have shown themselves ready, if inept, practitioners of the art of political manipulation. The idol-smashing revolutionary vanguard has again been revealed as a latter-day religious cult prostrating itself before patron saints and overseas meccas, while suppressing the heresy of thought with mind-gluing incantations from holy scriptures. R.I.P."
But the smug obituaries are. to say the least, premature. The “movement” is first of all larger than any of its organizations. The virility of the New Left, the sheer vitality of its actions and the deep, deep roots of its culture of rebellion will surely bypass the martinets of any bible-toting, icon-worshiping elite, should such a group seek to impose its Law—whether from the closeted cells of a Maoist sect or through the once
open forum of SDS. For the time being at least, this is still the revolution that can’t be taken over.
Nonetheless, the still unfolding fate of SDS—until now the central organization of (white) student struggle—cannot remain a matter of indifference to the radical movement from which it draws its strength and which it, in turn, inspires. Too much of the tried and tested leadership, too much of the best and most militant energies of the left are caught up in the current enthrallment of SDS for the outcome not to have significance for the movement as a whole.
What is at the source of SDS’s descent into a politics at once so claustrophobic and incomprehensible as to virtually insure the isolation and defeat of those who adopt it? A politics so antagonistic to the imaginative, open spirit and creative action that has informed and powered the New Left since its emergence from the ashes of the Old a decade ago? (The present vanguard seems to have forgotten that the New Left had to midwife its own birth precisely because the old line toeing. Lenin/Stalin/Mao-quoting vanguard had finally encased itself in a sectarian, sterile solitude where it had only its own self-righteousness for company.)
One can readily appreciate why liberals would rush to attribute the difficulties of America’s New Left (and the demise of the Old) to “Marxism.” Liberalism’s Great American Celebration of the Fifties has all but disappeared in the Great American Disintegration of the Sixties. The bankruptcy of the liberal world view has become more and more self-evident with each new stage of the social crisis. Who can still put credence in the basic tenets of the postwar liberal faith: the essential harmony and pluralistic democracy of America's “affluent” society, the alleged solution of the fundamental problems of the industrial revolution, the end of class-based struggle and its revolutionary ideologies? If the new generation has absorbed one lesson, it has been that of the vacuity of liberal analysis, the hypocrisy of liberal preachment and the collusion of liberal practice in the imperialist and racist world system of U.S. corporate capital.
How lucid Marxism—with its focus on the inequities and irrationalities of the status quo—now looks in comparison to the soothing obfuscations of the liberal mind. For what is Marxism but the recognition of the class pivot of history and the class basis of social oppression, coupled with a clear commitment to one side of the social struggle: the side of the oppressed against their oppressors? Far from being a handicap, the discovery of Marxism by the movement has put within its grasp the possibility of becoming a serious revolutionary force for the first time. A long-range perspective on real social forces (not illusory promises, superficial harmonies and surface stabilities) is essential to the development and success of any movement for social change and transformation, and it is Marxism above all other ideologies that has shown itself capable of providing such a perspective for the capitalist era.
But there is Marxism and there is Marxism. A Marxism which is developed in a concrete social context; which is flexible, open, and unafraid to re-think its revolutionary perspectives according to specific conditions; and which fashions its language as a means of communication, analysis and mobilization, rather than employing it merely as ritualistic invocation, can be just the powerful instrument that a revolutionary movement requires.
But there is also Marxism of the hand-me-down variety,
still
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where an ideological perspective and vocabulary developed in a different epoch or a different political-cultural environment is transposed whole and adopted as an all-embracing wisdom. This attempt to don the ideological cloth of the victims of imperialism and their vanguard may satisfy many egos and assuage much guilt, but it doesn’t help to build radical constituencies and revolutionary forces in the United States. Yet such a direction appears to be developing in SDS, where both major factions at the Chicago convention spoke in the language of Maoism and put forth a Maoist model of the world revolutionary process as their own.
The self-styled Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of SDS would do well to remember that the New Left grew out of two bankruptcies—not just liberalism, but old-line Marxism as well. The failure of Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, or Marxist- Trotskyist) vanguard parties to build revolutionary movements in the advanced capitalist countries is an historic fact that no revolutionary can afford to ignore. The “Marxist-Leninist” groups which exist in these countries have either isolated themselves as sterile sects, or transformed themselves into basically reformist organizations like the Italian and French Communist parties. A careful analysis of these failures will show that hand-me-down Marxism and overseas meccawatching played a significant role in each.
CAN MAOISM, THE NEW VOGUE IN SDS ideology, itself provide a reliable guide to the causes of the impasse in Western revolutionary Marxism? There is little reason to think so. According to Maoist theory, the key to all contemporary developments in the international revolutionary movement is Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, which marks the emergence of "modern revisionism" and its doctrines of “peaceful coexistence” and “peaceful transition” to socialism (in certain “favorable” circumstances). But the historical record shows that the reformism of the Western Communist parties (not to mention most of those in the Third World) predates Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin by at least two and probably three decades, as does the promulgation of the so-called "modern revisionist" doctrine of peaceful coexistence between the systems.
Of course, this is not merely a case of error in historical interpretation on the part of the Chinese. The fact is that the Chinese Communist Party, in order to pursue its ideological struggle with the Kremlin, has deliberately re-written the history of even its own movement to obscure the role of Stalin both in obstructing the Chinese Revolution and in transforming the Communist parties in Europe and elsewhere into reformist organizations.
A theory such as Maoism, in which the answers lo key- questions are based on the re-writing of history, can hardly provide a sound guide to revolutionary practice in the long run. Sooner or later the manipulation of facts will lead to a gap which cannot be bridged by administrative measures and historical legerdemain. Perhaps the gap will not be as large as that which developed in the Stalin era and which discredited and disoriented a whole revolutionary generation in the West. However, the very existence of the gap will prove crippling to a party which tries to build a revolutionary program across it, for truth is a basic weapon in the revolutionary arsenal just as the ability to grasp real social relationships and forces is its greatest strength. A revolutionary movement
thrives on truth just as surely as a ruling class lives by deception.
The penchant for ideological manipulation is not peculiarly Chinese. To some extent, any revolutionary party which achieves power in an underdeveloped country must itself become a ruling stratum. The problems of industrialization, education and democratization (including the liberation of internal nationalities) still lie before it. and it must deal with these problems in the face of encirclement and armed hostility from imperialist forces. Moreover, the urban proletariat in such a country is itself so underdeveloped as to be incapable of providing the leadership prescribed for it in the classic Marxist conception. Historically, therefore, the revolutionary party has tended to substitute itself for the revolutionary classes and. as a consequence, to resort to the techniques of manipulation and deception reminiscent of (but by no means equivalent to) the techniques used by the ruling classes of old. (The practice tends to vary: in some revolutionary countries, like Cuba, the level of revolutionary candor has been extraordinarily high; in others such as Russia, the reverse has been true.) In any event, because of these distortions, the attempt to transplant uncritically such revolutionary ideologies into the revolutionary movement in the United States serves to weaken the movement in a profound way.
A further element of distortion in the official ideologies of underdeveloped revolutionary regimes is introduced by the contradictions arising from the conservative character of the nation-state itself, a factor which has received little attention from Marxist theoreticians to date. Thus China's support for the reactionary military dictatorship in Pakistan (and its cilence during the repression of working-class strikes and student demonstrations after the fall of Ayub Khan) may be understandable from the point of view of the state interests of China and the diplomatic support it received from the Ayub regime; but from the point of view of the international revolutionary movement, which Peking aspires to lead, it can only be seen in a very difTerent light.
These are not academic points. The “weatherman” statement of the majority faction in the new SDS leadership (non-PL) is built around the strategic concept of “people’s war” as laid down by China’s Lin Piao. The concept envisages a united people's front of third world liberation forces encircling the principal metropolis of imperialism—the United States. The concept is derived from China’s own revolution, which was fought as a national war of liberation against the Japanese and progressed from its peasant base in the countryside to the towns.
The inadequacy of such a concept for a world characterized by uneven levels of development in which nationalism and its offspring, the nation-state, are still vital historical factors needs no emphasis. One has only to look at the contradiction between China's policy and Pakistan's revolution, or even more obviously at the Sino-Soviet split (neither the Soviet Union nor the Sino-Soviet split receives any mention in the 15,000- word global analysis called "weatherman”) to see how abstract and unrealistic such a projection can be.
No doubt, a consistent perspective in the Maoist vein can still be constructed by ignoring the tensions between revolutionary policy and raison d'etat, and by assigning the Soviet Union to the imperialist camp (a ploy which makes a mirage both of the arms race between Russia and the U.S. and of their military support for opposing sides in revolutionary
struggles such as in Viet-Nam and Cuba). There are obviously more things on revolutionary earth than are dreamt of in Maoist and “weatherman” philosophy; things, moreover, which a revolutionary movement ignores at its peril.
The main consequence so far of SDS’s new-found orientation is its essentially fifth-column mentality and its largely negative vision of revolution in its home environment. It is not surprising that Lin Piao and the Chinese should see the struggle against U.S. imperialism in negative terms (get off our backs), but the transposition of this attitude to the supposed revolutionary vanguard inside the. imperialist powers renders it self-defeating, not to say absurd. Thus the “weatherman” program in effect proposes approaching American workers with the argument that everything they possess is plundered from the Third World (a false proposition in any case: it is the imperialists and not the workers who benefit from imperialism), and that a revolution should be made in this country so that they can give it back.
No revolution was ever built on a negative vision. Moreover, there is no reason even to attempt to build the American revolution as a negative act, a program of social demolition. At a time when the industrial engine has reached a point in its development where it opens up a vista of material plenty and free time (i.e., freedom) for all. America’s imperialist system saddles its people and all mankind with militarism, war, pollution, deprivation, exploitation, racism and repression. America now possesses the means to a humane, liveable, democratic future for all its citizens, but only if they are ready to seize the means of production and overthrow the system which dominates their lives just as surely as it dominates the lives of those in the Third World who sutler under its aggression and rule. That is the revolutionary foundation and the internationalist bond as well. It is certainly true that the liberation of the Third World will hasten the liberation of the U.S. But it is no less true that the American revolution is the key to the liberation of mankind. This is the insight that was missing in Chicago; let us hope that it returns to SDS before long.
— DAVID HOROWITZ
David Horowitz is the author of Empire and Revolution Random House, 1969.
** Students and Workers
SDS’S INTEREST IN THE WORKING CLASS has not gone unnoticed by the business community. Businessmen view the student radicals as a crew of foreign saboteurs, and every trade journal has carried articles on how to screen summer job applicants and tighten in-plant security systems. In its front-page coverage of the SDS convention. Supermarket News heaved a sigh of relief at what it saw as lessened prospects of industrial disruptions due to the debilitating factional disputes. But before this happened, the National Association of Manufacturers, in cooperation with the Army and the FBI, had held 14 seminars on plant security for 4000 businessmen from 1500 companies.
What justifies all this preparation? The answer lies in a handful of experimental projects through which radicals are seeking a base within the working class, and a mountain of ana
lytical arguments built for doing so. But there is quite a difference between a class analysis and a working-class program.
The current venture begins with the goal of reaching out to the working-class counterparts of campus radicals in order to construct a revolutionary youth movement. For a number of reasons, the timing is opportune. Only one of these has to do with SDS and its analyses and that is the tremendous change which has been wrought in the thinking of the activist college students (and there are hundreds of thousands of them) about the working stiffs who make up the majority of the American people. Once scorned as the most reactionary element of the population. American workers are now seen in a clearer light by students as exploited men and women, working their lives out to meet the payments on the crumby substance that is the reward for years of classically alienated labor.
For several years a host of commentators have forecast a shake-up in the leadership ranks of the labor movement, the central institution through which working-class interests are defended in our society. Basically they have pointed to the distance between the leaders and their ranks, both in terms of age and aspirations. There has been a deeper recognition of labor's rigid anti-communist foreign policy, the strains between black workers and white leaders, and the recent economic problem of declining buying power in the face of inflation and taxes. The political understanding of many student radicals is generally limited to this conventional wisdom although it is often packaged in the assertion that these are symptoms of-the “racist, capitalist, imperialist system.”
But if this conventional wisdom can be supplemented with strategic insights, then SDS's commitment to working-class politics in principle may yet yield effective practice. Even before the process of trial-and-error has spelled them out, a few lines of strategy are clear enough right now to suggest avenues for fruitful activity.
For instance, the labor movement should not be a totally unfamiliar political setting to the student activists. Like the universities and like liberal politics, labor does -not have a ten-deep rank-and-file leadership committed to a liberal or social-democratic program. Al the top there are the outstanding labor leaders from the '20s and '30s. moderate enough to have survived the Cold War period, effective enough to have held together large organizations. But their post-World War II generation of successors was substantially suffocated by Taft-Hartley and the Red scare. In most unions there is no organized opposition, so the loyalists have little reason to mobilize politically. Thus, a tremendous vacuum has developed which is evident in flabby steward systems and is reflected in the remarkable backing which protest candidates have received in election challenges for high union offices (e.g., the case of Emil Narick against I. W. Abel for president of the Steelworkers). Very little about labor is predictable any more; George Meany will favor wage-and-price controls if Nixon demands them, and both Reuther and the AFL-CIO will be loyal to the Democratic Party. However, it is much harder to predict which union will fight a long strike despite government intervention, or which leaders' will reopen for criticism practices that have been standard for two decades. Who could have predicted the Black Lung Movement of West Virginia miners or the black Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit? Certainly no one who has swallowed the myth of the tight, monolithic unions.
ut more important to organizers than the leadership vacuum is the political vacuum surrounding the question of what precisely “good trade union practice" is. To read the left's initial responses, one would
believe that the answer is either more of the same (by virtue of the perennial criticism that whatever the union just settled for was not good enough), or total change (only revolutionary demands should be posed). Such simplistic solutions obscure substantial political questions such as: What should the minimum standards be for collective bargaining over wages? How should working conditions be regulated? What should the standards be for privately negotiated social insurance plans? There is a similar vacuum around questions of occupational health and safety and other issues in the workplace. The fact that these issues can be raised from below was demonstrated in the spontaneous wildcat developments in Detroit and West Virginia which led in the first instance to the creation of a new black workers’ organization seeing itself as a revolutionary force, and in the second case to a contest for control of the union. It may be possible to politicize workers to the point where the great discontentments that are a part of life on the job lead to struggles for workers’ control; this certainly would be a great advance over current mumblings about exploitation in general.
The same kind of vacuum exists outside the shops where working-class politics is interpreted by labor as the biennial mobilization for the Democrats. There are no labor-initiated mobilizations against privileges of the rich; this is why Wallace’s mobilizations against the strivings of black people made such headway. Of course there is no meaningful tradition of working-class politics in America. (Capitalism in our time, however, has become extremely politicized, using the state for many of the goals it cannot achieve in the private sector.) The catalog of class issues in working-class communities is a heavy one; spontaneous expressions of grievances are already emerging around state and local taxes. For a union local which is committed to fighting on the whole domestic front as well as on the job, there are tremendous possibilities for filling the void.
In stark contrast to these real strategic possibilities, even as tentatively sketched above, stand the mechanical formulations that are taking hold as the student left’s thinking about the working class begins to crystallize. One of the misconceptions was transmitted by the same left factions inside SDS which brought the organization to an awareness of worker discontent in the first place. To the various manifestations of worker militancy (among the most notable have been the large votes for insurgent candidates for high union office, some major strikes and contract rejections), these SDSers have tacked on implications of revolutionary potential. There is, however, a distinction between “throwing the rascals out," a fine old American tradition, and making basic changes in the system.
Another misconception, derived from a vulgarized Marxism, is the contention that all that is holding the workers back is their right-wing union leadership. The implication seems to be that the acceptance of Cold War, racist, liberal, chauvinist, nationalist, and free-enterprise ideologies by workers is nonexistent or superficial, easily overcome by an influx of radicals and radical ideology. This theory happens to be proposed with deadly seriousness by one of the major SDS factions. But any radical who is blind to the way these cultural forces in
fluence the worker is doomed to failure.
The facts of working-class life show that building the alliances and working relationships which allow class consciousness a fighting chance to develop will be a very arduous long-term task. It will not flow freely as soon as certain “bourgeois myths” are attacked; it requires the creation of class institutions, autonomous and powerful, through which the dominant myths can be challenged. —paul booth
Paul Booth, an officer of SDS up to 1966, has been involved in trade union work for the last two years.
** New Left: Old Traps
The new left of the sixties was specifically of the American Sixties. It was born in action and vision- action to create a decently responsible life in the 20th century; vision to recover the nation’s soul from the bankrupt imitative leftism and the end-of-ideology liberalism of the gray Fifties. Instead of the soapbox harangue, patient everyday work with people; instead of frozen hierarchy, organization by real contributions, participation, democracy. “Put your body on the line” and “let the people decide” were rallying cries from the Mississippi Delta to Berkeley and the Newark ghetto. New generations, born into affluence and cynicism, rattling around in the hollowness of the American Century, learned that the world was in revolution and that American power was finally the enemy of all dreams, discovered that blacks wanted out of their chains and felt unselfconscious in demanding that the society conform to their vision of a civilization beyond scarcity and in beginning to be that vision (traces of it at least), themselves.
The Good Old Days weren’t all that good, although people did seem to care more about each other then. The New Left was elitist, narrowly built on the education acquired in the hated but elite educational factory itself. It was self-righteous and vague enough in its rhetoric to see the slogans of Port Huron and the Free Speech Movement co-opted by the Peace Corps and the university pacification programs; it was tentative at a time when everything began to cry for clear explanations.
The New Left had to discard its lingering illusions of American flexibility with every broken black body, butchered Vietnamese and broken white head. The radical disappointment with which we began the decade, the bitter discovery that America had defaulted on her own liberal promises, had to yield to something that felt like a revolutionary imperative. Suddenly, in the middle of the decade there was a mass resistance—resistance against the war, against the war university, against white supremacy. Finally, whether in so many words or not, against capitalism itself, against class society and the empire which are its logical outgrowths. The very success of that mass resistance—a dead end against its own limits—has thrown the movement for a loop. The young radicals, increasingly the radical young, driven from all
** (Requiem: The Medium is the Epitaph}
** “ADVERTISING IS NO BUSINESS FOR A GROWN MAN”
—Howard Gossage
He also said, “Freedom Of The Press must imply the public interest, otherwise why bother to guarantee it?” And, “It seems wrong to me that a newspaper (magazine) should go under while its readers still want it." In fact, he said a great deal about advertising’s economic stranglehold on all forms of public communication and about the resulting loss regarding the public’s rights and considerations—and he was in advertising.
On July 9. he died.
[“steals your watch’’]
Gossage was really in the business of inventing people. He consistently maintained that his only genius was the ability to recognize and identify the talent of others and then to create an environment in which they could exercise it comfortably—“A rare ability indeed.”
Nicholas Samstag, also recently deceased, once defined a consultant as one who “steals your watch and then tells you what time it is.” It’s been a bad year for good people.'
[kickback]
The advertising industry has long been operating under the illusion that its real business is purchasing space in the various mass media. Agencies make their money by buying the space from the publishers at a lower rate than you or I can, and then charging their clients the full tariff, pocketing the difference (20 per cent). The actual ads are produced almost as a sideline, as if an artist charged for the frame and threw in the painting as a bonus.
In the simplest terms, this means that the agency which is able to produce ads at the lowest cost, and can then con its clients into running them (often in the most expensive magazine pages or at prime time on television) makes the most money. Not only is this method inefficient, misleading and insulting, it is also probably illegal.
When he entered the ad game (at
about age 35), Gossage was called the “enfant terrible” of the industry, because he operated his agency on the principle that he should get paid for actually making ads for clients and products he liked—not for calling up some magazine to get a right-hand page up front. He even gave his clients back their 20 per cent, the premise being that everyone should pay the same price for the same space whether he called himself an agency or not, and that the only criterion for acceptability should be the question of taste—the editor's analysis of the tolerance level of his readers. (The same applies to television.)
[original sin]
"Newspapers (magazines) ought to belong to their readers.” Gossage felt that once the reader paid less for a publication than it cost to produce, he had traded away his power to keep it alive- much less to voice his opinion of its policies—and that this practice is patently wrong and probably ultimately disastrous to any notions we may still have regarding a free press.
It’s pretty difficult for an editor to keep his readers in mind when he is losing money on every copy he sells. Most magazines that go belly-up do so with their readership on the increase,
simply because there aren’t enough pages of advertising to pay for the difference in production costs.
And this is original sin: a publication loses its independence and its readers surrender their right to complain about that loss the moment those readers do not pay enough themselves to keep it alive. Make no mistake about it, the advertising industry is a most demanding mistress.
Gossage spent his life trying to reverse this trend. He felt that an advertisement appears only by permission of the editor and reader, that it should not insult, offend, or even interrupt the editorial flow; that it should be entertaining, informative, and never misleading. Advertising people called this approach “off-beat.” (They are nothing if not trite —a weird bunch.)
[“grown man”]
Some time ago Ramparts hired Gossage as a consultant and put him on the Board of Directors. One of the first things he did in this capacity was to drag me out of advertising to be Ramparts’ Art Director, telling me at the time that I would have to take a pay cut, and that the magazine had about enough money to last four more months.
This issue marks the fourth year since then, and our survival is largely due to Gossage's efforts: raising investment capital, reorganizing the structure, and generally being a busy-body. (He was graceful when wrong, like the time he told us that the key to Ramparts’ success was the retention of its Catholic origins —“Fortunately they ignored me.”)
On the following pages appears part of a series of advertisements Howard wrote and designed for the Irish Whiskey Distillers. To my mind they are still some of the handsomest, best written, and most entertaining pages ever to appear anywhere in any publication.
Howard Gossage finally got out of advertising. —DugaldStermer
(2^ An Exhaustive Enquiry into the Irish Whiskey Question ^c)
[number I ]
HAS IRELAND BEEN LED FALSE BY A BAKED BRAZILIAN BERRY?
We’ll not pretend that we {The Whiskey Distillers of Ireland} weren’t the pleased ones when Irish Coffee became the darling of the Western World. We still are. There are few things more enjoyable than standing on the quay seeing the great ships off to America with golden cargoes of matchless Irish Whiskey. And yet, have we sold our birthright for a mess of coffee pottage? And money? It may well be. For while Irish Coffee is admittedly a luscious drink the fact remains that the Whiskey is somewhat obscured by the coffee, frothy cream, and the sugar cube. S Do you begin to see the shape of this bittersweet quandary? There’s much, much to be said. You will fathom how much when you recall
that Joyce’s Ulysses took over three-hundred-thousand words to deal with just twenty-four hours in a tiny corner of Dublin and not one of the very best tiny corners of Dublin at that. S Our subject covers several years and a hundred and twenty degrees of longitude. So it’s not likely this one page will do it justice.
Still, advertising costs the earth and when we reach the bottom we’ll just have
to stop wherever we are and continue over to next week. S Back to Irish Coffee
and its popularity. The upshot is that thousands upon thousands of Americans
have taken the Irish Whiskey without
ever having fully known the goodness of it.
{Its emphatic, burnished flavor must (fortunately) be tasted to be appreciated}. Otherwise they’d be drinking it all the time; in other ways less darksome and exotic, to be sure, but equ
ally satisfying. There’s no need to tell you what these
otherways of drinking fine whiskey are. Ic’d be like teaching your grandmother to
© 1958, THE WHISKEY DISTILLERS Of- IRELAND Though truly, plagiarism is cordially invited')
q£ Has Irish Whiskey Sold Its Birthright for a Mess of Coffee Pottage? ^0
** OH, IT’S A HORRID
** THING TO BE TORN BETWEEN
** PRIDE & PROFIT
[ NUMBER n ]
suck eggs. ^ [What we were saying when we (The Whiskey Distillers of Ireland) ran out of space last week is that it would be presumptuous of us to tell you how to drink line whiskey. It’d be like teaching your grandmother to stick eggs, as they say. Whatever that means.} $ Still, there's no dent ing that, thanks to Irish Coflee, any number of the Americans have taken Irish Whiskey without having truly tasted of it and that’s a fact. What happens is the fragrant coflee and the sugar cube and the cool, frothy cream on top all but drown out the principal ingredient! At no monetary loss to us, mind. It has been a real treat to watch the dear sales curve soaring. £j But Profit is not all in all; Pride has its innings. We arc an enormously Prideful lot when it comes to the elegant, burnished, emphatie flavor of our whiskies. This is why we should like you to buy them, to drink them, to cherish them for themselves alone. ^ “Ah! but there are nine grand brands of Irish Whiskey, "you say, “Which to choose?’’ You’ve stated the problem well, we think, if floridly. Look, why don't you ask the man at the whiskey store for his recommendation. He will be overjoyed at your humility. ^ Now you’ve grasped our dilemma you'll no doubt be wishing to take your stand for Pride or Profit as the case may be. You’ll appreciate that we must remain neutral ourselves, can’t aflord to do otherwise. But don't let our shilly-shallying prevent you from being forthright. ^ To this end we are issuing badges which we.trust you will wear openly and diligently. They are quite attractive and arc sure to draw admiring glances from one and all. You may obtain either the Pride Badge or the Profit Badge at no cost to yourself, that is to say, absolutely free for the asking. Address your requests to: Pride, P.O. Box 186, Dublin, Ireland, or to Profit, P. O. Box 207, Dublin, Ireland, as the case may be. Air Mail is fifteen cents; surface mail, is eight cents; post cards, four cents. ^ The lovely stamp you’lLget on the return envelope is alone worth the eflort, not to mention the brave badge. Perhaps you’d better write us via rhe air mail. It’s speedier for one thing, more flamboyant, and be- © 1958, THE WHISKEY DISTILLERS OF IRELAND wr may wish I: publish later in hard rovers';
** Eco-Catastrophe!
by Dr. Paul Ehrlich
][Wood Engraving by M.C. Escher
In the following scenario. Dr. Paul Ehrlich predicts what our world will he like in ten years if the present course of environmental destruction is allowed to continue. Dr. Ehrlich is a prominent ecologist, a professor of biology at Stanford University. and author of The Population Bomb (Ballantine).
*** [I.]
The end of the ocean came late in the summer of 1979, and it came even more rapidly than the biologists had expected. There had been signs for more than a decade, commencing with the discovery in 1968 that DDT slows down photosynthesis in marine plant life. It was announced in a short paper in the technical journal. Science, but to ecologists it smacked of doomsday. They knew that all life in the sea depends on photosynthesis, the chemical process by which green plants bind the sun's energy and make it available to living things. And they knew that DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbons had polluted the entire surface of the earth, including the sea.
But that was only the first of many signs. There had been the final gasp of the whaling industry in 1973, and the end of the Peruvian anchovy fishery in 1975. Indeed, a score of other fisheries had disappeared quietly from over-exploitation and various eco-catastrophes by 1977. The term "eco-catastrophe" was coined by a California ecologist in 1969 to describe the most spectacular of man's attacks on the systems which sustain his life. He drew- his inspiration from the Santa Barbara offshore oil disaster of that year, and from the news which spread among naturalists that virtually all of the Golden State's seashore bird life was doomed because of chlorinated hydrocarbon interference with its reproduction. Eco-catastrophes in the sea became increasingly common in the early 1970's. Mysterious "blooms" of previously rare microorganisms began to appear in offshore waters. Red tides— killer outbreaks of a minute single-celled plant—returned to the Florida Gulf coast and were sometimes accompanied by tides of other exotic hues.
It was clear by 1975 that the entire ecology of the ocean was changing. A few types of phytoplankton were becoming resistant to chlorinated hydrocarbons and were gaining the upper hand. Changes in the phytoplankton community led inevitably to changes in the community of zooplankton, the tiny animals which eat the phytoplankton. These changes were passed on up the chains of life in the ocean to the herring, plaice, cod and tuna. As the diversity of life in the ocean diminished, its stability also decreased.
Other changes had taken place by 1975. Most ocean fishes that returned to fresh water to breed, like the salmon, had become extinct, their breeding streams so dammed up and polluted that their powerful homing instinct only resulted in suicide. Many fishes and shellfishes that bred in restricted areas along the coasts followed them as onshore pollution escalated.
By 1977 the annual yield of fish from the sea was down to 30 million metric tons, less than one-half the per capita catch of a decade earlier. This helped malnutrition to escalate sharply in a world where an estimated 50 million people per year were already dying of starvation. The United Nations attempted to get all chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides banned on a worldwide basis, but the move was defeated by the United States. This opposition was generated primarily by the American petrochemical industry, operating hand in glove with its subsidiary, the United States Department of Agriculture. Together they persuaded the government to oppose the U.N. move—which was not difficult since most Americans believed that Russia and China were more in need of fish products than was the United States. The United Nations also attempted to get fishing nations to adopt strict and enforced catch limits to preserve dwindling stocks. This move was blocked by Russia, who. with the most modern electronic equipment, was in the best position to glean what was left in the sea. It was, curiously, on the very day in 1977 when the Soviet Union announced its refusal that another ominous article appeared in Science. It announced that incident solar radiation had been so reduced by worldwide air pollution that serious effects on the world's vegetation could be expected.
*** [II.]
Apparently it was a combination of ecosystem destabilization, sunlight reduction, and a rapid escalation in chlorinated hydrocarbon pollution from massive Thanodrin applications which triggered the ultimate catastrophe. Seventeen huge Soviet-financed Thanodrin plants were operating in underdeveloped countries by 1978. They had been part of a massive Russian "aid offensive" designed to fill the gap caused by the collapse of America’s ballyhooed "Green Revolution.”
It became apparent in the early '70s that the “Green Revolution” was more talk than substance. Distribution of high yield “miracle" grain seeds had caused temporary local spurts in agricultural production. Simultaneously, excellent weather had produced record harvests. The combination permitted bureaucrats, especially in the United States Department of Agriculture and the Agency for International Development (AID), to reverse their previous pessimism and indulge in an outburst of optimistic propaganda about staving off famine. They raved about the approaching transformation of agriculture in the underdeveloped countries (UDCs). The reason for the propaganda reversal was never made clear. Most historians agree that a combination of utter ignorance zof ecology, a desire to justify past errors, and pressure from agroindustry (which was eager to sell pesticides, fertilizers, and farm machinery to the UDCs and agencies helping the UDCs) was behind the campaign. Whatever the motivation, the results were clear. Many concerned people, lacking the expertise to see through the Green Revolution drivel, relaxed. The population-food crisis was "solved."
But reality was not long in showing itself. Local famine persisted in northern India even after good weather brought an end to the ghastly Bihar famine of the mid-’60s. East Pakistan was next, followed by a resurgence of general famine in northern India. Other foci of famine rapidly developed in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malawi, the Congo, Egypt, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico.
Everywhere hard realities destroyed the illusion of the Green Revolution. Yields dropped as the progressive farmers who had first accepted the new seeds found that their higher yields brought lower prices—effective demand (hunger plus cash) was not sufficient in poor countries to keep prices up. Less progressive farmers, observing this, refused to make the extra effort required to cultivate the "miracle” grains. Transport systems proved inadequate to bring the necessary fertilizer to the fields where the new and extremely fertilizer-sensitive grains were being grown. The same systems were also inadequate to move produce to markets. Fertilizer plants were not built fast enough, and most of the underdeveloped countries could not scrape together funds to purchase supplies, even on concessional terms. Finally, the inevitable happened, and pests began to reduce yields in even the most carefully cultivated fields. Among the first were the famous “miracle rats” which invaded Philippine "miracle rice" fields early in 1969. They were quickly followed by many insects and viruses, thriving on the relatively pest-susceptible new grains, encouraged by the vast and dense plantings, and rapidly acquiring resistance to the chemicals used against them. As chaos spread until even the most obtuse agriculturists and economists realized that the Green Revolution had turned brown, the Russians stepped in.
In retrospect it seems incredible that the Russians, with the American mistakes known to them, could launch an even more incompetent program of aid to the underdeveloped world. Indeed, in the early 1970’s there were cynics in the United States who claimed that outdoing the stupidity of American foreign aid would be physically impossible. Those critics were, however, obviously unaware that the Russians had been busily destroying their own environment for many years. The virtual disappearance of sturgeon from Russian rivers caused a great shortage of caviar by 1970. A standard joke among Russian scientists at that time was that they had created an artificial caviar which was indistinguishable from the real thing—except by taste. At any rate the Soviet Union, observing with interest the progressive deterioration of relations between the UDCs and the United States, came up with a solution. It had recently developed what it claimed was the ideal insecticide, a highly lethal chlorinated hydrocarbon complexed with a special agent for penetrating the external skeletal armor of insects. Announcing that the new pesticide, called Thanodrin, would truly produce a Green Revolution, the Soviets entered into negotiations with various UDCs for the construction of massive Thanodrin factories. The USSR would bear all the costs; all it wanted in return were certain trade and military concessions.
It is interesting now, with the perspective of years, to examine in some detail the reasons why the UDCs welcomed the Thanodrin plan with such open arms. Government officials in these countries ignored the protests of their own scientists that Thanodrin would not solve the problems which plagued them. The governments now knew that the basic cause of their problems was overpopulation, and that these problems had been exacerbated by the dullness, daydreaming, and cupidity endemic to all governments. They knew that only population control and limited development aimed primarily at agriculture could have spared them the horrors they now faced. They knew it, but they were not about to admit it. How much easier it was simply to accuse the Americans of failing to give them proper aid; how much'simpler to accept the Russian panacea.
And then there was the general worsening of relations between the United States and the UDCs. Many things had contributed to this. The situation in America in the first half of the 1970's deserves our close scrutiny. Being more dependent on imports for raw materials than the Soviet Union, the United States had, in the early I970’s. adopted more and more heavy-handed policies in order to insure continuing supplies. Military adventures in Asia and Latin America had,further lessened the international credibility of the United Stales as a great defender of freedom—an image which had begun to deteriorate rapidly during the pointless and fruitless Viet-Nam conflict. At home, acceptance of the carefully manufactured image lessened dramatically, as even the more romantic and chauvinistic citizens began to understand the role of the military and the industrial system in what John Kenneth Galbraith had aptly named "The New Industrial State."
At home in the USA the early '70s were traumatic times. Racial violence grew and the habitability of the cities diminished, as nothing substantial was done to ameliorate either racial inequities or urban blight. Welfare rolls grew as automation and general technological progress forced more and more people into the category of "unemployable.” Simultaneously a taxpayers' revolt occurred. Although there was ‘not enough money to build the schools, roads, water systems, sewage systems, jails, hospitals, urban transit lines, and all the other amenities needed to support a burgeoning population, Americans refused to tax themselves more heavily. Starting in Youngstown. Ohio in 1969 and followed closely by Richmond, California, community after community was forced to close its schools or curtail educational operations for lack of funds. Water supplies, already marginal in quality and quantity in many places by 1970, deteriorated quickly. Water rationing occurred in 1723 municipalities in the summer of 1974, and hepatitis and epidemic dysentery rates climbed about 500 percent between 1970-1974.
*** [III.]
AIR POLLUTION CONTINUED TO BE the most obvious manifestation of environmental deterioration. It was, by 1972, quite literally in the eyes of all Americans. The year 1973 saw not only the New York and Los Angeles smog disasters, but also the publication of the Surgeon General’s massive report on air pollution and health. The public had been partially prepared for the worst by the publicity given to the U.N. pollution conference held in 1972. Deaths in the late '60s caused by smog were well known to scientists, but the public had ignored them because they mostly involved the early demise of the old and sick rather than people dropping dead on the freeways. But suddenly our citizens were faced with nearly 200,000 corpses and massive documentation that they could be the next to die from respiratory disease. They were not ready for that scale of disaster. After all, the U.N. conference had not predicted that accumulated air pollution would make the planet uninhabitable until almost 1990. The population was terrorized as TV screens became filled with scenes of horror from the disaster areas. Especially vivid was NBC’s coverage of hundreds of unattended people choking out their lives outside of New York's hospitals. Terms like nitrogen oxide, acute bronchitis and cardiac arrest began to have real meaning for most Americans.
The ultimate horror was the announcement that chlorinated hydrocarbons were now a major constituent of air pollution in all American cities. Autopsies of smog disaster victims revealed an average chlorinated hydrocarbon load in fatty tissue equivalent to 26 parts per million of DDT. In October, 1973, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare announced studies which showed unequivocally that increasing death rates from hypertension, cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer and a series of other diseases had resulted from the chlorinated hydrocarbon load. They estimated that Americans born since 1946 (when DDT usage began) now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued, this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. Plunging insurance stocks triggered a stock market panic. The president of Velsicol, Inc., a major pesticide producer, went on television to “publicly eat a teaspoonful of DDT" (it was really powdered milk) and announce that HEW had been infiltrated by Communists. Other giants of the petrochemical industry, attempting to dispute the indisputable evidence, launched a massive pressure campaign on Congress to force HEW to “get out of agriculture's business." They were aided by the agro-chemical journals, which had decades of experience in misleading the public about the benefits and dangers of pesticides. But by now the public realized that it had been duped. The Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology was given to Drs. J. L. Radomski and W. B. Deichmann, who in the late 1960’s had pioneered in the documentation of the long-term lethal effects of chlorinated hydro-carbons. A Presidential Commission with unimpeachable credentials directly accused the agro-chemical complex of “condemning many millions of Americans to an early death.” The year 1973 was the year in which Americans finally came to understand the direct threat to their existence posed by environmental deterioration.
And 1973 was also the year in which most people finally comprehended the indirect threat. Even the president of Union Oil Company and several other industrialists publicly stated their concern over the reduction of bird populations which had resulted from pollution by DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. Insect populations boomed because they were resistant to most pesticides and had been freed, by the incompetent use of those pesticides, from most of their natural enemies. Rodents swarmed over crops, multiplying rapidly in the absence of predatory birds. The effect of pests on the wheat crop was especially disastrous in the summer of 1973, since that was also the year of the great drought. Most of us can remember the shock which greeted the announcement by atmospheric physicists that the shift of the jet stream which had caused the drought was probably permanent. It signalled the birth of the Midwestern desert. Man's air-polluting activities had by then caused gross changes in climatic patterns. The news, of course, played hell with commodity and stock markets. Food prices skyrocketed, as savings were poured into hoarded canned goods. Official assurances that food supplies would remain ample fell on deaf ears, and even the government showed signs of nervousness when California migrant field workers went out on strike again in protest against the continued use of pesticides by growers. The strike burgeoned into farm burning and riots. The workers, calling themselves “The Walking Dead." demanded immediate compensation for their shortened lives, and crash research programs to attempt to lengthen them.
It was in the same speech in which President Edward Kennedy, after much delay, finally declared a national emergency and called out the National Guard to harvest California’s crops, that the first mention of population control was made. Kennedy pointed out that the United States would no longer be able to offer any food aid to other nations and was likely to suffer food shortages herself. He suggested that, in view of the manifest failure of the Green Revolution, the only hope of the UDCs lay in population control. His statement, you will recall, created an uproar in the underdeveloped countries. Newspaper editorials accused the United States of wishing to prevent small countries from becoming large nations and thus threatening American hegemony. Politicians asserted that President Kennedy was a “creature of the giant drug combine" that wished to shove its pills down every woman's throat.
Among Americans, religious opposition to population control was very slight. Industry in general also backed the idea. Increasing poverty in the UDCs was both destroying markets and threatening supplies of raw materials. The seriousness of the raw material situation had been brought home during the Congressional Hard Resources hearings in 1971. The exposure of the ignorance of the cornucopian economists had been quite a spectacle—a spectacle brought into virtually every American’s home in living color. Few would forget the distinguished geologist from the University of California who suggested that economists be legally required to learn at least the most elementary facts of geology. Fewer still would forget that an equally distinguished Harvard economist added that they might be required to learn some economics, too. The overall message was clear: America’s resource situation was bad and bound to get worse. The hearings had led to a bill requiring the Departments of State, Interior, and Commerce to set up a joint resource procurement council with the express purpose of “insuring that proper consideration of American resource needs be an integral part of American foreign policy.”
SUDDENLY THE UNITED STATES DISCOVERED that it had a national consensus: population control was the only possible salvation of the underdeveloped world. But that same consensus led to heated debate. How could the UDCs be persuaded to limit their populations, and should not the United States lead the way by limiting its own? Members of the intellectual community wanted America to set an example. They pointed out that the United States was in the midst of a new baby boom: her birth rate, well over 20 per thousand per year, and her growth rate of over one per cent per annum were among the very highest of the developed countries. They detailed the deterioration of the American physical and psychic environments, the growing health threats, the impending food shortages, and the insufficiency of funds for desperately needed public works. They contended that the nation was clearly unable or unwilling to properly care for the people it already had. What possible reason could there be, they queried, for adding any more? Besides, who would listen to requests by the United States for population control when that nation did not control her own profligate reproduction?
Those who opposed population controls for the U.S. were equally vociferous. The military-industrial complex, with its all-too-human mixture of ignorance and avarice, still saw strength and prosperity in numbers. Baby food magnates, already worried by the growing nitrate pollution of their products, saw their market disappearing. Steel manufacturers saw a decrease in aggregate demand and slippage for that holy of holies, the Gross National Product. And military men saw, in the growing population-food-environment crisis, a serious threat to their carefully nurtured Cold War. In the end, of course, economic arguments held sway, and the “inalienable right of every American couple to determine the size of its family,” a freedom invented for the occasion in the early ’70s, was not compromised.
The population control bill, which was passed by Congress early in 1974, was quite a document, nevertheless. On the domestic front, it authorized an increase from 100 to 150 million dollars in funds for “family planning” activities. This was made possible by a general feeling in the country that the growing army on welfare needed family planning. But the gist of the bill was a series of measures designed to impress the need for population control on the UDCs. All American aid to countries with overpopulation problems was required by law to consist in part of population control assistance. In order to receive any assistance each nation was required not only to accept the population control aid, but also to match it according to a complex formula. “Overpopulation” itself was defined by a formula based on U.N. statistics, and the UDCs were required not only to accept aid, but also to show progress in reducing birth rates. Every five years the status of the aid program for each nation was to be re-evaluated.
The reaction to the announcement of this program dwarfed the response to President Kennedy’s speech. A coalition of UDCs attempted to get the U.N. General Assembly to condemn the United States as a “genetic aggressor.” Most damaging of all to the American cause was the famous “25 Indians and a dog” speech by Mr. Shankarnarayan, Indian Ambassador to the U.N. Shankarnarayan pointed out that for several decades the United States, with less than six per cent of the people of the world had consumed roughly 50 per cent of the raw materials used every year. He described vividly America’s contribution to worldwide environmental deterioration, and he scathingly denounced the miserly record of United States foreign aid as “unworthy of a fourth-rate power, let alone the most powerful nation on earth.”
It was the climax of his speech, however, which most historians claim once and for all destroyed the image of the United States. Shankarnarayan informed the assembly that the average American family dog was fed more animal protein per week than the average Indian got in a month. “How do you justify taking fish from protein-starved Peruvians and feeding them to your animals?” he asked. “I contend,” he concluded, “that the birth of an American baby is a greater disaster for the world than that of 25 Indian babies.” When the applause had died away, Mr. Sorensen, the American representative, made a speech which said essentially that “other countries look after their own self-interest, too.” When the vote came, the United States was condemned.
*** [IV.]
This condemnation set the tone of U.S.-UDC relations at the time the Russian Thanodrin proposal was made. The proposal seemed to offer the masses in the UDCs an opportunity to save themselves and humiliate the United States at the same time; and in human affairs, as we all know, biological realities could never interfere with such an opportunity. The scientists were silenced, the politicians said yes, the Thanodrin plants were built, and the results were what any beginning ecology student could have predicted. At first Thanodrin seemed to offer excellent control of many pests. True, there was a rash of human fatalities from improper use of the lethal chemical, but, as Russian technical advisors were prone to note, these were more than compensated for by increased yields. Thanodrin use skyrocketed throughout the underdeveloped world. The Mikoyan design group developed a dependable, cheap agricultural aircraft which the Soviets donated to the effort in large numbers. MIG sprayers became even more common in UDCs than MIG interceptors.
Then the troubles began. Insect strains with cuticles resistant to Thanodrin penetration began to appear. And as streams, rivers, fish culture ponds and onshore waters became rich in Thanodrin, more fisheries began to disappear. Bird populations were decimated. The sequence of events was standard for broadcast use of a synthetic pesticide: great success at first, followed by removal of natural enemies and development of resistance by the pest. Populations of crop-eating insects in areas treated with Thanodrin made steady comebacks and soon became more abundant than ever. Yields plunged, while farmers in their desperation increased the Thanodrin dose and shortened the time between treatments. Death from Thanodrin poisoning became common. The first violent incident occurred in the Canete Valley of Peru, where farmers had suffered a similar chlorinated hydrocarbon disaster in the mid-’50s. A Russian advisor serving as an agricultural pilot was assaulted and killed by a mob of enraged farmers in January, 1978. Trouble spread rapidly during 1978, especially after the word got out that two years earlier Russia herself had banned the use of Thanodrin at home because of its serious effects on ecological systems. Suddenly Russia, and not the United States, was the here noir in the UDCs. “Thanodrin parties" became epidemic, with farmers, in their ignorance, dumping carloads of Thanodrin concentrate into the sea. Russian advisors fled, and four of the Thanodrin plants were leveled to the ground. Destruction of the plants in Rio and Calcutta led to hundreds of thousands of gallons of Thanodrin concentrate being dumped directly into the sea.
Mr. Shankarnarayan again rose to address the U.N., but this time it was Mr. Potemkin, representative of the Soviet Union, who was on the hot seat. Mr. Potemkin heard his nation described as the greatest mass killer of all time as Shankarnarayan predicted at least 30 million deaths from crop failures due to overdependence on Thanodrin. Russia was accused of “chemical aggression,” and the General Assembly, after a weak reply by Potemkin, passed a vote of censure.
It was in January, 1979, that huge blooms of a previously unknown variety of diatom were reported off the coast of Peru. The blooms were accompanied by a massive die-off of sea life and of the pathetic remainder of the birds which had once feasted on the anchovies of the area. Almost immediately another huge bloom was reported in the Indian ocean, centering around the Seychelles, and then a third in the South Atlantic off the African coast. Both of these were accompanied by spectacular die-offs of marine animals. Even more ominous were growing reports of fish and bird kills at oceanic points where there were no spectacular blooms. Biologists were soon able to explain the phenomena: the diatom had evolved an enzyme which broke down Thanodrin; that enzyme also produced a breakdown product which interfered with the transmission of nerve impulses, and was therefore lethal to animals. Unfortunately, the biologists could suggest no way of repressing the poisonous diatom bloom in time. By September, 1979, all important animal life in the sea was extinct. Large areas of coastline had to be evacuated, as windrows of dead fish created a monumental stench.
But stench was the least of man's problems. Japan and China were faced with almost instant starvation from a total loss of the seafood on which they were so dependent. Both blamed Russia for their situation and demanded immediate mass shipments of food. Russia had none to send. On October 13, Chinese armies attacked Russia on a broad front....
*** [V.]
A pretty grim scenario. Unfortunately, we’re a long way into it already. Everything mentioned as happening before 1970 has actually occurred; much of the l rest is based on projections of trends already appearing. Evidence that pesticides have long-term lethal effects on human beings has started to accumulate, and recently Robert Finch, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare expressed his extreme apprehension about the pesticide situation. Simultaneously the petrochemical industry continues its unconscionable poison-peddling. For instance. Shell Chemical has been carrying on a high-pressure campaign to sell the insecticide Azodrin to farmers as a killer of cotton pests. They continue their program even though they know that Azodrin is not only ineffective, but often increases the pest density. They've covered themselves nicely in an advertisement which states, “Even if an overpowering migration [sic] develops, the flexibility of Azodrin lets you regain control fast. Just increase the dosage according to label recommendations.” It’s a great game—get people to apply the poison and kill the natural enemies of the pests. Then blame the increased pests on “migration" and sell even more pesticide!
Right now fisheries are being wiped out by over-exploitation, made easy by modern electronic equipment. The companies producing the equipment know this. They even boast in advertising that only their equipment will keep fishermen in business until the final kill. Profits must obviously be maximixed in the short run. Indeed, Western society is in the process of completing the rape and murder of the planet for economic gain. And. sadly, most of the rest of the world is eager for the opportunity to emulate our behavior. But the underdeveloped peoples will be denied that opportunity—the days of plunder are drawing inexorably to a close.
Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. More than three and a half billion people already populate our moribund globe, and about half of them are hungry. Some 10 to 20 million will starve to death this year. In spite of this, the population of the earth will increase by 70 million souls in 1969. For mankind has artificially lowered the death rate of the human population, while in general birth rates have remained high. With the input side of the population system in high gear and the output side slowed down, our fragile planet has filled with people at an incredible rate. It took several million years for the population to reach a total of two billion people in 1930, while a second two billion will have been added by 1975! By that time some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of World hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980’s. Of course more massive famine may be avoided if other events cause a prior rise in the human death rate.
Both worldwide plague and thermonuclear war are made more probable as population growth continues. These, along with famine, make up the trio of potential "death rate solutions” to the population problem—solutions in which the birth rate-death rate imbalance is redressed by a rise in the death rate rather than by a lowering of the birth rate. Make no mistake about it, the imbalance will be redressed. The shape of the population growth curve is one familiar to the biologist. It is the outbreak part of an outbreak-crash sequence. A population grows rapidly in the presence of abundant resources, finally runs out of food or some other necessity, and crashes to a low level or extinction. Man is not only running out of food, he is also destroying the life support systems of the Spaceship Earth. The situation was recently summarized very succinctly: "It is the top of the ninth inning. Man, always a threat at the plate, has been hitting Nature hard, it is important to remember, however, that NATURE BATS LAST.”
** THREE NOTES FROM EXILE BY ELDRIDGE CLEAVER
*** 1) A Note to my Friends
a T the moment, i'm sitting in a little pad on the beach about 200 yards from the water, and there are people / W passing by my window speaking in a language that Z XI do not understand—the language is not Spanish and this land is not Cuba.
My wife. Kathleen, is lying in another room, her belly swollen with another problem for the pigs. The sky is overcast and a pretty strong wind is working up. driving all the people from the beach and past my window. We are here, but our minds, hearts, and souls are there, in Babylon.
It has come to my attention that there are some Yankees in Babylon who feel that they have both the right and the power to tell others that they are no longer American citizens. They even go so far as to designate the outcast person a citizen of another country, without consulting either the person involved or the government of the country in question. In my case. I hear that 1 have been declared a Cuban by pigs who sit in ivory towers in Washington. D.C.. oinking at the world and its problems and apparently convinced that they are still working out of a brand new bag.
1 can't recall ever finding myself in agreement with these hot-shots on any subject, and I see no reason to start agreeing with them now. So. just to keep the record straight. I'd like to say that I am an American citizen—Afro-American, to be sure—and this latest oink is nothing but a whistle from some pig's ass.
I started working for Ramparts in 1966, while 1 was still in prison, and since that time I've often found myself in situations from which it has been difficult to do my job. However, through our joint efforts we have managed to make things hang together. For my part. I will continue to function as best I can and 1 have no intention of giving up my citizenship at Ramparts either.
Exiles always say that they are going to return, and perhaps at the moment of saying it they really mean it and have every intention of doing so. But something happens and they get locked into this bag, this cold bag of fleeing from the furies of the State. At other times, the situation flips over, turns inside out, and the exiles return. Then the pigs, who thought themselves secure, who went on oinking until the last minute, have to grab their hats and split. And it is not unusual that at such times the former exiles are among those who help put out the all-points bulletins for the pigs. 1 prefer to think of myself as falling in the latter category, that of those who shall return.
Since leaving Babylon. I have been in about eight countries, and in each place I've found much to love; people are beautiful
everywhere, and those whom I've been among, including the people with whom 1 find myself right now. are among the poorest in the world, the victims of centuries of colonialism and exploitation. 1 find myself repeating, beneath my breath, “this shit has to be ended, this shit has to be stopped." And all the while I know that the United States of America is the chief culprit. All this suffering, by all these beautiful people, for whose benefit? Mussolini Alioto, Mickey Mouse Reagan, Milquetoast Nixon, and Bulldog Hoover? No! Not just them, and not just for the puppet masters who pull their strings. But for every Babylonian, even those who are oppressed in Babylon. It seems to me now. after seeing this deep shit, that those who are being squashed in Babylon are being squashed between two pieces of silk.
Other people are being destroyed, starved and killed in our name; it is this that should piss us off most of all. It is no use to say that we were not consulted, that it is all happening against our will, and that we do not have any power. Others have dipped our hands in the blood for us. The point is that the blood is still there, and we are all Babylonians. For my part. 1 feel guilty about this shit, principally because I know that 1 have not done enough to bring it to an end. As long as I am alive and this system which creates all this suffering, all this pain, is also alive. 1 will know that 1 have not done enough. I will not have given my all to destroy it. And it has to be destroyed in its lair—in Babylon. It is for that reason that 1 must return. But that is not the only reason ,1 want to return. There is so much there that 1 love. But why speak of love . . . except that Che was quoted to have said that we must hate our enemies with a revolutionary love....
One last word. I think that we have all been sold a trick— this shit about us being powerless—by the pigs who benefit from the sale. In the formal sense, yes. we have been organized out of the power structure. But we still have the ultimate power: the power to overturn systems, to smash power structures, and to bring pigs to justice. We have that power, and the pigs tremble when they think of it because they know it's true, even if we don't.
[postscript: on surfacing]
July 17, 1969. 4 p.m. Algiers, Algeria.
So NOW IT IS official. I was starting to think that perhaps it never would be. For the past eight months. I’ve been scooting around the globe as a non-person, ducking into doorways at the sight of a camera, avoiding
English-speaking people like the plague. I used so many names that my own was out of focus. I trained myself not to react if 1 heard the name Eldridge Cleaver called, and learned instead to respond naturally, spontaneously, to my cover names. Anyone who thinks this is easy to do should try it. For my part, I’m glad that it is over.
This morning we held a press conference, thus putting an end to all the hocus-pocus. Two days ago, the Algerian government announced that I had arrived here to participate in the historic First Pan-African Cultural Festival. After that, there was no longer any reason not to reach for the telephone and call home, so the first thing I did was to call my mother in Los Angeles. “Boy, where are you at?” she asked. It sounded as though she expected me to answer, “Right around the corner, mom,” or “Up here in San Francisco,” so that when I said I was in Africa, in Algeria, it was clear that her mind was blown, for her response was, “Africa? You can't make no phone call from Africa!" That’s my mom. She doesn't relate to all this shit about phone calls across the ocean when there are no phone poles. She has both her feet on the ground, and it is clear that she intends to keep them there.
It is clear to me now that there are forms of imprisonment other than the kind I left Babylon to avoid, for immediately upon splitting that scene 1 found myself incarcerated in an anonymity, the walls of which were every bit as thick as those of Folsom Prison. I discovered, to my surprise, that it is impossible to hold a decent conversation without making frequent references to one’s past. So I found myself creating personal histories spontaneously, off the top of my head, and I felt bad about that because I know that I left many people standing around scratching their heads. The shit that I had to run down to them just didn't add up.
Now all that is over. So what? What has really changed? Alioto is still crazy and mayor. Ronald Reagan is still Mickey Mouse. Nixon is in the White House and the McClellan Committee is investigating the Black Panther Party. And Huey P. Newton is still in prison. I cannot make light of this shit because it is getting deeper. And here we are in Algeria. What is a cat from Arkansas, who calls San Francisco home, doing in Algeria? And listen to Kathleen behind me talking over the telephone in French. With a little loosening of the will, I could easily flip out right now!
I’ve always been amazed at the audacity of people who, when you criticize the United States government, or aspects of the society with which you disagree and which you would like to see changed, say to you, “Why don’t you go to Russia, or China, or Cuba?”—or whatever country happens to be on the State Department’s shit list at the moment. Just like that, off the tip of their lips, and I suppose they think they are being cute or taking a sound position. Many of the reporters who have been calling me up on the telephone from the United States have fallen into that pattern. “I hear you're homesick, and you want to return to the U.S." And then they go on. and this is the part that gets next to my rage: “Well, since you criticized the U.S. so strongly while you were here, why do you want to come back?" Is that a good question? 1 think not. To me it represents the worst smug, self-satisfied strain in the Babylonian mentality.
Well, it just happens that that is the kind of nigger this nigger just happens to be. And when I say that I'm homesick, it is not in the spirit of recantation, but in the spirit of focusing
in, ever more finely, on the Babylonian contempt for the rights of others that stands between me and where I want to be.
And so I say to these reporters that there is one question to consider: What will be the form of my return to Babylon? Inside my skull I know of only three possibilities: Rescind the decision of the California Adult Authority ordering me returned to prison, and I will catch the first plane out of here, or wherever else I may happen to be when I gel the word. Restore my right to my day in court on the charges for which I was indicted in Oakland, and 1 will be there when some pig of a judge bangs his gavel down and calls the court to order. That is my choice, and I think it is what every man deserves. If not that, then J. Edgar Hoover has to catch me and drag me back, but this, obviously, will be vigorously opposed. What’s left is the quiet passage back, and just as the pigs were unable to prevent me from leaving, they are unable to prevent me from returning, not knowing when, where, or how.
I don't know any other way of dealing with all this, and 1 can't help it if I'm obsessed with the idea that the madness in America does not have to last forever, that it can be grappled with and changed. 1 believe that the American revolution can and will be made in my lifetime, and I know that I want to help make it. I know that I would die of a broken heart were I to remain outside of Babylon and neglect the sense of duty that I have toward my people, toward my compatriots and toward the land in which I was born. I am not going to turn my back on America and I am not going to allow America to turn its back on me. All that has happened thus far 1 regard as neither a victory nor a defeat, but rather a flanking action from which to move again.
During the days of my blindness, of my evil deeds, I played with my life and risked it for the wind. But in these good days when I know that I am not fucking over anybody, but rather doing what 1 can in the movement to stop people from being fucked over, I dig the gamble involved. I know that I have bet my life—with no regrets, but with a relish that comes from knowing that I am doing my thing and that 1 dig doing it.
So I have to return to Babylon, to live or die in Babylon— but to fight, as it is only human to do. And the adversaries to be confronted are not super-beings from another planet. They are only other cats and other chicks who are in a pig bag.
In the meantime, the Pan-African Cultural Festival is about to begin. Folks are streaming in from all over the world to participate, to look at each other, and perhaps to conceive or communicate fantastic thoughts. The Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Parly. David Hilliard, is here, and so is Emory Douglas, our Minister of Culture, who will put on an exhibit of his revolutionary art. Bob Scheer, editor of Ramparts magazine, is here, and so is one of my attorneys; others will be coming. (Is the C1A/FBI already here or coming? Fuck them!) Ex-Prime Minister Stokely Carmichael, rumor has it. is arriving tomorrow. Yesterday, rumor had it he was arriving today. Miriam Makeba is coming with Stokely, and I wonder if I will get a chance to see her perform, or will 1 be barred, blocked by some strange wisdom that will blow my mind? My mind is already blown, wide open, because I dig life. And when I die, my death will be the price 1 paid to live. Right on! Power to the people. Oink to the pigs.
From left to right: Stokely Carmichael & Bobby Seale by Jeffrey Blankfort.
*** 2) An Open Letter to Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael, Conakry, Guinea:
Your letter of resignation as the Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party came, I think, about one year too late. As a matter of fact, since the day of your appointment to that position—February 17, 1968—events have proven that you were not cut out for the job in the first place. Even then it was clear that your position on coalition with revolutionary white organizations was in conflict with that of the Black Panther Party. But we thought that, in time, even you would be able to shake the SNCC paranoia about white control and get on with the business of building the type of revolutionary machinery that we need in the United States in order to unite all the revolutionary forces in the country to overthrow the system of Capitalism, Imperialism and Racism.
I know these terms are kicked around like lifeless bodies and that it is easy to allow the grisly realities behind them to become obscured by too frequent repetition. But when you see the squalor in which people live as a result of the policies of the exploiters, when you see the effects of exploitation on the emaciated bodies of little children, when, you see the hunger and desperation, then these terms come alive in a new way. Since you’ve made this trip yourself and seen it all with your own eyes, you should know that suffering is colorblind, that the victims of Imperialism, Racism, Colonialism and Neo-colonialism come in all colors, and that they need a unity based on revolutionary principles rather than skin color.
The other charges which you make in your letter—about our new-found ideology, our dogmatism, our arm-twisting, etc.—seem to me to be of secondary importance, because, with the exception, perhaps, of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, you are the most dogmatic cat on the scene today, and I’ve
never known you to be opposed to twisting arms or, for that matter, necks. In many ways your letter struck me as being an echo and rehash of the charges brought against the party by the bootlickers before the McClellan Committee. And since you chose this moment to denounce the party, we—and I am sure many other people outside the party—must look upon your letter in this light. The only point in your letter that I think is really you is the one about co.alitioh with whites, because it has been this point on which our differences have turned from the very beginning.
You have never been able to distinguish the history of the Black Panther Party from the history of the organization of which you were once the chairman—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It is understandable that you .can have such fears of black organizations being controlled, or partly controlled, by whites, because most of your years in SNCC were spent under precisely those conditions. But the Black Panther Party has never been in that situation. Because we have never had to wrest control of our organization out of the hands of whites, we have not been shackled with the type of paranoid fear that was developed by you cats in SNCC. Therefore we are able to sit down with whites and hammer out solutions to our common problems without trembling in our boots about whether or not we might get taken over in the process. It has always seemed to me that you belittle the intelligence of your black brothers and sisters when you constantly warn them that they had better, beware of white folks. After all, you are not the only black person out of Babylon who has been victimized by white racism. ‘But you sound as though you are scared of white people, as though you are still running away from slave-catchers who will lay hands on your body and dump you in a bag.
As a matter of fact, it has been precisely your nebulous
enunciation of Black Power that has provided the power structure with its new weapon against our people. The Black Panther Party tried to give you a chance to rescue Black Power from the pigs who have seized upon it and turned it into the rationale for Black Capitalism. With James Farmer in the Nixon Administration to preside over the implementation of Black Capitalism under the slogan of Black Power, what value does that slogan now have to our people’s struggle for liberation? Is denouncing the Black Panther Party the best you can do to combat this evil? I would think that your responsibility goes a little further than that. Even though you were right when you said that LBJ would never stand up and call for Black Power, Nixon has done so and he’s bankrolling it with millions of dollars. So now your old Black Power buddies are cashing in on your slogan. In effect, your cry for Black Power has become the grease to ease the black bourgeoisie into the power structure.
By giving you the position of Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, we were trying to rescue you from the black bourgeoisie that had latched on to your coattails and was riding you like a mule. Now they have stolen your football and run away for a touchdown: six points for Richard Milhouse Nixon.
In February 1968, at the Free Fluey Birthday Rally in Oakland. California, where you made your first public speech after returning to the United States from your triumphant tour of the revolutionary countries of the Third World, you took the occasion to denounce the coalition that the Black Panther Party had made with the white Peace and Freedom Party. What you called for instead was a Black United Front that would unite all the forces in the black community from left to right, close ranks against the whites, and all go skipping off to freedom. Within the ranks of your Black United Front you wanted to include the Cultural Nationalists, the Black Capitalists, and the Professional Uncle Toms, even though it was precisely these three groups who were working to murder your shit even before it broke wind. (Remember what Ron Karenga did to your meeting in Los Angeles?)
YOU HAD GREAT DREAMS IN THOSE DAYS, Stokely, and your visions, on the top side, were heroic. On the bottom side, when it came to the details of reality, your vision was blind. You were unable to distinguish your friends from your enemies because all you could see was the color of the cat’s skin. It was this blindness that led you to the defense of Adam Clayton Powell, that Jackal from Harlem, when he came under attack by his brother jackals in Congress. And it was this blindness that led you to the defense of that black cop in Washington. D.C., who was being fucked over by the whites above him in the Police Department .for whom he carried his gun as he patrolled the black community. In short, your habit of looking at the world through black-colored glasses would lead you, on the domestic level, to close ranks with such enemies of black people as James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins and Ron Karenga; and on the international level you would end up in the same bag with Papa Doc Duvalier, Joseph Mobutu, and Haile Selassie. Yes, we opposed that shit then and we oppose it now even more strongly, especially since the Nixon Administration has stolen your program from you and, I think, included you out.
And now you are going to liberate Africa! Where are you
going to start, Ghana? The Congo? Biafra? Angola? Mozambique? South Africa? If you are not aware of it, I think that you should know that the brothers in Africa who are involved in armed struggle against the Colonialists would like nothing better than for you to pack up your suitcase full of African souvenirs and split back to Babylon. They have never forgiven the fat-mouthing you did in Dar-es-Salaam when you presumed to tell them how to conduct their business. It seems to me that you are now trapped between the extremes of your own rhetoric. On the one hand, you have cut yourself off from the struggle in Babylon, and on the other hand, you are not about to become the Redeemer of Mother Africa.
The enemies of black people have learned something from history even if you haven’t, and they are discovering new ways to divide us faster than we are discovering new ways to unite. One thing they know, and we know, that seems to escape you, is that there is not going to be any revolution or black liberation in the United States as long as revolutionary blacks, whites, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Chinese and Eskimos are unwilling or unable to unite into some functional machinery that can cope with the situation. Your talk and fears about premature coalition are absurd, because no coalition against oppression by forces possessing revolutionary integrity can ever be premature. If anything, it is too late, because the forces of counterrevolution are sweeping the world, and this is happening precisely because in the past people have been united on a basis that perpetuates disunity among races and ignores basic revolutionary principles and analyses.
You are peeved because the Black Panther Party informs itself with the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism, but if you look around the world you will see that the only countries which have liberated themselves and managed to withstand the tide of the counterrevolution are precisely those countries that have strong Marxist-Leninist parties. All those countries that have fought for their liberation solely on the basis of nationalism have fallen victims to capitalism and neo-colonialism. and in many cases now find themselves under tyrannies equally as oppressive as the former colonial regimes.
That you know nothing about the revolutionary process is clear; that you know even less about the United States and its people is clearer; and that you know still less about humanity than you do about the rest is even clearer. You speak about an “undying love for black people.” An undying love for black people that denies the humanity of other people is doomed. It was an undying love of white people for each other which led them to deny the humanity of colored people and which has stripped white people of humanity itself. It would seem to me that an undying love for our people would, at the very least, lead you to a strategy that would aid our struggle for liberation instead of leading you into a coalition of purpose with the McClellan Committee in its attempt to destroy the Black Panther Party.
Well, so long, Stokely, and take care. And beware of some white folks and of some black folks, because I assure you that some of both of them have teeth that will bite. Remember what Brother Malcolm said in his Autobiography: “We had the best organization that the black man has ever had in the United States—and niggers ruined it!”Power to the People! —Eldridge Cleaver, Minister oj Information. Black Panther
Party. July, 1969.
*** 3) On Meeting the Needs of the People
Back during the days when I was still running around in Babylon talking crazy about the pigs, if anyone had told me that someday I'd find myself in this exile situation trying to send a message back about the Black Panther Party's Breakfast for Children program and the white radicals of Berkeley with their People’s Park, I probably would have taken it as a put-down. But it’s all for real, and what is more I find myself very enthusiastic about these developments.
Both of these actions expose the contradiction between the pretenses of the system and the needs of the people. They stand as an assertion that the pigs of the power structure are not fulfilling their duties and that the people are moving, directly, to fill their own needs and redress their grievances. And the pigs in turn, with their hostile response to both of these programs, clearly expose themselves as enemies of the people.
Breakfast for Children and the People’s Park are qualitatively ditferent types of actions from ’anything we have been into in the past. They represent a move from theory to practice and implementation. The pigs cannot argue against the substance of these programs, even though they hate the forces that have brought them about. In fact, they will move to co-opt the programs and to drive a wedge between the programs and the vanguard forces that launched them. This has been the strategy of ruling classes all through history, because they really have no other choice—given their determination to hang on to power until it is wrenched from their grasp—and even this never really works, except to buy them time. It can only be tragic when the vanguard forces allow themselves to get co-opted. On the one hand, the pigs will pressure the vanguard—they will make liberal use of the Big Stick—but at the same time they will use the carrot. For instance, they will try to get Jerry Rubin to become the director of a City Park, and Bobby Seale to become the headwaiter in a statewide Nutrition Supplement program.
I have a question: Will my child ever be able to sit down to a Black Panther breakfast, and will Kathleen and I, with our child—and I'm counting this Panther before he claws his way out of the womb—ever be able to visit the People's Park? What we need is some liberated territory in Babylon that we are willing and prepared to defend, so that all the exiles, fugitives, draft-dodgers, and runaway slaves can return to help finish the job.
The black and white communities are controlled by the same ruling class. Towards black people this ruling class uses racism as a tool of oppression, turning this oppression into a National Question. In the white community, oppression is a Class Question, provoking the response of Class Struggle. And when we see clearly that we’re only dealing with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we recognize the beauty of the response of the people. We recognize that the Breakfast for Children program and the People’s Park are authentic and accurate responses to the situations of black people and white people in Babylon.
Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organized into their
poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty. This is liberation in practice. In the white mother country where class struggle is the appropriate tactic and expropriation of the expropriators the proper means to revolution, the act of seizing that land and establishing a People’s Park could not have been more to the point. So it is clear that the people are always able to discover a way of moving. Out of their practice they develop new theory that sheds light on future ways of moving.
If we can understand Breakfast for Children, can we not also understand Lunch for Children, and Dinner for Children, and Clothing for Children, and Education for Children, and Medical Care for Children? And if we can understand that, why can't we understand not only a People's Park, but People's Housing, and People's Transportation, and People's Industry, and People's Banks? And why can't we understand a People's Government?
It is very curious that the Breakfast for Children program was born in West Oakland, which can be categorized as one of the most oppressed areas in Babylon, and that the People's Park, on the other hand, was born in Berkeley, which can be categorized as one of the least oppressed areas. I think this is how we have traditionally looked upon these two contrasting areas. Of white people, those in Berkeley thought that they were amongst the freest in the land, and of black people, those in West Oakland knew that they were amongst the most oppressed. So we have these two very significant developments, one in the most oppressed area and the other in the least oppressed area. And it's very instructive to notice that on the one hand there is an attempt to fill the emptiness of want, of need, and of deprivation that the system of oppression and colonization leaves in the lives of a people. Here people are fighting for the essentials of survival, fighting for food for children, fighting for what it takes just to survive. On the other hand, in the least oppressed area, we see a fight which at a superficial glance can be mistaken for a fight for leisure. But we must look upon the fight for the People's Park as an in-road into the system, because it poses the question of basic rearrangements in the system itself. And this is really the crucial question in our overall struggle, for in Babylon there is not really a scarcity of goods, and there is, objectively, no real reason why there can’t be people’s parks, because the land is available and the wherewithal to build such parks is there in abundance. But the capitalists, who must first see the
prospects of a profit before they make any distribution of the resources, do not see a profit in a park for the people. And they see no percentage, beyond underwriting some marginal goodwill in the community or good public relations, in the Breakfast for Children program. They see this program as a threat, as cutting into the goods that are under their control. They see it as cutting into the expendable portion of their possessions. These two questions pose the basic problem that radicals have to deal with in Babylon; ultimately, they both pose precisely the same question. It is ortly because they start from such divergent sources that they give the appearance of being worlds apart. One springs from needs that are obvious and basic, and people can relate to them on that basis, while the other springs from an area that we are not accustomed to looking upon as basic to survival. People can readily relate to the need to eat breakfast, but it is possible that they cannot see the need for a park. They can see life continuing without a park but they would be more concerned about attempting, to perpetuate life without food.
Revolution, in its essence, means precisely the rearrangement of a system. Many people think of revolution only as overt violence—as guns shooting ‘-■and conflagrations, as flames leaping into the air, bodies in the streets and the uprising masses storming city hall. This is only one phase of the revolutionary process, and the violence is not an end in itself but only the means through which the necessary power is seized so that the rearrangements in the system can be carried out. It is the means for expropriating the land, the natural resources, the machines, all the means of production, the institutions of society—for taking them out of the control, out of the hands of those who now have them and who have abused them, who have perverted these things and have converted them into instruments with which to pursue their own private gain at the expense of the wider public good.
Ironically, many of the oppressed people themselves do not feel that they have a right to the things that a revolutionary program demands in their name. They have guilt feelings about it. They recognize and relate to people having food to eat and a park for their children to play in. But when the pigs of the power structure oink their lying tears, bemoaning the outlaw nature of the movement, these politically unaware people who are not firm in their ideology will get up-tight and feel guilty. They can even be made to feel that they are doing something wrong or something that is immoral, and they can be manipulated because of this feeling. It is necessary to dispel this feeling, because what it flows from is indoctrination with the myth of private property, the myth and the cluster of beliefs that have been spawned by the soothsayers of greed in order to sanctify their possession of the earth under the guise of private property.
We are trapped between our visions of what life could be like and what it really is: a People’s Government in which a rational arrangement is made, and the present reality—helicopters dispatched over college campuses to spread clouds of noxious gasses in order to intimidate the people and to stifle their protests; troops marching in battle formation down our streets; sharpshooters in the uniforms of the guardians of the law, taking aim, taking deadly aim, at citizens, actually aiming at vital spots of the body, actually pulling triggers, and
actually killing people. And we stare dumbly, and we wonder, and we feel impotent and intimidated because we know that they have the guns, and they have the courts, and they have the prisons.
In a recent issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper which reported on the first casualty of the battle for the People's Park, an essential question was raised: “The white mother country radicals have demonstrated that they are willing to lay down their lives in the struggle, but the question still begs an answer—are they willing to pick up the gun?” This gives rise to another question. After picking up the gun, whom do we shoot?
We must get it clear in our minds that we will shoot anyone who uses a gun. or causes others to use guns, to defend the system of oppression, racism, and exploitation. And the issues of the People’s Park and the Breakfast for Children program clearly convey that we are moving beyond the racist pig cops to confront the avaricious businessmen and the demagogic politicians, because we have to ask ourselves who sends the cops and the National Guard, and who they are there to protect.
We have nothing to gain by deluding ourselves or by seeking ways to evade the reality, the terrible reality, that confronts us. We must face the fact that we are at war in America. Not everyone realizes that there is a war going on. Some of us understand theoretically that in a capitalistic economy the relationship between the ruling class and the ruled has been defined as a relationship of struggle, of war, but even so it is as though we have been reading some mysterious sociological poetry that stimulates the fat inside our skulls and gives us some sort of secret thrill. Others of us are so nit- pickingly fanatical that we cannot assess the reality before our very eyes—the reality in which we ourselves are participants and which our own work has helped bring about—unless we can read it in a book written a hundred years ago in another country, under vastly different circumstances which do not begin to approximate the gigantic proportions of the task which rests so smotheringly upon our shoulders.
The principles that have been learned from our experience with the People’s Park and the Breakfast for Children program, I think, will take root in the minds of radicals all over the United States. Myself, I’m tired of using the terms “radicals” and “militants,” and I prefer to use the term “revolutionaries,” because if we are not involved in a Revolution, and if we don’t understand ourselves to be revolutionaries, then there is very little that we can really hope to do. But if we understand ourselves to be revolutionaries, and if we accept our historic task, then we can move beyond the halting steps that we’ve been taking, beyond the Stupid Revolution, and gain the revolutionary audacity to take the actions needed to unlock and focus the great revolutionary spirit of the people. All they need is to get their teeth into a pig’s ass, or to see the ace up the avaricious businessman’s sleeve or the lies in the teeth of the demagogic politicians. Then there will be a new day in Babylon, there will be a housecleaning in Babylon, and we can halt the machinery of oppression, purge our institutions of racism, and put the oppressors up against the wall—or maybe more appropriately, up against the fence that they have built around the People’s Park.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
The south mall building complex now rising ponderously over a 100-acre expanse of downtown Albany, New York, is the largest building project ever undertaken at one time in the Western world, and the most ambitious construction boondoggle since the pyramids. Critics have peevishly dubbed it “the Nelson Rockefeller Pyramid.” But one day it will no doubt be officially designated “the Nelson Rockefeller South Mall,” as it is more than anything else a monument to him: the product of the governor's own triumphant vision of the state capital transformed by his tenure.
Governor Rockefeller is noted for the infrequency of his visits to Albany; he has never been fond of his dreary capital, but the South Mall is his delight. When flying over the city in one of the family planes, he often has the pilot circle the Mall construction so the passengers can get a good look at it from the air. It will be, says Rockefeller, “the most spectacularly beautiful seat of government anywhere in the world.”
The estimated construction cost of Rockefeller’s Mall, originally set at $350 million, is already past $600 million and is rising rapidly all the time. New York State Controller Arthur Levitt says the total cost will be more than SI billion, and Levitt is considered conservative in his estimates. If the cost escalation continues at its present rate, an ultimate price tag of SI.5 billion is possible.
That would be 15 times the cost of the plush U.S. Senate Office Building, the exorbitant expense of which caused a national furor a few years ago. Even the celebrated urban renewal program of New Haven, Connecticut (a larger city than Albany), by far the most comprehensive renewal program in the nation and the most expensive per capita, has cost less than S300 million for all its construction projects over the last 16 years.
But the Mall is not urban renewal; it was conceived and designed as a monument—a 100-acre sculpture. (In reviewing the Mall plans, the editor of Progressive Architecture likened one building to a “half a cantaloupe sliced on the bias” and termed the whole design “an exercise in architectural pop art.”) Because it was designed as a sculpture, the Mall has developed into an architec- J tural brontosaurus with form and mass completely overwhelming function. But even its disfunctionality comes at a
| premium. State Controller Levitt, who I must keep track of mundane considerations of utility, estimates that the cost of usable space in the South Mall structures will be about $100 per square foot—almost three times the average of $36 for commercial space in New York City.
Forcing the Mall’s various functional facilities into its unwieldy monumental form has required a steady stream of revised blueprints and fresh expenditures. GeneralCortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, commissioner of the State Office of General Services which oversees the Mall construction, reports that some plans have been sent back to the drawing boards as many as ten times.
One particularly difficult engineering problem that confronted the Mali’s builders was providing quarters for the State Health Department’s virology and radiology laboratories, which use infectious viruses and radioactive materials in their work. The problem was solved by burying the two laboratories three floors under the Mall platform at the base of the 44-story skyscraper. Special shielding is to be provided for the radiology laboratory, and a ventilating system in the virology laboratory will change the air 15 times an hour. The Rube Goldberg plan calls for huge fans to drive the exhaust 640 feet up a ventilation shaft past the 44 office floors, propelling it into the air high above the Mall. The cost of the ventilation shaft will fall somewhere between $5- and $10 million—a sum which would ordinarily pay for an entire laboratory.
But the most staggering expenditure on the South Mall is for the huge platform itself—a structure that is little more than a handsome, nonfunctional base for the Mall buildings. The original cost estimate for the platform was $81 million, but only one bid was submitted and it was high: $97 million. Thereupon the state's construction consultants re-eval- uated their original estimate, increasing it to $97 million, and the contract—the largest in the state's history—was awarded to the lone bidder. Now it seems even $97 million is not sufficient. Contractors working on the platform have said they intend to file claims against
Mister Rockefeller
Builds His Dream House
the state for additional expenses, and these could bring the platform's total cost to the $120 million mark.
Practically all sections of the Mall are behind schedule and above estimates. It was even necessary to seek legislation this year to establish special procedures । for the flood of claims being filed against the state by contractors due to delays and increased costs. Controller Levitt analyzes the syndrome: “The fact is that the State has compressed this building into too short a period of time, during an inflationary era ... it has intensified the pattern of overspending and overborrowing. The symptoms of the disease are now upon us: unreliable estimates, lack of normal competition, escalation in cost, rising interest costs and a heavy financial burden which will grow with each coming fiscal year.”
In other words, haste makes waste. And Nelson Rockefeller did exhibit rather unseemly haste in trying to get his project decisively launched while he remained in office. But although work on it began shortly after he took office in 1959, it was delayed by a two-fold political problem that had to be solved before a shovel could be turned: how to avoid submitting the preposterous project for the approval of the taxpayers who would have to pay for it, while assuring a piece of the action to those forces whose approval was needed.
[an issue of bonds]
In 1961 the state of New York appropriated $150,000 to study plans for refurbishing the capital. But studies don't cut any political ice. Even Nelson Rockefeller, with his impressively influential background—cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, soccer player, amateur cellist, Sunday school teacher, art collector and experienced Latin American diplomat—needed cooperation to put the Mall scheme over. For the sake of his expansive vision, he had to concern himself with the petty vulgarity of local politics. In particular he needed the cooperation of one Daniel P. O'Connell —sailor, convicted gambler, cock-fighting enthusiast and longtime Albany County Democratic Party chairman. Dan
** by W. David Gardner
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Photographs of the South Mall (in model form) by Carl Howard
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RAMPARTS 37
O'Connell, with his Democratic machine. had controlled the city of Albany for almost 50 years. There would be no deals without his consent. These two contrasting personages were spared a personal encounter since O'Connell, now 83, has for years led a secluded life, watching ball games on TV, saying his rosary and ruling Albany from his modest frame house where political aides report to him regularly. (O'Connell hasn't trusted the telephone since state investigators tapped his lines during the Republican administration of Thomas Dewey.)
O'Connell sent his patrician emissary, Albany Mayor Erastus Corning, a Yale Phi Beta Kappa, to negotiate with Rockefeller. But although the governor and the mayor were old friends and had ' summered together in swank Bar Harbor as youths, things went poorly. The next year, in 1962, when Rockefeller publicly I announced his plan for the South Mall, the Albany Democrats reacted swiftly and firmly: court action was instituted which threatened to tie up the project for | years. But aside from the courts, the local politicians had other leverage on the governor: he needed their help for a financing scheme that would not require a state bond issue which the voters would certainly turn down.
Meanwhile. Rockefeller’s political time appeared to be running out. His charisma was flagging, his recent divorce and subsequent remarriage had been a blow to his political image, and even Rockefeller himself was pessimistic about his chances of re-election. He was struggling to bring the Mall project to the point where it would be difficult for a possible Democratic successor in the 1966 election to scrap it. “Your procrastination has already delayed this vital project too long,” Rockefeller complained in a letter to Mayor Corning in December 1964, observing that he had been trying to negotiate a financial settlement for the past 20 months.
During this period, O'Connell, through Mayor Corning, was pressing his advantage, demanding a variety of special favors for Albany that would amount to millions of dollars over the years. One by one, Rockefeller accepted the points, but the Albany Democrats kept raising the ante. In the end, Rockefeller conceded to most of the demands, including some he had previously denounced as “preposterous and totally unacceptable." An agreement was reached.
The financing arrangement that was worked out for the Mall is reminiscent of the Catch 22 ingenuity of Milo Minderbinder. The state takes the land from the private owners and transfers it to Albany County, which markets a bond issue to pay for it. Then the state leases it from the county, giving the county the money to pay off the bonds. The state eventually takes ownership when the bonds are retired in 2004. There are many built-in advantages to this arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that it is so complicated that few people understand it. The key to the agreement is that it allows the bonds to be sold by the county instead of the state—county bond issues do not require voter approval in New York State.
New York State taxpayers got their first indication of just what this financial flim-flam would cost them when the first $70 million batch of Albany County bonds was sold in February 1966. The interest rate was 3.845 per cent (tax free) —nearly one half a percentage point more than had been expected. “The people," said Controller Levitt at the time, “were soaked $4.5 million [in] extra interest charges because their governor has a penchant for ‘imaginative financing.’ ” Levitt observed that the in
terest rate on voter-approved bond issues is generally substantially lower than on those not subject to a vote.
The county bonds also had an advantage over city bonds, which had previously been planned until Mayor Corning suddenly changed his mind. If the city had sold the bonds, conflict-of- interest regulations might have prevented the mayor’s insurance firm, Albany Associates, from doing business with Mall contractors. Albany Associates has written workmen’s compensation, liability and disability insurance policies for at least one construction firm working on the South Mall.
[who lives on the mall?]
Among those who did not have to be consulted about the plans for the Mall were the 9000 people—most of them poor and black—whose homes would be destroyed to make way for it. In fact, the Albany politicians are notable for having anticipated Daniel Moynihan in making a principle of Minimum Feasible Participation of the Poor. The city consistently rejected federal poverty programs because of the role poor people would have in running them. As late as February 1967, Albany was the largest metropolitan area in the nation, North or South, without an anti-poverty program. (The OEO finally managed to get around the local government to deal with private agencies.)
In light of this, one might be surprised at the compassionate -affirmation made by Mayor Corning about the Mall project in 1962: "The first step in this project, if any human consideration is to be given to the people living in the area, is to plan and start building the housing needed. Then and only then should the land be taken, section by section, after our people are relocated. Leave our people secure in their homes until there are places for them to go. Avoid deliberately and callously creating grief and hardship. Do not build this magnificent monument on a foundation of human misery."
The occasion for the mayor’s statement was the filing of the law suit intended to block Rockefeller until he came to terms. The suit was based on the need to protect the interests of the poor residents. The state expressed similar concern about housing for those then living in the Mall area. Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson said of the project in 1962: “One of its integral features
involves comprehensive plans for functional new housing facilities in other areas of the city to provide clean, decent accommodations for those who eventually will be displaced by the redevelopment program.”
Strangely enough, as soon as the Mall financing had been satisfactorily arranged, the lieutenant governor and the mayor quieted down about the need for new housing for displaced residents. When the 9000 persons were forced out of their homes five years ago, not a single unit of public housing had been built for them. No such housing has been built since and none is planned for the future. On the other hand, slum lords, apartment owners, and those who owned businesses or their own homes in the area were paid generously for their holdings.
The initial plans did call for construction of 442 units of low and middle income housing at the Mall. This would have been only a fraction of the 3000 units that had been lost, but it would have been something. However, Rockefeller received complaints that the housing would be too expensive for poor people, so he canceled it. A curious solution, but it showed that the Mall had not entirely robbed him of his sense of thrift.
Meanwhile, in 1967, the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Housing investigated the state’s Upstate cities and reported that Albany had the “worst slums” in Upstate New York. And the committee’s chairman, State Senator Whitney Seymour, Jr., commented on the lack of any effective program to improve the situation.
The South Mall project will contribute much to the community; it seems that everyone will get a piece of the pie. The smart real estate operators will make their killing; the local political fiefdom will fill its coffers; the bankers will juggle their hundreds of millions in tax-free bond interest; the State Department of Health will have its 640-foot ventilation shaft; and Nelson Rockefeller will have his monument. And after the Mall is completed and the pie is all sliced up, the poor blacks who used to live there- having been largely barred from the construction work itself—will, as black militant Leon Van Dyke observed, be invited back to clean up the crumbs.
Free-lance writer David Garner formerly worked as a reporter in Albany, N. Y.
** 20,000 GUNS UNDER THE SEA
Largely overlooked in the hysteria surrounding North Korea's capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo early in 1968 was the presence of two civilian oceanographers / among the ship's 83-man crew. The two, Harry R. Iredale and Dunnie R. Tuck. Jr., were middle-grade civil servants whose relatively unglamorous job was charting the bottom of the ocean on the underwater continental shelf off the coast of North Korea. Iredale and Tuck might have been acting in violation of the 1958 Geneva Convention, which makes it illegal for one nation to chart another’s continental shelf without explicit permission; but the U.S. government, already involved in an espionage operation, was willing to chance it. The oceanographers on the Pueblo were merely acting out the undersea aspect of the nation's military policy. For the Navy and the weapons planners in the Pentagon have already decided that much of tomorrow's arms race will be a Jules Verne affair, staged in the 71 per cent of the world which is under water.
The Navy’s current plans evoke science fiction, but with a terrifyingly real nuclear dimension. Deep-running, quiet submarines will circulate near the ocean floor, 6000 feet below the surface, each one capable of hurling megaton-force missiles at targets more than 5000 miles away. Underwater cities with depots and nuclear recharging facilities will service these vessels. Undersea shelters will provide rest and relaxation for crews, while functioning also as observation points to spy on enemy submarines. Specially trained aquanauts, breathing an oxygen-filled fluid instead of air, will be able to overcome sea pressure and make repairs to equipment as they swim freely thousands of feet below the ocean's surface.
Any doubts that this scenario is well on its way to becoming a reality should be dispelled by the fact that an oceanographic version of the military-industrial complex is already in full bloom in this country. Most of the major aerospace corporations have seen which way the defense currents are running and have quickly involved themselves in undersea warfare work over the past five years. Among the leaders are Westinghouse, Lockheed, Chrysler, Sperry Gyroscope, General Dynamics, Goodyear Aerospace and the Stanford Research Institute. Universities and academic institutes are also playing their part. Among those now heavily researching defense- related oceanography are the University of Miami, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, the Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, and the universities of Oregon. Washington and Hawaii.
With the corporations and the academies in its corner, the Navy is rapidly proceeding with its long-range strategy for turning the ocean bottom into an armed camp. Most of its plans to militarize the ocean floor center around its Deep Submergence Program (DSP), which includes the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) to research and develop deep-diving submarines, and the Deep Ocean Technology Project (DOT) to study the potential and the apparatus for undersea military bases. Although these programs are the key to the Navy’s plans for the ’70s, their military implications are consistently disguised or played down by Pentagon officials.
Officially, the Navy claims that the DSSP's highest priority is the development of a deep-diving vehicle and system for rescuing crews from disabled submarines and for recovering objects (like lost hydrogen bombs) from the floor of the ocean at depths up to 20,000 feet. Similarly, an article in the Defense Industry Bulletin, published monthly by the Pentagon’s public relations office, describes the Navy’s DOT program as having
. . perhaps the greatest potential benefit to the nation’s nonmilitary needs.” In the annual report of the Navy's Ocean Engineering Program, however, a document which is not publicly distributed, there is a different description of DOT: "This program is to provide the Navy with a technological base from which options for improving the present undersea warfare systems and developing future ones can be selected.”
Another emphasis of Navy public relations is its dramatization of the crucial importance of undersea developments to American business—in terms both of oceanographic research (on which the Navy has a monopoly) and protection for undersea commercial ventures. Press releases constantly refer to the fantastic potential for underwater mining of minerals and seafoods. Thus, Admiral David L. McDonald could tell the Navy League in 1967: "There is, right now. a major worldwide investment in the seabeds. For example, more than S2 billion a year is being invested in offshore oil alone . . . minerals are being mined commercially in various areas. The potential wealth of the sea may be of far greater importance to the world of today than the wealth of India ever was to Columbus'world in 1491.”
Such talk about exploiting the seabed for commercial purposes is the basis for a simple, effective argument: we must protect our commercial undersea investors from enemy attacks or sabotage. This was made most explicit by Gordon J. F. MacDonald, vice chancellor for research at the University of California. Santa Barbara, and a former vice president of the Institute for Defense Analysis, in "Uses of the Sea,” a recently published analysis of military and commercial undersea potential. “To what extent is the government willing to protect United States investments in undersea exploitation abroad?" MacDonald asks. "The policy is critical because of the high initial investments required and the great vulnerability of many underwater operations to sabotage or disruption. It is unlikely that American industry will place heavy investments ... if there is no government assurance regarding the protection of such investments.” In a 1967 speech. Robert A. Frosch, assistant secretary of the Navy, warned that one of the main undersea military missions would- be “protection of those engaged in exploitation of the sea. United States capital is unlikely to be risked unless it is United States policy to protect the investments against foreign or piratical invasions.”
Regardless of what is said publicly, the Navy is well aware of its ultimate mission for all oceanographic research. As Robert H. B. Baldwin, former under- secretary of the Navy, put it: "The plain truth is. of course, that modern oceanography is absolutely essential to national defense.” Baldwin has also outlined the Navy’s
Photograph by John Peden
** by Seymour Hersh
intentions regarding ocean sciences and technology. “In short,” he says, "our oceanography and ocean engineering programs are specifically and directly in response to military requirements. We are sponsoring basic research which has relevance to naval problems. We are involved in deep-ocean engineering because it contributes to our assigned mission; we are not in the business of exploiting the ocean’s abundant mineral or living resources.”
Admiral McDonald has given a further hint of what the Navy may ultimately envision: control not only of the sea bottom, but of the sea above it. Once a nation gets sovereign rights to the seabed, he says, “the next question, of course, is whether such nations might not be empowered to regulate passage in the oceans above their acknowledged areas.... The ultimate answer to that question will probably evolve from the interplay of many national interests, and the ability to back up diplomacy with force when necessary.”
Thus oceanography’s benefits not only become a cover for the real military interest, but are also used to justify the military’s long-standing fear of covenants to internationalize the seabed. Current U.S. policy, as interpreted under the 1958 Geneva Protocol, is to claim all resources of the ocean floor out to any depth we are able to exploit. One reason for U.S. objection to internationalization of the seabed is commercial, in that it would give the underdeveloped nations an equal chance. But a more significant objection is the military one—couched in familiar terms of the need for more deterrence. “We must do two things to protect the national interest of the United States.” says Admiral McDonald. “We must maintain an invulnerable strategic force to ensure that our deterrence is effective; and we must make certain that the United States is the nation that enjoys the benefits of ‘prior presence and continued use’ in the ocean areas of greatest importance to us.”
Dr. John P. Craven, head of the Navy's DSSP program and a leading scientific planner for the system, sees the basic challenge to U.S. dominance of the ocean deeps coming from the disarmament conference table. “The United States,” he wrote recently, “must be in the forefront so that when the inevitable and Gordian problems of sovereignty on the ocean floor are raised at the international conference table, the ability to resolve them on terms favorable to international peace and stability is matched by the capability for enforcement.”
It is important to view the recent negotiations regarding the disarmament of the ocean bed in this force-diplomacy light. A Russian proposal made at Geneva in March of this year called for the prohibition of nuclear weapons and military installations of any kind on the ocean floor outside territorial limits. The United States rejected the Russian approach, noting publicly that it would bar listening devices and similar “defensive” equipment. The U.S. counterproposal, made in May, specifically called for each party to undertake “not to emplant or emplace fixed nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction or associated fixed launching platforms on, within or beneath the seabed and ocean floor. . . .” (Emphasis added.) The U.S. offer, however, did not rule out deep-diving submarines and their underwater supply bases, nor did it rule out some form of constantly moving missile launcher on the ocean bottom—precisely the undersea projects which the Navy is most interested in pursuing.
The Navy has firm control over all U.S. research in ocean
ography. In fiscal 1969, the federal government spent a total of 5516 million for oceanographic programs. More than half of that—5287 million—was Navy money. The Pentagon’s interest in oceanography has increased amazingly in recent years. Such spending has gone up from a few million dollars in the early 1960’s to the current total of nearly 5300 million. In the early years, the Navy’s undersea emphasis was on pure research, with a tiny engineering budget. But today the emphasis has shifted from the purely exploratory phase to practical application; research published in recent years includes studies in undersea welding techniques and the development of special undersea equipment, such as oceanbottom sleds for carrying cargo and special glass materials capable of withstanding many pounds of sea pressure.
Significantly, the undersea engineering programs have prospered in spile of recent widespread cutbacks in military spending due to the Viet-Nam war. In the early ’60s the Navy was sending only a few officers a year for post-graduate oceanography study; now about 50 officers a year are engaged in on-campus study programs. The Navy now boasts the support of more than 1000 civilian scientists and engineers al over 100 academic and institutional facilities throughout the world and at a dozen Navy laboratories.
In fact, one of the ironies in the Navy's bureaucratically ponderous dominance of undersea technology is that it may actually be so great as to hinder the corporations in their efforts to exploit the billion-dollar undersea market. The Harvard Business Review recently published a study calling for a systematic national effort to harness the potential profit from the sea. noting that the undersea market of the 1970's could be compared to the market for guided missiles and outer space equipment that existed in the 195O’s. “Unless bold steps are taken soon.” the article warns, “the nation may awaken to discover a hydro-space gap.” Perhaps this threat helps to explain why Congress approved the Sea Grant College bill in 1966 enabling interested universities to get federal funds for oceanographic study. Senator Claiborne Pell, its chief sponsor, acknowledged that the legislation was needed in order to remedy gaps in civilian ocean technology caused by the heavy reliance on Navy leadership.
Of course, the increased university participation also gives the Navy more opportunities to get top-flight academic help and to draw many more university scientists into underwater warfare research. The attractiveness of the Navy’s current efforts is enhanced by its large array of test facilities, including large model basins, pressure testing facilities, underwater test and evaluation ranges, and many specialized laboratories. Several ocean test ranges are in operation for underwater testing of materials and weapons systems; a new Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center went into full operation in 1967. Two research ships and more than a dozen survey ships are in the Navy’s oceanographic fleet, along with more than 20 university-owned ships.
The navy is tying its future hopes for a share of the 1970’s missile market to a weapons system known as ULMS (undersea long-range missile system). The acronym is unfamiliar now. but planners expect to invest more than half of the Navy's annual research budget in undersea warfare by the mid-I970's. Although the exact nature of ULMS is a military secret, this definition was
provided to Congress in 1968 by Secretary of the Navy Paul Ignatius: “ULMS would be a new force of specially configured submarines armed with advanced long-range ballistic missiles. These submarines would operate from U.S. ports. As elements of the nation’s secure strategic offensive forces, they could maneuver over large ocean areas, remaining continuously in range of targets. The characteristic and operational modes of the weapons system, capable of immediate response to a weapon launch order, would provide the flexibility to counter foreseeable Soviet responses to the system.”
Work on the ULMS is much farther along-than the Navy is willing to admit. For example, in the annual Defense Department “Posture Statement" accompanying the S80-billion-plus 1970 defense budget, then Secretary of Defense Clark M. Clifford said: "We are also requesting S20 million in the FY [Fiscal Year] 1970 budget to prepare for possible engineering development in FY 1971 of a new undersea long-range missile system (ULMS)." Only S5 million had been spent on the system the year before. In a special report on the underwater weapons system two years ago. Defense Marketing Service (DMS). a reliable private defense industry newsletter staffed largely by retired military intelligence personnel, predicted that research on the ULMS would remain at the S3-5 million level until 1972. That report was recently updated to predict that the system would involve 700 missiles, and would be in production by 1978 and in operation two years later. Research spending would reach S75 million a year by 1974. said DMS. This estimate was undoubtedly conservative; spending will climb far beyond that total by the mid-1970's. In fact. DMS estimated 1970 spending at S14 million. S6 million below the total eventually approved by Clifford.
ULMS will clearly be the spearhead of the oceanographic military-industrial complex, but many problems remain. One is simply the development of an undersea missile capable of penetrating thousands of feet of water and landing on target thousands of miles away. The new missile, already being researched, is described as the "follow-on" to the Poseidon multiple-warhead nuclear missile now being installed in America’s nuclear submarine fleet. But just as important as the new missile is the development of a vessel capable of cruising near the ocean bottom at depths previously unreachable by a combat submarine—6000 feel and below, about 5000 feet deeper than present-day submarines are believed able to operate.
Some progress on the submarine has already been made. In January of this year the Navy launched what many believe to be the forerunner of the new class of deep-diving submarines needed for ULMS. Known simply as the NR-I. this first nuclear-powered deep submergence submarine was shrouded in secrecy from start to finish. One reason may have been the ballooning costs (which climbed from the original estimate of S30 million in 1965 to SI00 million at the launching); another certainly was the fact that the NR-1 gives the Navy its first opportunity to explore closely the ocean bottom at depths below 1000 feet. Dr. John P. Craven describes the NR-1 this way: "Initiated without fanfare, this submersible may be the most significant innovation in the technology of the sea bottom ... the NR-1 should be the pioneering prototype of the sea bottom vehicles which have all the requisites to revolutionize our concepts of the utilization of the sea."
In addition to the NR-1, the Navy won Defense Department
approval last year for the construction of two new prototype submarines: one to run deeper and another to run quieter. Both vessels had consistently been vetoed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, but they were authorized by Clifford after congressional pressure was applied—much of it from Chairman L. Mendel Rivers. South Carolina Democrat and head of the super-hawkish House Armed Services Committee. Congress had been rallied by a series of “submarine gap" charges stemming from Russia’s continued development in submarine warfare. The alleged Russian threat was lessened somewhat by the recent Soviet proposal to do away with all underwater weapons systems, a clear admission that the Soviet Union believes itself outgunned by the U.S. in this area.
Complementing the research programs on new submarines and missiles is the Navy’s vast ocean engineering program designed to turn the deep-ocean seabed into a military ally. As with its other undersea projects, the Navy has attempted to portray its underwater engineering work as simply advancing the frontiers of knowledge. In a 1967 address to the Marine Technology Society in San Diego, an organization composed largely of undersea industrialists. Rear Admiral O. D. Waters, Jr., then oceanographer of the Navy, was enthusiastic about the possibilities: “Along with deep submergence (the submarine program], there is a broader and parallel supporting program on deep-ocean technology, and I suggest that industrialists with an interest in future developments in oceanography keep an eye on it . . . immediately it includes experimental work on such things as deep-mooring devices, super- strength plastic materials, power packages and the whole complex of problems involved in facilities implanted on the deep-ocean floor. For the bureaucratic locution ‘facilities implantment,’ let’s just substitute the more interesting statement that the Jules Verne idea of cities under the sea is no longer just a science fiction idea. This calls now for research and development for life support in a new and most hostile environment, new problems in underwater communications, in deep underwater navigation and a host of other problems that arise in connection with the whole new enterprise of sea floor engineering."
Another idyllic vision was offered by Navy Secretary Ignatius in his Navy League talk last year: “Il is possible to imagine the construction of a true undersea laboratory, operated as a facility for general experiments in undersea science and technology, and available to university, to industry and to government. This would be the equivalent of a manned space station and would open another dimension to the reaches of scientific exploration of the oceans.”
But the admiral and the secretary aren't really interested in cities or laboratories under the sea. A recent fact sheet published by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, the agency responsible for underwater research, notes: "The Navy believes that, eventually. undersea facilities may be constructed for a variety of purposes such as fuel caches, supply depots, refueling stations, submarine repair facilities, nuclear weapons shelters, utility systems, and power generation.”
The underwater bases could be on the continental shelf or even much further out to sea—without being.in deeper water. The ocean, like the land, has mountain ranges and ridges. Many of the mountains—known as seamounts—are
flat on top; some are as little as six or ten fathoms from the surface, often thousands of miles from any land; all have some military potential. This summer, oceanographers from the University of Washington and private industry are planning to occupy a seamount in the Pacific Ocean, 270 miles due west of Grays Harbor, Washington. The seamount rises from an ocean depth of 9000 feet to within 122 feet of the surface at the point where they will do their work.
The men involved in this experiment will live in one of the pre-constructed underwater habitats, the development of which has become a focal point of the Navy's various underwater living experiments (known as Sealab). It is not surprising that John R. Moore, president of North American Rockwell, now working under a Navy contract on underwater habitat research, warned the American Society of Oceanography last year; “Only rapidly diminishing technical barriers are preventing a foreign power from establishing a deep-ocean base a few miles off the Los Angeles shoreline. Let there be no mistake about urgency. As a nation we can either push forward with marine development, or we can stand by while other nations develop and subdivide the two-thirds of the earth beneath the high seas.”
The Navy fully agrees with Moore. Research is underway not only on prefabricated underwater habitats, but also on much larger undersea sites. Nearly three years ago Dr. Carl F. Austin, of the U.S. Undersea Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. California (now known as the Naval Research and Development Center), published a comprehensive technical report on the Navy's programs for drilling into the ocean floor to develop self-contained underground and undersea complexes. “Using only the tools and techniques known to today's raw materials industry, manned installations of a large size containing a one-atmosphere, shirt-sleeve environment can be built today on much of the world's continental shelf region,” writes Austin. "With a modest extension in undersea vehicles capabilities [the NR-1 submarine, for example], large manned installations can be established at almost any location on the continental slopes, the deep-ocean floor, and on seamounts and ridges.”
Austin has specifically described undersea installations drilled through bedrock in the ocean, which he says offer the best protection. "A surprising amount of the deep ocean appears to be accessible competent bedrock,” he writes. Included in the article are dozens of U.S. Navy photographs depicting huge rock-boring machines and underwater railway shafts and workshops, some of them described as being three miles ofl’shore and 2400 feet beneath sea level.
The Navy scientist further notes that direct access to the undersea quarters by means of a lock system “is a practice now within the technologic capability of this nation's industry.” And with such a method, he adds, "manned undersea installations are possible al virtually any location.” The University of Miami and the Chrysler Corporation are now' cooperating in a scheme to build five undersea bases at a depth of 1000 feet off the east coast of Florida. The program, called Project Atlantis, has the support of the Navy, which estimates that the first base will be completed by the mid-1970's.
Just when the military will begin undersea operations is a closely held secret. Ocean Science News, an authoritative weekly newsletter of the ocean industry, predicted a year ago that by 1973 the Navy would "place a one-atmosphere
permanent manned habitat on the ocean floor at a depth of 6000 feet and service it with a yet-to-be designed deep submersible—a scale of just such a sea floor habitat is currently undergoing towing tests in San Diego. A whole network of deep-ocean seafloor and sub-seafloor bases will follow, some hollowed out of the rock of the mid-Atlantic ridge.”
A final step toward an undersea warfare future is being made by the Navy's Sealab program, designed to extend man's ability to live and work on the ocean floor. Men were sent to live underwater in the Navy's Sealab I and II experiments, staying more than 200 feet underwater for 15 to 30 consecutive days. Sealab 111 was to have sent men down 600 feet beneath the water for 12 days each, but it was delayed when one of the divers was killed during an early test this year. Scientists now know that animals and men are able to exist for long periods under high pressure beneath the sea by breathing mixtures of helium, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, divers are expected to be able to dive to. and work at. depths of 1500 feet by using helium technology; already some dives below 1000 feet have been made safely.
Below 1500 feet, scientists are unable to adapt man for underwater living, but the Navy is hard at work on a revolutionary technique that may enable man to outwit his environment. Known as fluid breathing, it consists simply of pumping an oxygenated fluid, rather than gas. through an aquanaut's lungs and sinus cavities. Thus the pressure outside his body would be no greater than that inside and he could survive— even at 12.000-fool depths. Congress was told during last year’s hearings on the Navy program that liquid breathing under pressure has been successfully achieved in animals.
The man behind this research is Dr. John P. Craven, head of the Navy’s DSSP program and its greatest advocate. His view of the future for undersea development has little to do with commercial exploits or basic research. Writing in a recent issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. Craven described his dream in a way that summarizes the Navy's hopes: "In the Pacific, the extensive chains of seamounts divide the Pacific Ocean into a significant number of basins which are now identifiable by the seamounts which constitute Wake, Guam, the New Hebrides, the Fijis. the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Ryukyus. the Kuriles, etc. Even now, these islands are important elements in the strategic outer periphery of the Asian land mass. The occupation and utilization of the undersea portion of these strategic barriers will make even more effective the utilization of the outer islands as a commercial, political and military balance to the mainland.”
All of the elements of the coming undersea arms race are falling into place. The universities, through the Sea Grant program, are supplying the academicians. The corporations, enticed by potentially immense profits, are diverting research funds into the sea. The Navy, anxious to keep its share of the defense budget, is pushing its underwater missile systems. The prospects for stopping a juggernaut of these proportions are very dim indeed. To do so would be to change the processes by which America lives.
Seymour Hersh is the author of Chemical and Biological War fare: America's Hidden Arsenal (Bobbs-Merrill. 1968). He is now work inn tm a book on the Pent anon (which he formerly covered Jor the AP) to be published by Random House.
iTfaAWV Mix?
,
** THE PRISONER
“They put us out there in the damned cane field to protect a sugar mill owned by Madame Nhu. Who the hell is Madame Nhu to die for?"—Ex-Sgt. George E. Smith
In November 1965, upon being released af ter two years of imprisonment by the National Liberation Front. "Greenberet" Staff Sergeant George E. Smith announced that when he returned to the United Stales he planned to work with the peace movement. He never did. After the press conference which Smith held jointly with Staff Sergeant Claude D. McClure in Phnom Penh. Cambodia, the two men were sent to Bangkok where the U.S. Army look charge of them. After a meal and phone calls to their families they were pul on a plane for the States via the Philippines. They were expected home in two days. Instead they were short-shipped to the United Stales' military bastion in Okinawa for "debriefing." After persistent inquiries as to their whereabouts, the military lold the press that both men had been formally charged with giving aid lo the enemy and would be tried by courts-martial. Efforts to see the men, get them civilian counsel and bring them to the States came to nothing and the months passed. Then, as quietly as they had been sidetracked to
Okinawa and as suddenly as the military had announced the court martial charges, the men were shipped to the States and discharged—having been neither tried nor cleared of the charges which had been brought against them.
Although Smith never contacted the peace movement, I managed to track him down to his mother s home in Chester, West Virginia, shortly after his discharge in April 1966, where I spoke to him briefly. The net result of the interview in terms of positive information was zero. He didn't trust me—or anyone else—and wasn’t about to talk. But he did say that when he got things figured out he might tell his story. I never expected to hear from him again.
This spring, however. Smith wrote lo say that he would like lo tell whal he knew. The Navy's handling of the Pueblo affair had apparently prompted his letter—he fell that his "harassment by the Army" was perhaps similar lo Commander Bucher's by the Navy. In any case, he wanted to talk.
Settling into a chair wim a cup of coffee. ex-Sergeant George Smith started at the beginning—the night of November 23, 1963, at the Special Forces camp of Hiep Hoa. He was part of a 12-man team which had been in Viet-Nam about five months. Four days earlier. Captain Horne, the officer in charge of the team, had received a report of perhaps a battalion of enemy troops in the area. He discounted it. leaving Lieutenant Colby, the executive officer, and four other Americans—Sergeants Isaac Camacho. Kenneth Roraback. Claude McClure and George Smith—at Hiep Hoa with their auxiliary forces while he took the rest of his men ahead to start a new camp on the day of the 23rd.
That night the Americans went to sleep in their thatched team house. At midnight Smith awakened to bursts of gunfire. "The VC must have paced off the distance. They were getting first-round hits with white phosphorous, and 1 found out later that traitors had let them into camp to set charges alongside the house.”
Barefoot and wearing only undershorts. Smith grabbed his webbing and weapon and ran outside to the mortar pit next to the house. The burning house was throwing out such heat and flame, however, that he was afraid to open the mortar ammunition for fear a random spark would set off the cellophane-enclosed increment powder. The scene illuminated by the fires was one of chaos—mortars exploding, tracers lacing the air, people shouting and screaming. Smith
started firing al a group of shadowy figures outside the gate only to find that they were his own Strike Force making a break for it. He made his way over the sandbags to a smaller bunker 30 yards away from the house where he was joined immediately by a Strike Force soldier with an automatic rifle.
As suddenly as it began, the mortar barrage stopped, and in a few more minutes the small arms fire tapered off. For the first time Smith saw the NLF soldiers. Wearing black shorts and camouflage helmets, they swarmed over the camp. "They [the VC] were moving around as if they owned the camp and as far as 1 was concerned they did." In the 20 minutes that had passed since he was awakened. Smith had seen Sergeant Camacho go to his mortar pit and knew by the flash from the tube that he was tiring. He never did see Colby or Sergeants McClure and Roraback. Then even Camachos mortar was silent.
Four or five Viet Cong jumped into an adjoining pit and started tiring at Smith's bunker. It was only going to be a matter of seconds until someone got around to lobbing a grenade into his hole, so he and his companion threw out their weapons. His arms were tied and he was led oyer to the latrine. All firing had stopped and a few minutes later he was joined by Camacho, also bound. Camacho told Smith that Colby had joined him in the mortar pit stark naked except for his Ranger harness, and had lold him to cover him and the Vietnamese Special Forces Commander while they made a
** by Donald Duncan
break for the front gate. Camacho had followed orders but when he didn't see Smith, McClure or Roraback, he turned around and came back. He was immediately set upon and clubbed with a rifle which left blood streaming down his neck.
Smith and Camacho were kept there while the NLF soldiers gathered up the 60- and 81mm mortars, the Strike Force weapons, the extra weapons in camp and as much ammunition as they could carry. The two Americans estimated the enemy force as at least 400 men and were later told that it was the crack “Fidel Castro" battalion. In the process of getting out of camp the two men, on short rope leads, were prodded none too gently with rifle barrels and butts. Smith was plagued by the additional discomfort of having to walk barefooted. Suddenly the whole area was lit up as the Vietnamese Air Force started dropping flares. They could clearly see the sugar mill with its ARVN detachment and American advisors a scant 300 yards away, but to the captives' surprise not a single round was fired their way. “Probably afraid of making the VC mad." Smith said with a laugh.
“The flares were followed by an air strike, but we didn't worry about that because we'd never known them to hit anything. They dropped napalm but they missed the furthest column by at least a thousand yards. The columns were still in the open fields about 200 yards apart and quite easy to see, but there was no damage done. They [the NLF] didn't seem worried, didn't even hurry. When the strafing started they would wait till they heard the planes coming in their direction, crouch along a small ditch, and then start walking again. I was worried about the napalm, of course, in case they hit something by accident. They look us to a small 20-hootch [house] village on the Oriental River. Nobody was excited and everybody treated us real well."
When daylight came the two prisoners were walked from village to village along a canal, stopping long enough at each village to eat or drink and have a cigarette. There was no attempt to demean them in front of the people and they were not abused—with one exception. In one village an old grandmother ran out and hit Camacho with a stick but was restrained by the guards. That night the Americans were put into boats which moved through a maze of canals that lost and disoriented them.
“They told us they were going to free us and send us back to Hiep Hoa. We thought for a while that maybe they would —it had happened before and by now it was obvious they weren't going to kill us. In the morning we stopped at yet another village and were eating some rice and fish when we were suddenly told to get moving. They ran us to the canal, put us on a boat and took us across. We no sooner got across the canal when B-26's started attacking the village. We hid in an inundated field all day while the B-26's and then helicopters bombed, strafed and rocketed the entire area—sometimes as close as 20 yards from our position.”
That evening Smith and Camacho were taken to the village and were fed again. Then they were led to a small house where they found McClure lying on a bed-bench smoking a cigarette. He told them that he had been brought almost directly to the village and that Roraback was somewhere nearby. McClure’s leg had been wounded by while phosphorous at Hiep Hoa, and he had not been taken with Roraback because he couldn't get around fast enough. Later all three were put in boats on the canal where they met another
boat with Roraback in it. Eventually they arrived at a small island, probably in the Plain of Reeds, where their captors built straw huts for them. It was Thanksgiving day, and they were to stay there until McClure’s leg was healed well enough for him to walk. His wounds were opened to drain and he was given penicillin to prevent infection. The four men were well fed with rice, fish and duck. To their great surprise, neither before they arrived nor during their eight days on the island were they interrogated.
WHEN THEY LEFT THE SWAMPY AREA they Stopped somewhere long enough to be issued black uniforms and to be photographed. Back in the boats, they continued on a northerly course until they could see Nuoi Ba Din—the “Black Virgin” mountain in Tay Ninh province. Soon the canal system ended and they were in primary jungle. After eight days of walking, the four prisoners and their escorts arrived at what appeared to be a permanent camp hidden under the heavy jungle canopy. During the four days they spent in the camp they were treated well, fed adequately and given cigarettes. They were then taken to another camp where a large cage made from stout wooden poles was awaiting them. The cage was about 12 by 14 feet, with two bamboo beds along each side and an eating table in the center. The cage made the men feel that their POW status was official.
The prisoners were issued mosquito nets, tin plates and cups and the inevitable cigarettes. The only “indoctrination” was in the form of signs with slogans, such as “You are committing the same ignominious crimes as the Ku Klux Klan is committing in the United Stales.” which were posted up by a French-speaking guard. None of the four Americans spoke Vietnamese. Roraback had taken a cram course in French al Fori Bragg and Smith had received the same in Vietnamese, which meant that beyond "hello," "good-bye” and “thank you.” they had no foreign language ability.
When Christmas approached, an English-speaking woman told them that they would receive a special meal for the occasion. To their surprise, it appeared—a whole pot full of chicken and six loaves of French bread. I asked Smith if that indicated the presence nearby of a village large enough to support a bakery. No. he replied, not too close. Their captors would walk as much as two days to get such things.
As the weeks passed, the captives continued to receive three meals a day, consisting mostly of ample portions of rice. On those occasions when rations were cut, they were told that their captors themselves were short. They were told by a woman, somewhere in her late forties and cruelly thin. “Do not worry. In some days men will come and explain to you"— a hint of possible forthcoming interrogation.
In the meantime, three one-man cages were built and the prisoners were separated. McClure being left in the large cage. The camp commander at this juncture was a man they called “Suave” because of his gentlemanly manners and the appearance he gave of having a good education. His interpreter was called “Prevaricator" because "he couldn't tell the truth even when he wanted to.”
One day "Prevaricator" brought Smith a razor and told him to shave—for the first time in well over a month— because the cadre wished to have a conversation with him. He was taken to an area specially prepared for the meeting with
a table placed on a platform so that his interrogators had the psychological advantage of height. Two men sat behind the table and offered him tea. cigarettes and sugar candy. “Man with glasses” did most of the talking, explaining about the war and the American role in it. Similar three- or four-hour sessions went on almost daily for the better part of a week.
Smith refuses to call it brainwashing. There was no coercion, bright lights or psycho-physical preparation. He likens it more to the Army’s own Troop Information classes. Finally he was asked to write a letter denouncing the United States’ role in the war. He was further informed that he was not expected to give military information because the NLF had enough flowing from its people working for the military in Saigon.
Smith and—as he found out later—the other three refused. Pressure (but still not physical coercion) was then applied: ‘We are your benefactors. It is much trouble to feed you and give you medical attention. We could even turn you loose in a large field and your own planes will shoot or bomb you.’ Smith finally agreed to write a letter saying that he was wrong, that he shouldn’t be in Viet-Nam and that the United States was fighting a war of aggression. Eventually all three wrote similar papers.
“They were very happy with that—it seemed to please them. Of course, back at Fort Bragg we had been warned against such things as that. But they also told us back at Fort Bragg that the Viet Cong had a reputation for killing prisoners. So I said ‘Better look out for myself because apparently nobody gives a damn about me.’ I had a bad attitude about the whole situation, probably feeling sorry for myself because I got into such a predicament. Besides, their detailed explanation of the war seemed to make a certain amount of sense.”
The men’s main motivation for writing the letter, however, was the promise that if their papers satisfied those at headquarters they would be freed. To give this weight, the men were shown bulletins stating that three or four other Americans had been released. Partly because they wanted to believe it, all three did. Another nudge toward belief was rice. Smith felt that if he had to eat rice one more month, he “would surely die.”
A few days later, “Man with glasses,” together with another Vietnamese who had been trained at Fort Bragg and Quantico and who talked about Fayetteville and Raleigh, came to say good-bye. The Americans were then told to pack their kits— soap, toothbrush, plate, cup, hammock, extra black uniform— and were moved a full day away to another camp. The camp was a large one, and at nights the NLF often lit huge fires and sang patriotic songs. The prisoners were kept segregated. The boring weeks became a month, and the interrogator’s advice, “be patient, soon you will be released,” grew thin.
after five months, diversion came in the person of A Wilfred Burchett, an overweight, white-haired west-
A—A erner dressed in oversized black pajamas. Smith -4- jL-remembers being suspicious, thinking that Burchett might perhaps be some special interrogator. They only talked for perhaps ten minutes, and from Smith’s point of view it wasn’t very productive. He was careful to say no more than he had written in his statement five months before.
Burchett arrived at the height of Smith’s “ornery period.” Their conversation ended with Smith’s chronic complaint
about too much rice and not having any bread. Burchett’s rejoinder was something to the effect of, “Well they really do try their best, but it’s not very easy, you know, to build a bread factory in the jungle.” Smith did a fair imitation of Burchett’s Australian accent and laughed at the recollection. “When he said that, I cracked up. I looked at the jungle and at my situation, and all things considered what could be funnier than building a bread factory for four prisoners. For months after, every time I got depressed I’d think of Burchett's remark and start laughing all over again."
Smith recalls the situation and Burchett with wry fondness. Before the journalist left, the men were brought together for the first time in five months to have their picture taken. When Burchett returned from the jungles, the photograph was wired around the world, and for the first time there was positive proof that the men were alive and well.
The separation of the prisoners ended after Burchett’s visit, evidently because the NLF was happy with the answers the GI’s gave to the outsider. Smith said: “Didn’t tell him anything I hadn’t already said in my statement . . . like I believed the United States was in the wrong. ’Course I still feel this way myself now. The more I learn the more I think they’re barking up the wrong tree over there ... a lot of foolishness." The men could now converse together on work details cutting dead trees for firewood with “those Donald Duck axes hammered out of old beer cans.” The work wasn’t pleasant—millions of ants lived in the dead trees—but it was a welcome relief from boredom.
Again they moved camp; again “Man with glasses” appeared for further “explanations.” He wanted more statements. The word was passed among the four not to do business this time because their promised release hadn’t materialized. Questioned individually, each man said, “We made statements before and we are still prisoners, so no more statements.”
“You could have been released now but the last time you wrote a paper you say nothing,” was the interrogator’s angry reply. “’Course he was right about that, ’cause we had just written a bunch of double-talk—it didn't mean anything if someone read it. He told me my attitude was very bad—that I was the worst, and they were tired of it. Once I had a bad flap with the camp commander because I refused to sweep out the guard’s shack, and of course I complained a lot.”
The GI’s filled in the days working on the rice mill and occasionally playing volleyball. Christmas—their second in captivity—was approaching, and again the signs pointing to release looked good. Then one day Smith and Camacho were on their bunks talking, ignoring a young guard, perhaps 17 years old, who was playing with a MAT-49 submachine gun. He was pulling the bolt back and forth when suddenly the gun went off, spewing about four bullets, one of which went through Smith’s leg. The NLF were very apologetic and chastised the guard. They treated the wound, but it took almost three months to heal.
Around Christmas, “Suave” was replaced by a new camp commander who was immediately dubbed “Oil Can Harry” because of his attitude toward the GI’s. For the first time they were coerced into doing work under the threat of having all food withheld. “Harry wanted the prisoners to sharpen punji’s”—the long, finely sharpened bamboo stakes used to impale those careless enough to step into camouflaged pits near trails, etc. Threatened with guns and placed in pits in
the ground, the four GI's held out until the prospects of starvation became real.
The prisoners were moved to various camps bearing such names as “Iron Mines” and “Big River.” On a short visit to the familiar base camp, they met two more English-speaking cadre, “Alex” and “Grandpa.” "Alex," whose English was almost flawless, gave them news of the war, but “Grandpa" gave them bad news and a warning: make propaganda tape recordings or their safety could not be guaranteed. If they refused to cooperate, it would be concluded that they were enemies of the Front. Eventually Smith and McClure made tapes saying essentially what they had written a year before.
Moved to a new area, the GI’s were put to building their own cages and some extras. At an information session one day “Alex" told the men that new prisoners would be coming. The new prisoners were Captain Cook, a Marine, and Corporal Crass, an Army radio operator. Evidently the men had been captured on separate occasions when the ARVN they were advising deserted them in the field. Another man. a sergeant who had been with the two newcomers, had come down sick. “Prevaricator” later told the men that he had been killed trying to escape.
Cook was not treated with the same considerations as were the four Special Forces prisoners, perhaps due to his rank, but more likely because he and the sergeant had almost beaten a guard to death in an escape attempt. The escape was foiled by a guard clamping down on Cook’s thumb and almost biting it off. Cook and Crass were kept in individual cages, but Smith and Camacho shared a cage, as did Roraback and McClure.
Smith and Camacho, using a system of “dead-drop” notes left at the well in a medicine bottle, kept the captain informed about the camp and what could be expected. They also kept him up to date on an escape plan they were formulating. Roraback and McClure had rejected the plan on the grounds that even if they got away, they would never be able to find their way out of the jungle. The captain, however, agreed that the escape could work, and Smith and Camacho continued planning. It was decided that if both men escaped their absence would be noted almost immediately, but if one stayed, the other could get a good headstart. Smith was elected to stay. Camacho made good his escape shortly after dark and wasn’t missed until wake-up the following morning.
After the guard recovered from his shock at finding a prisoner had escaped almost before his very eyes, the camp was alerted and the NLF sent patrols out in all directions. The other prisoners were immediately chained hand and foot and to each other. The guards indicated that Camacho had been recaptured and shot. When the fourth day arrived and the camp was not moved, the remaining prisoners suspected that such might be the case. That day “Alex” called Smith, Roraback and McClure to his area for a tongue-lashing, telling them that some guerrillas had been executed in Saigon and that retaliation was called for. All three were convinced that they were to be executed.
That night the NLF broke camp and marched the prisoners night and day for 30 or 40 miles. The guards, having caught hell for the escape and now having to force-march, were surly. For the first and only time Smith saw them abuse a prisoner. Crass, who was having leg trouble, couldn’t keep up and the guards kicked him a few times. He was finally left with two guards to catch up later.
The new camp was a large one. Bombings were now a daily event; every morning jets and Al-E’s bombed within two or three hundred yards of the prisoners’ camp. Smith says that the noise of the oncoming planes was “fearsome" and that the shock waves from the exploding bombs hurt the eardrums. The strikes always came from the same direction and were the same distance away; the frightened prisoners assumed it was only a matter of time until a plane dropped short or long, wiping them all out.
By now it was September. 1965. When the prisoners were not in their bomb trenches, they were in hammocks, one leg chained to a supporting tree. Roraback and Cook were chained to the same tree, and Roraback. contrary to repeated orders, persisted in conversing with the captain. Finally “Oil Can Harry” himself came down and. through "Prevaricator.” told Roraback that if he refused to obey orders his safety could no longer be guaranteed. Roraback's response was to laugh in the camp commander’s face; the commander, without another word but with the blood rising in his face, turned and walked away.
Roraback had been a difficult captive, even for his fellow prisoners. He often took more than his share of the food and the guards as a result called him Con /on (pig). The healthiest of the lot, he refused to share equally in the work, feigning a bad back or trying to use the weight of his rank (he outranked Smith and McClure) to get the others to do his work for him. All three at one time or another wanted to punch him out. None of these things had gone unnoticed by the guards. In the information classes Roraback argued as forcibly with the interrogators as he often did with his three companions. Because he was the oldest of the four, the Vietnamese assumed he was the "senior" man or leader and as such was responsible for Camacho's escape. Moreover, of the two men who didn't make a tape. Camacho was gone and Roraback (the man they believed responsible for the escape) was obnoxious.
A day or so later, the interpreter came and told Roraback that he was wanted for an interview, and to pack his hammock and the rest of his gear. The following morning the Americans heard two shots; they never saw Roraback again. Smith assumed he had been shot, but Captain Cook doubted it. The Vietnamese did not tell the men that the NLF had publicly announced that Sergeant First Class Kenneth Roraback had been executed in retaliation for the execution of an NLF guerrilla in Saigon; neither did they use the event to intimidate the prisoners.
More time passed and the men were in cages again—the enlisted men in one, the two officers in another. Having given up hope of being freed. Smith and McClure were once again informed by “Alex” that they would definitely be released. He told them about the peace movement, that most people in the United States were opposed to the war, and that in response to these peace-loving Americans they were to be set free.
“He told us two people—he mentioned Norman Morrison by name—had killed themselves to oppose the war and that the NLF was giving back two people to help replace the American people’s great loss. They wanted the American people to know that they understood their loss. We were told we could be the two, but first they wanted another paper written. This time, however, they wanted only for us to ask for release and tell how we had been treated while prisoners.
“I told Captain Cook about it and that I was going to do
it. Actually the paper had nothing to do with our release, because I wrote the paper one day and they moved us out the next. The Viet Cong had a big feast for us. offering toasts, good luck and so on. We walked for about four days on what seemed like a fairly straight line and stopped for two days in sight of the border—we could see the Cambodian flag at an outpost—while crossing arrangements were made. On the second day it was announced that cars were waiting on the other side, and a squad walked with us directly to the border, less than an hour away. The squad turned ground at the border and one man. Le Van Duyet. I think, and the interpreter crossed over with us. After some talk with the Cambodian officials, the interpreter also returned to Viet-Nam. but Le Van Duyet accompanied us all the way to Phnom Penh.
“The first main town we saw was Svay Rieng and shortly we were in Phnom Penh. We were taken to Police Headquarters, photographed in our Viet Cong uniforms, then somebody was sent to get us regular clothes and they took more pictures. Next they took us to a real nice hotel, the Royale, I think, and we could have anything we wanted. It was really nice, individual rooms, beds, showers, and the food was really great.”
The two men were still somewhat uncertain about their status even though everyone was very friendly and tried to reassure them that they really were free. They were even suspicious of the Australians who approached them. On the second day Smith and McClure were presented at a press conference held at the Ministry of Information and after some sightseeing and a visit to a night club while arrangements were being made, the two GTs flew to Bangkok, accompanied by the Australians.
They were met by, among others, members of U.S. Counter- Intelligence, who greeted them with a reading of Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the military rights against self-incrimination. On the way to the Philippines they got more of the same, and of course instead of going home they were shipped to Okinawa. Le Van Duyet had wanted Smith and McClure to take another route home, possibly through Europe, and had told the men that if they went to the U.S. military in Bangkok, they would be put in jail. “Of course I couldn't imagine such a thing. I didn't know what was going on in the world and the only thing I knew about the peace movement was what the NLF had told me. 1 didn't know until I got to Okinawa that 'peace movement’ was a dirty word and that they looked upon discussing it as treason. It wasn't long before I began to think Le Van Duyet was right.”
It had been two long years—a period filled with uncertainty, anger, sickness and boredom. Now three years later, in his slow, quiet, sometimes humorous West Virginian drawl, Smith took a long time in telling about it. Yet, it could easily be condensed: a short period of fear and apprehension resulting from what he had been told by Special Forces to expect if he were ever taken prisoner, followed by months of frustration and tedium. Fully expecting to be shot immediately or subjected to excruciating torture, Smith was not even beaten and had to concede that he was well provided for under extreme circumstances. He hardly expected what followed his release from captivity.
Told they would be home in two days, he and McClure instead were sent to Okinawa, and home was as far away as
ever. The Army now replaced the NLF as captor. Restricted to NLF information about the world for two years, the men now had to rely on the U.S. military for their frame of reference. The clothes, food and housing were different, but there were still interrogators and other intimidations.
Having again formally apprised the two men of their rights under Article 31, the Army began the “debriefing” in earnest. Questioned separately by two teams of three men each. Smith and McClure were told that anything they could relate about Viet Cong methods, habits, manners, personalities, etc. would be a great service to the Army. For three weeks they were taken step by step back through the two years' captivity. Too late, the men discovered that they weren't operating under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but under Article 32 —pre-trial investigation—and that everything they had said was to be used as the grounds for their courts-martial. Almost at the end, at what Smith thought was to be another “normal” session, an officer told him: “It is my duty to inform you that you are suspected to be guilty of violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice under the provisions of Article 104— aiding the enemy.” He also named other articles that Smith was suspected of violating, but 104 was enough—it carries the death penalty.
As soon as debriefing was completed, the men were taken to Fort Buckner. "I met my commanding officer for the first time. Somehow or another I thought I was still in Special Forces but it turned out I was in Headquarters Company, Fort Buckner." The meeting was brief, just long enough to read the formal charges for trial by court-martial.
During this whole period Smith and McClure were held incommunicado. Incoming and outgoing mail was censored— even before the men were charged—and they were not offered defense counsel until after debriefing and after the charges had been released to the press. Then, of course, it was military counsel. The army heightened the isolation of the two men by moving them to a small camp at the north end of the island. To inquiries from peace and/or political groups and from the ACLU, the military replied that the men were assigned to “normal" duties. Although they were occasionally permitted to go to town, they were always accompanied by security officers. Again weeks drifted into months; both men were now almost two years past their normal date of discharge.
“They pulled a real cute little caper on us just before they finally discharged us. Captain Nelson [one of their defense attorneys] had warned us not to say anything else to 'em unless he was present. The colonel from the Judge Advocate's office sent someone from the Intelligence Corps up to get me, supposedly to go to the hospital for a physical examination at Fort Buckner. As soon as I left, another intelligence officer started questioning McClure at Camp Hardy. After he started, this officer phoned Captain Nelson to say he was interrogating McClure, that if he wanted to be there to protect his client, he'd better hurry up and get there because he was going to continue. I wasn’t taken to the hospital, and pretty soon they started interrogating me and wanted me to give testimony against McClure. They gave up that plan when they, saw it wouldn’t work and offered a deal: if we would waive a board hearing they would give us a discharge other than an honorable discharge.”
By now, after three weeks of testimony provided by the men themselves and three months of investigation, it was
obvious that the Army either didn’t have enough evidence to convict on the charges or had decided that a trial would embarrass the military. Warned that if they didn't accept the deal they could be court-martialed and that if they insisted on a board hearing, the case could drag out for six more months, the two men accepted. Just as they had had to sign a final paper to gain their freedom from the NLF, they also had to sign one to gain freedom from the U.S. military.
Throughout its harassment of the two men. the military emphatically denied that Smith's statement about the peace movement in any way accounted for their bizarre treatment Sergeant Camacho, however—the man who escaped with Smith's help—was awarded a Silver Star on his return to the United States. President Johnson made a personal trip to Texas to pin the medal on Camacho’s chest. George Smith is not interested in denying Camacho this high honor, but points out that while he was a prisoner. Sergeant Camacho dug holes, sharpened punji stakes, milled rice and wrote the same statements as Smith and McClure. Furthermore, he is still in Special Forces and still retains either a Secret or Top Secret security clearance.
If the contrast between the treatment of Camacho and of the other two men points up the absurdity of the Code of Conduct, then the “deal'' Smith and McClure were offered must be the last word on the ridiculousness of military security and military justice. As part of the “deal." both men were forbidden to describe iheir captivity and specifically to discuss the Christmas dinner and Red Cross bundles given them by the NLF. Why ? With the possible exception of the particulars of Camacho's escape, there was absolutely nothing not known to the NLF. As usual, “secret” was stamped on information not to deny it to any enemy but to deny it to the American people. Having branded Smith and McClure "turncoats.” the military then denied them the right to clear themselves publicly.
I mentioned that when Smith went to Viet-Nam there was no peace movement and in 1965 all he knew of it was what the NLF had told him. What impressions did he have now?
“Well it's hard to say. You don't hear much about them these days. Most people in this country still think we're protecting ourselves over there, which is nonsense. How we got involved there is another story, but why we stay there is beyond me—of course if we pull out we lose face. It's quite a predicament we got ourselves into there. We can't win militarily, unless we annihilate all the Vietnamese people—I said that in one of my statements and I still believe it.
“Yes. I feel the U.S. military should get out. I can’t see where they've accomplished a damned thing. Hell, things were bad in ’63. But we controlled things better then than we do now, and in those days, including civilians, we only had 25,000 Americans."
I told him that many people are opposed to the idea of a coalition government because they are convinced that it would only mean the country would become communist. Given his background and his everyday frame of reference, his response almost floored me.
“Well, if that’s the way it goes, what can we do about it— stay over there fighting for another 20 years? If the people are inclined to go communist, we certainly aren’t going to be able to stop ’em. In open free elections it would undoubtedly go communist, because the only people who would vote otherwise are the people in Saigon who profit from the military
buildup there. The elections held recently are meaningless. Nothing has changed since '63 in that respect. I remember our interpreter at Hiep Hoa. He wanted the day off to go vote. I asked him who he was going to vote for and he said Madame Nhu. I asked him who else was running and he said nobody, just Madame Nhu. The names have changed, that’s all. The voting and candidate restrictions make the elections meaningless. Communists aren't allowed to run or vote, so what is proved? The people we're supporting and in turn who support us are a special clique and don't represent any crosssection in the country.
“A lot of people have different impressions about communism. I don’t really see anything bad in it. in how it would be used over there, and if communism can help them I see nothing wrong with it. Those people have nothing now and the communists sure as hell can't take that away from them. The only thing they could possibly do is help them to help themselves. I can't see the system of free enterprise possibly working there. The Indians would end up still owning all the shops like they do now, and the Vietnamese would be exploited as they have been for many years. The poor farmers would continue to be poor and a certain faction in Saigon would run the country, and they would be overtaxed just like under the Ngo family. In countries like Viet-Nam I can’t see how anything other than socialism can work; otherwise the country will be run by the few people that have money and everything will be as it always has been. Free enterprise hasn’t done a damned thing for West Virginia, people can’t afford to live there anymore, and it sure can't do anything for Viet-Nam. In fact some of the places in West Virginia look just like some of those poor villages in Viet-Nam—there's poverty both places. 'Course you mention socialism here and it's immediately equated with communism—something bad. And as for the U.S. military, they really have the American people buffaloed and bullied.”
IT HAD BEEN THREE YEARS SINCE I HAD first met him. To a person in San Francisco or New York, the life George Smith led during this period may seem contradictory. He is anti-military and resentful of the way the Army treated him. but he draws a disability pension (for his leg wounds) and belongs to the VFW. He has a yearning to travel, “perhaps even to California,” but so far he has managed only to move a stone's throw from his mother’s house in West Virginia across the bridge to East Liverpool. Ohio.
He is married, has two small children and is rebuilding a house financed on a GI loan. With its new facade, heating system and other modifications, his home stands out from those of his neighbors. The town is dying; the pottery business which justified its existence is defunct and there is no other industry to take its place. And yet. given his past and day- to-day environment, George Smith's three years have been straight ahead. You get the impression that if he lived in another community he would be leading living-room discussions or the next Vets Against the War protest. He has worked it out for himself from observation and experience, bolstered by night school courses in political science. He is part of the peace movement whether he realizes it or not. From NLF prisoner to U.S. Army prisoner to prisoner of a dying part of the country—Smith may yet realize his freedom.
(continued from page 20) the institutions of control and management, had to make a new life, necessarily a life of political opposition, out there in the space between institutions.
The interface between “hippies” and “politicals” melted into a new creature: the hairy, anarchic, activist, implacable, creatively desperate “street person” whose life conditions admit no chance of reform solutions, who says with his actions: “Your schools, your offices, your shops, your Army have vomited me up, and now your cops come to mop me up. but you can’t take from me the only place you have left me, the place where I live and breathe my being, the base from which I launch my assault on your barbarism; / will fight." He is a new creature living in a new political culture; he feels like a nigger and the coercive powers-that-be treat him like one.
Through all this, from Stop the Draft Week to Chicago, the movement felt its strength in the streets. But precisely at the moment it discovered its strength, it also comprehended its weakness. Although it grew numerically as a social force, including high school kids and soldiers as well as “students” and “dropouts,” and became recognizable, even to the universal sign of the flashed “V.” it was still painfully far from even the shadow of revolutionary change. Not only that; at the peak of its energy it was more brutally attacked by the police, the courts, the entire repressive apparatus, than ever before. Moreover, first-hand encounters with Vietnamese and Cubans made imperialism and its Third World opposition concrete. The stakes of success or failure had never seemed so fatefully present.
In this sequence, most sharply at the time of the Chicago battles, an inescapable choice presented itself: Either the post-scarcity left would comprehend its own unprecedented identity as a social force, elaborate that identity into a vision and program for the campus and the youth ghettoes, and use its reality as a strength from which to encounter anticolonial and working-class energy and to devise common approaches—or it would turn from its identity, throw the vision out with the narrowness of the class base, and seek at; historically prepackaged version of revolution in which students and declasse intellectuals are strictly appendages or tutors to the "real” social forces. Either it would take I
itself seriously as a visionary force, conscious of post-scarcity potentials with revolutionary and democratic goals, or it would buy clarity on the cheap, taking refuge in mirror-models of the underdeveloped socialisms of Russia and the Third World. Either it would accept the awesome risk of finding new paths—or it would walk the beaten trails, pugnacious and sad. A grave choice where the stakes are immense; but the pounding pressure of the state leaves no time for placid reflection.
Since Chicago, there has been a fundamental failure of nerve throughout the white movement which is too widespread to be pinned on any agency, individual, or faction. We could obsess ourselves infinitely with the horror stories of this collective failure: assuming you are the revolution if you say so; getting to like the taste of the word “dictatorship” (of the proletariat, over the proletariat, over anyone); getting so pleased with being correct that you don’t like being corrected; substituting rhetoric and slogans for analysis and appeals; kicking your friends as practice for your enemies. It is easier to obscure the real achievements of the past year (and it is again progress which is the property of no faction): the dozens of militant campus movements; the broaching of questions of class within the movement itself; the self-direction of a Women’s Liberation movement which refuses to be pigeonholed; the development of the movement’s own institutions, including the underground press. Newsreel, communes; the explosion of energy in the high schools and the stirrings in the working-class junior colleges; the identification of the enemy as the global imperialist system. But make no mistake. Most of that growth, numerical and political, is an enormous tribute to what Marxists call the objective conditions; much of the rest, like the weight of a tumor, is canceled out by the attending pathologies.
Fortunately, this impossible society creates the left faster than the organized left can destroy itself. Little question about it—regardless of the fate of the left, all signs are that the monster will continue to sap itself of its own strength, keep itself off-balance. It will lose the loyalty of students, blacks and other colonized minorities by failing to meet their most elemental needs. Soldiers will continue to desert, blacks to revolt, white
students to reject the withering carrot and fight the big stick, millions of others to look, at least, for ways to make sense of the madness. Even deprived of its revolutionary scapegoats, this society will disrupt itself.
At the same time, the society digs the foundations of the police state. Not only the police, but all the skilled and privileged whites who are squeezed to finance the failures of capitalism, all those forced to occupy the front lines of racism while the Rockefellers and Cliffords are secure in their bunkers—they are the shock troops for a desperate system. Whether the left can survive is finally a question of whether it can inject its dreams so deeply into the lifestream of the society that millions of people across class and race lines will fight to vindicate the revolutionary promise. Right now it is a question of whether the living consciousness that a new world is possible—free of material misery, hierarchy, useless work—can encounter the more traditional needs of the rest of the American people and the rest of the world, without abandoning its integrity. For underneath the new pre-packaged, clenched-teeth optimism complete with symbols, language. heroes, and unquestioning allegiances is a fundamental despair about this country, whether it can make or even deserves its own revolution.
But that revolution, if fought with an international sensibility, wpuld be the best contribution we could make to the rest of. the world. If the wealth that America loots from the Third World and wastes (on arms, packaging, trivial work, etc.) were liberated, how much of the economic pressure could be taken off the Third World, whose own best energies are now absorbed in the struggle for brute industrialization? How might the continents now entering history be spared the agonies of primitive capital accumulation? There are no answers yet because we have not asked urgently, because we have been satisfied to try to tie down American troops on domestic battlefronts—to break the will of the Leviathan by depriving it of the loyalty of its work force, its managerial apprentices, its reluctant soldiers and its literal children. Good, but not enough.
The left must be conscious of its visionary prerogative as well as its privilege; it must find ways of working on the other side of both hope and despair because there is no other way to live and because
“GOOD RADICAL BUY" says the Guardian
The San Francisco Mime Troupe has just published a 48 page booklet on the Radical Theater Festival held last Fall at S.F. State College with the Mime Troupe, the Bread and PuppetTheater,and El Teatro Campesino. It speaks about radical theater from the radical viewpoint. Panel discussions between the directors of the companies, group histories, and photos are included.
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Americans must be confronted with the practicality of a new way of life. It must make models of that life, like People’s Park, while at the same time explaining itself and constantly probing outward from its roots in the middle classes. It must be patient while urgent, and it must do all this without transforming itself into a scatter of “vanguards,” each defined by its imperious distance from the Americans for whom at least one piece of the world revolution is to be made.
Plainly there is much more to be said. But the old civil rights song said the important thing: “Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.” —todd gitlin
Todd Gillin was president oj SDS in 1963- 6>4. His book (with Nanci Hollander), Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago, will be published by Harper and Row this winter.
** ON THE OTHER HAND
** The Rich Confer
ON SEPTEMBER 13,#_ftn2]†] GOD WILL DE- cree “which countries are destined for the sword and which for peace, which for famine and which for plenty.” Two days later, surrounded by a most raucous chorus of anarcho-hip- pie-yippie-bolshevik-New-Leftists. 500 of the richest men on God's green earth will assemble at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel to pass judgment on the very same questions. Participants in the five- day International Industrial Conference (IIC), a quadrennial effort of the National Industrial Conference Board and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the Lords of Creation will brave the wrath of their youthful arch-enemies to swap strategies on “Closing the World's Income Gap.”
Clearly, if these men wanted to close the income gap, they could. General Conference Chairman David Rockefeller, overseer of the family's S5 billion fortune and its Standard Oil empires, John Loudon of Royal Dutch Shell, the chairman of the Conference's International Council and a handful of other
Conference oilmen control somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of the southern hemisphere’s oil.
United States Council Chairman Roger Blough, Chairman of the Board of U.S. Steel, along with his competitors at the conference, Bethlehem, Kaiser, Republic, and Jones and Laughlin control an only slightly smaller part of the iron ore. South Africa’s Harry Oppenheimer, Edgar Kaiser, and their colleagues have their corporate hands on the “Free World’s'! bananas, sugar, copper, nickel, bauxite, diamonds, gold, rubber and timber.
Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas will head up a large contingent of the big international investment banking houses which Fortune calls “the hard financial core of capitalism in the Free World." It will be quite a crowd.
Obviously, unless the demonstrators have something special up their ragged sleeves, the income gap will grow: the rich will gel richer, and the poor will be forced lo find solace in the statement of SR (-International vice president Robison that "living standards and happiness are not necessarily related."
Ever since Stanford-affiliated SRI and Henry Luce's Time/Life/Fortune convened the first Rich People's Conference back in 1957, IIC agendas have placed emphasis “on the problems of the developing countries and what can be done, particularly in the private sector, to narrow the spread between their incomes and those of the industrialized areas." Just as steadily, under the stewardship of “the Free World's business and industrial leaders,” the gap has grown. According to Business Latin America, the total of all goods and services produced in the United States since I960 grew 3.9 per cent per person. In Western Europe, the per capita GNP grew 3.2 per cent; in Japan, 8.4 per cent. On the other side of the gap. Latin America’s per capita GNP grew only 1.6 per cent, which is even lower than its 2 per cent growth in the pre-Alliance for Progress 1950’s.
U.N. figures on food consumption for 1967 tell the same story. North Americans consume an average of 3130-3140 calories a day. Venezuelans, despite all their oil, consume only 2240 calories; Indians, 2110. It is easy to see why the Conference sponsors so readily admit that the income gap is “steadily widening between nations of the world.”
To Commemorate The New Grateful Dead Album, We Present Our Pigpen Look Alike Contest (PartTWo)
To be downright brutal about it. Part One of our Pigpen Look-Alike Contest that we laid on you a few weeks back is a bust. Not that there haven't been entries. There’ve been plenty. But so far no one has, via black-and-white or color photograph, captured the panache, the bravado, the insouciance—the true and utter raunch of
MR. PEN
Just to have a moustache doesn't make it.
Just to have long hair doesn't make it.
Blondes don't make it.
Photos with no name and address don't make it.
And the pigmy from Venice (Calif.) who wrote that "contests suck" doesn't make it.
Now, because (1) in our heart of hearts we know there is a Pigpen Look-Alike in this world of ours. (2) The Grateful Dead have a new al
bum. called Aoxomoxoa, and deserve an ad, and (3) we need all the diversion we can get here in Burbank, the Box Top and Party Games Dept, has voted to extend the deadline of the Pigpen Look-Alike Contest and make it
EASIER TO ENTER
No longer do you have to send us a reasonable facsimile of any of the Dead's album covers (a stipulation the first time round and a not-too-clever ruse to get you into the record stores). Now all you have to do fill out the form below and send it in with a photograph of your favorite Pigpen Look-Alike. The guy or gal who most resembles and captures the spirit of Mr. Pen is our lucky winner.
Live entries will not be accepted.
All photos become the property of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Records and cannot be returned.
The decision of the judges is final.
And we reserve the right to make up more rules as we go along.
The Judges. Eagerly awaiting your deluge of entries is a frolicsome panel of Warners secretaries who have, on at least one occasion, brushed shoulders with the real Mr. Pen and are convinced there cannot be a double. Prove them wrong.
The Prizes. As before, First Prize is $200 worth of our grooviest albums (Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull. The Mothers. Joni Mitchell, etc.). Second Prize is $100 worth. Third through Tenth Prizes: $50. No winners will receive a copy of Aoxomoxoa. That we want you to buy.
THE FORM
Box Top and Party Games Dept W
Room 208
Warner Bros -Seven Arts Records
Burbank. California 91503
Dear Jean. Gigi. Shannon, Thelma. Ruth.' Cinnamon. etc.:
Here is my Pigpen Look-Alike The subject is □ male □ female. On my honor this is an honest- to-gosh unretouched photograph.
The Pigpen Look-Alike's name is
If this entry wins, send all those albums directly to
Do hurry. Our judges have given up coffee breaks to work on this—and those albums are ready and waiting to be shipped out.
One final note: Fun Is Fun. but... we can't keep cracking out these divertissements without some sales. So we nervously suggest you take on Aoxomoxoa. For our mutual benefit.
i
Womer Sms -7Arts Records & fopes
AOXOMOXOA-WS 1790
ATTENTION
Students... Peace Groups... Everyone! It's time to face the facts!! There will be no peace on this planet as long as the Democratic and Republican parties are in power!!!
We are sponsoring a petition that reads: “Petition fora Special Presidential Election. We, The undersigned, Being of sound mind, and with a clear understanding of the critical WORLD SITUATION, do hereby demand that the 1968 presidential election be declared NULL and VOID on the grounds that the people were not PERMITTED to VOTE for a PEACE CANDIDATE— because ALL PEACE CANDIDATES were SYSTEMATICALLY Eliminated in one way or another!! We therefore call for and demand that a SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION (which will include peace candidates) be held at the earliest possible date!!!!”
Will YOU help us DISTRIBUTE this PETITION and help bring an end to the SENSELESS SLAUGHTER of HUMAN BEINGS in VIETNAM??
If you are unable to participate, a contribution will be greatly appreciated. Write to:
PROGRESSIVE PEACE PARTY Post Office Box 734, SABINAL
TEXAS 78881
But “income gaps" are only part of the picture. Even more embarrassing to the cadres of international capitalism, and not so readily admitted, is the fact that the peoples of the poorer areas continue to subsidize the overdevelopment of the rich by shipping out far more wealth than they receive. They pay more for what they buy from the industrialized nations than they can earn from the coffee beans, oil and copper which the rich man's marketplace compels them to export. They pay back foreign investors far more in profits than they receive in investments. Their meager savings end up in the hands of foreign branch banks.
They try to supply their domestic markets with local manufactures, and end up with a franchised producer of Kodel Fiber. 12 auto assembly plants, and a chain of Rockefeller-owned super- mercados which serve only a handful of people (generally urban “consumers") and actually increase the amount the poor areas will have to spend for the machinery and techniques of the already industrialized nations. Meanwhile—and this is the real “income gap"—the poorer 50 per cent of Latin America's people get only 14 per cent of the area's income, which means that 4.9 million 1 Venezuelans live on from S106 to S35O per person per year. The pattern is as old as empire.
Call it "income gap.” “imperialism." or whatever—responsibility for this impoverishment of the world's poor rests squarely with those who spend their time (and make their money) expediting the transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves: the policy makers and participants of the International Industrial Conference. Yet to write olf the meeting of the "Capitalist International" as a ; festival of fiends would be to “misunderstand" these men—something the New Left is wont to do. The men coming to San Francisco in September believe with Roger Blough that they have "the instrumentality” which “could do more to bind nations together than any other development yet found by man in his pursuit of peace’’—the multi-national corporation.
They are idealists, and their ideal is "an integrated international economy." They are men of reason, fighting off “emotional attitudes which favor independent and economically self-sufficient | domestic industries." They are interna- I
tionalists, hopeful that the “maximum feasible participation” of native capital and management can turn their less developed colleagues from dreams of brown and yellow capitalism to the higher vision of international management. They are pragmatists, beyond capital’s old ideological hatred of the state, open and eager for “techniques for investor-government collaboration under private management.” They are businessmen.
Certainly no one should blame them if. at the same time they wish to serve mankind, they also, in the words of one speaker at the 1965 Conference, “desire to retain markets which would otherwise be lost as a result of competitive local manufacture: to ensure essential raw materials for the domestically based operation; to exploit patented or specialized knowledge or skill; and. of course, either to protect existing profits or to make higher profits because conditions are more favorable than in the home markets.” Blaming them for that would be misguided and blasphemous.
But blasphemers abound and the announcement for this year's IIC terms them “increasingly explosive social forces." According to police reports, many of them will be at or near the Conference. Not all of them, however: the Peruvian generals are busy expropriating the Rockefellers’ International Petroleum Company; the French students, the Thai guerrillas, and the Argentine workers are all tied up doing their thing.
But Northern California protesters will be there, and they will have plenty of grievances. Bay Area conservationists know chairman Rockefeller as the man filling in their Bay and erecting high-rise office buildings on their skyline. Stanford’s SDS is still fighting SRI's research on strategic hamlets for Viet-Nam and Thailand. Berkeley people remember that SRI perfected the CS gas used against them in the People’s Park fight, and a good number of young people in the area seem to have fallen off the sweet end of the income gap and come up with just one demand: "STOP!"
It should be the hottest convention in at least a year. —steve weissman
Sieve Weissman is an activist al Stanford and was a leader in the demonstrations against the Stanjord Research Institute.
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SEXUAL LOVEMAKING by Frank S. Caprio, M.D.
kJiDi Y, most adult males (and more than a few females) learn to love sex — without ever learning to love sexually. Yet. today, human sexuality is the legitimate object of popular inquiry, physical modes of sexual intimacy, too. are openly explored in lay books and periodicals. But these writings, while supposedly describing the physio- emotional factors of "sexual mechanics.” often pay tribute to outdated taboos and minority mores — with time-wasting, obei- sant word-camouflage. Thus, definitive instruction in the lovemaking arts isn't always easy to come by: one can only speculate how many marriages suffer thereby.
That's why sexual lovemaking's functional raison d'etre is to DO even more than it says. That's why its author. Frank S. Caprio. M.D. (an eminent psychiatrist, marriage counselor and world-famous sexologist). resists the threatening imprecations of self-appointed critics who inhabit a puritanical world of their own. Definitely not a moralistic ‘‘marriage manual” of abundant aphorisms—to God. motherhood and the flag, no slight intended — this book informs, instructs and. unabashedly, illustrates techniques of pleasurable loveplay, intercourse and sexual variations. A "bedroom book." then? Yes! Voluptuously frank, sexual lovemaking is more useful, fir more usable, in the bedroom than in the library. If you find this distasteful, dissentient or dissolute, read no more: for the book itself would only nettle your sensibilities. If not. you may secure a copy (at a special substantially reduced price) by returning the coupon below.
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This 64-page section has been printed on photo-gloss stock. The original photographs. of articulated anatomical models, are fine-screen lithographed thereon. (NOTE: These definitive photos are so lighted and composed as to minimize any corporal-personal identification and salacious insinuations: obviously, however, they are intended only for self-instruction by adults. Their reproduction is strictly prohibited.)
Piano Lessons
Sexual lovemaking explores not only the biology of male-female sexual apparatus. but also the sensual specifics of lovemaking: Loveplay . . . Intercourse . . . Arousal Paths . . . Orgasmic Caresses . . . Oral Contacts . . . Fantasies . . . even so- called "Deviations.” These physio-sexual realities are defined and illustrated in 256 plainspoken pages. This bestseller-to-be is unique. Deftly, it has you reaching new heights of mutual gratification. Indeed, comparing this book to others is like comparing piano lessons to a treatise on music appreciation! It presupposes your sexual experience — but NOT your sexual performance. It transforms same-old-thing "bedroom encounters” into excitingly different LOVE AFFAIRS—again, again and again!
Detailed Sexual Presentations
In sexuai. lovemaking you'll find boundless new sexual experiences. Every night a
"new” lover — uninhibited, inventive, incredibly sensitive, deliciously delightful! Yet a lifelong mate whose lovemaking repertory, complemented by yours, passionately banishes the sameness of old-hat sex. Can any marriage, anchored to this solid bedrock of unsuppressed voluptuous sexual variety fail to become stronger? Could you find a better "bedroom instructor" than this history-making book? Where else have so many revealing presentations, with 64 pages of positional photographs, been marshalled in one volume? Find out for yourself, without risk or purchase obligation. simply by returning the coupon below. The deluxe lock-and-key edition (shown above) is now yours, subject to approval, at only S7.5O the copy. S10.95 the regular price. The standard ciothbound edition is only $5.00 the copy. $7.95 the regular price. Norfolk-Hill Ltd.. Inc.. 35 Ninth Ave.. New York City 10014
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THE NEW LEFT
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS
Priscilla Long, Ed.
Intro, by Staughton Lynd
michael appleby richard barnet
c. george benello father daniel berrigan
amy cass noam chomsky barbara deming charles denby dave gilbert percival and paul goodman peter irons frank joyce evelyn goldfield barbara and al habor
Steve halliwell louis kampf paul mattick rick margolies john me dermott c. wright mills sue munaker truman nelson hilary putnam rudolf rocker richard rothstein naomi weisstein howard zinn
$6.00 cloth; S3.00 paper; 475 pages at leading bookstores or order from:
PORTER SARGENT PUBLISHER
11 Beacon St., Boston, Mass. 02108
ALSO: Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy by Paul Mattick
** Ephemera
BOOKS
America’s Nomads
bullet park. By John Cheever. Alfred Knopf, 1969. S5.95.
In bullet park, as in all of John Cheever’s novels, “the setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter.” The town for which the novel is named, a suburban commuterstop near Manhattan, appears to be a community but is not. This is at the heart of the matter, because the book itself is about appearances and how they have come to supplant reality in American life. The plot and the characters are organized to develop this theme, which the setting represents.
The inhabitants of Bullet Park include a number of minor characters who, rather than being essential to the action, are more or less elements of the setting. To describe them is to describe Bullet Park. Mrs. Trencham, for instance, is a “religious” woman: “Her genuflections were profound and graceful . . . her Lamb of God was soulful . . . she would throw in a few signs of the cross as a proof of the superiority of her devotions.” Charlie Stringer, although he publishes pornography, still "wants to water his grass and play softball with the kids.” The rest could be summarized in these words: “The handful of men and women who attended Holy Communion were all well known to Nailles . . . they seemed invincible. Their honor, passion and intelligence were genuine.”
Of course, they are no such thing. The central action of the novel—acted out by the symbolic pair, Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer, and focusing on their struggle for the life and the soul of Eliot’s son, Tony—is a dramatic (possibly melodramatic) embodiment of the struggle between appearance and reality. On the part of Paul Hammer it is a conscious— perhaps mad—attempt to strip away .
appearances by an act of violence: “Nothing less than a crucifixion will wake the world.” For Eliot Nailles it is an unconscious attempt to preserve appearances if possible, but above all to preserve life—in this case, Tony’s life— without which there can be neither appearance nor reality.
“Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper, good and evil, life and death, love and death.” The struggle between these two characters—between Nailles, who is a suburban Dad, a mouthwash chemist for Saffron Chemical Corporation (producer of Spang) and Paul Hammer, a bastard son, an intellectual and malcontent, sometime translator of poetry, pursued by a cafard and seeking release from his anxieties—is in many ways the struggle between love and death (Cheever seems to consider them opposites which, locked in battle, comprise the totality of modern life). In fact, however, Bullet Park is symbolic narrative a la Nabokov, pasted onto a very good contemporary problem play a la Playhouse 90.
The story of Eliot Nailles and his commuting double, Paul Hammer, is like one of those X-rays in TV commercials—only this time the subject is America’s spiritual heartburn. And although it is a slightly different, somewhat better X-ray than the one taken by John Updike in his lascivious Couples, or that taken by Philip Roth in his malicious Portnoy's Complaint, it is little more than an ad for the author’s own brand of aspirin. Bullet Park does differ from these two novels in one sense: although the calibration of Human Sexual Response is as accurate and clinical as it ought to be in a modern novel, the sexual organs are not so large that the rest of human experience—also the rightful domain of the novel—shrivels up and dies in their shadow. According to Cheever, the rest of human experience died of other causes not long before he wrote his novel. "He feels himself to be a hollow man, but one who has only recently been eviscerated and who can recall what it felt like to have a skinful of lively lights and vitals.” Bullet Park
IE STONE In a Time of Torment OUR MOST DISTINGUISHED
INDEPENDENT JOURNAUST.ON THE MOST URGENT ISSUES AND KEY PERSONALITIES OE OUR TIMES: EDJ. THE WAR IN VIETNAM. FUIRRIGHT, THE NEGRO REVOLUTION,THE KENNEDYS. MALCOM X.THE LEFT,THE RICHLAND WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
“Stone’s journalism is remarkably unperishable”
—Erwin Knoll in The Progressive
This book presents the best of I. F. Stone’s pieces written over the last five years. It goes beyond being a chronicle of Mr. Stone’s journalism. It is an incisive view of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, Senator Fulbright and Curtis LeMay, Hubert Humphrey and Malcolm X, and other significant political figures of the Left, Right, and Center—who they are, what they want, and how their strengths and weaknesses affect the quality of our times.
In January, 1953, Mr. Stone launched his own independent newsletter, I. F. Stone s Weekly, which immediately distinguished itself for its biting opposition to McCarthyism, then in its heyday — and has since achieved an international reputation for outspoken journalism:
"There is fine intellectual nourishment in Stone's moral indignation."
— Stuart W. Little in the Saturday Review
“He is a journalistic pamphleteer in the highest sense of that anachronistic craft because he has an eye and mind for essentials, because he owns his own press and he has something to say."
— Laurence Stern in The Washington Post
"I. F.(Izzy) Stone is in a class by himself. While the young editors of the proliferating underground press act as though they discovered journalistic dissent. Stone's Weekly has been putting down authority for 15 years."
— Newsweek
“No Washington reporter is so exquisitely unforgiving of government stuffed shirts, bullies, windbags, liars and the rest of that mighty legion.”
— Robert Sherrill in COMMONWEAL
"He is the master debunker of the ponderous platitude and the gilded lie ... a master of the felicitous phrase .. . He may infuriate or inspire, but he never bores."
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— Sol Stern in Ramparts
“His weapons include humor and satire ... 'In a Time of Torment' ... will delight or enrage you.. .it will not leave you unmoved."
— Robert Cromie in The Chicago Tribune
"Stone is a small outpost of the Left who cannot be pigeonholed because some of his greatest shafts are aimed at people with whom he sympathizes.”
— Stan Isaacs in Newsday
"Izzy Stone is a newspaperman who gives other newspapermen pride in
their profession but makes them envious of his craft.” —Robert W. Smith
in the Minneapolis Star
"Neither secrecy blackouts nor 24-hour rumor factories can throw him off the scent. He puts together the clues everyone else has ignored or forgotten.” — Christian Science Monitor
“What really emerges in this invigorating book is Stone's basic love for America. That, in a sense, is why he has become perhaps its severest critic. He wants the Republic to survive."
— Wm. Hogan in the San Francisco Chronicle
“The concern that holds his writings together, that gives shape and style to their characteristic angles and perspectives. is a moral concern, against which the art of politics, as currently practiced, is a confidence game.”
— Patrick MacFadden in The Nation
"A man like Stone isn’t going to waste valuable time fingering the holes in the
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— Alex Campbell in The New Republic
"What sets Stone apart from the pack is his uncompromising radicalism."
— Richard Dudman in The Washingtonian
"He is a man of learning and gentleness . . . He can write in white heat, thoughtfully.” — Alvin Beam
in The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Unlike- Mencken, his iconoclasm is not for sport. Unlike Lippmann, his sense of history and perspective have not been corrupted by political over- exposure." — Kenneth J. Harvey
in the Minneapolis Tribune
To: I. F. STONE’S WEEKLY 5618 Nebraska Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20015 r-9
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Guevara On Revolution
Edited and with an introduction by JAY MALLIN
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is an exploration of the cavity which remains.
Although Cheever's subject matter seems to have died off with Honora Wapshot in The Wapshot Scandal. Cheever still has his tine eye for the vulgar and the ridiculous. “Nailles was principally occupied with the merchandising of Spang and he was definitely restive about this. It seemed to reflect on his dignity. In Nailles's mythology the nymphs complained among themselves about the bad breath of Priapus."
Eliot is as happily married to Nellie Nailles as Dagwood has been to Blondie for so many comic strip years. As in most comic strips, soap operas and video tape fairy tales, the hero has a problem. His son. Tony, does not do well in school; he prefers football and observing the ghost of nature which still haunts the countryside to French verbs. He even threatens his sex-starved, hysterical French teacher with extinction. In other words, the boy is not content to Grow Up Absurd without a struggle. Of the modes of rebellion open to him. Tony chooses prolonged bedrest after a funny-tragic scene with the old man at an abandoned miniature golf course: “Then I lost my patience, my woolly blanket, and said he ought to get olf his ass and do something useful and he said: ‘What? Like pushing mouthwash?’ ” As Paul Goodman put it, “It's hard to grow up when there isn’t enough man’s work.”
Tony takes to his bed for an epic sleep-in of approximately 22 days. He explains that although the real estate salesman claims Bullet Park is here to stay. "I feel as if the house were made of cards.” In other words. Tony is overwhelmed by the temporariness, the pro- visionality and the weakness of the world in which he lives. He does not realize it. but he has seen through its appearances. Like a sleeping beauty, however, he is revived by the magic of Swami Rutuola. a beautiful black prince from the Bullet Park ghetto.
The grand finale of the novel includes a "Graduate"-like chase when Paul Hammer kidnaps Tony and takes him to be sacrificed on the altar of the American Identity Crisis. Eliot rushes to the church where Tony is to be immolated, cuts through the locked doors with his sanctified power saw and rescues his son. Eliot's weaknesses and foibles, we are tempted to read, are outweighed by his love for his son. Paul Hammer's attempt
to kill Tony is an attempt through an act of violence to symbolize the emptiness and meaninglessness of Bullet Park and to reveal reality—blood and all. But it is motivated by spiritual desperation and a death-wish.
At the beginning of the novel, a hypothetical adolescent who is both “zealous and vengeful.” states his case against the inhabitants of Bullet Park: "Damn their shelves on which there rests a single book —a copy of the' telephone directory bound in pink brocade." The adolescent has been unfair to the depth and dimension of the typical Bullet Park family library. On that shelf would also be a paperback copy of The Graduate, and the book club editions of Couples, Portnoy's Complaint, and Pullet Park. Cheever would be one of the favorite novelists of his hero. Eliot Nailles.
John cheever has not become a public figure like certain other major American authors. He is not the showpiece intellectual on the Merv Griflin show like Norman Mailer. He probably would not like having his writing career embalmed by becoming a "Man of Letters” at the hands of the National Book Award Committee. He has not taken epic pisses at radical rallies or claimed the role of Intellectual Master of Ceremonies of the Revolution. He would seem, from the incriminating evidence of Pullet Park, to be engaged in the national pastime of many of our important novelists (e.g. John Updike and Philip Roth): he is destroying his past, abandoning the landscape where his imaginative roots were laid. Updike's sexy toddlers playing in their Tarbox lack something his earlier characters had; Roth's masturbating anti-Jew lacks something the real Jews of his Goodbye. Columbus collection had. Cheever seems intent on joining them in the composition of clever, bright, facile commentaries on the suburban-urban void- chronicles of the homeless, nomadic American without a past and therefore without a future.
"It would have troubled Leander," states the narrator of one of John Cheever's early Wapshot stories, "to think that he would be buried in any place as distant from West Farm as Yankee Stadium, but that is where his bones were laid to rest." The story, "The National Pastime.” is about a young, modern man who is oppressed by the
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full, energetic spirit of his large-dreamed father not only during his life but even after his death. The narrator confesses, “I had never been able to build any kind of bridge from Leander’s world to the worlds where I lived.” This is Cheever’s problem as well, and for him as for the narrator of the story, learning to play baseball will not resolve it. It is clear that Cheever had not laid Leander to rest when the story was written. He returned to St. Botolph’s and to Leander in The Wapshot Chronicle. No matter how oppressive the myths and landscape
of the Wapshot family may have been to him, they continued to be the fertile nexus of his most powerful associations.
From that material he wrote a novel which bears comparison with Faulkner’s Sartoris (The Sartoris Chronicle it might have been called) in the realization of regional landscape, in the theme of family and social disintegration and in total imaginative impact. With The Wapshot Chronicle Cheever seemed very near to greatness—almost a Yankee Faulkner. And yet, Cheever's discovery of the North and of the Wapshot myths
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released in him none of the enormous fictional energies that Faulkner had attained with his discovery of the Sartoris family and the South. With his death at the end of the Chronicle, one might have expected that Leander, like John Sartoris, “freed as he was of time and flesh," would have become a “more palpable presence" in the subsequent fiction of John Cheever. One felt that Leander's injunction, “admire the world," might find Cheever admiring it best by rendering it most fully in the place he knew best, St. Botolph's, as Faulkner had done in the South in Jefferson.
However, the new generation of Wap- shots in The Wapshot Scandal sense that if they ever return to St. Botolph’s it will have disappeared. And the spirit of Leander has not survived in them. Coverley Wapshot foreshadows Eliot Nailles, and his brother Moses is a Paul Hammer. Now that Cheever has abandoned St. Botolph’s, he persists in writing novels; but they are merely a form of literary baseball above the bones of Leander in which Cheever attempts to drive American Vulgarity. American Anxiety and American Complacency from the mound in disgrace.
The best of Cheever’s work is rooted in West Farm on the rocky Massachusetts coast. That is the "dear perpetual place" which nourished his imagination. Bullet Park is no place, and any novelist who felt condemned to write about the humanoids who live there would have good reason to tell Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, as Cheever recently did: “Right now I’m working on a Reporter-at-Large piece for The New Yorker about a state highway they want to build through the valley near here. It’s caused a lot of trouble." And to speculate on whether he would "ever write fiction” again. —louis grant
Marx and the Zionists
THE NON-JEW1SH JEW AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Isaac Deutscher. Oxford University Press. 1968. S5.00.
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The tension between a narrow particularism and a broad universalism is a dominant theme in Jewish intellectual history. Why is it that the God of all peoples should have picked one special people as His “chosen
treasure”? The prophets advanced a tentative solution: in Isaiah’s language, the Jews were not chosen in order to set them in opposition to all other peoples; rather the Jews, by their example, were to be a light unto the nations, to lead other peoples toward the good life. In the end of days when swords would be beaten into plowshares and the lion would lie down with the lamb, the divisions between nations would dissolve. But paradoxically that time would come only after the Jews, having retained their particular identity, had played their missionary role.
From the time of the Enlightenment, advanced Jewish secular thinkers rejected this mysterious role of the Jewish people, but they firmly adopted the vision of the “end of days” in secularized form. The kingdom of heaven on earth was in man's hands; the question was how to establish it. For many, the new chosen people were the workers, but this time they had been chosen not by God's inscrutable will, but because they were oppressed by the system and also capable of altering it by becoming aware of their oppression and organizing to overcome it. Marxists and other socialists saw a major stumbling block to organizing the working classes in the divisive nationalist sentiments which were continually whipped up by the bourgeoisie to justify its wars of economic expansion. So socialism emerged in Europe as the main proponent of internationalism ("Workers of the world unite”), an internationalism that was both an end in itself and a means to developing class consciousness and solidarity. Il is understandable, then, that Jewish thinkers like Marx, Trotsky and Luxemburg looked forward to the abolition of the national consciousness of the Jewish people. The great hostility toward Zionism that the socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries manifested must be understood in this context: precisely when the socialists were urging an abolition of national consciousness, the Zionists were claiming that the only solution to the "Jewish problem” was the recreation of a political entity in Palestine which would renew a national consciousness among the Jews.
The Non-Jewish Jew is a collection of essays written over the past 20 years, assessing this ancient debate in light of the history of this century. Isaac
Deutscher, whose eminence as a Marxist historian was universally recognized long before his death in 1967. had been ordained as a rabbi while still in his teens. His essays radiate insight and sensitivity in an area which is overgrown with a tangle of polemics and ideology. (It is a testament to the awesome power of the Jewish literary establishment that .not a single major magazine has reviewed the Deutscher essays, which are often critical of the Zionist ideal and of the current policies of the state of Israel.)
The central dilemma for the Marxist in his debate with Zionists today is that the latter made predictions which have been confirmed by history. While the Marxists urged Jews to remain in Europe to fight for the ultimate solidarity of man and the future of civilization, the Zionists argued that there was no possibility of a dignified life with self-determination so long as Jews remained a minority people. Jews would have to build a national state and secure their own existence as a people before they could make a real contribution to the- future of mankind. The Marxists charged that by opting out of the struggle and fostering nationalism instead of internationalism. the Zionists were becoming a counterrevolutionary force.
In fact, most Jews turned their backs on the Zionists and. for a variety of reasons, remained in Europe. The Nazi genocide, coupled with the revival by Stalin of anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia, leaves little doubt that in the short run at least, the Zionists were more correct than the Marxists: dignity and self- determination for Jews could not be left in the hands of Europe. Says Deutscher: “Zionism has scored a horrible victory, one which it could neither wish nor expect: six million Jews had to perish in Hitler's gas chambers in order that Israel should come to life. It would have been better had Israel remained unborn and the six million Jews stayed alive—but who can blame Zionism and Israel for the different outcome?" This has given rise to what Deutscher calls "the paradox of Jewish history”: the decay of bourgeois Europe has forced the Jews to embrace the nation-stale at a time when the nation-stale is becoming an anachronism “as ridiculous and outlived as little medieval princedoms were in the age of the steam-engine.” You can’t blame the Jews for this, says Deutscher, you must blame the world.
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THE ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS on both sides, from the Manifesto of the Bilu in 1882, the Balfour Declaration and McMahon letter to the present-day (“An extraordinary collection.” American Zionist)
But Deutscher offers little evidence to support the thesis that the nation-state must necessarily be outmoded and regressive. It is clear that nationalism plays a destructive role in the advanced industrial societies, but why must this be true in the underdeveloped countries of the Third World? Certainly Vietnamese nationalism is playing a progressive role, weakening the hold of American imperialism and by its example strengthening the will of other peoples to resist oppression. Is Cuban nationalism, linked as it is with socialist aspirations and a desire to advance the cause of other oppressed peoples, really outmoded? Must not one give a concrete assessment of the content of the specific nationalism one is judging in order to ascertain how it in fact relates to the worldwide struggle for human liberation? It is precisely in this way that the Talmudic rabbis defended the ancient notion of the “chosen people.” “Chosen for what?” they were asked. If chosen to spread the doctrine that all society must be just and humane and to serve as an example, halevie (we only wish) that all peoples considered themselves chosen to do the same.
PLUS
HE REAL TRAGEDY of the State of Israel is that the sort of nationalism that flourishes there today, although originally rooted in a devel
THE VIEWPOINTS including I. F. Stone's famed N. Y. Review article, Arnold Toynbee. Hal Draper, Abba Eban, Nasser, Fedorenko, Laqueur, and others.
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oped socialist consciousness, does not function in a progressive manner. Deutscher explains the genesis of Israel’s present ties to the West primarily in economic terms: the great influx of foreign funds (mostly German reparations and American Zionist financial aid) has distorted Israel’s economic structure by encouraging the growth of a large unproductive sector and a standard of living which is not related to the country’s own productivity and earnings. As German reparations ended and American investments and donations became even more important, Washington’s influence increased—for at any moment it could eliminate the tax advantages enjoyed by investors and donors. These ties gain in importance as Israel finds that it can buy arms only from the West.
But Deutscher ignores the role that the Communist bloc played in driving Israel toward the West. If Russia chose to woo Farouk over Ben Gurion in the late ’40s and early ’50s, it was not because the former was a better socialist or a more committed anti-imperialist.
Russia was playing out its own role as a super power, trying to gain influence and standing in the Mideast; as was so often the case, its opportunism was coincidentally counterrevolutionary. The Israeli left, vulnerable enough in the face of the tremendous financial aid being offered by the West, was continually repudiated by the “socialist world.” Israeli communists were excluded from world communist gatherings, and European communist propaganda seemed to give indiscriminate support to reactionary Arab regimes bent on Israel’s destruction. The revelation of the "Doctor’s Plot” by Stalin and the purges of prominent Jews in Eastern Europe were part of a series of incidents which severely weakened the credibility of an Israeli left that had been dominated by proStalinist elements before the birth of the state in 1948. All these factors played a role in determining the direction that Israel ultimately took.
But whatever the historical reasons, Israel is now tied to the West in a way which makes Jewish nationalism an antiprogressive force. Instead of serving as a light to the nations, the role of the Diaspora Jew as a critic of established power has been submerged. The sabras proudly declare, “We are just like everybody else,” and that has proven all too true. If Israel had done battle with outside exploitation and control in the region, the history of the Middle East might look different today. Instead, Israel has become little more than an attention-catching sideshow, diverting concern from the Mideast’s real problem: the big power struggle for control of the area’s oil resources. When it serves their purpose, Israel’s Western allies will quickly abandon their little friend to pursue more serious and substantial interests. But in the meantime, Israel, with all its victories, is reversing the whole tradition of Jewish history. The people who were themselves exiles have created a million new exiles; those who were the people of the book now rally around the flag, the gun and the dollar.
Deutscher gives prophetic warnings to the Israelis that their hard line on the Arabs is harming their own long-term interests. And, like the prophets of old, he thunders his warnings not from hatred but from love and compassion: “I am speaking as a Marxist of Jewish origin, whose next-of-kin perished in Auschwitz and whose relatives live in Israel.” The
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Jews were once the victims of the bourgeois order in Europe. Forced to take the most obnoxious positions as traders and money-lenders, they reaped the hatred for capitalism that was intense enough to force an outlet for itself and focus on a scapegoat. The anti-Semitism that developed was a misguided response on the part of oppressed peoples who did not understand the real source of their oppression: the capitalist order. Thus. anti-Semitism was, in Augst Bebel’s phrase, the “socialism of the fools.” But the Jews did not understand the lesson of Europe, warns Deutscher: "They now appear in the Middle East once again in the invidious role of agents not so much of their own. relatively feeble, capitalism but of powerful western vested interests and as proteges of neo-colonialism.”
It is not just that such a path is not in the interests of Jewish survival; it is in fact a betrayal of that which is most genuine and valuable in Jewish tradition iiself. The Jew who identifies with the capitalist order and its imperialism, responsible for so much of the oppression of mankind, is in some sense a degenerate type, a Jew who has no sense of Jewish history or its meaning. “I am a Jew." says Deutscher, “by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated." The Jewish intellectual, and indeed the non- Jewish intellectual as well, must remain an eternal protester. His job is “to remain the opposition to the powers that be. to militate against the taboos and conventions, to struggle for a society in which nationalism and racialism will at last lose their hold on the human mind." It is precisely in the name of what is best in Jewish history and tradition that the Jew must raise his voice in criticism of the state of Israel.
At the same time. Deutscher has no illusions about the purity of the Arab world. He urges the Arabs to abandon their bloodthirsty rhetoric, their own socialism of fools, and he calls for the intensive modernization of the structure of Arab economics and politics by the development of revolutionary and socialist tendencies. If his pleas to the Arab and Israeli worlds seem like cries in the wilderness, they remind one of the similar calls for justice and a change of ways that bellowed forth from. Jeremiah, Isaiah and Amos—calls which also
fell on ears that would not hear.
The state of Israel is not the first attempt of the Jewish people to channel their energies into a national state. David and his descendants built the first such state, and the Maccabees engineered the second commonwealth. Both were corrupt. land-hungry bullies—and the destruction of both was interpreted by Jewish tradition to be a sign of God's displeasure with the unrighteous social order that prevailed therein. If today’s prophets are also ignored, the modem Jewish state may well face a similar fate. The depth of such a tragedy can only be appreciated against the background that Deutscher recognizes so well: the failure of the socialist revolution in Eastern Europe to provide satisfactory alternative solutions to the "Jewish problem."
Deutscher accounts for the socialist failure both in terms of the deep-rootedness of anti-Semitism among the people and of the specific historical machinations of Stalin in consolidating his power. The people's anti-Semitism derived both from the pervasive indoctrination by the Church against the “Christ-killers" and from resentment of the peasants against the Jewish village shopkeeper or innkeeper who seemed to be prospering in the Czarist order. These factors could be played upon by those who were destroying the internationalist tradition of the Bolshevik party while building the road to socialism in one country. “In Russia." says Deutscher, "as in the West. anti- Semitism invariably worms its way to the surface in times of reaction and feeds and grows on nationalist emotions and hatreds. Stalin, never fastidious in the choice of means, did not shrink from exploiting anti-Jewish tendencies in his struggles with the Opposition.... Stalinist agitators stirred up anti-Semitic prejudice, brought it nearer the surface, until in the period of the Great Purges it reached its first climax.”
Zionism and socialism, the two great Nth century solutions that were the center of a great debate in Eastern European Jewish intellectual circles, have thus both proved inadequate in their concrete historical manifestations in the 20th century. Deutscher's work, exploring how this came to be. is a crucial prerequisite for the next step: a critical rethinking of the role of the Jew in the historical present and future.
— MICHAEL P. LERNER
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100,000 ligMd this Dsclaration during Iha JOHNSON Administration. NIXON is allowing doalh and daslruclion Io coniinua and to increase. Pressure and action against tha war are needed.
Individuals Against the Crime of Silence
A Declaration To Our Fellow Citizens Of The United States, To The Peoples Of The World, And To Future Generations:
1 We are appalled and angered by the conduct of our country in
Vietnam.
2 In the name of liberty, we have unleashed the awesome arsenal of the greatest military power in the world upon a small agricultural nation, killing, burning and mutilating its people. In the name of peace, we are creating a desert. In the name of security, we are inviting world conflagration.
3 We, the signers of this declaration, believe this war to be immoral. We believe it to be illegal. We must oppose it.
4 At Nuremberg, after World War II, we tried, convicted and executed men for the crime of OBEYING their government, when that government demanded of them crimes against humanity. Millions more, who were not tried, were still guilty of THE CRIME OF SILENCE.
5 We have a commitment to the laws and principles we carefully forged in the AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, at the NUREMBERG TRIALS, and in the UNITED NATIONS CHARTER. And our own deep democratic traditions and our dedication to the ideal of human decency among men demand that we speak out.
We Therefore wish to declare our names to the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, both as permanent witness to our opposition to the war in Vietnam and as a demonstration that the conscience of America is not dead.
On September 23. 1965. a Memorandum of Law was incorporated In the Congressional Record of the 89th Congress of the United States of America m which leading American attorneys, after careful analysts of our position and actions In the Vietnam War. came to the conclusion that the U S Is violating the following accords The Charier of the United Nations. Tha Genova Accords of 1954. the United States Conatitution.
To Protest —To Object —To Dissent has long been an American tradition. The following are a few among the many who have signed this declaration to be on permanent record.
TEAR OUT ALONG THE DOTTED LINE AND MAIL
ABE AJAY
JAMES BALDWIN
(FATHER) J E BAMBERGER. M.D.. OCSO
DANIEL BERRIGAN. S.J
REV PHILLIP BERRIGAN. S S.J.
RAY BRADBURY
ROBERT McAFFEE BROWN
REV. WILLIAM H DU BAY
JAMES FARMER
W H. FERRY
DR. JEROME 0 FRANK
REV. STEPHEN H FRITCHMAN
BEN GAZZARA
DR FRED GOLDSTEIN
NAOMI L GOLDSTEIN
DR RALPH R GREENSON PROF. ABRAHAM J HESCHEL BRIG. GENERAL H B HESTER. RET DR STANLEY HOFFMAN TERESSAB HOFFMAN CHARLESH HUBBEL SANDER L JOHNSON.ESQ PROF DONALD KALISH EDWARD M KEATING PHIL KERBY RING LARDNER. JR RABBI RICHARD N LEVY LOUIS LICHT. ESQ DR ROBERT E LITMAN VICTOR LUDWIG
HERBERT D MAGIDSON SHIRLEY MAGIDSON NORMAN MAILER THOMAS MERTON SIDNEY MEYER EASON MONROE
PROF. HANS J MORGENTHAU HENRYE NILES DR MARK F ORFIRER AVA HELEN PAULING
DR LINUS PAULINO BISHOP JAMES A PIKE RICHARD M POWELL CARL REINER JANICE RULE
ROBERT RYAN
DAVID SCHOENBRUN LORRY SHERMAN
PROF ROBERT SIMMONS DR BENJAMIN SPOCK FREDH STEINMETZ ESQ DR NORMAN TABACHNICK D IANTHIERMANN
BRYNA IVENS UNTERMEYER
LOUIS UNTERMEYER DICK VAN DYKE ROBERT VAUGHN OR MAURICE N WALSH DR HARVEY WHEELER A L WIRIN ESO
I wish to sign my name to the above Declaration to the United Nations and want to go on record with this Declaration of the Individuals Against the Crime of Silence.
signature
For clarity, also print your nama aftar your signature address
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date
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city
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state
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ZIP
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Sign, complete and mail to P.O. Box 69960. Los Angeles. Calif 90069 The office of the Individuals Against the Crime of Silence will then forward the information to the United Nations
Should you also wish to support additional publishings and communications, send $1 or more in cash or by check made payable to Individuals Against the Crime of Silence This donation entities you to the lapel emblem, the wallet-size registration card and four personalized letter replicas of the Declaration for you to individually send on to the President and your U.S. senators and congressman. Money is needed to speed our progress.
The strength of our numbers will regularly and effectively be made known Your signature does have power
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[1] P737. Picasso: DON QUIXOTE.
[2] At least according to traditional celebrations of the Jewish Rosh Hashanah.