Re: [Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Empire]: Beatty on McGarry, 'The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916'

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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it seems to me that Easter 1916 can be understood as the unity of three
tendencies

Revolutionary Nationalism
Revolutionary Socialism &
Revolutionary Feminism

It is also possible to read the subsequent history as an attempt to disrupt
that unity including by some nationalists, socialists and feminists. The
"Irish Question" as it was called when I was at school can only be answered
through unity of the three forces. So I am skeptical of post-structural
deconstructions of "nationalist myths'.  I am skeptical of class only
critiques coming from Stalinist,  International Socialist and Maoist
tendencies and I am skeptical of hose historians who use feminist theory to
discredit Countess Markiewicz.

comradely

Gary

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 6:00 AM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 3:37 PM
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Empire]: Beatty on McGarry, 'The Rising: Ireland:
> Easter 1916'
> To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu
>
>
> Fearghal McGarry.  The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916.  Centenary
> Edition. New York  Oxford University Press, 2016.  400 pp.  $29.95
> (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-873234-1.
>
> Reviewed by Aidan Beatty (Concordia University)
> Published on H-Empire (October, 2016)
> Commissioned by Stephen Jackson
>
> In 1947, the Irish government established the Bureau of Military
> History (BMH), an organization overseen by senior military figures
> that brought together professional historians with former members of
> the Irish Volunteers (the precursor to both the Irish army and the
> Irish Republican Army [IRA]). The mission of the bureau was to
> compile witness statements from those directly involved in the 1916
> Easter Rising as well as the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and
> civil war (1922-23). In operation for a decade, the BMH accumulated a
> total of 1,773 statements running to 36,000 pages of oral
> testimonies, as well as 150,000 ephemeral documents from this
> formative period of modern Irish history. And then, inexplicably and
> to the dismay of the historians who had collaborated with the
> project, the Irish government placed the entirety of the collection
> in storage in government buildings in Dublin, refusing to make the
> witness statements available to either the general public or to
> researchers. The eighty-three steel boxes of oral history files
> remained off limits until March 2003, when the last holder of a
> military service pension died (p. 5).
>
> Fearghal McGarry's account of the Easter Rising, first released in
> 2010 and here republished in a special centenary edition, draws
> heavily on the BMH's witness statements to craft an animated and
> readable account of this rebellion at the heart of what was then one
> of the major cities of the United Kingdom. Yet he does little to
> unpack the nature of his source material. The Easter Rising, a
> military failure in April 1916 that was condemned by almost all
> mainstream Irish nationalists, soon came to be seen as a heroic deed
> rather than a treacherous attack on the British state. A large dose
> of mythmaking soon emerged, myths that in turn became part of the
> Irish state's carefully protected nationalist narrative. The witness
> statements of the BMH cannot be read as unadorned accounts of what_
> really _happened in the rising. Rather, they were also partially a
> product of the same processes of post-1916 mythmaking. As McGarry
> points out, in some cases, the witness statements "were written by
> the witnesses but, more frequently, they were formed into a coherent
> statement by the investigators before being submitted to the witness
> for verification and signed approval" (p. 5). Yet McGarry never
> interrogates the meaning and limits of this state-curated act of oral
> history collection, much less that the post-1922 Irish state had a
> strong track record of both invasive censorship and zealous
> protection of national mythologies.
>
> To a large degree, these witness statements are more reflective of
> the constructed memories of post-1916 Ireland than of the lived
> realities of the rebellion itself. And indeed there are quite a
> number of fanciful memories recounted without critical comment by
> McGarry: a participant in the 

[Marxism] The 8th condition of membership in the Communist International

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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Following the Russian Revolution, socialist parties around the world split
between those who sided with the Bolsheviks and those who had supported
imperialist war and simply wanted to help manage capitalism.  The result
was the establishment of the Third International, officially the Communist
International.  In order to keep out opportunists, reformists, national
chauvinists, the spineless and such-like – the types who had got more and
more influential in the Second (or Socialist) International – the new
International adopted 21 conditions for membership.  Condition 8 dealt with
parties in the imperialist countries and anti-imperialism.  It stated:

“A particularly marked and clear attitude on the question of. . .

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/the-condition-of-anti-imperialism/
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[Marxism] Colombia votes No to peace agreement

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Colombia has voted No on the peace agreement with the FARC. Approximately
13,000,000 of the 34,000,000 people who were eligible to vote voted. The no
vote won by about 70,000 votes.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Fwd: Revolutionary Strategy and the Politics of the Democratic Socialists of America | Communist League of Tampa

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A polemic with Jacobin by the Communist League of Tampa. Communist 
League of Tampa? Say what?


https://communistleaguetampa.org/2016/10/01/communist-strategy-today/
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[Marxism] Fwd: What on Earth is the Modern World-System? Foodgetting and Territory in the Modern Era and Beyond | Friedman | Journal of World-Systems Research

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The project of a common world cuisine, the culinary equivalent of English
as a world language, is embodied in the fast-food hamburger (Harris
1985: 121; Ritzer 1993). The history of the hamburger and its ingredients,
wheat and beef cattle, also traces the larger story of reconstellation and
suppression of ecosystems, from the forests of Europe to the grasslands of
North America, to the rainforests of South America.

The fast food hamburger condenses much of the simplification of
human diet, of the underlying complexity of the agrofood system, and of
the still deeper simplification of ecosystems to supply wheat and beef. 
Let us

begin with some common distinctions. Is the hamburger an American food
imposed on the world, an edible enticement of cultural imperialism? One
could say so. It was invented in the U.S. despite its Germanic name and its
culinary roots in European wheat and beef cuisines, specifically fried disks
of ground fl esh. It followed bottled bubbly flavoured water (Coca Cola and
Pepsi-Cola, by name) into the local street food markets of the world. Like
the early wordless television advertisements intended for world consumption,
showing happy, healthy, frolicking, youthful people drinking Coke or
Pepsi, the commercial propaganda for hamburgers devotes considerable 
artistry,

technique, and money to create images of luxury and freedom designed
to lure humans all over the world into ingesting the food of America and
valuing it above the unglamourous cuisines of their ancestors.

full: http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/214/226

---

As stupid, irrational and self-destructive a system capitalism is, it 
reached new depths when it fostered the development of cattle- ranching 
in Central America in the early 1970s.


The growth of McDonald's, Burger King and other fast food outlets had 
created an insatiable demand for beef. These types of restaurants had no 
need for the choice, fat-stuffed grain-fed beef that were found in super 
markets. They could get by on the sort of tougher, lower- grade beef 
that was typical of cattle that subsisted on grass alone, since the meat 
would be ground up anyhow. The free-range "criollo" cattle of Central 
America made a perfect fit for this expanding market.


Historically, the cattle industry in Central America was a very low- 
tech operation. Cowboys would drive a herd to a major city where 
slaughter-houses could be found. The cattle would be cut up and sent out 
to public markets, often in the open air and unrefrigerated, where a 
customer would select a piece of meat off of the carcass. However, to 
satisfy the external market, a more modern mode of production had to be 
adopted. Firstly, roads needed to be created to transport the cattle by 
truck from the countryside. Secondly, packing houses had to be created 
near ports to prepare the beef for export. Foreign investors made road- 
building possible, just the way that British capital made railroads 
possible in the US for identical reasons. The "Alliance for Progress" 
aided in the creation of such infrastructure as well.


The packing-houses themselves were built by local capitalists with some 
assistance from the outside. It was these middle-men, who stood between 
rancher and importer, that cashed in on the beef bonanza. The Somoza 
family were movers and shakers in the packing-house industry. As 
monopolists, they could paid the rancher meager prices and sell the 
processed beef at a premium price since demand for beef was at an 
all-time high.


In addition, the Somoza family used its profits and loans from foreign 
investors to buy up huge swaths of land in Nicaragua to create cattle 
ranches. They had already acquired 51 ranches before the beef-export 
boom, but by 1979, after two decades of export-led growth, their 
holdings and those of their cronies had expanded to more than 2 million 
acres, more than half of which was in the best grazing sectors. It was 
these properties and the packing-houses that became nationalized 
immediately after the FSLN triumph.


full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/cattle.htm
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[Marxism] Fwd: For Knicks’ Joakim Noah, Principled Stand Isn’t a Novelty - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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As a student at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, Joakim Noah 
often took the bus to school from his home in Manhattan, 
circumnavigating construction on the site of the World Trade Center, 
which had been demolished in the attacks of Sept. 11. It was a daily 
reminder for him of violence, of the cruel capabilities of man.


Noah was, even then, according to friends, a pacifist and a freethinker. 
At Florida, he decorated his dorm room with images of people like 
Mahatma Gandhi, Bob Marley, Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. 
Fluent in several languages, he studied art, religion and history. He 
was neither hemmed in by convention nor shy about sharing his views on 
politics.


full: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/sports/basketball/joakim-noah-knicks-west-point-antiwar-protest.html?ref=sports

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Empire]: Beatty on McGarry, 'The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 3:37 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Empire]: Beatty on McGarry, 'The Rising: Ireland:
Easter 1916'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Fearghal McGarry.  The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916.  Centenary
Edition. New York  Oxford University Press, 2016.  400 pp.  $29.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-873234-1.

Reviewed by Aidan Beatty (Concordia University)
Published on H-Empire (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Stephen Jackson

In 1947, the Irish government established the Bureau of Military
History (BMH), an organization overseen by senior military figures
that brought together professional historians with former members of
the Irish Volunteers (the precursor to both the Irish army and the
Irish Republican Army [IRA]). The mission of the bureau was to
compile witness statements from those directly involved in the 1916
Easter Rising as well as the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and
civil war (1922-23). In operation for a decade, the BMH accumulated a
total of 1,773 statements running to 36,000 pages of oral
testimonies, as well as 150,000 ephemeral documents from this
formative period of modern Irish history. And then, inexplicably and
to the dismay of the historians who had collaborated with the
project, the Irish government placed the entirety of the collection
in storage in government buildings in Dublin, refusing to make the
witness statements available to either the general public or to
researchers. The eighty-three steel boxes of oral history files
remained off limits until March 2003, when the last holder of a
military service pension died (p. 5).

Fearghal McGarry's account of the Easter Rising, first released in
2010 and here republished in a special centenary edition, draws
heavily on the BMH's witness statements to craft an animated and
readable account of this rebellion at the heart of what was then one
of the major cities of the United Kingdom. Yet he does little to
unpack the nature of his source material. The Easter Rising, a
military failure in April 1916 that was condemned by almost all
mainstream Irish nationalists, soon came to be seen as a heroic deed
rather than a treacherous attack on the British state. A large dose
of mythmaking soon emerged, myths that in turn became part of the
Irish state's carefully protected nationalist narrative. The witness
statements of the BMH cannot be read as unadorned accounts of what_
really _happened in the rising. Rather, they were also partially a
product of the same processes of post-1916 mythmaking. As McGarry
points out, in some cases, the witness statements "were written by
the witnesses but, more frequently, they were formed into a coherent
statement by the investigators before being submitted to the witness
for verification and signed approval" (p. 5). Yet McGarry never
interrogates the meaning and limits of this state-curated act of oral
history collection, much less that the post-1922 Irish state had a
strong track record of both invasive censorship and zealous
protection of national mythologies.

To a large degree, these witness statements are more reflective of
the constructed memories of post-1916 Ireland than of the lived
realities of the rebellion itself. And indeed there are quite a
number of fanciful memories recounted without critical comment by
McGarry: a participant in the rebellion who claimed that "I never
slept one single hour of that week" (p. 191); a female combatant who
said that for the eleven days she was imprisoned in unhygienic
conditions in Kilmainham Gaol after the rising, "I never went to the
lavatory" (p. 261); and parents who were "prepared to sacrifice their
children for the cause" (p. 125). There are clearly some invented
memories at work here, reflecting the ways in which the rising came
to be seen as a moment of profound self-sacrifice for the cause of
the nation. Other memories are more subtly problematic. One witness
statement recalled, with an air of pride, that in the rising, "the
Irish Republican Army had taken Dublin" (p. 133), despite this
organization not formally existing until 1917. Leslie Price, a member
of the female milita, Cumann na mBan (The Women's Organization), and
later the wife of the IRA's Tom Barry, described seeing the leaders
of rebellion in a funeral a year before the rising: "When the armed
Volunteers passed I then suddenly realised that the men I had
seen--Tom Clarke, The O'Rahilly, Seán McGarry--looked as if they
meant serious business" (p. 92). The subtly prophetic tone, as if she
could tell what they were already planning for Easter 1916, points to
how much of a constructed 

Re: [Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about anti-Semitism

[Carl G. Estabrook via Marxism]

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Having taught at Brown as a post-doc long ago, I find the response quite 
reasonable.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 2, 2016, at 12:15 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
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> 
> Those bathroom stalls all seem to be filled with swastikas.
> 
>> On 10/2/16 1:11 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
>> @Benjamin Gladstone, I take the same Brown University courses as you. I
>> currently sit across from you in a Middle East Studies seminar. So I'm
>> confused by today's New York Times op-ed, where you write of
>> experiencing anti-Semitism after listening to our professor "glorify"
>> Egyptian leader Nasser and Hezbollah. (When/where did that happen?!)
>> 
>> Brown is also 1/4th Jewish and anecdotally, in my 4 years, I've never
>> seen a 'swastika carved into the bathroom stalls" or heard another
>> student "accuse me of killing Jesus." (But in your op-ed, you've had a
>> different experience.)
>> 
>> Ben, your exaggerations and allegations of anti-Semitism at Brown harm
>> our professors' ability to teach. Your rhetoric invites outside
>> political groups to pressure, fire and censor non-tenured academics
>> critical of your Israel politics (a la the Canary Mission). Your op-ed
>> portends a threat to academic freedom at Brown.
>> 
> 
> Open Letter to Bard College President on "Anti-Semitism" on campus
> 
> (Posted to www.marxmail.org on Oct. 8, 2002)
> 
> Dear Leon Botstein,
> 
> I hope everything is going okay with you and your master plan for turning 
> Bard College into a first-rate American institution. No doubt the new 
> Performing Institute designed by megastar Frank Gehry will catapult Bard into 
> the stratosphere even though to me it looks like a melting gingerbread house 
> designed by somebody who ate one too many peyote buttons. But--hey--what do I 
> know. For me, some of the most emblematic buildings at Bard during my stint 
> (1961-1965) were the barracks that had been constructed after WWII for 
> returning veterans. They might have looked like dormitories for migrant farm 
> laborers, but they did contain some extraordinary students. Other 
> times--other places.
> 
> But the reason I write you now is to express my disappointment that you would 
> jump on the "Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism" bandwagon. Surely, you must 
> understand that this was the purpose of the full-page ad in the NY Times, 
> even though it was framed in terms of protecting Jewish students from another 
> Kristallnacht. Here at Columbia University, where I have worked for the past 
> 10 years, you can find a vibrant anti-Zionist movement that is spearheaded by 
> Jews in fact. Now maybe they are in some sort of dark conspiracy to punish 
> their co-religionists but mostly they seem intent on raising fellow students' 
> awareness of what Gush Shalom leader Uri Avnery calls "a cruel, brutal and 
> colonizing state."
> 
> When you turn to the Chronicles of Higher Education (Oct. 4) article on 
> "anti-Semitism" on campus, the evidence is pretty thin. Your fellow signatory 
> Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College of Columbia University, said 
> that he noticed a graffiti on a men's-room wall that said, "Let's kill the 
> Jews." He said he looked in several stalls and found other graffiti, both 
> anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic.
> 
> Now my offices are in Teachers College and I have had occasion to visit many 
> of their facilities on account of my chronic irritable bowel syndrome. But I 
> have never seen such graffiti myself. Is it possible that President Levine is 
> manufacturing evidence like the Gulf of Tonkin incident? I wouldn't rule this 
> out myself.
> 
> (I would hasten to add that the only threatening graffiti I spotted was 
> "Death to Short People", which is on the first floor of Thorndike, in the 
> rightmost stall in the bathroom near the photocopying room. I often go there 
> to do my business and read a little CLR James while I'm at it. Now I have 
> never felt threatened by this graffiti, even though I barely reach 5'6".)
> 
> On the other hand, there are lots of real attacks taking place against 
> professors and students who are protesting Israeli brutality. I am acquainted 
> with Mohammad Alam, an economics professor at Northeastern, whose "dossier" 
> has turned up in a website run by Daniel Pipes. Along with institutions 

Re: [Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about anti-Semitism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 10/2/16 2:05 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:

But if we're going to talk about racism, let's talk about Brown gentrifying
black/brown neighborhoods for the past 50 years.


NY Times Editorial, Oct. 23 2006
Brown University’s Debt to Slavery

A long-awaited report on Brown University’s 18th-century links to 
slavery should dispel any lingering smugness among Northerners that 
slavery was essentially a Southern problem.


The report establishes that Brown did indeed benefit in its early years 
from money generated by the slave trade and by industries dependent on 
slavery. It did so in an era when slavery permeated the social and 
economic life of Rhode Island. Slaves accounted for 10 percent of the 
state’s population in the mid-18th century, when Brown was founded, and 
Rhode Island served as a northern hub of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, 
mounting at least 1,000 voyages that carried more than 100,000 Africans 
into slavery over the course of a century.


The Brown report is the latest revelation that Northern businesses and 
institutions benefited from slavery. Countless other institutions might 
be surprised, and ashamed, if they dug deeply into their pasts as Brown 
has over the past three years.


The Committee on Slavery and Justice, composed of faculty, students and 
administrators, found that some 30 members of Brown’s governing board 
owned or captained slave ships, and donors sometimes contributed slave 
labor to help in construction. The Brown family owned slaves and engaged 
in the slave trade, although one family member became a leading 
abolitionist and had his own brother prosecuted for illegal slave 
trading. The college did not own or trade slaves.


The hard question is what to do about it. The committee makes sensible 
recommendations — creating a center for the study of slavery and 
injustice, rewriting Brown’s history to acknowledge the role of slavery, 
creating a memorial to the slave trade in Rhode Island, and recruiting 
more minority students. Other proposals are more problematic. But the 
value of this exercise was to illuminate a history that had been 
“largely erased from the collective memory of our university and state.”

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Re: [Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about anti-Semitism

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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I've lived in RI for 30 years and commute in to Providence daily. There is
zero antisemitism on the East Side, it's a historic Jewish neighborhood.
But if we're going to talk about racism, let's talk about Brown gentrifying
black/brown neighborhoods for the past 50 years. Ben Gladstone, how do you
feel about funding an ethnic cleansing with your tuition?

Message: 7
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2016 13:11:25 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about
anti-Semitism
Message-ID: <9173b06d-4a6e-0494-d74d-31ca6e619...@panix.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed


@Benjamin Gladstone, I take the same Brown University courses as you. I
currently sit across from you in a Middle East Studies seminar. So I'm
confused by today's New York Times op-ed, where you write of
experiencing anti-Semitism after listening to our professor "glorify"
Egyptian leader Nasser and Hezbollah. (When/where did that happen?!)

Brown is also 1/4th Jewish and anecdotally, in my 4 years, I've never
seen a 'swastika carved into the bathroom stalls" or heard another
student "accuse me of killing Jesus." (But in your op-ed, you've had a
different experience.)

Ben, your exaggerations and allegations of anti-Semitism at Brown harm
our professors' ability to teach. Your rhetoric invites outside
political groups to pressure, fire and censor non-tenured academics
critical of your Israel politics (a la the Canary Mission). Your op-ed
portends a threat to academic freedom at Brown.


-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] American Apartheid: A Georgia County Drove Out All Its Black Citizens in 1912

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Oct. 2 2016
American Apartheid: A Georgia County Drove Out All Its Black Citizens in 
1912

By CAROL ANDERSON

BLOOD AT THE ROOT
A Racial Cleansing in America
By Patrick Phillips
Illustrated. 302 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

Patrick Phillips’s book, at its core, is about the lies told over and 
over again until they become the truth. Lies ­crafted to exonerate white 
residents, who deployed terror, lynching and the law to racially cleanse 
all black people from Forsyth County, Ga. Lies proffered to explain why, 
despite the civil rights movement and the area’s proximity to Atlanta, 
the ­county remained virtually all-white into the 1990s. “Blood at the 
Root,” whose title is taken from a stanza of “Strange Fruit,” the 
hauntingly painful song about lynching, is no redemption tale. By the 
end, it is clear that the white supremacy responsible for killing black 
bodies and stealing land and property remains, to this day, unbowed and 
­unrepentant.


Phillips begins with his childhood. In the late 1970s, his family had 
moved out of Atlanta and, like so many, purchased a home in a white 
suburban setting. But, Phillips began to think: Why this white? Not one 
black person in the entire county? How could that be? Years later, still 
asking those questions, he began his quest.


He takes us back to the moment in 1912 when a young white woman named 
Mae Crow is found in a ditch, bludgeoned and raped. Forsyth County’s 
whites immediately assumed that the perpetrators had to be black. Who 
else would do something so savage? Moreover, there were a few 
­African-Americans who were “outsiders,” teenagers taken in by their 
extended families and given a home in Forsyth County. Because they 
weren’t born there they automatically fell under suspicion. Soon 
thereafter an upstanding citizen drove one of the black teenagers into 
the woods, placed a noose around the child’s neck and demanded a 
confession. The frightened youth told whatever story this man ­wanted to 
hear and, for good measure, ­implicated others.


Confession in hand, Forsyth County’s whites were determined to avenge 
Mae Crow. And Rob Edwards, one of the “outsiders” seen with the teenager 
that day and held in the local jail, fit the bill. While the sheriff, 
who was up for re-election, conveniently slipped away leaving only his 
rival, the deputy, to protect a young black man whom the voters wanted 
dead, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. After Edwards was dragged, 
beaten and shot on the town square, his bullet-riddled body was strung 
up and left as a warning. ­Unsated, the lynch mob then went after the 
other defendants, but they had already been secreted away to Atlanta’s 
Fulton County Jail, known as the Tower. Denied their pound of flesh, 
bands of night riders turned their attention to the remaining black 
community and finished the job with dynamite, gunfire, arson and sheer 
terror. Within a matter of weeks, Forsyth County was racially cleansed.


Months later, when the state militia escorted the defendants back to the 
county seat of Cumming, Ga., to stand trial, the only black faces in the 
county were theirs. The subsequent court proceedings, designed to exude 
an aura of decorum amid the lawlessness of vigilante justice, snuffed 
out the last black lives in Forsyth County for nearly 80 years.


Phillips provides powerful insight into the motives of the various class 
and business sectors in the county’s white community, which conducted, 
acquiesced to or benefited from the terror. Key to the sustained 
systematic violence was the refusal of law enforcement to enforce the 
law. Thus, the voices of the few who pleaded for moderation were 
threatened or ignored. Impunity ruled. Even a crime with parallels to 
the Mae Crow case — committed after there were no African-­Americans 
left and Edwards had been lynched and his co-­defendants executed — was 
not enough to compel local whites to admit that a killer was still on 
the loose and that racism and greed had been guiding their own actions.


Phillips’s goal in this book, however, is not just to tell the tale of 
whites who rained down violence on their black neighbors but also to 
capture the voices, hopes, fears and subsequent lives of Forsyth 
County’s African-American population as they emerged from slavery, built 
their lives around Cumming, and then lost everything — sometimes 
hundreds of acres — as whites drove them out. This part of the book is 
the most hopeful, ambitious and, unfortunately, least successful. 
Phillips’s effort is hampered by the scarce records, biased contemporary 
newspaper reporting, traumatized family 

Re: [Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about anti-Semitism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Those bathroom stalls all seem to be filled with swastikas.

On 10/2/16 1:11 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

@Benjamin Gladstone, I take the same Brown University courses as you. I
currently sit across from you in a Middle East Studies seminar. So I'm
confused by today's New York Times op-ed, where you write of
experiencing anti-Semitism after listening to our professor "glorify"
Egyptian leader Nasser and Hezbollah. (When/where did that happen?!)

Brown is also 1/4th Jewish and anecdotally, in my 4 years, I've never
seen a 'swastika carved into the bathroom stalls" or heard another
student "accuse me of killing Jesus." (But in your op-ed, you've had a
different experience.)

Ben, your exaggerations and allegations of anti-Semitism at Brown harm
our professors' ability to teach. Your rhetoric invites outside
political groups to pressure, fire and censor non-tenured academics
critical of your Israel politics (a la the Canary Mission). Your op-ed
portends a threat to academic freedom at Brown.



Open Letter to Bard College President on "Anti-Semitism" on campus

(Posted to www.marxmail.org on Oct. 8, 2002)

Dear Leon Botstein,

I hope everything is going okay with you and your master plan for 
turning Bard College into a first-rate American institution. No doubt 
the new Performing Institute designed by megastar Frank Gehry will 
catapult Bard into the stratosphere even though to me it looks like a 
melting gingerbread house designed by somebody who ate one too many 
peyote buttons. But--hey--what do I know. For me, some of the most 
emblematic buildings at Bard during my stint (1961-1965) were the 
barracks that had been constructed after WWII for returning veterans. 
They might have looked like dormitories for migrant farm laborers, but 
they did contain some extraordinary students. Other times--other places.


But the reason I write you now is to express my disappointment that you 
would jump on the "Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism" bandwagon. Surely, you 
must understand that this was the purpose of the full-page ad in the NY 
Times, even though it was framed in terms of protecting Jewish students 
from another Kristallnacht. Here at Columbia University, where I have 
worked for the past 10 years, you can find a vibrant anti-Zionist 
movement that is spearheaded by Jews in fact. Now maybe they are in some 
sort of dark conspiracy to punish their co-religionists but mostly they 
seem intent on raising fellow students' awareness of what Gush Shalom 
leader Uri Avnery calls "a cruel, brutal and colonizing state."


When you turn to the Chronicles of Higher Education (Oct. 4) article on 
"anti-Semitism" on campus, the evidence is pretty thin. Your fellow 
signatory Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College of Columbia 
University, said that he noticed a graffiti on a men's-room wall that 
said, "Let's kill the Jews." He said he looked in several stalls and 
found other graffiti, both anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic.


Now my offices are in Teachers College and I have had occasion to visit 
many of their facilities on account of my chronic irritable bowel 
syndrome. But I have never seen such graffiti myself. Is it possible 
that President Levine is manufacturing evidence like the Gulf of Tonkin 
incident? I wouldn't rule this out myself.


(I would hasten to add that the only threatening graffiti I spotted was 
"Death to Short People", which is on the first floor of Thorndike, in 
the rightmost stall in the bathroom near the photocopying room. I often 
go there to do my business and read a little CLR James while I'm at it. 
Now I have never felt threatened by this graffiti, even though I barely 
reach 5'6".)


On the other hand, there are lots of real attacks taking place against 
professors and students who are protesting Israeli brutality. I am 
acquainted with Mohammad Alam, an economics professor at Northeastern, 
whose "dossier" has turned up in a website run by Daniel Pipes. Along 
with institutions such as my employer Columbia University, these voices 
are being singled out as virtually in league with suicide bombers.


I think you probably understand why this point of view is being policed 
right now. The Zionist establishment is deathly afraid that a divestment 
movement might take root among Jewish progressives on campus. My 
suggestion to all the esteemed college presidents who signed the ad is 
to use their good influence to stop Israel from acting like apartheid 
South Africa. That is surely the best way that such a movement can be 
preempted.


Respectfully yours,

Louis Proyect, class of 1965
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[Marxism] Brown student responds to NYT op-ed about anti-Semitism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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@Benjamin Gladstone, I take the same Brown University courses as you. I 
currently sit across from you in a Middle East Studies seminar. So I'm 
confused by today's New York Times op-ed, where you write of 
experiencing anti-Semitism after listening to our professor "glorify" 
Egyptian leader Nasser and Hezbollah. (When/where did that happen?!)


Brown is also 1/4th Jewish and anecdotally, in my 4 years, I've never 
seen a 'swastika carved into the bathroom stalls" or heard another 
student "accuse me of killing Jesus." (But in your op-ed, you've had a 
different experience.)


Ben, your exaggerations and allegations of anti-Semitism at Brown harm 
our professors' ability to teach. Your rhetoric invites outside 
political groups to pressure, fire and censor non-tenured academics 
critical of your Israel politics (a la the Canary Mission). Your op-ed 
portends a threat to academic freedom at Brown.




NY Times Op-Ed, Oct. 2 2016
Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight
 On Campus
Benjamin Gladstone

Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak 
against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of 
the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to 
stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the 
planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work 
with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.


That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized 
this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a 
petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock 
because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even 
though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, 
who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. 
Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues 
than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation.


Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees, 
combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices 
and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut 
out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to 
fight oppression.


My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like 
me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas 
that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on 
chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They 
don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal 
Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.


Nor do they speak against the anti-Semitism in American culture. Even as 
they rightfully protest hate crimes against Muslim Americans and 
discrimination against black people, they wrongfully dismiss attacks on 
Jews (who are the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate 
crimes in the United States) and increasing anti-Semitism in the 
American political arena, as can be seen in Donald Trump’s flirtations 
with the “alt-right.” They don’t take issue with calls for the 
destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.


Many of my fellow activists also perpetuate anti-Semitism by dismissing 
Jews of color, especially the Mizrahi and Sephardi majority of Israel’s 
Jewish population, descendants of refugees from Southwest Asia and North 
Africa. Ignoring the expulsion of 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from 
Arab and Muslim countries from 1948 to the early 1970s allows students 
to portray all Israelis as white and European and get away with making a 
“progressive” case for dismantling the Jewish state.


Even hummus has become politicized: Anti-Zionists at my school who 
demanded that cafeterias stop serving hummus produced by a company with 
Israeli ownership, also claimed that the product showed cultural 
appropriation even though Mizrahim and Sephardim have been eating 
Southwest Asian cuisine since long before the rise of organized Zionism.


In my experience, anti-Semites refuse to acknowledge Mizrahi and 
Sephardi Jews to minimize the history of oppression against Jews, and in 
doing so dismiss contemporary Jewish concerns. For example, non-Jewish 
students at Brown tell me that I cannot appreciate a history of 
marginalization because, as they see it, Jews have historically been a 
powerful group, the Holocaust being the only few years of exception. 
They play down the temporal and geographic scope of that history so that 
the oppression appears 

Re: [Marxism] Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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Yes, Republicans seed the media with frauds.

Fortunately, Clay's party would never lie to us.
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote | The Nation

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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Ernest Leif makes an excellent point.

Who to vote is not an easy question.  Who not to vote for, on the other
hand, is not so hard.  There are very solid answers to that.

We need to vote less based on fear and start acting--not just voting but
acting--in hope.  We have the issues and, if we put effort in bringing the
numbers who agree with us into the streets, we will mop the floor with
whatever figurehead they put in charge.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] further thought

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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 Clay is one of the few people I know who regularly denounces "the white
Left" who isn't a white liberal academic from an elite institution.

Still, it's always good to see the barriers coming down.

I doubt that the Greens are not as white as the SWP was in 1967.  But what
I really doubt is whether or not it's a "party" as opposed to a ballot
line.  This isn't nit-picking because the Greens are not really an end in
themselves . . . because most of the state organizations actively resist
functioning as a party in any serious sense.

Comparing the Greens to the Democrats is just nuts because the former are
not going to take power and a vote cast for the Greens isn't going to have
much of an impact on what the U.S. government does and who its slaughters
over the next four years.  A vote for the Greens fits a strategy of
breaking the strength of the two-party idiocy.

Clay says we have to accept political life in a "binary" system, but I'd
suggest that it's is more accurately "bipolar," and we don't really need to
embrace the disease if we don't want to do so.

On the other hand, we can certainly dismiss as a "racist" "the white Left"
that doesn't want to help elect one of the authors of the racialized mass
incarceration of the poor and the non-white.

All power to the new Judenrat, I guess.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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95% of the Afro-Americans you see on TV and think flirting with Trump are
being well paid to fool you. You may not understand how GOP politics is
play in the US, but I do.

Googling your Malcolm X quote turns up nothing. If you can rephrase I will
try again. What I did find was this pro-Trump piece:

"Hillary Is Closer To Mussolini Than Trump Is To Hitler"

www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-13/hillary-closer-mussolini-trump-hitler

Regards,

Clay

Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 

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[Marxism] Fwd: Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos - The Daily Beast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos
A controversial foreign PR firm known for representing unsavory 
characters was paid millions by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist 
videos.


By Crofton Black & Abigail Fielding-Smith of The Bureau of

The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars 
to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of 
Investigative Journalism can reveal.


Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of 
Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to 
track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.
The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers 
in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.


Bell Pottinger's former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday 
Times, which has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had 
worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy 
documents.”


Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National 
Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.


Bell, one of Britain’s most successful public relations executives, is 
credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and helping the 
Conservative party win three elections. THE AGENCY HE CO-FOUNDED HAS HAD 
A ROSTER OF CLIENTS INCLUDING REPRESSIVE REGIMES AND ASMA AL-ASSAD, THE 
WIFE OF THE SYRIAN PRESIDENT.


full: 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/01/pentagon-paid-for-fake-al-qaeda-videos.html?via=desktop=facebook

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[Marxism] Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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I think Malcolm X once said, "If they want you to vote for Mussolini, they'll 
run Hitler against him."

I can certainly understand that Afro-Americans feel themselves to be in a bad 
position in this election.
Judging by what I see on television (I'm not in the US), a handful of 
Afro-Americans are flirting with Trump as a way of punishing or pressuring the 
Democrats.
For me, this underlines how weak are the alternatives to the two parties, and 
the work ahead of us in building an alternative.

ken h
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