The "beginning" and "The End" (by The Doors) of Apocalypse NowThe 1979 film Apocalypse Now, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was filmed in the Philippines. It's a connection to the Vietnam War and the expansionist, and essentially imperialist policy of the US, that cannot be avoided when it comes to understanding the place of the Philippines in the history of the centuries old globalised geopolitical landscape.
It's all about the inception of an American empire and its relation to a modern China.
This magnificent map of the Philippine archipelago, drawn by the Jesuit Father Pedro Murillo Velarde (1696–1753) and published in Manila in 1734, is the first and most important scientific map of the Philippines. The Philippines were at that time a vital part of the Spanish Empire, and the map shows the maritime routes from Manila to Spain and to New Spain (Mexico and other Spanish territory in the New World), with captions. In the upper margin stands a great cartouche with the title of the map, crowned by the Spanish royal coat of arms flanked each side by an angel with a trumpet, from which an inscription unfurls.
The map is not only of great interest from the geographic point of view, but also as an ethnographic document. It is flanked by twelve engravings, six on each side, eight of which depict different ethnic groups living in the archipelago and four of which are cartographic descriptions of particular cities or islands. According to the labels, the engravings on the left show: Sangleyes (Chinese Philippinos) or Chinese; Kaffirs (a derogatory term for non-Muslims), a Camarin (from the Manila area), and a Lascar (from the Indian subcontinent, a British Raj term); mestizos, a Mardica (of Portuguese extraction), and a Japanese; and two local maps — one of Samboagan (a city on Mindanao), and the other of the port of Cavite. On the right side are: various people in typical dress; three men seated, an Armenian, a Mughal, and a Malabar (from an Indian textile city); an urban scene with various peoples; a rural scene with representations of domestic and wild animals; a map of the island of Guajan (meaning Guam); and a map of Manila.
Among the Re:LODE (2017-18) A Cargo of Questions pages there is an article that explores the historical and spatial origins of the globalisation of trade. The heading for this article runs:
The Seven Seas referred to are not the oceans but the seas of the Dutch East Indies, the colonial territories that provided Dutch merchants and financiers with a monopoly on the spice trade. In the nineteenth century the Clipper Ship Tea Route from China to England was the longest trade route in the world. This route took sailors through seven seas near the Dutch East Indies: the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea. So, the Seven Seas, in these quarters and during these times, referred to those seas, and if someone had sailed the Seven Seas it meant he had sailed to, and returned from, the other side of the world.
Manila is also referred to as "the world's first global city" as a result of the Manila Galleons trade route, arguably the first example of the globalisation of trade. In 2017, the Philippines established the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Museum in Metro Manila, one of the necessary steps in nominating the trade route to UNESCO as a UNESCO World Heritage project.In Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World, the chapter 'The Road of Silver' sets out the way this trading route transformed world trade. China is ever present in this narrative, as are the multiple routes and connections that have shaped the modern world. The Spanish city of Manila was founded on June 24, 1571, by Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, and is regarded as the city's official founding date.
In 1571, the foundation of Manila by the Spanish changed the rhythm of global trade; for a start it followed a programme of colonisation whose character was markedly less destructive for the local population than had been the case after the first Atlantic crossings. Originally established as a base from which to acquire spices, the settlement quickly became a major metropolis and an important connection point between Asia and the Americas. Goods now began to move across the Pacific without passing through Europe first, as did the silver to pay for them. Manila became an emporium where a rich array of goods could be bought.
This essentially Spanish trade route, often referred to as the silver road, carried an amount of silver originating in the Americas, then through the Philippines and on into the rest of Asia, that was truly staggering: at least as much passed this way as it did through Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, causing alarm in some quarters in the Spanish Empire as remittances from the New World began to fall.
The silver road was strung round the world like a belt. The precious metal ended up in one place in particular: China. It did so for two reasons. First, China's size and sophistication made it a major producer of luxury goods, including the ceramics and porcelain that were so desirable in Europe that a huge counterfeit market quickly grew up. The Chinese, wrote Matteo Ricci while visiting Nanjing, 'are greatly given to forging antique things, with great artifice and ingenuity', and generating large profits thanks to their skill. China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly. The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver's value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere - which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese. The opportunities for currency trading and taking advantage of these imbalances in what modern bankers call arbitrage were grasped immediately by new arrivals to the Far East - especially those who recognised that the unequal value of gold in China and Japan produced easy profits.Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World (pp 239-41)
In the chapter 'Cheap Money' in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel (see Guardian Review), they look at this particular history of exchange:"Once again we can see cheapness at work. Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money - and quite a lot of it. Potosi was the single most important silver source in the New World, and New World silver constituted 74 percent of the world's sixteenth century silver production. Silver does not make trade, but global trade can be traced from the mines of Potosi. Unless it forms parts of circuits of exchange, silver is just shiny dirt. It's the fusion of commodity production and exchange that turns it into capital. That's why some commentators have suggested that the birth year of global trade was 1571, when the city of Manila was founded. Silver from the New world didn't stay in Europe but was propelled along the spice routes and later across the Pacific. Japanese silver flowed to China from 1540 to 1620 as part of a complex network of exchange and arbitrage. Without the connection of exchange of silver for Asian commodities, money couldn't flow from the New World into East Asia. Because the Portuguese and then the Dutch controlled maritime silver flows through Europe to Asia, the Spanish short-circuited them, annually sending as much silver (fifty tons) across the Pacific and through Manila as they did across the Atlantic through Seville. Similar volumes of silver found their way to the Baltic. In eastern Europe, silver combined with credit, quasi-feudal landlords, and enserfed labor to deliver cheap timber, food, and vital raw materials to the Dutch Republic. To remember this is to insist that, although Europe features in it, capitalism's story isn't a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosi to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam."(pages 84-85)
From an American western hemisphere to the Philippines. The spatial expansion of an American empire?
The Spanish Empire was set to disintegrate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, offering the United States an opportunity to expand its sovereign territories on a global as well a continental scale.
There had been numerous quasi-religious uprisings in the Philippines during the more than 300 years of colonial rule, but the late 19th-century writings of José Rizal and others helped stimulate a more broad-based movement for Philippine independence. Spain had been unwilling to reform its colonial government, and armed rebellion broke out in 1896. Rizal, who had advocated reform but not revolution, was shot for sedition on December 30, 1896; his martyrdom fuelled the revolution, led by the young general Emilio Aguinaldo.Thus the Philippine Revolution began in August 1896 and ended with the Pact of Biak-na-Bato, a ceasefire between the Spanish colonial Governor-General Fernando Primo de Rivera and the revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo which was signed on December 15, 1897. The terms of the pact called for Aguinaldo and his militia to surrender. Other revolutionary leaders were given amnesty and a monetary indemnity by the Spanish government in return for which the rebel government agreed to go into exile in Hong Kong.However, on the pretext of the failure of Spain to engage in active social reforms in Cuba, as demanded by the United States government, would lead to the cause for the Spanish–American War. American attention was focused on the issue after the mysterious explosion that sank the American battleship Maine on February 15, 1898 in Havana harbour. As public political pressure from the Democratic Party and certain industrialists built up for war, the U.S. Congress forced the reluctant Republican President William McKinley to issue an ultimatum to Spain on April 19, 1898. Spain found it had no diplomatic support in Europe, but nevertheless declared war; the U.S. followed on April 25 with its own declaration of war.Theodore Roosevelt, who was at that time Assistant Secretary of the Navy, ordered Commodore George Dewey, commanding the Asiatic Squadron of the United States Navy: "Order the squadron ...to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands." Dewey's squadron departed on April 27 for the Philippines, reaching Manila Bay on the evening of April 30.
The Battle of Manila Bay took place on May 1, 1898. In a matter of hours, Commodore Dewey's Asiatic Squadron defeated the Spanish squadron under Admiral Patricio Montojo. The U.S. squadron took control of the arsenal and navy yard at Cavite. Dewey cabled Washington, stating that although he controlled Manila Bay, he needed 5,000 additional men to seize Manila itself.
On June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines at his house in Cavite El Viejo. Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista wrote the Philippine Declaration of Independence, and read this document in Spanish that day at Aguinaldo's house. On June 18, Aguinaldo issued a decree formally establishing his dictatorial government. On June 23, Aguinaldo issued another decree, this time replacing the dictatorial government with a revolutionary government (and naming himself as President).Within days, on the other side of the Pacific, the American Anti-Imperialist League had begun to take shape. This organisation, which opposed American involvement in the Philippines, grew into a mass movement that drew support from across the political spectrum. Its members included luminaries such as social reformer Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, philosopher William James, and author Mark Twain.Writing retrospectively in 1899, Aguinaldo claimed that U.S. Consul E. Spencer Pratt had verbally assured him that "the United States would at least recognize the independence of the Philippines under the protection of the United States Navy". In an April 28 message from Pratt to United States Secretary of State William R. Day, there was no mention of independence, or of any conditions on which Aguinaldo was to cooperate. In a July 28 communication, Pratt stated that no promises had been made to Aguinaldo regarding U.S. policy, with the concept aimed at facilitating the occupation and administration of the Philippines, while preventing a possible conflict of action. On June 16, Secretary Day cabled Consul Pratt with instructions to avoid unauthorised negotiations, along with a reminder that Pratt had no authority to enter into arrangements on behalf of the U.S. Government. Filipino scholar Maximo Kalaw wrote in 1927: "A few of the principal facts, however, seem quite clear. Aguinaldo was not made to understand that, in consideration of Filipino cooperation, the United States would extend its sovereignty over the Islands, and thus in place of the old Spanish master a new one would step in. The truth was that nobody at the time ever thought that the end of the war would result in the retention of the Philippines by the United States."On August 12, 1898, The New York Times reported that a peace protocol had been signed in Washington that afternoon between the U.S. and Spain, suspending hostilities between the two nations. The full text of the protocol was not made public until November 5, but Article III read: "The United States will occupy and hold the City, Bay, and Harbor of Manila, pending the conclusion of a treaty of peace, which shall determine the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines." After conclusion of this agreement, U.S. President McKinley proclaimed a suspension of hostilities with Spain.On the evening of August 12, the Americans notified Aguinaldo to forbid the insurgents under his command from entering Manila without American permission. On August 13, unaware of the peace protocol signing, U.S. forces assaulted and captured the Spanish positions in Manila. While the plan was for a mock battle and simple surrender, the insurgents made an independent attack of their own, which led to confrontations with the Spanish in which some American soldiers were killed and wounded. The Spanish formally surrendered Manila to U.S. forces.There was some looting by Insurgent forces in portions of the city they occupied. Aguinaldo demanded joint occupation of the city, however U.S. commanders pressed Aguinaldo to withdraw his forces from Manila. General Merritt received news of the August 12 peace protocol on August 16, three days after the surrender of Manila. Admiral Dewey and General Merritt were informed by a telegram dated August 17 that the President of the United States had directed that the United States should have full control over Manila, with no joint occupation permissible. After further negotiations, insurgent forces withdrew from the city on September 15.This battle marked the end of Filipino-American collaboration, as the American action of preventing Filipino forces from entering the captured city of Manila was deeply resented by the Filipinos.On August 14, 1898, two days after the capture of Manila, the U.S. established a military government in the Philippines, with General Merritt acting as military governor. During military rule (1898–1902), the U.S. military commander governed the Philippines under the authority of the U.S. president as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces. After the appointment of a civil Governor-General, the procedure developed that as parts of the country were pacified and placed firmly under American control, responsibility for the area would be passed to the civilian.General Merritt was succeeded by General Otis as military governor, who in turn was succeeded by General MacArthur. Major General Adna Chaffee was the final military governor. The position of military governor was abolished in July 1902, after which the civil Governor-General became the sole executive authority in the Philippines.While the initial instructions of the American commission undertaking peace negotiators with Spain was to seek only Luzon and Guam, which could serve as harbours and communication links, President McKinley later wired instructions to demand the entire archipelago. The resultant Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, formally ended the Spanish–American War. Its provisions included the cession of the archipelago to the United States, for which $20 million would be paid as compensation. This agreement was clarified through the 1900 Treaty of Washington, which stated that Spanish territories in the archipelago which lay outside the geographical boundaries noted in the Treaty of Paris were also ceded to the U.S.On December 21, 1898, President McKinley proclaimed a policy of Benevolent assimilation with regards to the Philippines. This was announced in the Philippines on January 4, 1899. Under this policy, the Philippines was to come under the sovereignty of the United States, with American forces instructed to declare themselves as friends rather than invaders.The Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain, commonly known as the Treaty of Paris of 1898, was a treaty signed by Spain and the United States on December 10, 1898, that ended the Spanish–American War. Under it, Spain relinquished all claim of sovereignty over and title to Cuba and also ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The cession of the Philippines involved a compensation of $20 million from the United States to Spain.
On the night of February 4, 1899, shooting erupted on the outskirts of Manila. Morning found the Filipinos, who had fought bravely, even recklessly, defeated at all points. While the fighting was in progress, Aguinaldo issued a proclamation of war against the United States. Anti-imperialist sentiment was strong in the United States, and on February 6 the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty that concluded the Spanish-American War by a single vote. U.S. reinforcements were immediately sent to the Philippines. Antonio Luna, the ablest commander among the Filipinos, was given charge of their military operations but seems to have been greatly hampered by the jealousy and distrust of Aguinaldo, which he fully returned. Luna was murdered, and on March 31 the rebel capital of Malolos was captured by U.S. forces.
Portion of the ruins of Manila, Philippines, after shelling by U.S. forces in 1899.
The Paris Treaty came into effect on April 11, 1899, when the documents of ratification were exchanged. It was the first treaty negotiated between the two governments since the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty.The Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Spanish Empire, apart from some small holdings in Northern Africa and several islands and territories around the Gulf of Guinea, also in Africa. It marked the beginning of the United States as a world power. But there would be NO peace!The outbreak of hostilities in the so-called Philippine-American War, a war between the United States and Filipino revolutionaries from 1899 to 1902, led to an an insurrection that may be seen as a continuation of the Philippine Revolution against Spanish rule.
Filipino insurgents
In March 1900 U.S. Pres. William McKinley convened the Second Philippine Commission to create a civil government for the Philippines (the existence of Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic was conveniently ignored). On April 7 McKinley instructed commission chairman William Howard Taft to “bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction, or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.” While nothing explicit was said about independence, these instructions were later often cited as supporting such a goal.Meanwhile, the Filipino government had fled northward. In November 1899 the Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare, with all its devastating consequences. The major operations of the insurrection were conducted in Luzon, and, throughout them, the U.S. Army was assisted materially by indigenous Macabebe scouts, who had previously served the Spanish regime and then transferred that loyalty to the United States. The organised insurrection effectively ended with the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901, by U.S. Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston. After learning of the location of Aguinaldo’s secret headquarters from a captured courier, Funston personally led an audacious mission into the mountains of northern Luzon. He and a handful of his officers posed as prisoners of war, marching under the guard of a column of Macabebe scouts who were disguised as rebels. Aguinaldo, who had been expecting reinforcements, welcomed the lead elements of the force only to be stunned by a demand to surrender. When Funston arrived, Aguinaldo remarked, “Is this not some joke?” before being led back to Manila.
U.S. troops in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902).
Although Aguinaldo pledged his allegiance to the United States and called for an end to hostilities, the guerrilla campaign continued with unabated ferocity. Brig. Gen. Jacob F. Smith, enraged by a massacre of U.S. troops, responded with retaliatory measures of such indiscriminate brutality that he was court-martialled and forced to retire. After the surrender of Filipino Gen. Miguel Malvar in Samar on April 16, 1902, the American civil government regarded the remaining guerrillas as mere bandits, though the fighting continued. About a thousand guerrillas under Simeón Ola were not defeated until late 1903, and in Batangas province, south of Manila, troops commanded by Macario Sakay resisted capture until as late as 1906.The last organised resistance to U.S. power took place on Samar from 1904 to 1906. There the rebels’ tactic of burning pacified villages contributed to their own defeat. Although an unconnected insurgency campaign by Moro bands on Mindanao continued sporadically until 1913, the United States had gained undisputed control of the Philippines, and it retained sovereignty over the archipelago of the islands until 1946.
Cheap lives?
Filipino casualties
The human cost of the war was significant. An estimated 20,000 Filipino combatants were killed, and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger, or disease. Of the 4,300 Americans lost, some 1,500 were killed in action, while nearly twice that number succumbed to disease.
The consequences of the images are the images of the consequences!
Page from Souvenir of the 8th Army Corps, Philippine Expedition. A Pictorial History of the Philippine Campaign, 1899.
A stepping-stone to China? An American Empire? The costs and the benefits?
And, after all, the Philippines are only the stepping-stone to China
Supporters of U.S. policy in the Philippines frequently reminded the American public that acquisition of a colony in Asia could open the door toward trade opportunities in China. This 1900 cartoon by Emil Flohri shows Uncle Sam bringing not only “education” and “religion” but a vast array of consumer goods to an eager Chinese population. The many signs on the Chinese shore itemise all the goods that presumably will find a market in China. The tiny Chinese figure dressed in traditional clothing follows the condescending stereotype demeaning non-Western, non-Caucasian peoples.
When it comes to this, the China-United States struggle for hegemony and the expansion of global power and influence has consequences for all, including along the LODE Zone Line.
Just as there was widespread opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States, and across the world, U.S. policy and the Spanish-American War elicited a strong anti-imperialist response from a wide section of American society. On June 2, retired Massachusetts banker Gamaliel Bradford published a letter in the Boston Evening Transcript in which he sought assistance gaining access to historic Faneuil Hall to hold a public meeting to organise opponents of American colonial expansion. An opponent of the Spanish–American War, Bradford decried what he saw as an "insane and wicked" colonial ambition among some American decision-makers which was "driving the country to moral ruin." Bradford's organiing efforts proved successful, and on June 15, 1898, his protest meeting against "the adoption of an imperial policy by the United States" was held.
The June 15 meeting gave rise to a formal four member organising committee known as the Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence, headed by Bradford. This group contacted religious, business, labor, and humanitarian leaders from around the country and attempted to stir them into action to stop what they perceived as a growing menace of American colonial expansion into Hawaii and the former colonial possessions of the Spanish empire. A letter-writing campaign attempting to involve editors of newspapers and magazines was initiated. This initial pioneering effort by Bradford and his associates bore fruit on November 19, 1898, when the Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence formally established itself as the Anti-Imperialist League.
The U.S. public was bitterly divided over the American conquest of the Philippines. While anti-imperialist critics denounced the invasion, supporters of the war defended it in terms of America’s destiny to spread civilization and progress to backward peoples and nations. In the rhetoric of the pro-war camp, the independence movement was commonly referred to as an “insurrection”.Even more vividly than in photographs, poems, and prose, the mystique of the white man’s burden found expression in a flood of colourful cartoons depicting the global spread of the Western world’s superior material as well as spiritual civilisation.
“If they’ll only be good. ‘You have seen what my sons can do in war — now see what my daughters can do in peace.’”
This graphic by S.D. Erhart, published in 1900 in the popular magazine Puck, depicts American colonialism as a benevolent form of uplift. As U.S. soldiers depart, Uncle Sam introduces a group of female teachers to the Filipinos, depicted in typical caricatures — here as childlike and half-naked — that suggested they were in need of education and civilisation. The U.S. government did send small numbers of teachers to the Philippines soon after acquiring the colony, but in reality, American troops outnumbered teachers throughout the military occupation.
The female personification of agency in the civilising mission belongs to the many propaganda efforts where the stereoptypes generating images of "pretty girls" are mobilised in these ideological wars, actual wars and culture wars.
Howard Chandler Christy "Mother of His Country" 1932
The anti-imperialists opposed expansion, believing that imperialism violated the fundamental principle that just republican government must derive from "consent of the governed." The League argued that such activity would necessitate the abandonment of American ideals of self-government and non-intervention — ideals expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Farewell Address and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
In 1941, with war in the Pacific looming, it was these "values" that were trumpeted as the American "freedoms" in this image of Howard Chandler Christy's "pretty girl" personification of these sacred freedoms that were to be defended at all costs.
Female symbol of America holding torch in front of Bill of Rights and standing on "150 years" pedestal. Pastel drawing by Howard Chandler Christy, 1941. Library of Congress.
The Anti-Imperialist League was ultimately defeated in the battle of public opinion by a new wave of politicians who successfully advocated the virtues of American territorial expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War and in the first years of the 20th century.
However important Americans may have felt it was to get to know the Philippines, they also felt it important to understand why Americans were there. As often as not, they drew on notions of civilisation and uplift that British poet Rudyard Kipling had conveyed in his famous 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” in which Kipling urged Americans to “Take up the White Man’s burden” in the Philippines and “bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.”
This ca. 1900 studio photo of a baseball team in the Philippines conveyed a reassuring aura of normalcy for those worried about the well-being of American forces in the Philippines. (T. Enami Studio, Manila)
Soldiers posed for the camera with visages serious and calm. Some appeared as visual embodiments of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Kipling-esque call in an 1899 speech urging young American men to undertake “The Strenuous Life.” T.R. explained,Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.Americans in the Philippines understood colonial conquest as a burden to be carried by soldiers, missionaries, doctors, and teachers, and they frequently documented their personal sacrifices in images sent back home.
Americans who would never travel to the Philippines as soldiers, teachers, missionaries, or journalists had the opportunity to learn about the place from an explosion of books sold around the country during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and in the years that followed. The books promised an easily digestible introduction to the war’s campaigns, along with maps of the physical and cultural landscapes of America’s new island territories, all lavishly illustrated with photographs that took advantage of their status as honest guides to a far-off reality that most readers would never experience directly.
“There is truth-telling that should be prized in photography,” explained the author of one popular guide published as early as 1898 under the title The Story of the Philippines, The El Dorado of the Orient, “and our picture gallery is one of the most remarkable that has been assembled.” Another album titled Our New Possessions, put out that same year by a publisher of mass entertainments, mystery novels, and children’s books, interspersed images of war, destruction, and enemy corpses with landscapes and cozy scenes of camp life — as if to reassure Victorian Americans that their sons and brothers were upholding the standards of civilisation.
When it comes to the Vietnam War the same methods were employed, as in the example of the Playboy "playmate" G.I. Jo, a typical "girl next door", who visits Vietnam to "meet the troops". The article appeared in the May 1966 issue of Playboy.
Playboy magazine has its place in the much wider story of the Americanisation of the world, a place that is worthy of consideration, regardless of the obvious reservations concerning regressive aspects of patriarchy and misogyny. After all in this case, some examination is capable of revealing, or "unveiling", as it does, the dominant cultural shifts in the mess of our mass age (a mess-age and/or mass-age). Some of these aspects of what has been called a pornotropia are explored in this Re:LODE Radio page:
So, just what has been normalised?
Here's the story of GI Jo: The Story of One Playmate’s Visit to Vietnam in 1966
Cover girl Jo Collins signing photos for American GI's during her 1966 visit to meet troops during the Vietnam War
Most military strategists agree that, aside from actual firepower, nothing means more to an army than the morale of its men. And since the days of GI Joe, the American fighting man has seldom appeared on the frontiers of freedom without an abundant supply of that most time-honored of spirit-lifting staples: the pinup. From the shores of Iwo Jima to the jungles of Vietnam, the pinup queen has remained a constant companion to our men at arms; but the long-legged likenesses of such World War Two lovelies as Grable and Hay-worth have given way to a whole new breed of photogenic females better known as the playboy Playmates. It was only a matter of time, therefore, until centerfolddom’s contemporary beauties would be asked to do their bit for our boys in uniform. That time came last November, when Second Lieutenant John Price — a young airborne officer on duty in Vietnam — sent Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner the following letter:
“This is written from the depths of the hearts of 180 officers and men of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate) stationed at Bien Hoa, Republic of Vietnam. We were the first American Army troop unit committed to action here in Vietnam, and we have gone many miles—some in sorrow and some in joy, but mostly in hard, bone-weary inches. …We are proud to be here and have found the answer to the question, ‘Ask what you can do for your country.’ And yet we cannot stand alone—which brings me to the reason for sending you this request.“The loneliness here is a terrible thing—and we long to see a real, living, breathing American girl. Therefore, we have enclosed with this letter a money order for a Lifetime Subscription to playboy magazine for B Company. It is our understanding that, with the purchase of a Lifetime Subscription in the U. S., the first issue is personally delivered by a Playmate. It is our most fervent hope that this policy can be extended to include us. …Any one of the current Playmates of the Month would be welcomed with open arms, but if we have any choice in the matter, we have unanimously decided that we would prefer . . .
. . . the 1965 Playmate of the Year — Miss Jo Collins.
“If we are not important enough…to send a Playmate for, please just forget about us and we will quietly fade back into the jungle.”
Deciding that only old soldiers should fade away, and deeply touched by the paratrooper’s plea, Hefner immediately began drawing up plans for the successful completion of Project Playmate. “When we first received the request,” Hef recalls, “we weren’t at all sure how the Defense Department would feel about Playboy sending a beautiful American girl into Vietnam at a time like this, but lieutenant Price’s letter was too moving to just put aside and forget. The lieutenant had obviously been a playboy reader for quite a while, since he remembered a special Christmas gift offer the magazine published several years ago, which stated that a lifetime subscriber from any city with a Playboy Club would have his first issue delivered in person by a Playmate. Of course we don’t have a Playboy Club in Vietnam at the moment, but we figured we could overlook that little technicality under the circumstances.”
Along with the usual complications and military restrictions any average civilian encounters when attempting to travel to Vietnam these days, many more technicalities had to be ironed out through the proper channels before Jo received the necessary Government clearance for a late-February flight to the front lines. “The fellows in Company B said it would be a privilege if I could visit them,” remarked the Playmate of the Year when asked how she felt about her upcoming tour of delivery duty in the war-torn Far East;
“but the way I see it — I’m the one who’s privileged.”
Roses are the order of the day as two members of Company B welcome Jo to Vietnam on behalf of their wounded Project Playmate officer, Lieutenant John Price, hospitalized back at battalion headquarters in Bien Hoa; Playboy’s pretty Vietnam volunteer visits Lieutenant Price’s wardmates at the Evacuation Hospital. “Most of them had been badly hurt,” says Jo, “but no one ever complained.”
Her call to arms came much sooner than expected, however, when word was received that Lieutenant Price had been wounded in action on January 3, and that her morale-boosting mission might have to be canceled unless Jo could reach the injured officer’s bedside at a Bien Hoa combat-zone hospital before his scheduled evacuation from Vietnam on January 13. All additional red tape still pending prior to Jo’s departure was quickly bypassed: On Sunday afternoon (January 9), Playmate First Class Collins and her party — which included playboy’s Playmate and Bunny Promotion Coordinator Joyce Chalecki as acting chaperone and staff photographer Larry Gordon — departed from San Francisco on a Pan Am jetliner bound for Saigon. Commenting on some of her own last-minute logistic problems before take-off, Jo later told us:
“Things were so hectic those last few days before we left that I was sure we’d never make it. For openers, I was away visiting friends in Oregon when the news came in about Lieutenant Price being wounded. The original plans called for my flying to Chicago in mid-February, where I would team up with Larry and Joyce, get my travel shots and clear up all the final details for the trip. Hef phoned me about the sudden switch in Project Playmate, and I spent the next five days flying back and forth—first to Seattle for my passport when I found out Oregon doesn’t issue them; then to Los Angeles, where I got my smallpox vaccination, checked out some last-minute details with my agent at American International Studios and raided my apartment for the clothes I figured I’d be needing. As it was, I managed to meet Larry and Joyce at the San Francisco airport and board our jet to Vietnam with all of about fifteen minutes to spare.” (In typical above-and-beyond-the-call fashion, trooper Collins — an aspiring actress whose recent film credits include minor roles in Lord Love a Duck and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? — neglected to mention that, in reporting for duty on such short notice, she’d had to bypass an important audition for a principal part on TV’s Peyton Place.)
Some 8000 miles and 18 hours after their Stateside rendezvous, Jo and her playboystaffers landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where 400 American troops and a regiment of newsmen and photographers had turned out to greet them. After a brief review of her assembled admires, Jo was introduced to Lieutenant Clancey Johnson and Private First Class Marvin Hudson, two of Lieutenant Price’s friends in the 173rd Airborne Brigade who had ever-so-willingly volunteered to serve as a stand-in reception committee for their wounded buddy back at Bien Hoa. Mindful of his guerrilla training, Private First Class Hudson put on a one-man camouflage display when, after handing Jo her Company B (for Bravo) tribute of red roses, he subsequently blushed a deep crimson and succeeded in concealing the telltale lipstick print she had just planted on each of his cheeks.Following the deplaning festivities, the three playboy recruits were taken to a nearby “chopper” pad and given a whirlwind aerial tour of Saigon and the outlying districts aboard the “Playboy Special” — a Brigade helicopter especially renamed in honour of their visit. “That first chopper ride really started things off with excitement,” reports GI Jo. “It seemed as though we’d hardly even arrived, and there we were over hostile country being given our first taste of what they call ‘contour flying.’ That’s where you skim the treetops to prevent possible enemy snipers from getting a clear shot at you and then, suddenly, shoot straight up at about 100 miles per hour to 3500 feet so you can check the area for Viet Cong troop movements from outside their firing range. After our stomachs got used to it, we figured we were ready for just about anything.”
Jo takes a guided tour of Company B’s base-camp area, stopping off to admire the imaginative floor-to-ceiling Playmate motif adoring the PX (“It was the closest the fellows could come to a real Playboy Club”).
Back on terra firma, the Playboy troupe was joined by Jack Edwards, who took time out from his regular duties as Special Services Director for the Saigon-based press and military officials to act as the trio’s liaison man during its forthcoming three-day tour of the surrounding combat areas. As Jo later told us: “Jack was so concerned about our running into a V.C. ambush after we left Saigon that he wound up worrying enough for all of us. He managed to get us rooms at the Embassy Hotel in Saigon after our original reservations at the Caravelle somehow went astray; he kept press conferences down to a minimum so we could spend most of our time with the men at the front, arranged a first-night sight-seeing trip to some of the Saigon night clubs in case our own morale needed bolstering and, in general, watched over us like a mother hen. By the end of the first evening in Vietnam, we were all so pleased we’d come that, when one reporter reminded me I could end up getting shot during the next three days, I told him that the only shot I was still worried about was the one for cholera I was scheduled to get the next morning.”
A bit foot-weary during her first day at the front, Playmate First Class Collins hitches a ride with some armored admirers. Back to the company mess hall; seems pleased that an autographing gal can always find a strong back in Bien Hoa when she needs one.
The following day (Tuesday, January 11), Jo and her colleagues got a chance to test their calmness under fire. Arriving at Tan Son Nhut at 0830 hours, dressed in combat fatigues, they were issued bulletproof vests before boarding the “Playboy Special” with their MP escorts for an initial front-line foray. “I realize it was a question of safety before beauty,” says Jo, “but I couldn’t help feeling a little insecure. After seeing some of Saigon’s Vietnamese beauties Lieutenant Price referred to in his letter and catching a glimpse of myself in combat gear, I was afraid the guys wouldn’t be nearly as homesick for an American girl once they had a basis for comparison.” Flying low over enemy-infiltrated territory and encircled by three fully manned gun ships flying escort, the “Playboy Special” made its first stop at the 173rd Airborne Brigade Headquarters in Bien Hoa. Here, any fears our pretty Playmate might have harbored about her uniform appeal were summarily dispatched by the parade of smiling paratroopers waiting on the airstrip to greet her.
Most of the men of Company B were on jungle patrols during Jo’s first visit to Bien Hoa, but the one man most responsible for her being in Vietnam — Lieutenant John Price — was present and accounted for at his unit’s surgical ward. In spite of a severely wounded arm that will require several additional operations before it can be restored to full use, Lieutenant Price managed to muster up enough energy to give his favorite Playmate a healthy hug or two when she showed up to deliver his company’s Lifetime Subscription certificate and the latest issue of Playboy. The lieutenant’s initial reaction to seeing the Company B sweetheart standing there in the flesh was “Gosh, you’re even prettier than your pictures.” Flattered, Jo sealed her Playboy delivery with a well-timed kiss, and consequently convinced the company medics that Price was well along the road to recovery by evoking his immediate request for a repeat engagement. In fact, his condition seemed so improved that the doctors waived hospital regulations for the day to allow him to accompany Jo to lunch at Camp Zenn — the Company B base camp on the outskirts of Bien Hoa.
Jo lunches with Company B enlisted men, who show more interest in signatures than sustenance; After chow, she hoists their Bunny flag.
After lunch, Jo put her best bedside manner to use as she paid a brief call on each of the men in Lieutenant Price’s ward. “A few of the fellows asked me to help them finish a letter home, others wanted a light for their cigarette; but most of them just wanted to talk awhile with a girl from their own native land. A couple of times I was sure I would break down and bawl like a baby, but I managed to control myself until they brought in a badly wounded buddy who asked if he could see me before going into surgery. When I got to his side, he was bleeding heavily from both legs and I didn’t know what to do or say to comfort him. Then he looked up at me with his best tough-guy grin and simply said, ‘Hi, gorgeous.’ After that, I lost all control and the old tears really flowed.”
Before leaving Bien Hoa, Jo made additional bedside tours at the 93rd Medical Evacuation Hospital and the 3rd Surgical Hospital, where the doctors on duty decided to add some Playmate therapy to their own daily diet by piling into the nearest empty beds during her final rounds. Not until their day’s tour had ended and their chopper was warming up for the flight back to Saigon did Jo and her companions suddenly realize how close to actual combat they’d been for the past several hours. “We were all ready to go and standing outside the Brigade Officers’ Club when I first heard the sound of shots coming from fairly close by,” explains Jo. “Then a few mortar shells went off, but it still didn’t sink in how near the action we really were. I guess we’d all been too busy meeting wounded soldiers and talking to the men on the base to notice anything before. Then, right before our chopper lifted off, a series of flares went off and lit up everything for miles. I kept thinking how great it would have been if all those boys had been back home watching a Fourth of July celebration instead of out there in the jungle fighting for their very lives.”
Before leaving Bien Hoa, Jo makes a tour of other companies’ “Playboy Clubs” (“We ran across these ‘clubs’ at every GI base”). With her own whirlybird safely flanked by two gunships (left), Jo listens in on conversation between chopper jockeys.
GI Jo arrives at Special Forces camp atop Black Virgin Mountain.
Wednesday, the group headed out toward some of the more crucial combat zones in the Saigon military theater. First on the day’s itinerary was a stopover at Nu Ba Den, a strategic communications outpost under the command of Special Forces troops who had long since renamed their precarious hilltop position “Black Virgin Mountain.” Rising some 3200 feet above the surrounding countryside and under continuous assault from Viet Cong guerrillas hidden in the densely wooded areas below, Black Virgin Mountain is defended by a small detachment of Special Forces personnel and the South Vietnamese regulars placed in their charge. But despite the precariousness of their position, these wearers of the famed Green Berets greeted the Playboy group with a typical show of Special Forces readiness: crowning Jo upon arrival with her own green beret, escorting her to various lookout points around the installation and serving as interpreters when Vietnamese soldiers asked to meet her.
Visiting Playmate queen is crowned with a green beret (left) by Special Forces man assigned to this critical mountain outpost, signifying she bears this famed guerrilla-fighting group’s very special seal of approval; our GI Jo on-the-job instruction (right) in mortar firing.
From Black Virgin Mountain the “Playboy Special” flew its charges to the Special Forces encampment at Lay Ninth, whose boundaries encompass the majestic Cao Dai Temple — seat of the Cao Dai religion, which combines the teachings of Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism. “The temple itself was right out of a fairy tale,” remembers Jo. “But its presence right in the middle of a combat theater made everything about it that much more strikingly unusual. We entered barefooted and were met by a different world, full of ornate columns, uncaged white birds and young headshaven priests, while just outside men in uniform walked about with their guns always ready at their sides.”
Another 85 miles over enemy lines brought the passengers of the “Playboy Special” to the village of Bu Dop, one of the most strategically critical military outposts in the entire Vietnam war zone. Located on the Cambodian border and protected by the 5th Special Forces Group, this vital base had, only three months earlier, been the scene of an ambush that cost the lives of all the men then assigned to its defense. “The Green Berets at Bu Dop went out of their way to try and maintain a relaxed air around us,” Jo later said, “but you could still cut the tension with a knife. We were introduced to just about everyone there was to meet—from the group commander to most of his American and South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters—but it seemed as though none of them ever left his field position or took his eyes off the surrounding jungle. Some of the edge was taken off our nerves when the village chief and his two wives came by to welcome us, since they all projected the feeling of complete calm by nonchalantly walking about the community with nothing on from the waist up.”
Whatever tranquilizing effect the sight of a Vietnamese village chieftain and his two topless ladies fair might have had on the threesome was short-lived, however, for the next stopover on their tour took them well outside the barbed-wire gates of Bu Dop and across the same jungle trail they had just been told was often swarming with Viet Cong. “Like most red-blooded female cowards,” jokes the 20-year-old Playmate of the Year, “Joyce and I hit the panic button the minute we caught sight of all the bullet holes in the side of our truck. And we both swear we saw Larry’s shutter finger shake through an entire roll of film, but he refuses to admit it.” As it turned out, the purpose of this overland junket into the unknown was to let some of Jo’s fighting South Vietnamese fans—stationed 15 minutes away in a small Montagnard hamlet — get a glimpse of their green bereted glamor girl before she left.The final item on Wednesday’s agenda was a flight to Vung Tau, a scenic coastal village on the Mekong Peninsula where American and South Vietnamese troops can enjoy a few days of muchneeded rest and rehabilitation before their next tour of duty in the interior. “At first,” says Jo, “I was afraid to ask any of the fellows how they felt about going back into combat after having a chance to get away from it all. I figured they’d all like to forget about war and just lie on the beach there until everything got settled. It didn’t take me long to find out otherwise. Many of our boys in Vietnam may only be 17-and 18-year-olds who don’t know much about world politics, but I came away from places like Vung Tau convinced that they know why they’re there. Nobody’s going to make them throw in the towel.”
Arriving at Bu Dop, a strategic supply base near the Cambodian border, Jo poses with fellow Green Berets (left) while Special Forces shutterbug in the foreground snaps away for post’s scrapbook. then meets General Williamson (right), who proclaims her the first female Sky Soldier.
Jo’s last day in Vietnam wound up being the busiest of all. With a gallant assist from Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson — American Airborne Commander in Vietnam — she got a second chance to complete her mission as planned when the front-line troops from Company B were called back to Bien Hoa for a 24-hour lifetime subscribers’ leave and a long-awaited look at the Playmate of their choice. One by one, the combat-weary paratroopers filed off their choppers and hurried over for a hard-earned hello from Jo — a few even produced crumpled-up copies of her December 1964 Playmate photo they’d been carrying in their helmet liners in hope of someday having them autographed. “When I saw all those happy faces running toward me from every direction, I knew we’d finally gotten our job done,” she said.
One more trip to the front was on the agenda before Jo would be ready to head back to Saigon and a Hawaii-bound jet. Landing in War Zone D, Jo was escorted to combat headquarters, where a grateful general was waiting to hand her a farewell memento of her short stay in Vietnam — a plaque upon which had been inscribed the words: “Know ye all men that, in recognition of the fact that Playmate Jo Collins traveled to the Republic of Vietnam to deliver a Lifetime Subscription to playboy magazine to sky soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and demonstrated exceptional courage by volunteering to travel into hostile areas to visit its men and in doing so exhibited the all-the-way spirit typical of true airborne troopers…I, Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson, do appoint her an honorary Sky Soldier, done this 13th day of January, 1966.”The day after her Saigon departure, Jo received further praise from high places for the job she had done. Between visits in Honolulu to Tripler Army Hospital and Pearl Harbor, she was called on the phone by Ambassador Averill Harriman, who wished to express his and Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s congratulations on all the good reports they’d heard concerning her morale-lifting mission. Needless to say, Jo was highly honored by the tributes of so dignified a brace of statesmen, but, as she put it, “The finest compliments I could ever receive have already been sent in the letters of over 200 fellows I was lucky enough to meet somewhere near Saigon.”It remained for the men of Company B to pay their Playmate postmistress the highest honor, however, by renaming their outfit “Playboy Company” and thus assuring Jo that her presence south of the 17th Parallel would not be soon forgotten. When asked how she felt about becoming the official mascot for this troop of front-line sky soldiers, a jubilant Jo replied, “I’ve never been prouder.” As the company’s new namesake, Playboy seconds that statement.
The "Apocalypse Now" Playmate scene is a dramatic construction!
The True Story of the 'Apocalypse Now' Playmate Scene
The reality was different, as the story about Jo Collins in her trip to Vietnam and covered in Playboy makes clear.
The Apocalypse Now version is set up to tell a different truth, using the crazy, surreal (as in hyper-real) situation of a Las Vegas style show helicoptered into a colonised and contested jungle. When it comes to show business and the Vietnam War, the reality was Bob Hope's annual USO tour of Southeast Asian military bases, including Vietnam, a reality emphatically situated in another age.
This video of Bob Hope's Christmas Special of 1967 features Raquel Welch, Elaine Dunn, Phil Crosby, Barbara McNair, and Miss World, Madeleine Hartog Bell.
Given that the difference in time between this USO tour of 1967 and the beginning of the filming of Apocalypse Now in 1976 was less than ten years, Francis Ford Coppola's film, constructed as it is, an exaggerated, surreal and dreamlike vision of a modern hell, the film is, as Coppola says in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the 1991 American documentary film about the production of Apocalypse Now:
It's NOT about Vietnam! It IS Vietnam!
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane".
Yes, perhaps that is something of an explanation from Coppola, but Apocalypse Now is . . .
. . . NOT the Vietnam War!
It is a version of the usual, pure or impure . . .
. . . Eurocentric ideology!
Show business as usual?
The scene of Playmates performing in Apocalypse Now occurs about half way through the movie, and works dramatically to foreground a kind of symmetry that exists in the facts and history of the Vietnam War, and the process of making the film itself, show business.
The first half of the movie has echoes of the inspiration afforded to the director Coppola by Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), as much as the original concept that John Milius came up with for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting.
The journeys along the rivers in Conrad's novella, and in Herzog's film, are journeys through "jungle", a kind of nature that, to the extent that it is "strange" and potentially hostile, a territory to be controlled, colonised yet resisting, so in its pristine and untameable state becomes a kind of enemy. The Indigenous People, inhabitants of a landscape, either to be conquered in a quest for a City of Gold, or in the Congo, mercilessly exploited for the trade in ivory and the monopolistic extraction of rubber from the forests, they are merges with this nature. They are an unseen enemy, invisible, with "primitive" projectiles, arrows and spears, wreaking havoc from its source, the jungle. A jungle that is itself the "unfamiliar", the "other", upon which countless paranoias, generated from the denial and guilt of the oppressor, are projected.
The fact of the racial "otherness" of Indigenous People in the project of the stabilisation of colonial appropriation in Vietnam, just as in the Amazon or the Congo, and along this other river, the Nung, includes a necessary process, fundamental to colonial and capitalist strategies, the de-humanisation of the "other". Or, as in the case of Apocalypse Now, a near complete erasure of the actual history of the Vietnamese peoples from the account.
Colonialist paranoia and the unidentified and invisible enemy
The costs of the Vietnam War
The first official death of an American in Vietnam was Technical Sergeant Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon Jr., United States Air Force, of Stoneham, Massachusetts, who was murdered by another U.S.A.F. airman on October 21, 1957.
The first US Army soldier to be killed in the line of duty in the Vietnam War was Capt. Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr., a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, who was killed near Nha Trang, Vietnam on October 21, 1957.
On July 8, 1959, while watching The Tattered Dress, five US Army officers became American casualties of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong attacked the mess hall where Dale R. Buis, Chester M. Ovnand and three other officers were watching the movie. M/Sgt Ovnand, who was in charge of the projector, switched on the lights to change to the next reel, when Viet Cong guerrillas poked their weapons through the windows and sprayed the room with automatic weapons fire. M/Sgt Ovnand was hit with several 9mm rounds. He immediately switched the lights off and headed to the top of the stairs, where he was able to turn on the exterior flood lights. He died from his wounds on the stairs. Major Buis, at that time, was crawling towards the kitchen doors. When the exterior flood lights came on, he must have seen an attacker coming through the kitchen doors. He got up and rushed towards attacker, but was only able to cover 15 feet (4.6 m) before being fatally hit from behind.
His actions startled the attacker who was about to throw his satchel charge through the door. The attacker's satchel charge had already been activated and his moment of hesitation allowed the satchel charge to explode, killing him. Two South Vietnamese guards that were on duty that night were also killed by the Viet Cong. The wounded were, Captain Howard Boston (MAAG 7) and the Vietnamese cook's eight-year-old son.
Chester M. Ovnand and Dale R. Buis are listed Nos. 1 and 2 at the time of the memorial wall's dedication. Ovnand's name is spelled on the memorial as "Ovnard," due to conflicting military records of his surname.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses May 7, 1975, the Fall of Saigon, as the official end date for the Vietnam War era, but the last servicemen listed on the memorial timeline are the 18 U.S.servicemen killed on the last day of a rescue operation known as the Mayaguez incident with troops from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Named casualties? Un-named casualties? Unseen casualties?Invisible casualties?
On May 29 2017 US News reported that the names of three American service members were added to the wall this month.
The additions bring the total number of names on the memorial to 58,318.
The Wikipedia article on Vietnam War casualties states that:
Estimates of casualties of the Vietnam War vary widely. Estimates include both civilian and military deaths in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The war persisted from 1955 to 1975 and most of the fighting took place in South Vietnam; accordingly it suffered the most casualties. The war also spilled over into the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos which also endured casualties from aerial and ground fighting.Civilian deaths caused by both sides amounted to a significant percentage of total deaths. Civilian deaths were partly caused by assassinations, massacres and terror tactics. Civilian deaths were also caused by mortar and artillery, extensive aerial bombing and the use of firepower in military operations conducted in heavily populated areas.
Mỹ Lai massacre
Photo taken by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on 16 March 1968, in the aftermath of the Mỹ Lai Massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road.
A number of incidents occurred during the war in which civilians were deliberately targeted or killed. The most prominent of these events were the Huế Massacre and the Mỹ Lai Massacre.R. J. Rummel's mid-range estimate in 1997 was that the total deaths due to the Vietnam War totalled 2,450,000 from 1954–75.
Rummel calculated Viet Cong(VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) deaths at 1,062,000 and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and allied war deaths of 741,000, with both totals including civilians inadvertently killed.
He estimated that victims of democide (deliberate killing of civilians) included 214,000 by North Vietnam/VC and 98,000 by South Vietnam and its allies. Deaths in Cambodia and Laos were estimated at 273,000 and 62,000 respectively.
Nick Turse, in his 2013 book, Kill Anything that Moves, argues that a relentless drive toward higher body counts, a widespread use of free-fire zones, rules of engagement where civilians who ran from soldiers or helicopters could be viewed as VC, and a widespread disdain for Vietnamese civilians led to massive civilian casualties and endemic war crimes inflicted by U.S. troops. One example cited by Turse is Operation Speedy Express, an operation by the 9th Infantry Division, which was described by John Paul Vann as, in effect, "many My Lais".
Air force captain, Brian Wilson, who carried out bomb-damage assessments in free-fire zones throughout the delta, saw the results firsthand. "It was the epitome of immorality...One of the times I counted bodies after an air strike — which always ended with two napalm bombs which would just fry everything that was left — I counted sixty-two bodies. In my report I described them as so many women between fifteen and twenty-five and so many children — usually in their mothers' arms or very close to them — and so many old people." When he later read the official tally of dead, he found that it listed them as 130 VC killed
The Vietnamese? . . .
The use of another kind of derogatory terminology for Vietnamese people by U.S. military personnel, regardless of whether they were insurgent, innocent villager, or fighting a colonial war as a Viet Cong cadre would, generally apply. This was the derogatory term "gook", used by for people of Asian descent, a pernicious and de-humanising racial slur, a term that may have originated among U.S. Marines during the Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902). If so, according to the Wikipedia article:
It could be related to the use of "gook" as a slang term for prostitute during that period. Historically, U.S. military personnel used the word to refer to non-Americans of various races. The earliest published example is dated 1920 and notes that U.S. Marines then in Haiti used the term to refer to Haitians.
U.S. occupation troops in South Korea after World War II called the Koreans "gooks". After the return of U.S. troops to the Korean Peninsula, so prevalent was the use of the word gook during the first months of the Korean War that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur banned its use, for fear that Asians would become alienated to the United Nations Command because of the insult.
It acquired its current racial meaning as a result of movies dealing with the Vietnam War. Although mainly used to describe non-European foreigners, especially East and Southeast Asians, it has been used to describe foreigners in general, including Italians in 1944, Indians, Lebanese and Turks in the '70s, and Arabs in 1988.
In modern U.S. usage, "gook" refers particularly to communist soldiers during the Vietnam War and has also been used towards all Vietnamese and at other times to all Southeast Asians in general. It is a highly offensive-humanising and racist term.
In a highly publicized incident, Senator John McCain used the word during the 2000 presidential campaign to refer to his North Vietnamese captors when he was a prisoner of war:
"I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live… I was referring to my prison guards and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend."
A few days later, however, he apologized to the Vietnamese community at large.
The elision of a 19th century slang term for "a low prostitute" into a generalised and racial slur, especially against Southeast Asians in general, is part of a pernicious mixing and exchanging of sexual and sexualised terms with a racist and American exceptionalism, plus an added pinch of delusional superiority complex.
Do all lives matter? An American General explains . . .
This video montage cuts and pastes scenes from the award winning documentary film on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds (1974), directed by Peter Davis. The film's title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson:
"the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there".The montage begins with an interview that takes place 1.43.09 into the film with General William Westmoreland — commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 — telling a stunned Davis that:
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
After an initial take, Westmoreland indicated that he had expressed himself inaccurately. After a second take ran out of film, the section was reshot for a third time, and it was the third take that was included in the film. Davis later reflected on this interview stating, "As horrified as I was when General Westmoreland said, 'The Oriental doesn’t put the same value on life,' instead of arguing with him, I just wanted to draw him out... I wanted the subjects to be the focus, not me as filmmaker."This interview is followed in the sequence by a clip of the napalm attack upon the village of Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
The next cut taken from an earlier part of the Hearts and Minds film, documents American military personnel searching for paid sex on the streets of Saigon (0.14.51). The next cut (0.44.57) shows American military personnel interacting with Vietnamese sex workers. This sequence continues into scenes that shows American forces setting fire to Vietnamese villagers homes.
The next cut from the film Hearts and Minds (1.38.08) shows the collateral tragedy and human grief caused by the indiscriminate bombing campaign on the civilian population of North Vietnam. This sequence continues with scenes of grief and mourning for South Vietnamese military personnel at their funeral ceremonies. A sobbing woman is restrained from climbing into the grave after the coffin. This funeral scene is juxtaposed with the shocking interview with General William Westmoreland. This sequence is a repeats of the opening sequence of this montage, but continues with a sequence that shows the aftermath of the napalm attack on the village of Trảng Bàng. This includes film footage of the nine year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc OOnt, depicted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at Trảng Bàng by AP photographer Nick Ut, that shows her running naked on the road after being severely burned on her back by a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack.
This harrowing footage is followed by moving testimony from a U.S. veteran who explains that although he never used the horrific weapon of napalm he was responsible for dropping anti-personnel cluster bombs. He reflects on the possibility of his own children suffering a napalm attack and quietly breaks down in front of camera. The montage ends with the sound of grieving in the burial grounds of a cemetery.
Apocalypse Now, along with most dramas and documentaries on the Vietnam War, becomes an American story of an American war, an American madness, a madness, that like a virus, left unchecked, will destroy the world it seeks to dominate.
An American war and American casualties!
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honouring service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War. The 2-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by a black granite wall engraved with the names of those service members who died as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The wall, completed in 1982, has since been supplemented with the statue The Three Soldiers and the Vietnam Women's Memorial.The instigation for this memorial came from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Inc. (VVMF), incorporated as a non-profit organization, to establish a memorial to veterans of the Vietnam War. Much of the impetus behind the formation of the fund came from a wounded Vietnam War veteran, Jan Scruggs, who was inspired by the film The Deer Hunter, with support from fellow Vietnam veterans such as West Point and Harvard Business School graduate John P. Wheeler III. Eventually, $8.4 million was raised by private donations.On July 1, 1980, a site covering two acres next to the Lincoln Memorial was chosen and authorised by Congress where the World War I Munitions Building previously stood.
The chosen design for the monument was a proposal submitted by Maya Lin, the 21 year old undergraduate from Yale, studying architecture.
The public design competition saw 2,573 entrants register for selection with a prize of $20,000 as the competition award. On March 30, 1981, 1,421 designs were submitted. The designs were displayed at an airport hangar at Andrews Air Force Base for the selection committee, in rows covering more than 35,000 square feet (3,300 m2) of floor space. Each entry was identified by number only. All entries were examined by each juror; the entries were narrowed down to 232, then to 39. Finally, the jury selected entry number 1026, which had been designed by Maya Lin.
Her design specified a black granite wall with the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers carved into its face (hundreds more have been added since the dedication), to be v-shaped, with one side pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument The memorial was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated in November 1982.
According to Maya Lin, her intention was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the pain caused by the war and its many casualties. "I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal," she recalled.
Maya Lin's selected design proved controversial, in particular, its unconventional minimalist design quality, the use of the black granite as the dominant colour and its lack of ornamentation. Newspaper critics, politicians, and some veterans recoiled. Opponents blasted the design as "a black gash of shame," "a scar," even "a tribute to Jane Fonda." Two prominent early supporters of the project, H. Ross Perot and James Webb, withdrew their support once they saw the design. Said Webb, "I never in my wildest dreams imagined such a nihilistic slab of stone." James Watt, secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan, initially refused to issue a building permit for the memorial due to the public outcry about the design. However, since these early years, criticism of the Memorial's design has faded. In the words of Jan Scruggs, "It has become something of a shrine."
The timeline for the memorial begins on the 1st of November 1955, marked by the formation of the Military Assistance Command Viet Nam, better known as MACV.
One of the strategies that the Americans adopted in an attempt to defeat an "invisible enemy" was to deny the Vietcong the cover provided by the lush forest canopy in across Vietnam by deploying herbicides and defoliants to utterly remove and destroy it.
The costs of war, as the song has it . . .
For American servicemen and their families, along with the entire Vietnamese people, it turns out that . . .
. . . the actual "invisible enemy" was the U.S. government and U.S. capitalist corporations! And Agent Orange!
Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1979 and Playmate of the Year in 1980.
Behind the glamour (and tragedy) it was the Playboy Press that in 1980 published one of the first investigations into the impact of Agent Orange with Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign's book:
GI Guinea Pigs: How the Pentagon Exposed Our Troops to Dangers More Deadly Than War: Agent Orange and Atomic Radiation.
mm
These shocking revelations were picked up in the 1984 film Vietnam: The Secret Agent directed by Jacki Ochs, and pointing to the invisible agent dioxin.
"Dioxin, a compound found in Agent Orange, is recognized as the most toxic man-made chemical. We dumped it on Vietnam and we dumped it on the dusty backroads of Southern Missouri."
This video montage includes some clips from this film followed by a performance by Country Joe McDonald of the Agent Orange song.
". . . and I had to look . . . and to realise that my own government could have done this . . . that corporate America . . . for the love of the almighty dollar, had sacrificed my child."
"I didn't ask any questions when I was an 18 year old boy growing up on Long Island, but I am asking a hell of a lot of questions now, as a 34 year old man sitting paralysed in a wheelchair for the last 13 years dealing with an insensitive government that could care less if I lived or died, or these people here lived or died . . ."
Listen to the people! And then listen . . .
The Wikipedia article on the Effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people The use of Agent Orange as a chemical weapon has left tangible, long-term impacts upon the Vietnamese people that live in Vietnam as well as those who fled in the mass exodus from 1978 to the early 1990s. Hindsight corrective studies indicate that previous estimates of Agent Orange exposure were biased by government intervention and under-guessing, such that current estimates for dioxin release are almost double those previously predicted Census data indicates that the United States military directly sprayed upon millions of Vietnamese during strategic Agent Orange use. The effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese range from a variety of health effects, ecological effects, and sociopolitical effects.
Accountability? Or, capitalism's culture of denial?
Difficulty in maintaining judicial and civil transparency persists despite decades passing since the use of Agent Orange by the United States military. Corporations indicted for their blindness to normal ethical standards have responded defensively and aggressively, in moves described as "antagonistic and focused on technological arguments" (Kernisky, Debra A (1997). "Proactive Crisis Management and Ethical Discourse: Dow Chemical's Issues Management Bulletins 1979-1990". Journal of Business Ethics).
The first legal proceeding taken on behalf of Vietnamese victims was undertaken in January 2004 in a New York district court. Ultimately the district court held that "herbicide spraying . . . did not constitute a war crime pre-1975" and that international law prevented the companies that produced Agent Orange from being liable.
Alternative models for reconciling the harms done by the dioxin on the Vietnamese people with reparations have also been proposed. Some have called for the defoliation and destruction to be deemed an "environmental war crime". Law reviews have even called for a revision to the litigation process in the US due to the harmful implications regarding justice, reparations, and accountability as a result of the political sway of large conglomerate, and connected private interests.
Since at least 1978, several lawsuits have been filed against the companies which produced Agent Orange, among them Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock.
Attorney Hy Mayerson was an early pioneer in Agent Orange litigation, working with environmental attorney Victor Yannacone in 1980 on the first class-action suits against wartime manufacturers of Agent Orange. In meeting Dr. Ronald A. Codario, one of the first civilian doctors to see affected patients, Mayerson, so impressed by the fact a physician would show so much interest in a Vietnam veteran, forwarded more than a thousand pages of information on Agent Orange and the effects of dioxin on animals and humans to Codario's office the day after he was first contacted by the doctor. The corporate defendants sought to escape culpability by blaming everything on the U.S. government.In 1980, Mayerson, with Sgt. Charles E. Hartz as their principal client, filed the first U.S. Agent Orange class-action lawsuit in Pennsylvania, for the injuries military personnel in Vietnam suffered through exposure to toxic dioxins in the defoliant.
Attorney Mayerson co-wrote the brief that certified the Agent Orange Product Liability action as a class action, the largest ever filed as of its filing. Hartz's deposition was one of the first ever taken in America, and the first for an Agent Orange trial, for the purpose of preserving testimony at trial, as it was understood that Hartz would not live to see the trial because of a brain tumor that began to develop while he was a member of Tiger Force, special forces, and LRRPs in Vietnam. The firm also located and supplied critical research to the veterans' lead expert, Dr. Codario, including about 100 articles from toxicology journals dating back more than a decade, as well as data about where herbicides had been sprayed, what the effects of dioxin had been on animals and humans, and every accident in factories where herbicides were produced or dioxin was a contaminant of some chemical reaction.The chemical companies involved denied that there was a link between Agent Orange and the veterans' medical problems. However, on May 7, 1984, seven chemical companies settled the class-action suit out of court just hours before jury selection was to begin. The companies agreed to pay $180 million as compensation if the veterans dropped all claims against them. Slightly over 45% of the sum was ordered to be paid by Monsanto alone.
Many veterans who were victims of Agent Orange exposure were outraged the case had been settled instead of going to court and felt they had been betrayed by the lawyers. "Fairness Hearings" were held in five major American cities, where veterans and their families discussed their reactions to the settlement and condemned the actions of the lawyers and courts, demanding the case be heard before a jury of their peers. Federal Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused the appeals, claiming the settlement was "fair and just".
By 1989, the veterans' fears were confirmed when it was decided how the money from the settlement would be paid out. A totally disabled Vietnam veteran would receive a maximum of $12,000 spread out over the course of 10 years. Furthermore, by accepting the settlement payments, disabled veterans would become ineligible for many state benefits that provided far more monetary support than the settlement, such as food stamps, public assistance, and government pensions. A widow of a Vietnam veteran who died of Agent Orange exposure would receive $3,700.In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: "We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects."
It turns out that it is citizen-to-citizen dialogue, and for individuals to call for accountability by the United States government, that addresses this discrepancy in the justice system. The first of these initiatives was established in 2006 by the Ford Foundation. Citizens sought a legal avenue by which private citizens and policy makers could work together to form a coherent plan of action in addressing the legacy of Agent Orange.
The US-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, composed of members of the Aspen Institute, Vietnam National University, and Vietnam Veterans Association, is the most notable example of this civic response. Long-term programs and continued check-ups on the state of current plans to address Agent Orange are heavily monitored.Questions of governmental accountability have been raised towards who should be responsible for allowing the use of the chemical dioxin despite knowing the risks. Those who said that the use (at the time of the Vietnam War) of Agent Orange was merely a means of defeating the Viet Cong did not believe that the defoliant violated the Geneva Protocol. However, the 1925 Geneva Protocol and Geneva Weapons Conventions signed by all members of the UN ban the use of chemical and biological weapons specifically. The 1925 Geneva Convention Gas Protocol corroborated and reinforced this ban.
This video montage includes a trailer for the 2020 film THE PEOPLE VS. AGENT ORANGE.
This film documentary is a profile of two women who have dedicated their lives to terminating the use of a deadly chemical herbicide that cost the lives of both Americans and Vietnamese.You didn’t have to be in Vietnam to get sick or die from Agent Orange. Unbelievably, after its use was banned in 1971, it eventually was sprayed by the millions of gallons in Western Oregon upon the soil that once held millions of trees. After they were cut down, Agent Orange was used to kill the weeds left behind as an aid to reforestation.Around that time, a woman named Carol Van Strum moved close to the forest with her four young children in a kind of “back to nature” retreat so common in the 60s and 70s. Not long after building a house and a barn for the animals she was raising, the children began to complain about various illnesses that remained a mystery. It was only after driving her car closer to the clear cut forest that she noticed a sickly odor. Suspecting the worst, she took samples from the soil and water, sent it off to a lab, and finally learned that entire area was drenched with Agent Orange, whose main toxin is called dioxin. The EPA, which tends to give back-handed support to corporations like Dow Chemical that manufacture it, categorised it as a carcinogen. As soon as she discovered the source of her children’s ailments, as well as others living near the forest, she went on a crusade against the corporations and the “experts” who sanctioned the poisonous herbicide.The film’s other fearless heroine is Tran To Nga, who is a septuagenarian like Van Strum. She comes from a family that opposed both the French and American colonizers, first as leaders in the Viet Minh and then with the NLF. Nga was in the Vietnamese forests when American planes were showering them with Agent Orange. As a result, her first-born child died in infancy. Her health has been affected as well. Long after the war ended, her body contains traces of Dioxin that some scientists view as much of a threat to human health for generations as plutonium.She is now suing the American chemical industry for poisoning her in Vietnam – a lawsuit she filed in 2014 against the corporations that produced and sold the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange. The suit includes U.S. multinational companies Dow Chemical and Monsanto, now owned by the German conglomerate Bayer.As Nga's landmark trial begins in Paris, a trial which could see the chemical manufactures held responsible for the devastation caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the film follows the claimants, as incriminating documents disappear, activists and their children are threatened and die. A helicopter technician secretly films the contamination of reservoirs, while a massive industrial cover-up continues.The film was co-directed by Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna. In the press notes, the directors state:Documents are a leitmotif. Storms, rain and flowing surface water are a recurring visual theme that evokes the lethal dioxin run-off and dioxin contamination. Similar images tie together the contamination of Vietnam and America’s Pacific Northwest as helicopters spray the ancient mangrove forests of Vietnam and Oregon’s majestic conifers. The scenes of the deformed and handicapped Vietnamese child victims, difficult as they are to watch and as sensitively as we try to present them, are a stark testimony to the film’s core message. We chose not to shy away from images the world might rather not see. They are indelible evidence of corporate greed and man’s inhumanity to man.
The trailer for this film is followed by the the documentary Toxic Rain - The Legacy of Agent Orange (2005), a film that focuses on the consequences of the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War upon the Vietnamese in Vietnam, directed by James Pastouna, camera: Constantin Titineanu.
The montage then returns to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with an educational video posted by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on the ongoing toll on Vietnam veterans as a consequence of exposure to Agent Orange. Callie Wright, VVMF's Director of Education, talks to students at The Wall That Heals about Agent Orange.
The struggles . . .
The first use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War is thought to have occurred on August 10, 1961.
On August 10, 2020, VVMF held its first-ever Agent Orange awareness event.
Bring Light . . .
“Bring Light” illuminated the entire Vietnam Veterans Memorial site with orange candlelight — from The Wall itself to The Three Servicemen statue, the flagpole, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial statue and the In Memory plaque.
Collateral damage and the Americanisation of the world . . .
. . . begins in May 1961, when T. C. Schelling wrote an article titled Dispersal, Deterence, and Damage, which referred to the term "collateral damage":
The USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide defines the term [that is, 'collateral damage'] "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces".
The emergence during the 1960's of the use of this term, even though originating in a more general use much earlier, became ideologically useful as an example of military jargon. As a convenient euphemism, the phrase "collateral damage" came into its own during the Vietnam War, especially when referring to countless examples of casualties of friendly fire or the intentional killing of non-combatants and destruction of their property.
As a term, it functions in a way that dehumanises non-combatants killed or injured during combat, and can also be used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.
The light that glows from the candles in the "Bring Light" awareness event concerning the collateral damage caused by Agent Orange cannot illuminate the immense number that exists in some future monument. This is the number of those who have died as a result of collateral damage, in the Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Guam, Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Johnston Atoll, Okinawa (Japan), Thailand and the United States.
How do human rights, the wider values of society, civilisations and culture stand in relation to this notion of collateral damage?
Harry Lime (The Third Man) knows!
The famous so-called "Swiss cuckoo clock" speech occurs in the1949 British film The Third Man, a cold war drama penned by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed.
In this famous scene, Lime meets Martins on the Wiener Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park.
Victims? . . .
Looking down on the people below from his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, and says that it would be insignificant if one of them or a few of them "stopped moving, forever". Back on the ground, he notes:
You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles added this remark – in the published script, it is in a footnote. Greene wrote in a letter, "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence." Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play" — in any event the idea is not original to Welles, acknowledged by the phrase "what the fellow said".
From a distance! A version of "realism" in the capitalist "West"?
Cool visual detachment?Returning to Playboy's "high priest of pop cult and metaphysician of media Marshall McLuhan", in The Gutenberg Galaxy (Gutenberg - as in the technology of the mechanised printing of texts and images) he has this chapter heading:
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.
The view from the Wiener Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park in The Third Man, runs in a line from, and was pre-figured, according to McLuhan by Shakespeare. He writes:
Shakespeare seems to have missed due recognition for having in King Lear made the first, and so far as I know, the only piece of verbal three- dimensional perspective in any literature.
The arbitrary selection of a single static position creates a pictorial space with a vanishing point. This space can be filled in bit by bit, and is quite different from non-pictorial space in which each thing simply resonates or modulates its own space in visually two-dimensional form.Now the unique piece of three-dimensional verbal art which appears in King Lear is in Act IV, scene vi. Edgar is at pains to persuade the blinded Gloucester to believe the illusion that they are at the edge of a steep cliff:
Edgar. . . . Hark, do you hear the sea?
Gloucester. No, truly. Edgar. Why then, your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes' anguish... .
Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three-dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative. That it was an acquired illusion Shakespeare helps us to see by his comments on the other senses in relation to sight. Gloucester is ripe for illusion because he has suddenly lost his sight. His power of visualization is now quite separate from his other senses. And it is the sense of sight in deliberate isolation from the other senses that confers on man the illusion of the third dimension, as Shakespeare makes explicit here. There is also the need to fix the gaze:
Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, That on th' unnumb'red idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong
. . . and yond tall anchoring bark
Detail from Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (probably an early copy of Bruegel's lost original, c. 1558).
What Shakespeare does here is to place five flat panels of two-dimensions, one behind the other. By giving these flat panels a diagonal twist they succeed each other, as it were, in a perspective from the "stand still" point. He is utterly aware that the disposition to this kind of illusionism results from the separation of the senses.
The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synesthesia may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology. This process of separation and reduction of functions had certainly reached a critical point by the early seventeenth century when King Lear appeared. But to determine how far such a revolution in the human sense life could have proceeded from Gutenberg technology calls for a somewhat different approach from merely sampling the sensibility of a great play of the critical period.
King Lear is a kind of medieval sermon-exemplum or inductive reasoning to display the madness and misery of the new Renaissance life of action. Shakespeare explains minutely that the very principle of action is the splitting up of social operations and of the private sense life into specialized segments. The resulting frenzy to discover a new over-all interplay of forces ensures a furious activation of all components and persons affected by the new stress.
In McLuhan's chapter headed:
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.
He says:
Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear. The Chinese culture is considerably more refined and perceptive than the Western world has ever been. But the Chinese are tribal, people of the ear. "Civilization" must now be used technically to mean detribalized man for whom the visual values have priority in the organization of thought and action. Nor is this to give any new meaning or value to "civilization" but rather to specify its character. It is quite obvious that most civilized people are crude and numb in their perceptions, compared with the hyperesthesia of oral and auditory cultures.
Later on in this chapter McLuhan references J. C. Carothers, previously cited in a preceding chapter headed:
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.
J. C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (November, 1959 ) on "Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word," . . .
. . . reiterates that the Westerner depends on a high degree of visual shaping of spatio-temporal relations without which it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of causal relations so necessary to the order of our lives. But the quite different assumptions of native perceptual life have led him to ask (p. 311) what has been the possible role of written words in shifting habits of perception from the auditory to visual stress:When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as whim dictates. They lose those emotional overtones and emphases which have been described, for instance, by Monrad-Krohn. . . Thus, in general, words, by becoming visible, join a world of relative indifference to the viewer — a world from which the magic 'power' of the word has been abstracted.
McLuhan then refers to Carothers turning to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; for further orientation in his queries concerning the effects of writing on non-literate communities. Riesman had characterized our own Western world as developing in its "typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to acquire early in life an internalized set of goals." Riesman made no effort to discover why the manuscript culture of the ancient and medieval worlds should not have conferred inner direction, nor why a print culture should inevitably confer inner direction. That is part of the business of the present book. But it can be said at once that "inner direction" depends upon a "fixed point of view." A stable, consistent character is one with an unwavering outlook, an almost hypnotized visual stance, as it were. Manuscripts were altogether too slow and uneven a matter to provide either a fixed point of view or the habit of gliding steadily on single planes of thought and information. As we shall see, manuscript culture is intensely audile-tactile compared to print culture; and that means that detached habits of observation are quite uncongenial to manuscript cultures, whether ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Chinese or medieval. In place of cool visual detachment the manuscript world puts empathy and participation of all the senses. But non-literate cultures experience such an overwhelming tyranny of the ear over the eye that any balanced interplay among the senses is unknown at the auditory extreme, just as balanced interplay of the senses became extremely difficult after print stepped up the visual component in Western experience to extreme intensity.
The view from the shambles!
The word "shambles", used generally, and informally today to refer to situations of total disorder, was originally, and now an obsolete term, for an open-air slaughterhouse and meat market. Streets with this name were so called from having been the sites on which butchers killed and dressed animals for consumption. One source suggests that the term derives from "Shammel", an Anglo-Saxon word for shelves that stores used to display their wares while another indicates that by AD 971 "shamble" meant a 'bench for the sale of goods' and by 1305, a 'stall for the sale of meat'.
So, "war" and "shambles" belong together, and both "besmeared with sluttish time".
As highlighted before in this article, in the film , Hearts and Minds (1974), directed by Peter Davis General William Westmoreland — commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 — tells a stunned Davis that:
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In contrast to the montage of the famous so-called "Swiss cuckoo clock" speech in The Third Man, Re:LODE Radio chooses to juxtapose this montage (and edit) of Wayne Wang's title sequence to his 1989 film Life Is Cheap... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive.
"Life is cheap . . .
The Re:LODE Radio edit begins with the title sequence, followed by a sustained episode involving a chase, a device that Wayne Wang uses to probe the urban and social fabric of this era of Hong Kong during the late 1980's.
By the early 1990s, Hong Kong had established itself as a global financial centre and shipping hub. The colony faced an uncertain future as the end of the New Territories lease approached, and Governor Murray MacLehose raised the question of Hong Kong's status with Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Diplomatic negotiations with China resulted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which the United Kingdom agreed to transfer the colony in 1997 and China would guarantee Hong Kong's economic and political systems for 50 years after the transfer. The impending transfer triggered a wave of mass emigration as residents feared an erosion of civil rights, the rule of law, and quality of life. Over half a million people left the territory during the peak migration period, from 1987 to 1996.
Lastly the edit ends with an earlier sequence in the film where the main protagonist ventures out on foot to the "wet markets" and "shambles" of this "old Hong Kong", from where the title sequence, in a documentary style, was filmed.
Wikipedia's summation of the film's plot is contained within this short sentence: "A man is hired, by people he believes to be gangsters, to deliver a briefcase from America to Hong Kong". Re:LODE Radio chooses to present an edit of scenes from the film to juxtapose the combination of arrogance, ignorance and cool detachment of an American General (factual), an American black marketeer (fictional), and the values of a Chinese butcher in capitalist Hong Kong.
The butcher points out that in the "shambles" of this British colony, the values of everyday life where everything is reduced to a price in the market, other values end up meaning not very much. The film begins with this title scene of brutal realism, something that Re:LODE Radio connects to McLuhan's thought on the differences between the cool visual detachment of most civilized people, made crude and numb in their perceptions, compared with the hyperesthesia of oral and auditory cultures, such as found in five thousand years of Chinese culture.
Re:LODE Radio considers that Wayne Wang's film begins the film with this scene, that also provides the title of the film, because it exposes a fundamental contradiction of modern life. This Chinese "everyman" puts empathy and participation of all the senses in everyday life ahead of the nihilistic absurdity that produces a system where "life is cheap but toilet paper is expensive".
Cold War II?
The making of this film in the Hong Kong of the late 1980's is significant, given the the impending outbreak of a new cold war where the contestation for global hegemony between the West and the East is taking a different turn from the way the ideological battlegrounds of the Vietnam War were conducted.
Throughout the Re:LODE and Re:LODE Radio project many references have been made to the historical contexts relevant the LODE Zone Line that include the present contenders for global power and influence, China and the United States of America.
Playboy's Little Annie Fanny had a role to play in massaging the American message . . .
. . . a message for a readership in the US and its wider sphere of cultural influence rather than spooks at the Kremlin.
Little Annie Fanny was a humorous satire of contemporary American society and its sexual mores, created by Harvey Kurtzman, the genius who founded the satirical Mad magazine in 1952. An early fan of Mad was onetime cartoonist Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy in 1953. Hefner had offered Kurtzman an opportunity to conceive a new humour magazine, which the cartoonist accepted after laving Mad in 1956 in an ownership dispute. Kurtzman took most of the Mad artists with him, including frequent collaborator Will Elder, to create the adult-oriented humour magazine Trump. Trump magazine was short lived, as was their they self-published the satirical magazine Humbug in 1957–58. In the end Kurtzman returned to work for Hefner, creating a series appearing in 107 two- to seven-page episodes in Playboy magazine from October 1962 to September 1988, and with Little Annie Fanny as the culmination of his career. Each episode of the comic strip was designed and written by Kurtzman and rendered in oil, tempera, and watercolor by Elder. Hefner edited each episode, often requiring detailed changes to ensure that the series remained true to the magazine's editorial style.
Annie Fanny, the title character, is a statuesque, buxom young blonde woman who innocently finds herself nude in every episode. An inspiration for the artist Will Elder was the Playboy model June Cochran who first appeared nude in magazine two months after the first Annie Fanny comic strip appeared in October 1962. Annie Fanny is the feature's lead character. Like other young women in Playboy pictorials, Annie is beautiful, buxom, and often unclothed. She is sexually innocent, oblivious to the worldliness around her. Annie was conceived as a modern Candide, a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. As such she rises above each story's corruptions and temptations.
Annie is never shocked or offended, and she remains blithe of spirit throughout her trials and tribulations.
Annie "glides through a changing world with an untiring optimism" with a "good-natured lack of desire". She is insulated from the carnal nature of those around her, who explain the new rules of society to her each episode. A number of other characters in Little Annie Fanny are derived from Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Sugardaddy Bigbucks, Annie's surrogate father and a powerful, manipulative capitalist, is based on Daddy Warbucks.
The character of Daddy Warbucks was often used as a platform for cartoonist Harold Gray's political views, which were free market-based. He sometimes expounded on the need for wealthy men to work hard — lest the masses have no employment. At the same time, capitalists who underpaid or mistreated their workers were portrayed in a negative light, with corrupt businessmen often being shown as villains. While, in the strip, Warbucks would interact with the rich and powerful, the close relationship in the play and movie between Warbucks and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) would likely have been anathema to Gray, who opposed the New Deal policies of FDR and the Democrats.
In the 1982 film Annie, Daddy Warbucks says he was born in Liverpool, which has an obvious significance for the Re:LODE Radio project along the LODE Zone Line.
Sugardaddy Bigbucks and Daddy Warbucks are classic caricatures of the twentieth century American capitalist class. Making money from wars that shape neoliberal, colonial and imperialist ventures.
The fictional backstory for the Daddy Warbucks character is that, having lost both parents in childhood he had to work seven nights a week in the local steel mill to make ends meet. He eventually became foreman in the rolling mill, married Mrs. Warbucks, worked and planned for a family and house of their own. "Daddy" began to make big money during World War I. After the war, Warbucks continued as an industrialist, but became a philanthropist as well — his fortune had built to "ten billion dollars." His wife instigated the taking in of Annie while Warbucks was away on a business trip. On his return, he was smitten with Annie and, as her father-figure, offered the girl support as needed.
Just as with the Sugardaddy Bigbucks and Annie Fanny storylines, Daddy Warbuck's often intervened in Annie's life during a crisis, always returning in time to save the day. During World War II, Warbucks became a three-star general. Later in life he was knighted by the Queen of the United Kingdom.
Sugardaddy Bigbucks would, likewise, have profited from the neocolonialist wars waged by the US government, but the costs would be covered by the citizen taxpayer. The economic impact upon US citizens of the Vietnam War was considerable, especially with inflation and an increasingly high interest rate. This is another example of the "business as usual" model that ends up with:
Vietnam War Profits and Loss! The privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss!
U.S. Spent $141‐Billion In Vietnam in 14 YearsMay 1, 1975
WASHINGTON, April 30 (AP) —From 1961 until the surrender of the Saigon Government, the United States spent more than $141‐billion in South Vietnam, or more than $7,000 for each of South Vietnam's 120 million people.
By the time the Paris peace accords were signed in January, 1973, more than 56,000 American servicemen had died in Vietnam, 46,000 of them in combat.
Measuring the full cost of Vietnam fighting to the United States inevitably goes far beyond the statistics. For example many economists link the rapid inflationary spiral of the late nineteen‐sixties directly to large Federal deficits that resulted from United States spending in Vietnam.
Critics of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson maintain that he tried to finance his Great Society domestic programs and an expensive war simultaneously without a corresponding increase in Federal taxes. When huge Federal deficits appeared, the purchasing power of the dollar fell, a decline that continues eating into the pocketbooks of American consumers today.
Million Battle Deaths
Although America's involvement in the war was costly in both casualties and dollars spent, it set no U.S. record for either category. In the Civil War 498,332 Americans died, and combat deaths were higher in both World Wars 1 and II than they were in Vietnam.
Casualties and combat deaths among the South Vietnamese and Communist forces went far beyond American losses.
The Pentagon estimates that there were over 241,000 South Vietnamese combat deaths and more than one million combined Vietcong and North Vietnamese combat deaths.
The dollar cost of the United States involvement in the war is more difficult to compare. Everything from rifles to uniforms to ships to fighter planes cost less in previous conflicts;
Salaries of the 2.6 million servicemen who served in Vietnam over 11‐ years accounted for much of the cost of the Vietnam war, as did the 4,900 helicopters and more than 3,700 jets and other American‐made planes lost in the fighting.
American ‐ made military weaponry and equipment valued at more than $2‐billion were in the hands of the South Vietnamese Army before it stopped fighting.
Record tonnages of ammunition, including artillery and B‐52 bombs, expended by the United States in Vietnam also added to the cost of the war.
The Soviet Union and China have also poured staggering amounts or military and economic aid into North Vietnam,
Hanoi Received $7‐Billion
As of January, 1975, it was estimated that the Soviet Union and China had provided more than $7.5‐billion in aid to the North Vietnamese, with about 40 per cent being military. But Pentagon officials cautioned that all such estimates are at best rough guesses.
Nonetheless, the March 1975 intelligence estimate said: “Total Communist military and economic aid to North Vietnam in 1974 was higher than in any previous year.”
When the role of American fighting men in Vietnam ended on Jan. 27, 1973, the conflict was the longest in American history. It took eight years for the Revolutionary War to end; the Spanish‐American War of 1898 ran only four months.
In the period 1967 to 1970, the United States spent successively $22.2‐billion, $26.3‐billion, $26.5‐billion and $18.5‐billion.
In the current fiscal year, after sending almost $700‐million in aid to South Vietnam, President Ford was still pressing for additional millions when the end came.
Understanding the Vietnam War Machine
This Jacobin interview with Diana Roose by Derek Seidman (originally published by LittleSis) runs under the subheading:
A look at the radical Vietnam-era research collective that exposed US companies profiteering off the war
17 June 2018The interview is in a section of the Jacobin website headed:
UNITED STATESWAR AND IMPERIALISMThe document illustrated (the image with an orange background) at the top of the webpage sets out in order the:
TOP 100 DEFENSE CONTRACTORS IN FISCAL 1977
No. 1. in the list is McDonnell Douglas Corp with a contract award amounting to $2,574,047,000.00
This is the No. 1. representative of the so-called Military Industrial Complex. No. 65. turns out to be British Petroleum Co Ltd with a contract award running to $104,498,000.00
Derek Seidman contextualises the interview with Diana Roose with the following introduction:
Diana Roose was a longtime staffer with National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex, or NARMIC, as it was commonly known. NARMIC was a group of power researchers that was affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee. It formed in 1969, at the height of the US war on Vietnam, and existed throughout the mid-1980s.
NARMIC was dedicated to uncovering the defense profiteers behind the US war machine. They worked closely with the peace movement to resist militarism and published valuable reports and slideshows that helped activists better understand the power behind the military-industrial complex — and how to fight it.
In October, I profiled NARMIC as part of an ongoing exploration into the role of power research in social movement history. I interviewed Diana Roose to learn more about NARMIC and its legacy.
The LittleSis webpage carrying this interview runs with the headline:
The “Research Arm” of the Peace Movement: How Power Researchers Helped the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
Beneath the headline the webpage shows this photo of an Anti-Vietnam War protest with marchers carrying a banner that reads:
We won't fight another rich man's war!!!
One of the questions to Diana Roose in the interview was:
Can you talk a little bit about the slideshows you made?
That was a brilliant idea that came from somebody in the movement who said, “You have all this information and you can put out all these booklets. Can you put this together with pictures and make it into a slideshow or something, so that we can use it to go out into the communities and tell people about the war – and not just have leaflets?”
I don’t know why anybody didn’t think about it earlier. It was remarkable in its success. We had pictures from all these military magazines of all these weapons. We had pictures from Vietnam of people who had been injured by these weapons. So we made all this into slides, and people started saying, “Can I get a copy?”
We found a little business in Philadelphia that would copy slides pretty quickly, and we decided to sell them as kits. That’s what people were asking for – it was all driven by the market, by the activists who were trying to find tools that they could use to educate their communities.
“Automated Air War” became used all across the country. Groups would take the slideshows out into communities all over the country and show them. I remember talking to some of the veterans that were using the slideshows. They would go into the bars and set them up, and they’d get their fellow veterans to see it. They’d even go into VFW places and show these things before anybody had a clue what they were trying to do!
It really hit a nerve. Organizers now had a tool they could use as a group. It wasn’t just an individual reading a pamphlet. It was a group activity, and that was the the important part of it, because it was self reinforcing. People would talk to their neighbors. If you’re just reading a pamphlet or a report, it’s a mostly individual act.
So this, again, was part of the activism part of research. It wasn’t just research for research’s sake. It was research that would be useful to activists. And that was something new.
The world's oldest colony
The LODE Zone Line includes the world's oldest colony, Puerto Rico, still a colony of the United States of America. Nevertheless, reference to the United States is relevant along the the length and breadth of the LODE Zone Line because of capitalist globalisation, and how the hegemony of the U.S. has played out in the lives of people living everywhere.
The historical significance and influence of China has also been referenced along the LODE Zone Line, and when it comes to Cold War II, the contestation for global hegemony is between the United States as the dominant, but possibly declining superpower, and China, with an economy on the rise.
A U.S. v. China "Cold War II", however ideological, is not a competition between socialism and capitalism!
While the U.S. military industrial complex is governed by the short term, be it a monopolistic economic advantage, or skewing the system so that competition is rigged, United States global power is based on variations of the theme of globalised capitalism. So what about China? Richard D. Wolff, an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis, has put a variant of this question in a recent article (August 22, 2020) for Asia Times:
Socialist or capitalist: What is China’s model, exactly?
The subheading for this article runs:
In China today, like the USSR a century ago, transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled
A float featuring the Communist Party of China passes through Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2019 during a parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Richard D. Wolff writes:
Near the end of his life, Lenin gave a speech that referred to the USSR as a transitional society. He explained that socialists had taken state power and could thereby take the post-revolutionary economy – which he labeled “state capitalism” – further. The socialists’ state could achieve transition to a genuinely post-capitalist economy.
He never spelled out exactly what that meant, but he clearly saw that transition as the revolution’s goal. In any event, conditions inside and outside the USSR in effect halted further transition. Josef Stalin’s USSR came to define socialism as state power in socialists’ hands overseeing an economy that mixed private and state enterprises with market and state planning mechanisms of distribution.The state capitalism originally conceived as a transitional stage en route to a socialism different from and beyond state capitalism came instead to define socialism. The transition had become the end.*The “different from and beyond” faded into a vague goal located in a distant future. It was a “communism” described by slogans such as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It named a party with communism as its goal, but socialism as its present reality.The hallmark of capitalism, what distinguished it from feudalism (lord/serf) and slavery (master/slave), was the employer/employee relationship structuring its enterprises. In Stalin’s USSR and since, the employer/employee relationship became, instead, a necessary, unquestioned presumption common to any and all “modern” economies, capitalist and socialist alike (rather like machinery or raw materials).That Stalinist view of the universality of the employer/employee relationship was also the view of all major strains of economic thought in the capitalist world outside the USSR.China’s Communist Party largely replicated the USSR’s history in terms of constructing a state capitalism overseen by the party and the government it controls. One key difference from the USSR has been China’s ability to engage with the world market in ways and to degrees the USSR never could. China also allowed a far larger component of private enterprises, foreign and domestic, alongside state-owned and -operated enterprises than the USSR did.Yet China today, like the USSR a century ago, faces the same transition problem: Transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled.In China since at least the 1970s, the Communist Party and the government it controls have managed state-owned and supervised private enterprises. Both kinds of enterprise exhibited the same employer/employee structure.Chinese state capitalism is a hierarchy with the party and government at the top, state and private employers below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom. Western private capitalism has a slightly different hierarchy: private employers at the top, parties and government below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom.China’s economy has grown or “developed” much faster over recent decades and now rivals the North American and European economies. China was better prepared for and better contained the damages flowing from the 2000 dot-com crisis, the 2008-09 Great Recession, and the 2020 Covid-19 crisis.The party and government in China mobilized private and public resources to focus on prioritized social problems that also included reduced dependence on exports and massive infrastructural expansion.China’s party and government have produced a huge, well educated labor force working for private and state enterprises, foreign and domestic. Popular support for China’s existing economic system seems widespread notwithstanding considerable criticism and some opposition.Rising labor productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.A key lesson of Chinese development is that economic objectives are better met faster if a dominant social agency prioritizes achieving them and can mobilize the maximum resources, private as well as public, to that end. China’s party and government were that agency.In Western capitalism, no comparably empowered social agency possessed that power. Private and public sectors stayed separate.Ideology and politics generally kept the public subordinate to the private. The private employers’ differing particular interests and profit-driven goals discouraged many kinds of coordinated behavior among them as did their system’s structures of competition. Party and state apparatuses depended on corporate donations and corporate-media supports.Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.Some Western capitalist countries embraced social democracy (as in much of Western Europe). There states provided major social supports (national health insurance, subsidized schools, transport, housing, etc) that enabled some state-mobilized national resources for social priorities.The less capitalist countries embraced social democracy – the more committed to laissez-faire ideology and private-sector dominance – the less they could mobilize national resources. The United States and UK are prime examples of such countries; hence their poor preparations for and containments of the Covid-19 pandemic and the capitalist crash of 2020.A second lesson China offers the world concerns the relationship between the basic structure its private and public enterprises share and the nature of its socialism. Almost all enterprises in China have an employer/employee internal structure; they differ in who the employers are. In state-owned and operated enterprises, state officials occupy the employer position. In private enterprises, the employers are private citizens; they occupy no position within the state apparatus.China’s economic system differs sharply from a Western capitalist system. First, it has a larger sector of state-owned and operated enterprises than what Western capitalisms display. Second, it accords a dominant political and social role to the party and government. The latter together direct the economy’s development and coordinate how economy, politics and culture interact to achieve its goals.China’s economic system is also clearly not a communism in the sense of having overcome the employer/employee structure or mode of production. To the extent that such overcoming once occurred during the era of communes early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, it mostly vanished.Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked.There is an alternative way of drawing a second lesson from China’s remarkable history over the last half-century. We could infer that by “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” China means its system of a socially dominant party and state directing a mix of private and state-owned enterprises, both organized in the typically capitalist structure of employer and employee.Western European “socialisms” (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, etc) would thus also, like China, fall somewhere in the blocked transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Despite Europe’s different politics and multiple-party system, most of its parties accept and reinforce a commitment to a kind of state capitalism.The socialisms of the USSR, China, and Western Europe were and are transitional. They all embody a process that got stopped or stalled en route to a post-capitalist society barely imagined.“Actually existing socialisms” were actually state capitalisms ruled, more or less, by persons and associations who wanted to go somewhere further, beyond, to a society much more different from capitalism. Hence the gap felt deeply by so many socialists and socialist organizations (parties, etc) between what motivates their commitment (socialist ideals) and what they can and must do in their practical lives.The Cold War waged against the USSR added to the pressures that blocked transition from going beyond state capitalism. A cold war now against China will do the same. Even without cold wars, internal pressures in the USSR and China likely sufficed then and suffice now to stall any transition beyond state capitalism.And so it is as well with Western European–type socialisms. The only way the transition can be resumed would be if some force within the private and/or state capitalisms emerged that defined its project as precisely that resumption.Global capitalism today exhibits historic difficulties: pandemic closures, global depressions (in 2008 and worse in 2020), extreme and deepening inequalities within nations, unsustainable government, corporate and household debts, and collapsing coordination among blocs.Long-deferred social problems (global warming, racism, labor migration, and gender inequality) are exploding as partial effects and partial further causes of those difficulties. Everywhere social movements are emerging or struggling to emerge in response to the difficulties and problems besieging modern societies.All those movements share the problem of defining just what they will do to solve the problems motivating them. Many will yet again see government as the solution. Their program will give the state more power to oversee, regulate, control, and spend for the solution.Those people may or may not label their views as “socialism.” Either way, their proposals advocate for or sustain another blocked transition: from a private to a state capitalism or from a lesser to a greater degree of state capitalism.Over the past century, many attracted to socialism have come to understand that blocked transitions did not and do not suffice to solve the problems created by modern capitalism. Those people can now become the new social force to unblock the socialist transition. From below, they can demand an end to the employer/employee structure of enterprises, public as well as private.That end would help define the new society to which an unblocked socialist transition can and must now proceed. That society would be post-capitalist: different from and beyond all actually existing socialisms. It will have displaced the employer/employee structure of enterprises in favor of the democratic, worker-cooperative structure.Stalled revolutionsIn the late 18th century, the French and American Revolutions marked the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Leaders of those revolutions believed that they would bring into being a new society characterized by liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy.But that transition also stalled: It did achieve the change from lord/serf to employer/employee, but it did not achieve the further changes to that desired new society. Socialism mostly represented the continuation of the drive toward those further changes.But the socialisms of the USSR, China and Western Europe stalled too. Their advocates and leaders had believed that a transition from private to state capitalism would bring those further changes that capitalism never did. The lessons of Soviet and Chinese socialisms offer a profound critique of stalled socialism, their own and others’.The completion of the passage from capitalism and beyond socialism as a transitional stage requires a micro-level economic revolution. The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise.That economic foundation – what communism concretely means – offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.*A full exposition of this argument concerning the rise and fall of the USSR is available in Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2002.This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.
Fun, Travel, Adventure?
Sir! . . .
Or CLASS WAR?
This montage shows a trailer for the film Sir, No Sir, followed by a clip from the film Born on the Fourth of July.
Sir! No Sir! is a 2005 documentary by Displaced Films about the anti-war movement within the ranks of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, produced, directed, and written by David Zeiger. The film brings to life the history of the GI Movement and the stories of those who were part of it through interviews with veterans plus hitherto unseen archival material. Archival materials include news reports from local and national television broadcasts, images from newspapers and magazines, and Super-8 and 16mm film footage of events in the GI Movement shot by GIs and civilian activists. Recently shot interviews with individuals involved in the struggle include soldiers imprisoned for refusing to fight, to train other soldiers, or to ship out to the frontlines; Vietnam veterans who became antiwar activists or joined the 500,000+ soldiers whom the Pentagon listed as deserters during the war; the leader of the Presidio 27 Mutiny, also known as the Presidio mutiny; and soldiers who went on strike while in Vietnam, plus other interviews, including with Hollywood activist Jane Fonda. Exclusive footage from documentary coverage of the movement includes highlights from the FTA Show, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's antiwar stage revue that traveled to military bases around the world, F.T.A. the feature-length film about that tour; Vietnam veterans hurling their medals onto the Capitol steps; the refusal by troops to engage in combat at Firebase Pace (which sped up the final withdrawal of U.S. ground forces); and an audio recording made by the journalist Richard Boyle, who was also the author of The Flower of the Dragon and the Oliver Stone film Salvador.
The following scene is from Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a biographical anti-war drama film based on the eponymous 1976 autobiography by Ron Kovic, directed by Oliver Stone, and written by Stone and Kovic. The scene shows how in 1972 Ron Kovic, having joined the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War, travels to the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida. As Richard Nixon is giving an acceptance speech for his presidential nomination, Ron expresses to a news reporter his hatred for the war and the government for abandoning the American people. His comments enrage Nixon supporters, and his interview is cut short when police attempt to remove and arrest him and other protestors. Ron and the veterans manage to break free from the officers, regroup, and charge the hall again, though not successfully.
Re:LODE Radio considers the way this drama unfolds is not necessarily following a trajectory of emerging political consciousness and awareness, as evidenced in Sir, No Sir. It's the total collapse of trust and belief in authority by a significant grouping, a community of shared experience, that shapes a view of government that doesn't care, and a sense that there's corruption at the heart of this democracy. Democracy in the U.S. is a low intensity sort of democracy at the best of times, and so the gap widens between the powerful and those who feel powerless. This also chimes with the emergence of a matrix of conspiracy theories that originate in this period too.
Paranoid styles and conspiracy theories, Left and Right! True and False!
The left and the right in politics is dominated now by fake news and conspiracy theories, some of which may actually be true, however outlandish, while many are the extension of grotesque psychological projections that expose some ugly truths, as with the work of William Blum, an inspiration for Stone's work, and discussed below.
Oliver Stone has become a controversial figure in American filmmaking, with critics accusing him of promoting conspiracy theories, and of misrepresenting real-world events and figures in his works.In 1991 Oliver Stone released the epic political thriller film JFK, that examines the events leading to the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. It focusses on an alleged cover-up dramatised through the experience of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. Garrison filed charges against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for his alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, for which Lee Harvey Oswald was found responsible by the Warren Commission.In modern times, multiple conspiracy theories concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 have emerged. Vincent Bugliosi estimated that over 1,000 books had been written about the Kennedy assassination, at least ninety percent of which are works supporting the view that there was a conspiracy. As a result of this, the Kennedy assassination has been described as "the mother of all conspiracies". The countless individuals and organizations that have been accused of involvement in the Kennedy assassination include the CIA, the Mafia, sitting Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, the KGB, or even some combination thereof. It is also frequently asserted that the United States federal government intentionally covered up crucial information in the aftermath of the assassination to prevent the conspiracy from being discoveredAccording to Wikipedia, Stone has been described as having left-wing political views. He has also drawn attention for his opinions on controversial world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Hugo Chávez. In Showtime's The Putin Interviews, Stone called Joseph Stalin "the most famous villain in history, next to Adolf [Hitler]", who "left a horrible reputation, and stained the [Communist] ideology forever ... it's mixed with blood, and terror."
Stone has endorsed the works of author William Blum, saying that his books should be taught in schools and universities.In 1969 Blum wrote and published an exposé of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees. He worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1972–1973, Blum worked as a journalist in Chile where he reported on the Allende government's "socialist experiment". In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex-CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds". He supported himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses. One of Blum's stories on Iraq was listed by Project Censored as one of "The Top Ten Censored Stories of 1998"
In his books and online columns, Blum has devoted substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. Noam Chomsky has called Blum's book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, "far and away the best book on the topic."
Blum supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns. He circulated a monthly newsletter by email called "The Anti-Empire Report".
An Unreasonable Man
Quoted here are the first two paragraphs of this article/opinion piece, followed by the last section headed:
Some Further Thought Regarding the 9/11 Truth MovementWilliam Blum writes:
I recommend the new documentary about Ralph Nader, which was recently shown on PBS television, “An Unreasonable Man”. Its primary focus is on Nader’s argument for having run in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections despite the alleged harm done to the Democratic Party candidates. As I’ve written earlier: The choice facing people like myself was not Ralph Nader or Albert Gore or John Kerry. The choice facing us was Ralph Nader or not voting at all. If Nader had not been on the ballot, we would have stayed home. It’s that simple. The film shows a clip of a TV network newscast just after the 2000 election in which star news anchors Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw are discussing this very question, and much to my surprise they both come to this same conclusion — Nader did not cost the Democrats many votes at all. If he had not been on the ballot, the great bulk of his supporters would NOT have voted Democratic instead.
This escapes Nader’s critics, such as the two featured in the film, Nation magazine columnist Eric Alterman and author and 60s icon Todd Gitlin. NASA should check them out — just mention “Ralph Nader” and they go ballistic. They engage in an orgy of angry name calling, labeling Nader an egomaniac, irrational . . . “prefabricated purity” . . . “borders on the wicked” … responsible for the Iraq war and the destruction of the environment . . . They don’t directly challenge anything of substance amongst the views of Nader or his supporters. They’re not at all impressed with what I find most exhilarating — the unique phenomenon of a noted public political figure consistently standing on principle. Nader’s critics can’t admit that there’s principle involved in all this, for fear of revealing their own lack of that quality, as they cling to defending the indefensible — the idea that the Democratic Party is a force for even liberal change, never mind progressive.Some Further Thought Regarding the 9/11 Truth MovementWhen I say, as I did in last month’s report, that I don’t think that 9-11 was an “inside job”, it’s not because I believe that men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, et al. are not morally depraved enough to carry out such a monstrous act; these men each has a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a social conscience; they consciously and directly instigated the current Iraqi and Afghanistan horrors which have already cost many more American lives than were lost on 9/11, not to mention more than a million Iraqis and Afghans who dearly wanted to remain amongst the living. In the Gulf War of 1991, Cheney and other American leaders purposely destroyed electricity-generating plants, water-pumping systems, and sewage systems in Iraq, then imposed sanctions upon the country making the repair of the infrastructure extremely difficult. Then, after twelve years, when the Iraqi people had performed the heroic task of getting these systems working fairly well again, the US bombers came back to inflict devastating damage to them all once more. My books and many others document one major crime against humanity after another by our America once so dear and cherished.So it’s not the moral question that makes me doubt the inside-job scenario. It’s the logistics of it all — the incredible complexity of arranging it all so that it would work and not be wholly and transparently unbelievable. That and the gross overkill — they didn’t need to destroy or smash up ALL those buildings and planes and people. One of the twin towers killing more than a thousand would certainly have been enough to sell the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, and Homeland Security. The American people are not such a hard sell. They really yearn to be true believers. Look how they scream hysterically over Hillary and Obama.To win over people like me, the 9/11 truth people need to present a scenario that makes the logistics reasonably plausible. They might start by trying to answer questions like these: Did planes actually hit the towers and the Pentagon and crash in Pennsylvania? Were these the same four United Airline and American Airline planes that took off from Boston and Newark? At the time of collision, were they being piloted by people or by remote control? If people, who were these people?Also, why did building 7 collapse? If it was purposely demolished — why? All the reasons I’ve read so far I find not very credible. As to the films of the towers and building 7 collapsing, which make it appear that this had to be the result of controlled demolitions — I agree, it does indeed look that way. But what do I know? I’m no expert. It’s not like I’ve seen, in person or on film, numerous examples of buildings collapsing due to controlled demolition and numerous other examples of buildings collapsing due to planes crashing into them, so I could make an intelligent distinction. We are told by the 9/11 truth people that no building constructed like the towers has ever collapsed due to fire. But how about fire plus a full-size, loaded airplane smashing into it? How many examples of that do we have?But there’s one argument those who support the official version use against the skeptics that I would question. It’s the argument that if the government planned the operation there would have to have been many people in on the plot, and surely by now one of them would have talked and the mainstream media would have reported their stories. But in fact a number of firemen, the buildings’ janitor, and others have testified to hearing many explosions in the towers some time after the planes crashed, supporting the theory of planted explosives. But scarce little of this has made it to the media. Likewise, following the JFK assassination at least two men came forward afterward and identified themselves as being one of the three “tramps” on the grassy knoll in Dallas. So what happened? The mainstream media ignored them both. I know of them only because the tabloid press ran their stories. One of the men was the father of actor Woody Harrelson.
Blum, who died in December 2018, described his life's mission as:
"If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."
In an interview with C-SPAN in 2006, Blum stated: "Speaking about U.S. foreign policy, which is my specialty, the authors I would most recommend would be Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and Howard Zinn and Alexander Cockburn."America for the the Americans?
To quote Diego Portales on the Monroe Doctrine (December 2, 1823), a Chilean businessman and minister, wrote to a friend:"But we have to be very careful: for the Americans of the north [from the United States], the only Americans are themselves".Oliver Stone has had an interest in Latin America since the 1980s, when he directed Salvador, and later returned to make his documentary South of the Border about the left-leaning movements that had been taking hold in the region. He has expressed the view that these movements are a positive step toward political and economic autonomy for the region. He supported Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and admired the Colombian militant group FARC.Stone has criticized the U.S.–supported Operation Condor, a state terror operation that carried out assassinations and disappearances in support of South America's right-wing dictatorships in Argentina (see Dirty War), Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
Clickbait? Two of a kind?
Ex-Playboy model accuses Stone of grabbing her boob!
Boobs, an ex-Playboy model and a rogue left-wing film director, who needs taking down a peg or two, has the capacity to draw some attention in the "information environment".
A headline from Variety from 2017 runs . . .
Variety magazine ran this story (Oct 13, 2017)Oliver Stone Accused of Groping Former Playboy Model in ’90sMaane Khatchatourian reported:After coming to disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s defense, Oliver Stone is now facing a sexual assault allegation of his own.Former Playboy model Carrie Stevens has accused the renowned director of groping her at a party 26 years ago.Stevens wrote in a Facebook post that Weinstein and Stone are (Re:LODE Radio's emphasis):
“two of a kind.”
Stevens, who was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in June 1997 and has had small acting roles since then, said the filmmaker grabbed her breast at a party.“I was only 22 years old. Oliver walked past me and grabbed my boob as he waltzed out the front door of a party,” the now 48-year-old wrote on Thursday.“I still remember the cocky grin on his face like he got away with something,” she added. “These douchebags are not above the law, and they should be held to the same standard as every other man. It’s common decency NOT to grab boobs, pu–ies (like our President does) … or any other body part of another, uninvited. They should go back to preschool, because they must’ve missed the lesson … ‘keep your hands to yourself.'”Too right!
If true, then Stone was responsible for a sexual assault, in a clear equivalence to the misogynistic power-play and abuse found at the Playboy Mansion, and in the type of behaviour that led to the jailing of Harvey Weinstein.
But! Hush! Caution! Echoland!
Is this, and other stories, simply "news", or furthering other, or hidden, agendas? Time for a conversation? A long conversation? And to find out more about Carrie Stevens Google "Carrie Stevens today".
UNRATED
They were just a couple of tweets, . . .
. . . but they propelled actress and Playboy playmate Carrie Stevens into the headlines, as stories swirled about sexual harassment in the movie industry and the alleged affairs of some of the most powerful men in America.
Besieged by the media, Carrie was shocked and astounded at the frenzy those tweets aroused.
"It convinced her that she needed to write her memoir."
Her thought process was “If they think these stories are sensational, just wait until they hear about my life’s crazy adventures!” The result is Unrated: Revelations of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Centerfold, the memoir of an unimaginable evolution from small-town girl, to an extraordinary life in the fast lane. A life in which she had intimate encounters with marquee celebrities from all walks of life - rock stars, Oscar-winning actors, royalty, a future president, sports legends, a sultan and billionaires.
It’s a life she shared with the privileged and the powerful that took her from Kiss' tour bus to the Playboy Mansion, hopping on private jets at a moment’s notice and cruising the Mediterranean on mega yachts, and even spending six months as a “guest” in the exotic harem of the prince of Brunei. Carrie candidly admits that because she couldn’t escape being treated like a sex object, she chose to become one. With humor and wisdom, she takes you on an unapologetic, whirlwind adventure of debauchery, dysfunction, and heartache.Carrie reflects on the tornado of emotional torture she’s endured and the choices she has made, including life as a single mother. Her story is more than that of survival. It’s about soulmates. In her quest for what matters most in life, (and almost 30 years after his passing) Carrie can’t let go of her love for her late boyfriend Eric Carr, drummer for the rock band Kiss. Yet, through the years, she has found a way to embrace the loss and use it as her guiding light. Eric will always be the heart and soul of her story.
A paranoid style in politics?
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is an essay by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964.
Hofstadter's essay:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . . [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:As early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:. . . It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. . . . The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. . . .These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
The Eye of Providence . . .
. . . or the all-seeing eye of God, seen here on the US$1 bill, has been taken by some to be evidence of a conspiracy involving the founders of the United States and the Illuminati
Illuminism and MasonryI begin with a particularly revealing episode — the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.Americans first learned of Illuminism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion — a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb — a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statemen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, it was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man. . . . It may truly be said to be Hell’s master piece.”The Jesuit ThreatFear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation . . . we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here. . . . She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly. . . . ” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,(1) the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.Why They Feel DispossessedIf, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country — that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall as the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government” — note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” — a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”Emulating the EnemyThe paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.(2) Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons — later, Negroes and Jews — have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.Renegades and PedantsA special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.The Double SuffererThe paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
Notes from Hofstadter's essay1. Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”2. In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not."
Black helicopters
The first item of interest on the Wikipedia page that contains a List of conspiracy theories is:
1.1 Black helicopters
This conspiracy theory emerged in the US in the 1960s. The John Birch Society originally promoted it, asserting that a United Nations force would soon arrive in black helicopters to bring the US under UN control. The theory re-emerged in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton, and has been promoted by talk show host Glenn Beck. A similar theory concerning so-called "phantom helicopters" appeared in the UK in the 1970s. Hofstadter's essay for Harpers includes, in the right hand margin this example of:
The Paranoid Style in Action
The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor, . . . The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs. . . .
The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin . . . said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)
Birch official John Rousselot said, “We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964
That was then . . .
. . . this is NOW!
What Are Black Helicopters?Black Helicopters (BH) are not just helicopters with a black paint-job as you may have been told. They are, in fact, autonomous agents -- lifeforms -- created by New World Order (NWO) agencies via nanobiotechnology. Their primary purpose is to spy on the activities of average citizens in order to gather tactical information and discover "subversives" who are not bowing to the will of the Liberati's UN-backed Federal Government. Furthermore, when the NWO Invasion takes place in the not-too-distant future, they will round up citizens for internment in concentration camps or carry out the elimination of the more vocally anti-Liberati.
Q. Is this the TRUTH?
A. No! It's a HOAX!
It's also not so far from a Sci-Fi or Horror genre script "idea" for a Hollywood 'B' movie.
"Serving The Paranoid Since 1997"
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. This fictitious endangered species of cephalopod was given the Latin name "Octopus paxarbolis" (the species name being coined from Latin pax, the root of Pacific, and Spanish arbol meaning "tree"). It was purportedly able to live both on land and in water, and was said to live in the Olympic National Forest and nearby rivers, spawning in water where its eggs are laid. Its major predator was said to be the Sasquatch. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sources of information.
This TRUTH, like many conspiracy theories, relates to clandestine government plans and elaborate murder plots. Conspiracy theories usually deny consensus or cannot be proven using the historical or scientific method.In principle, conspiracy theories are NOT ALWAYS FALSE by default and their validity depends on evidence just as in any theory. However, they are often discredited a priori due to their cumbersome and improbable nature.
Psychologists attribute finding a conspiracy where there is none to a form of cognitive bias called:
Hofstadter's legacy?
In a 2007 article in Harper's, Scott Horton wrote that "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was "one of the most important and most influential articles published in the 155 year history of the magazine."
Thomas Frank, in a 2014 essay for Harper's, suggested that Hofstadter's method had popularized a "pseudopsychological approach to politics."Laura Miller writes in Salon.com that "'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' reads like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid's 'quality of pedantry' and 'heroic strivings for 'evidence'..."
Economist Paul Krugman titled a 2018 op-ed in The New York Times "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics" and explicitly referred to the 1964 essay.Researcher Travis View, who has extensively studied and written about the QAnon conspiracy theory for The Washington Post has described it in 2019 as "an example of the paranoid style as described by Hofstadter.".Several academics have suggested that Hofstadter's argument has been outpaced by events. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed that Hofstadter's essay assumes "a presumptive 'we' -- apparently still practically everyone," who regards conspiracy theories "from a calm, understanding, and encompassing middle ground." Sedgwick, and later Gordon Fraser, argued that conspiracy theories after the middle of the twentieth century proliferated to such a degree that Hofstadter's imagined, rationally liberal audience no longer exists, if it ever existed in the first place.
America, democracy and revolution?
The Americanisation of the World is, understandably, entirely connected to the history of "America", the name given to a so-called "new world" by a German map maker. Part of this history is covered in the Re:LODE Radio page on:The Americanisation of the WorldThis page includes Samir Amin's historical explanation as to why there is no Workers Party in the U.S. despite the emergence of many working class and trades union movements over the last one hundred and fifty years or so.
Re:LODE Radio suggests that there is a possible connection between the absence of a Workers Party, and a communitarian demography that predominates in politics and ideology, produces the perfect conditions for politicised conspiracy theories and a culture of paranoia. Hence the present culture war invoked by the RIGHT against the WOKE. This is NOW a GLOBAL problem, and along the LODE Zone Line there is abundant evidence to support this theory, especially in India and Indonesia. A question is begged:
Why are there no "workers' parties" in the two largest democracies in the world, India and the USA?
The American dream? - OR - Once Upon a Time in America?
The American ideology that Samir Amin identifies, and that for him is the foundation of the liberal virus that is leading to the Americanization of the world, is, for Amin, strengthened by the successive waves of immigration that have taken place in the USA over the last two centuries. He says:The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the misery and oppression that caused their departure. On the contrary, they were the victims of it. But circumstances led them to abandon the collective struggle to change the common conditions of their classes or groups in their own country, in favour of adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system, which suited it perfectly. it delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, had to face a new wave of immigrants that prevented its crystallization. But simultaneously, immigration encouraged the communitarianization of American society, because individual success does not exclude strong integration into a community of origin (the Irish, the Italians, and others), without which individual isolation could become unbearable. Yet, here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity, which the American system uses and encourages, is done at the expense of class consciousness and the education of the citizen. While in Paris the people got ready to assault the heavens (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs formed by successive generations of poor immigrants killed each other, manipulated in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes.
The Gangs of New York and the New York City Draft Riots
The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863).
Sometimes referred to as the Manhattan draft riots, and known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and most racially charged urban disturbance in American history.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln diverted several regiments of militia and volunteer troops after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly white working-class men who feared free black people competing for work and resented that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 (equivalent to $6,300 in 2020) commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared from the draft.
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, many of them Irish immigrants, attacking black people, in violence throughout the city.
The background to this communal violence was a classic case of a capitalist class society making necessary adjustments, via organised violence and corruption, to maintain the highest profit returns on vested capital interests.
New York in the 1860's
New York's economy was tied to the South; by 1822 nearly half of its exports were cotton shipments. In addition, upstate textile mills processed cotton in manufacturing. New York had such strong business connections to the South that on January 7, 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood, a Democrat, called on the city's Board of Aldermen to "declare the city's independence from Albany and from Washington"; he said it "would have the whole and united support of the Southern States." When the Union entered the war, New York City had many sympathisers with the South.
The city was also a continuing destination of immigrants. Since the 1840s, most were from Ireland and Germany. In 1860, nearly 25 percent of the New York City population was German-born, and many did not speak English. During the 1840s and 1850s, journalists had published sensational accounts, directed at the white working class, dramatizing the "evils" of interracial socializing, relationships, and marriages. Reformers joined the effort. Newspapers carried derogatory portrayals of black people and ridiculed "black aspirations for equal rights in voting, education, and employment". Pseudo-scientific lectures on phrenology were a popular means to justifying an explicitly white supremacist position, although this campaign was countered by some in the medical profession.
The Democratic Party Tammany Hall political machine had been working to enroll immigrants as U.S. citizens so they could vote in local elections and had strongly recruited Irish. In March 1863, with the war continuing, Congress passed the Enrollment Act to establish a draft for the first time, as more troops were needed. In New York City and other locations, new citizens learned they were expected to register for the draft to fight for their new country. Black men were excluded from the draft as they were largely not considered citizens, and wealthier white men could pay for substitutes.
New York political offices, including the mayor, were historically held by Democrats before the war, but the election of Abraham Lincoln as president had demonstrated the rise in Republican political power nationally. Newly elected New York City Republican Mayor George Opdyke was mired in profiteering scandals in the months leading up to the riots. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 alarmed much of the white working class in New York, who feared that freed slaves would migrate to the city and add further competition to the labor market. There had already been tensions between black and white workers since the 1850s, particularly at the docks, with free blacks and immigrants competing for low-wage jobs in the city. In March 1863, white longshoremen refused to work with black labourers and rioted, attacking 200 black men.
This is an excerpt from:
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
by Leslie M. Harris:
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863
In September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect January 1, 1863, and free slaves in those states or regions still in rebellion against the Union. If any southern state returned to the Union between September and January, whites in that state theoretically would not lose ownership of their slaves. Despite its limits, free blacks, slaves, and abolitionists across the country hailed it as one of the most important actions on behalf of freedom in the nation's history. The Emancipation Proclamation brought formal recognition that the war was being fought, at least in part, on behalf of black freedom and equality.
The enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 capped two years of increasing support for emancipation in New York City. Although Republicans attempted to keep abolitionists from taking a leading role in New York's antislavery politics during the early years of the war, by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York's white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.
In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.
The rioters' targets initially included only military and governmental buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. Mobs attacked only those individuals who interfered with their actions. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters had turned to attacks on black people, and on things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility. At 4 P.M. on July 13, "the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution." The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes.
In the meantime, the superintendent and matron of the asylum assembled the children and led them out to Forty-Fourth Street. Miraculously, the mob refrained from assaulting the children. But when an Irish observer of the scene called out, "If there is a man among you, with a heart within him come and help these poor children," the mob "laid hold of him, and appeared ready to tear him to pieces." The children made their way to the Thirty-Fifth Street Police Station, where they remained for three days and nights before moving to the almshouse on Blackwell's Island — ironically, the very place from which the orphanage's founders had hoped to keep black children when they built the asylum almost thirty years earlier.
The Irish man who castigated the mob for not helping the black children was not the only white person punished by rioters for seeming overly sympathetic to blacks. Throughout the week of riots, mobs harassed and sometimes killed blacks and their supporters and destroyed their property. Rioters burned the home of Abby Hopper Gibbons, prison reformer and daughter of abolitionist Isaac Hopper. They also attacked white "amalgamationists," such as Ann Derrickson and Ann Martin, two women who were married to black men; and Mary Burke, a white prostitute who catered to black men. Near the docks, tensions that had been brewing since the mid-1850s between white longshoremen and black workers boiled over. As recently as March of 1863, white employers had hired blacks as longshoremen, with whom Irish men refused to work. An Irish mob then attacked two hundred blacks who were working on the docks, while other rioters went into the streets in search of "all the negro porters, cartmen and laborers . . . they could find." They were routed by the police. But in July 1863, white longshoremen took advantage of the chaos of the Draft Riots to attempt to remove all evidence of a black and interracial social life from area near the docks. White dockworkers attacked and destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses, and tenements that catered to blacks; mobs stripped the clothing off the white owners of these businesses.
Black men and black women were attacked, but the rioters singled out the men for special violence. On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men's bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams — jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones — while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging "vengeance on every nigger in New York." A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin's body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.
With these actions white workers enacted their desires to eradicate the working-class black male presence from the city. The Longshoreman's Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that "the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry." But "other parts of industry," such as cartmen and hack drivers, not to mention skilled artisans, also sought to exclude black workers. The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove blacks not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and leisure spaces. The rioters' actions also indicate the degree to which the sensational journalists and reformers of the 1840s and 1850s had achieved their goals of convincing whites, and particularly the Irish, that interracial socializing and marriage were evil and degrading practices. The riots unequivocally divided white workers from blacks. The act of rioting may itself have released guilt and shame over former interracial pleasures. Finally, and most simply, white workers asserted their superiority over blacks through the riots. The Civil War and the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln to power indicated to New York's largely Democratic white workers a reversal of power in the nation; black labor competition indicated a reversal of fortunes in New York City itself. White workers sought to remedy their upside-down world through mob violence.
Ironically, the most well known center of black and interracial social life, the Five Points, was relatively quiet during the riots. Mobs neither attacked the brothels there nor killed black people within its borders. There were also instances of interracial cooperation. When a mob threatened black drugstore owner Philip White in his store at the corner of Gold and Frankfurt Street, his Irish neighbors drove the mob away, for he had often extended them credit. And when rioters invaded Hart's Alley and became trapped at its dead end, the black and white residents of the alley together leaned out of their windows and poured hot starch on them, driving them from the neighborhood. But such incidents were few compared to the widespread hatred of blacks expressed during and after the riots.
In all, rioters lynched eleven black men over the five days of mayhem. The riots forced hundreds of blacks out of the city. As Iver Bernstein states, "For months after the riots the public life of the city became a more noticeably white domain." During the riots, landlords drove blacks from their residences, fearing the destruction of their property. After the riots, when the Colored Orphan Asylum attempted to rebuild on the site of its old building, neighboring property owners asked them to leave. The orphanage relocated to 51st Street for four years before moving into a new residence at 143rd Street between Amsterdam and Broadway, in the midst of what would become New York's predominantly black neighborhood in the twentieth century, Harlem. But in 1867, the area was barely settled and far removed from the center of New York City. Black families also fled the city altogether. Albro Lyons, keeper of the Colored Sailors' Home, was able to protect the boardinghouse on the first day of the riots, but soon fled to the neighborhood police station to seek an escort from the city for his wife and family. An officer accompanied the Lyons family to the Sailors' Home, where they gathered up what belongings they could carry before boarding the Roosevelt Street ferry, which took them to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. "From the moment they put foot on the boat, that was the last time they ever resided in New York City, leaving it forever." Other blacks fled to New Jersey and beyond. By 1865, the black population had plummeted to just under ten thousand, its lowest since 1820.
Those blacks who remained in the city found a somewhat chastened elite eager to help New York's black residents recover in the aftermath of the riots. The seven-month-old Union League Club (which had as one of its main tenets black uplift) and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People spearheaded relief efforts to blacks, providing forty thousand dollars to almost twenty-five hundred riot victims and finding new jobs and homes for blacks. Just under a year later, Republican elites and New York City blacks publicly celebrated their renewed alliance. In December of 1863, the secretary of war gave the Union League Club permission to raise a black regiment. The Union League Club decided to march the regiment of over one thousand black men through the streets of New York to the Hudson River, where the ship that would take them south waited. On March 5, 1864, before a crowd of one hundred thousand black and white New Yorkers, the black regiment processed, making "a fine appearance in their blue uniform, white gloves and white leggings." They were preceded by the police superintendent, one hundred policemen, the Union League Club itself, "colored friends of the recruits," and a band. In a powerful display, the parade publicly linked blacks with the leaders of the new order being ushered in by the Civil War.
But the event could not completely erase the racial concerns that had been part of the draft riots, if indeed its organizers sought to. One account said of the soldiers, "a majority of them are black; indeed there are but few mulattoes among them," an attempt to downplay the obvious fears of racial mixing that white workers displayed before and during the riots, fears which many white elites may have shared. Observers also used the event to contrast the loyalty of blacks to the Union and their good behavior with the recent rioting as well as the general culture of white workers: "The 20th is emphatically an African regiment, and to its credit be it spoken, not one of its members disobeyed orders, no one broke ranks to greet enthusiastic friends, no one used intoxicating drinks to excess, no one manifested the least inclination to leave the service, and their marching was very creditable." The New York elite presented the black troops as symbols of the new orderly working class they desired: sober, solemn, obedient, and dedicated to the Union cause. But such simple symbolism obscured the complex divisions of status, class, outlook and aspiration that had been part of New York's free black community from its inception.
As the Union Army marched south, it brought with it black and white abolitionists (many affiliated with the American Missionary Assocition, others independent of organized efforts) who sought to reform southern blacks during and after the war. These largely middle-class activists carried ideas of racial uplift first promulgated in the northeast, from creating manual labor schools to moral reform to enhancing wage labor. They encountered newly free blacks eager for educational and economic betterment, but just as certainly shaping their own definitions of independence and equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction years, black and white people from urban and rural areas in the north and south were challenged to create new opportunities for the freed people. But New York City had never unified to overcome the problems of racism and fully embrace black freedom; neither would the nation.
Is communitarianism a stumbling block?
Samir Amin writes:
In the United States, there is no workers' party and there never has been. The communitarian ideologies were not and are not a substitute for a working-class socialist ideology, even the most radical of them in the Black community. By definition, communitarianism is part and parcel of the context of widespread racism, which it fights on its own ground, but nothing more.
(page 48)
Socialism in the United States began with utopian communities in the early 19th century such as the Shakers, the activist visionary Josiah Warren and intentional communities inspired by Charles Fourier. Labor activists—usually British, German, or Jewish immigrants—founded the Socialist Labor Party in 1877.
The Socialist Party of America was established in 1901. By that time, anarchism also established itself around the country while socialists of different tendencies were involved in early American labor organizations and struggles which reached a high point in the Haymarket affair in Chicago which started International Workers' Day as the main workers holiday around the world (except in the United States, which celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September) and making the 8-hour day a worldwide objective by workers organizations and socialist parties worldwide.
Under Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, socialist opposition to World War I led to the governmental repression collectively known as the First Red Scare. The Socialist Party declined in the 1920s, but nonetheless often ran Norman Thomas for President. In the 1930s, the Communist Party USA took importance in labor and racial struggles while it suffered a split which converged in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
In the 1950s, socialism was affected by McCarthyism and in the 1960s it was revived by the general radicalization brought by the New Left and other social struggles and revolts. In the 1960s, Michael Harrington and other socialists were called to assist the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration's War on Poverty and Great Society while socialists also played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Socialism in the United States has been composed of many tendencies, often in important disagreements with each other; it has included utopian socialists, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, Trotskyists and anarchists.
The socialist movement in the United States has historically been relatively weak.
Unlike socialist parties in Europe, Canada and Oceania, a major social democratic party never materialized in the United States and the socialist movement remains marginal,"almost unique in its powerlessness among the Western democracies".Oshinsky, David (24 July 1988), "It Wasn't Easy Being a Leftist", The New York Times.
But change is NOT just coming!
It is already here NOW!
AOC - an American democratic socialist!
This is the official photographic portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born October 13, 1989), also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician and activist. She has served as the U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of the Democratic Party. The district includes the eastern part of the Bronx, portions of north-central Queens, and Rikers Island in New York City.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of an informal group of progressive freshmen members of Congress called "The Squad", along with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who coined the "Squad" name in an Instagram post a week after the 2018 election. The use of the word "squad" originates in East Coast hip hop culture and describes "a self-chosen group of people that you want to identify with". So, Ocasio-Cortez in using this term, locates political vision in the context of a popular form of cultural expression, as well as being a playful reference to social cliques in a specific cultural setting. And Ocasio-Cortez's home borough of The Bronx is where hip hop originates.The photo, taken at a VoteRunLead event where the four founding members spoke, subsequently went viral.
Initially composed of the four women who appear in the Instagram image, all four having been elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections, they have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections. The group is well known for being among the most progressive and left-wing members of the United States Congress.
All are under 50, have been supported by the Justice Democrats political action committee, and are on the left wing of the Democratic Party. All except Omar and Tlaib were initially elected to Congress after unseating incumbents in primary challenges. All members of this group represent safe seats.The group has been said to represent the demographic diversity of a younger political generation and the advocacy of progressive policies such as the Green New Deal, which have sometimes clashed with their party's leadership.On July 14, 2019, President Donald Trump attacked the Squad (which had only the original four members at the time) in a tweet, saying that they should "go back and help fix" the countries they came from rather than criticise the American government. He continued to make similar comments over the next several days, even though three of the women, including Ocasio-Cortez, were born in the United States. Ocasio-Cortez responded in a tweet that "the President's words [yesterday], telling four American Congresswomen of color 'go back to your own country' is hallmark language of white supremacists." She later added, "We don't leave the things that we love, and when we love this country, what that means is that we propose the solutions to fix it." Days later, Trump falsely asserted that Ocasio-Cortez called "our country and our people 'garbage'"; she had actually said that Americans should not be content with moderate policies that are "10% better from garbage". Trump also falsely claimed that Ocasio-Cortez said "illegal immigrants are more American" than Americans who tried to keep them out; she actually said that "women and children on that border that are trying to seek refuge and opportunity" in America "are acting more American" than those who tried to keep them out.Ocasio-Cortez is an American socialist, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and embraces the democratic socialist label as part of her political identity. In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, she described democratic socialism as "part of what I am. It's not all of what I am. And I think that that's a very important distinction." In response to a question about democratic socialism ultimately calling for an end to capitalism during a Firing Line interview on PBS, she answered: "Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree, and it's hard to say what direction that that takes."
Later at a conference she said:
"To me, capitalism is irredeemable."Ocasio-Cortez supports progressive policies such as single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and trade school, a federal job guarantee, the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of outstanding student debt, guaranteed family leave, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending the privatisation of prisons, enacting gun-control policies, and energy policy relying on 100% renewables.She is open to using Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as an economic pathway that could provide funding and enable implementation of these goals.Q. Who else wants this change?
A. Young Americans from diverse urban communities!
The demographic landscape, as far as the Black Lives Matter movement, and the campaigns for social justice and demands for action to tackle the causes of global heating, is changing. The demands are for structural and systemic change. Protesters are coming together from across society, and from different communities, and they are younger than Americans overall.
This report by the Pew Research Center by Amanda Barroso and Rachel Minkin (June 24, 2020) analyses the data under the headline:
Recent protest attendees are more racially and ethnically diverse, younger than Americans overall
Amanda Barroso and Rachel Minkin write:Large-scale protests and rallies for racial equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reforms in recent weeks. Some 6% of U.S. adults say they have attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the last month, and those who have are more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. They are also more likely to live in an urban area and to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.
Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey. Hispanic Americans account for 22% of recent protest attendees, versus 15% of all adults. The difference is less pronounced but still statistically significant when it comes to the share of protesters who are Asian (8% vs. 5% of the adults surveyed). While 64% of U.S. adults are white, just 46% of those who said they attended a protest focused on race in the last month are white. About four-in-ten (41%) of those who say they recently attended a protest focused on race are younger than 30; among all U.S. adults, 19% are in this age group. In turn, those ages 50 and older are underrepresented among the protesters, while those ages 30 to 49 represent a similar share of those who have attended a protest as they do of the adult population overall.City dwellers, who represent 28% of the adults surveyed, make up 41% of those who say they have protested within the past month. Some 42% of people who participated in last month’s protests live in the suburbs (compared with 47% of all adults), and those who live in rural areas account for 17% of recent protesters, compared with 25% of the survey sample.
When it comes to political party affiliation, about eight-in-ten (79%) of those who say they participated in a protest or rally focused on race or racial equality in the last month identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 17% say they are Republican or Republican-leaning.
As is the case among the overall adult population, men and women each make up about half of those who say they attended a protest focused on race in the last month. Protesters also don’t differ considerably from the adult population in terms of income or educational attainment.
They share a common concern, a shared future!It's a "Woke Up" call!
AOC shares her thinking . . .
There is NO political party for the working class, in the United States, and along the length and breadth of the LODE Zone Line! And communitarianism still dominates the political discourse, especially in India and Indonesia, where religious identity is mobilised by an established patriarchy to maintain existing power and interests. But there is a growing generational and cross community demand for change all along the LODE Zone Line. The present situation echoes some of the features of the 60's and 70's counterculture, and, maybe, the times they are a changing' . . .
So come gather round people . . .
The coincidence of the Civil Rights movement with the Vietnam War helped to radicalise African American servicemen both in Vietnam and on their return. In this article, accessible from On-line resources - American Studies Resources Centre at Liverpool John Moores University, Brendan Gallagher considers how the two events are inextricably bound up.
In the opening paragraphs of this article Brendan Gallagher references a scene from Apocalypse Now:
When the Vietnam War escalated and was wholeheartedly backed by the White House, President Johnson failed to realise the racial nightmare that American involvement in Vietnam would create. Vietnam coincided with the protests of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of Black Power during 1960s America. Whilst African-Americans were discriminated at home but also within the U.S. armed forces, the effects of black power, the impact of the Civil Rights struggle and “the resurgence of black sub-cultural style, expressed through dress, language and gesture”, had been transferred to the war zone.
Amidst increasing tension, black soldiers embraced Black Power: culturally and politically. Vietnam was America’s first racially integrated conflict. Black soldiers had fought in all of America’s previous military encounters, but in segregated units. However, a small number of segregated units still existed, and “an officerless and forgotten platoon of anxious black G.I.s despairingly shooting into the darkness…in the last American outpost on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia” was movingly portrayed in the film Apocalypse Now.
The experience of American military personnel of African ancestry during the Vietnam War had received significant attention. For example, the website "African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War" compiles examples of such coverage, as does the print and broadcast work of journalist Wallace Terry whose book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984), includes observations about the impact of the war on the black community in general and on black servicemen specifically. Points he makes on the latter topic include: the higher proportion of combat casualties in Vietnam among African American servicemen than among American soldiers of other races, the shift toward and different attitudes of black military careerists versus black draftees, the discrimination encountered by black servicemen "on the battlefield in decorations, promotion and duty assignments" as well as their having to endure "the racial insults, cross-burnings and Confederate flags of their white comrades" — and the experiences faced by black soldiers stateside, during the war and after America's withdrawal.
Brendan Gallagher sets out the facts:
The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement:
As President Lyndon Johnson increased the focus of American foreign policy on the conflict in Vietnam, statistics soon presented stark evidence of racial discrimination. In 1965 there were 23,000 U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. By the end of 1967, the number rose dramatically to 465,000 – the result of Project 100,000, initiated by President Johnson in 1966. Qualification standards were lowered meaning that black Americans who had previously evaded the draft owing to poor education opportunities, were now eligible and so too, ironically, were racially intolerant, poor white men from the Southern States. 246,000 men were recruited between October 1966 and June 1969 – 41% were black, although black Americans represented only 11% of the U.S. population. 58,000 lost their lives in the conflict, 22% of whom were black. Less than 3% of the officers in the Army were black, less than 1% in the Marines.
Draft boards themselves were, by their very nature, divisive and discriminatory: in 1967 no black Americans were present on the boards in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Jack Helms, a member of the Louisiana draft board, was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. He described the long established National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People black civil rights group, as “a communist-inspired, anti-Christ, sex-perverted group of tennis short beatniks.”
Soon rumours abounded that the U.S. government were using the Vietnam War as a form of genocide. Money was being pumped into Vietnam instead of poor black communities in America. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver noted the contradictory situation, and complained: “black Americans are asked to die for the system in Vietnam, in Watts (a poor black suburb of Los Angeles) they are asked to die by it.”
Lance Corporal William L. Harvey also voiced his concern to a Washington Post reporter: “Vietnam is a white man’s war. Black men should not go, only to return and fight whites at home.”
Black soldiers began to identify with the enemy: they saw the Vietnamese as, like themselves, victims of white colonial racist aggression. They were encouraged by anti-war demonstrations at home. White and black students, representing the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, regularly organised marches and disruptive sit-ins. Boxer, Muhammad Ali dared to speak out: “ I ain`t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.” and declared: “They want me to go to Vietnam to shoot some black folks that never lynched me. Never called me nigger, never assassinated my leaders.” His subsequent refusal to enlist as a serviceman led to a harsh rebuke from the American Government: he was subsequently fined and sentenced to prison - effectively stripping him of his World title.
Martin Luther King voiced his concerns and charged the U.S. Government with being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today ”, and urged dissenting blacks to seek the status of conscientious objectors (as indeed Ali had done). Furthermore, other groups uttered their discontent and disillusionment. “We recoil with horror,” said an S.N.C.C position paper in 1965, “at the inconsistency of a supposedly free society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression.” Outrage over the war, and over the “disproportionate number” of young black men being drafted to fight it, contributed significantly to S.N.C.C’s embrace of Black Power.
Wikipedia says:
Civil rights leaders protested the disproportionate casualties and the overrepresentation in hazardous duty and combat roles experienced by African American servicemen, prompting reforms that were implemented beginning in 1967–68. As a result, by the war's completion in 1975, black casualties had declined to 12.5% of US combat deaths, approximately equal to percentage of draft-eligible black men, though still slightly higher than the 10% who served in the military.
All the signs . . .
In the capitalocene age, where all things are subject to constant change, regardless of the consequences, changes governed by the imperative to maximise profit, the constant refrain heard, again and again, is that:
"That's just the way it is - Some things will never change - That's just the way it is!"
All the Signs from Houston to Galveston and Back
by Earl Staley, September 24, 1970. Early Staley papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
This artwork by Earl Staley provides a platform for a video montage that "bookends" the recording of "Changes", the "hip hop" song by 2Pac with "The Way It Is", a song by American rock group Bruce Hornsby and the Range. In Tupac Shakur's song "Changes", the chorus of "The Way It Is" was slightly reworded and sung by Talent and used for this song. Bruce Horsby's chorus of "The Way It Is" runs:
That's just the way it is - Some things will never change - That's just the way it is - Ah, but don't you believe them
In 2Pac's "Changes" the chorus runs:
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Bruce Hornsby's song "The Way It Is" was released in September 1986 as the second single from their debut album The Way It Is.
Bruce Hornsby makes explicit reference in the last verse of the song to the Economic Opportunity Act, also known as the 1964 Poverty Act, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Well, they passed a law in '64 - To give those who ain't got a little more - But it only goes so far - Because the law don't change another's mind - When all it sees at the hiring time - Is the line on the color bar
So, even after two long decades, "some things", such as institutional and structural racism driving social injustice, along with "the line on the color bar", "will never change"!
"Ah, but don't you believe them"
This is Bruce Hornsby's warning - never accept that "some things will never change", even when "the way it is" continues unchanged.
For Tupac by the time he makes his original recording of "Changes" in 1992, change needs to come, but it hasn't arrived. And by the time "Changes" was later remixed in 1998 by Poke from Trackmasters, while growing up to adulthood carries the loss of innocence, and so "Things will never be the same". Instead a lot of bad things just carry on, and so; We gotta start makin' changes. Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers. And that's how it's supposed to be. How can the devil take a brother, if he's close to me? I'd love to go back to when we played as kids. But things changed, and;
"That's the way it is"
Tupac's lyric:
Come on, come on - I see no changes, wake up in the morning, and I ask myself - Is life worth living, should I blast myself?
I'm tired of bein' poor, and even worse I'm black - My stomach hurts, so I'm lookin' for a purse to snatch
Cops give a damn about a negro - Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he's a hero
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares - One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First, ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers - Give 'em guns, step back, watch 'em kill each other
It's time to fight back, that's what Huey said - Two shots in the dark, now Huey's dead
I got love for my brother, but we can never go nowhere - Unless we share with each other
We gotta start makin' changes - Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers - And that's how it's supposed to be - How can the devil take a brother, if he's close to me? - I'd love to go back to when we played as kids - But things changed, and that's the way it is
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Ooh, yeah
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeahI see no changes, all I see is racist faces - Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races - We under, I wonder what it takes to make this - One better place, let's erase the wasted - Take the evil out the people, they'll be acting right - 'Cause mo' black and white is smokin' crack tonight - And only time we chill is when we kill each other - It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other - And although it seems heaven sent - We ain't ready, to see a black President
It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact - The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks - But some things will never change - Try to show another way but you stayin' in the dope game - Now tell me, what's a mother to do?
Bein' real don't appeal to the brother in you - You gotta operate the easy way - (I made a G today) But you made it in a sleazy way - Sellin' crack to the kid (I gotta get paid) -Well, hey, well, that's the way it is
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeahWe gotta make a change - It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes
Let's change the way we eat - Let's change the way we live - And let's change the way we treat each other
You see, the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do - What we gotta do, to survive
And still I see no changes, can't a brother get a little peace?
There's war in the streets and war in the Middle East- Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs - So the police can bother me - And I ain't never did a crime, I ain't have to do
But now, I'm back with the facts givin' 'em back to you- Don't let 'em jack you up, back you up - Crack you up and pimps smack you up - You gotta learn to hold ya own - They get jealous when they see ya, with ya mobile phone - But tell the cops, they can't touch this - I don't trust this, when they try to rush, I bust this - That's the sound of my tool, you say it ain't cool?
But mama didn't raise no fool - And as long as I stay black, I gotta stay strapped - And I never get to lay back - 'Cause I always got to worry 'bout the pay backs - Some buck that I roughed up way back - Comin' back after all these years - Rat-a-tat, tat, tat, tat, that's the way it is
That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is (Way it is) - Aww, yeah
That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Some things will never change
This last line is NOT defeatist!
Tupac is a realist!
And Tupac is on a mission here:
"We gotta make a change - It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes - Let's change the way we eat - Let's change the way we live - And let's change the way we treat each other.You see, the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do - What we gotta do, to survive."
The song re-uses lines from "I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto" which was recorded during the same year, and samples the 1986 hit "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. At times Tupac re-used lines from other unreleased songs because he planned to make an updated version at a later date. The remixed version released in 1998 has notably different percussion, and a few minor changes to the musical elements. The chorus on the original track features a notable difference in a vocal sample of the line, "It's like that and that's the way it is", from Run DMCs "It's Like That", which is also played twice during the intro. The second chorus adds the Ice Cube line, "Dope dealers, you're as bad as the police," from his song, "Us". The third chorus omits the Ice Cube sample and adds B-boy-style chant with an unknown person repeating, "Clap your hands and feel it, clap you hands and feel it!" until the song ends.
Tragically Tupac never "got to lay back", always had to worry "'bout the pay backs. Some buck that he roughed up way back - Comin' back after all these years". Two years before the remixed version of "Changes" was released in 1998, Tupac was the victim of an unsolved shooting . . .
. . . rat-a-tat, tat, tat, tat!
In Las Vegas on the night of September 7, 1996, at about 11:15 pm at a stop light, a white, four-door, late-model Cadillac sedan pulled up to the passenger side and an occupant rapidly fired into the car. Tupac Shakur was struck four times: once in the arm, once in the thigh, and twice in the chest with one bullet entering his right lung. Shakur was taken to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada where he was heavily sedated and put on life support. In the intensive-care unit on the afternoon of September 13, 1996, Shakur died from internal bleeding. He was pronounced dead at 4:03 pm.
"that's the way it is"Since his death many of the unreleased and unmastered songs have been officially released, including this recording that overlays audio of Tupac talking of his experience, as well as sound clips of news reports on the shooting and resulting tragic death in Las Vegas.The Re:LODE Radio video montage is called . . .
. . . all the signs - that's just the way it is!
And uses All the signs, filmed by Earl Staley, September 24, 1970 on a road trip from Houston, Texas, to Galveston.
Re:LODE Radio intends to pick up the idea of "all the signs" a little later in this mosaic of texts and images, but the links and parallels are multiple.
Galveston in Jimmy Webb's song, first released in 1968, set against the background of the Vietnam War; a Juneteenth pilgrimage, against the background of Tupac's "war in the streets and war in the Middle East. Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs, so the police can bother me"; and Black Lives Matter NOW!
In this Re:LODE Radio video montage, the song "The Way It Is" by American rock group Bruce Hornsby and the Range plays over the silent film by Earl Staley of "all the signs" on the trip from Houston to Galveston. Then Tupac's "Changes" plays while the film documents the signs along the road into Galveston and the beginning of the return journey to Houston.
Coming into Houston as Tupac's "Changes" fades, a "ricorso" of the song "The Way It Is" underlines the fact that no matter how many times we are told:
that's just the way it is! Don't you believe them!
Change is coming, and the global capitalist system, the driver of inequality and social injustice everywhere, has to change! Or, if it doesn't, we lose the habitability of the planet!An Apocalypse Now? Or . . .
Perhaps the device in this montage of "bookending" and "centring" Tupac's song "Changes" in a sequence that begins and ends with Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is", is a version of the "Rule of Three".
Why it is that a group of three elements enhances the effect of a communication is NOT clear, but it works for Re:LODE Radio in telling this story of how, over the years, decades, and centuries, economic, social and racial injustice continues, despite continuing calls for change.
Here are a triad of memorable examples of the rule of three:
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – Rights outlined in the U.S. Declaration of IndependenceLiberté, égalité, fraternité – The slogan of the French Republic predating 1790Turn on, tune in, drop out - 1960s counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary.
Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist and preacher, was known for his uses of tripling and the rule of three throughout his many influential speeches. For example, the speech "Non-Violence and Racial Justice" contained a binary opposition made up of the rule of three: "insult, injustice and exploitation", followed a few lines later by "justice, good will, and brotherhood". Conversely, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace inveighed: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" during his 1963 inaugural address.
Let's have an ORGY!! Apocalypse THEN!
This work of visual art is known as The Garden of Earthly Delights has three folding panels, and is the modern title given to a triptych oil painting on oak panel painted by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, between 1490 and 1510.
When the triptych's wings are closed, the design of the outer panels becomes visible. These exterior panels show the world during creation, probably on the Third Day, after the addition of plant life but before the appearance of animals and humans. Rendered in a green–gray grisaille, these panels lack colour, probably because most Netherlandish triptychs were thus painted, but possibly indicating that the painting reflects a time before the creation of the sun and moon, which were formed, according to Christian theology, to "give light to the earth". The typical grisaille blandness of Netherlandish altarpieces served to highlight the splendid colour inside.
When the triptych's wings are opened what is revealed is, literally, a "revelation", especially the central panel, an image that both fascinates and perplexes everyone who has tried to understand what its original purpose and meaning might have been. Was it originally commissioned as an altarpiece? If so, it is unlikely that such subject matter was intended for a church or monastery. What it is that the imagery symbolises has led to a wide range of speculations and interpretations, that say more about the paradigms of speculators and interpreters than the work.The "Garden" was first documented in 1517, one year after the artist's death, when Antonio de Beatis, a canon from Molfetta, Italy, described the work as part of the decoration in the town palace of the Counts of the House of Nassau in Brussels. The palace was a high-profile location, a house often visited by heads of state and leading court figures.
It is this public and prominent status of the painting that has led some to conclude that the work was commissioned, and not "solely ... a flight of the imagination". A description of the triptych in 1605 called it the "strawberry painting", because the fruit of the strawberry tree (madroño in Spanish) features prominently in the center panel. Early Spanish writers referred to the work as La Lujuria or "Lust".
An ORGY of lust or Paradise and the fulfilment of the Millennium?
Many of the numerous human figures in the central panel appear to revel in an innocent, self-absorbed joy as they engage in a wide range of activities; some appear to enjoy sensual pleasures, others play unselfconsciously in the water, and others, in various groups and processions frolic in meadows with a variety of animals, where differences in scale are seemingly of little importance.
As shown in the details above and below, in the middle of the background, a large blue globe resembling a fruit pod rises in the middle of a lake. Visible through its circular window is a man holding his right hand close to his partner's genitals, and the bare buttocks of yet another figure hover in the vicinity.
According to Fraenger, the eroticism apparent in the central panel frame could be considered either as an allegory of spiritual transition or a playground of corruption.
Re:LODE Radio chooses to foreground the research and conclusions of Wilhelm Fraenger, a specialist in the epoch of the German Peasants' War and of the mysticism of the Late Middle Ages. He wrote important studies of Jerg Ratgeb, Matthias Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch. His work on Bosch was very influential in its day and considered Bosch under the aspect of occultism, seeing Bosch as an artist guided by an esoteric mysticism.In 1947, Wilhelm Fraenger argued that the triptych's central panel portrays a vision of a future joyous world, of a time when mankind will experience a rebirth of the innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve before their fall. In his book The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, Fraenger wrote that Bosch was a member of the heretical sect known as the Adamites — who were also known as the Homines intelligentia and Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit. This radical group, active in the area of the Rhine and the Netherlands, strove for a form of spirituality immune from sin even in the flesh, and imbued the concept of lust with a paradisical innocence.
The Adamites were originally an obscure sect, adherents of an Early Christian group in North Africa dating probably from the 2nd century. Adherents professed to have regained Adam's primeval innocence.
Various accounts are given of their origin. Some have thought them to have been an offshoot of the Carpocratian Gnostics, who professed a sensual mysticism and a complete emancipation from the moral law. St. Epiphanius and Augustine of Hippo mention the Adamites by name, and describe their practices. They called their church "Paradise", claiming that its members were re-established in Adam and Eve's state of original innocence. Accordingly, they practiced "holy nudism", rejected the concept of marriage as foreign to Eden, saying it would never have existed but for sin, and lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they did, their actions could be neither good nor bad.
Practices similar to these just described appeared in Europe several times in later ages. During the Middle Ages the doctrines of this obscure sect, which did not itself exist long, were revived in the 13th century in the Netherlands by the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Taborites in Bohemia, and, in the 14th century, by some German Beghards. Everywhere they met with firm opposition from the mainstream churches. The earliest surviving documentation of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit is to be found in a text called the Compilatio de novo spiritu put together by Albert the Great in the 1270s, concerning a group of persons investigated in the Swabian Ries area of Germany.The themes which occur in these documents, and which would emerge again in subsequent investigations, included:
- Autotheism – in other words, a belief that the perfected soul and God are indistinguishably one. This was often expressed through the language of indistinction or annihilation. This belief would be heretical because it would undermine the necessary distinction between fallen created being and creator.
- Denial of the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments for salvation – such that austerity and reliance on the Holy Spirit was believed to be sufficient for salvation. They believed that they could communicate directly with God and did not need the Catholic Church for intercession.
- Use of the language of erotic union with Christ.
- Antinomian statements -"Nothing is a sin except what is thought to be a sin". Critics of the Free Spirit interpreted their beliefs to mean that they considered themselves to be incapable of sin and above the moral conduct of the Church.
- Anticlerical sentiment.
During the late thirteenth century, such concerns increasingly became applied to the various unregulated religious groups such as beguines and beghards, who had greatly increased in number in the preceding decades. Concerns over such sentiments then began to occur elsewhere, especially during the 1300s, and especially in Italy. Partly motivated by such concerns, in 1308 Pope Clement V summoned a general council, which met at Vienne from October 1311 to May 1312. In particular, it had to engage with the report from the Paris inquisition (1308–1310) into the beguine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls a text which had become well read through France, but had been condemned in 1310 as heresy, and Porete herself had been burned at the stake. It was the Council of Vienne which first associated these various beliefs with the idea of the 'Free Spirit'.The Taborite movement was started in 1419 in opposition to the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. One sect of Taborites, the Bohemian Adamites, dissociated themselves from other Taborites and took up the practice of going naked through towns and villages. They preached that "God dwelt in the Saints of the Last Days" and considered exclusive marriage to be a sin.
The historian Norman Cohn observed:
"Whereas the Taborites were strictly monogamous, in this sect free love seems to have been the rule. The Adamites declared that the chaste were unworthy to enter the Messianic kingdom ... The sect was much given to ritual naked dances held around a fire. Indeed, these people seemed to have spent much of their time naked, ignoring the heat and cold and claiming to be in the state of innocence enjoined by Adam and Eve."
Cohn also commented that the Adamites were criticised by other Taborites for "never thinking of earning their own living by the work of their hands".Fränger believed The Garden of Earthly Delights was commissioned by the order's Grand Master. Later critics have agreed that, because of their obscure complexity, Bosch's "altarpieces" may well have been commissioned for non-devotional purposes. The Homines intelligentia cult sought to regain the innocent sexuality enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall. Fränger writes that the figures in Bosch's work "are peacefully frolicking about the tranquil garden in vegetative innocence, at one with animals and plants and the sexuality that inspires them seems to be pure joy, pure bliss." Fränger argued against the notion that the hellscape shows the retribution handed down for sins committed in the center panel. Fränger saw the figures in the garden as peaceful, naive, and innocent in expressing their sexuality, and at one with nature. In contrast, those being punished in Hell comprise "musicians, gamblers, desecrators of judgment and punishment".
Examining the symbolism in Bosch's art — "the freakish riddles … the irresponsible phantasmagoria of an ecstatic" — Fränger concluded that his interpretation applied to Bosch's three altarpieces only: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the Haywain Triptych. Fränger distinguished these pieces from the artist's other works and argued that despite their anti-cleric polemic, they were nevertheless all altarpieces, probably commissioned for the devotional purposes of a mystery cult.
However, the Wikipedia article on the triptych points out that while commentators accept Fränger's analysis as astute and broad in scope, they have often questioned his final conclusions. These are regarded by many scholars as hypothesis and conjecture.
The modern use of the term "apocalyptic" is of importance, primarily because of the "psychology" that is associated with millenarianism and millenarian movements. The Wikipedia article on Apocalypticism says that:
Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation, but now usually refers to the belief that the end of the world is imminent, even within one's own lifetime. This belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization will soon come to a tumultuous end due to some sort of catastrophic global event. These views and movements often focus on cryptic revelations about a sudden, dramatic, and cataclysmic intervention of God in history; the judgment of all men; the salvation of the faithful elect; and the eventual rule of the elect with God in a renewed heaven and earth. Arising initially in Zoroastrianism apocalypticism was developed more fully in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic eschatological speculation.
Apocalypticism is often conjoined with the belief that esoteric knowledge that will likely be revealed in a major confrontation between good and evil forces, destined to change the course of history. Apocalypses can be viewed as good, evil, ambiguous or neutral, depending on the particular religion or belief system promoting them. However, it is not exclusively a religious idea and there are end times or transitional scenarios based in modern science and technology.
However, an apocalypse is not necessarily an "end of days" event, and our present times include several levels of possible meaning in the use of the word. And, predictably, the most positive level is regarded by the powers that be as heretical, and easily labelled extreme.
A reminder . . ."Apocalypse" (ἀποκάλυψις) is a Greek word meaning "revelation", "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling".
As a genre, apocalyptic literature details the authors' visions of the end times as revealed by an angel or other heavenly messenger. The apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity embraces a considerable period, from the centuries following the Babylonian exile down to the close of the Middle Ages.
There are echoes of eschatology, or "the end of times", in popular culture, literature, films, comics, manga and other art forms. A list of apocalyptic films can be found on Wikipedia, that include the 1961 film:
The Day the Earth Caught Fire . . .
. . . and the 2004 film:
The Day After Tomorrow
Originally this speculative eschatology was to be found in a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. Hence, this concept is commonly referred to as the "end of the world" or "end times".
The word arises from the Greek ἔσχατος eschatos meaning "last" and -logy meaning "the study of", and first appeared in English around 1844. The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as "the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind". A relatively modern term pointing to a longer history of belief systems.
Fact and or fiction?
However the apocalypse, revelation, or "seeing things as they actually are", is also associated with a more positive, revolutionary and transformative scenario, that in the medieval period generated collective efforts to create perfection on the planet Earth, a period of peace to last a thousand years before a final judgement day. Rather than wait for divine judgement and a destination in heaven or hell, these Millenarianist movements, including religious, social, or political groups (from Latin mīllēnārius "containing a thousand"), were driven in the belief in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which;"all things will be changed".This is a collective mind set focused on real change, and requiring radical and revolutionary change to the system of power. In the middle ages this involved creating autonomous social and political space for what Norman Cohn described as anarcho-syndicalist communities. See Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, revised and expanded in 1970) an amazing study of millenarian cult movements.
Covering a wide span of time, Cohn's book discusses topics such as anti-Semitism and the Crusades, in addition to such sects as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, flagellants, the Anabaptists, and the Ranters.
The Pursuit of the Millennium concludes with a discussion of the theocratic king John of Leiden, who took over the city of Münster in the so-called Münster rebellion of 1534. The context of power, and the abuse of power then, and which was clearly visible, included the church, principalities, kingdoms and empires. Today it is global capitalism, a far more complex and often invisible force.
The cover chosen for the Paladin publication in the 1970's was the painting of The Battle of Alexander at Issus (German: Alexanderschlacht) is a 1529 oil painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538). Altdorfer was a pioneer of landscape art and a founding member of the Danube school. It portrays the 333 BC Battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great secured a decisive victory over Darius III of Persia. The painting is widely regarded as Altdorfer's masterpiece, and is one of the most famous examples of the type of Renaissance landscape painting known as the world landscape, which here reaches an unprecedented grandeur.
The LODE and Re:LODE projects and Re:LODE Radio are, in art historical terms, and in many ways, an echo of this type of world landscape. The purposes and methods may be very different, but the atmosphere and sense of crisis at a local and global scale are shared across nearly 500 years.
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
The German term Weltlandschaft was first used by Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen in 1905 with reference to Gerard David, and then in 1918 applied to Patinir's work by Ludwig von Baldass, defined as the depiction of "all that which seemed beautiful to the eye; the sea and the earth, mountains and plains, forests and fields, the castle and the hut".
In Altdorfer's work the global scale shown in the detail above frames the action at a particular location, in this case a battle between empires rather than the hermit's hut.
The scope of Norman Cohn's book The Pursuit of the Millennium has this kind of scale, albeit in a world where it is Europe and its Asian adversary that are the real and imagined world pyscho-geography. However, it is worth commenting on the fact that 37 years before Altdorfer completed his work Columbus had begun the "discovery", from a European standpoint, of a "New World".
Referencing psychogeography with world landscape rather than, or as well as urban landscapes, has its place in the fact that one of the many people influenced by Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium include the French Marxist philosopher and writer Guy Debord, who considered the chiliastic cults discussed by Cohn something of a model for the Situationist International.
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium
Published on YouTube by Intellectual Deep Web
The man who points . . .
. . . in the bottom right hand corner of the central panel is the only clothed figure in the Garden.
Is this a portrait of the patron, or a self portrait of the artist? The woman below him lies within a semicylindrical transparent shield, while her mouth is sealed. Does she bear a secret?
Re:LODE Radio considers that if this central panel is, as the modern title suggests, a garden of earthly delights, perhaps reflecting a desire to regain the innocent sexuality enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall, then an alternative to the notion that the painting is one kind of moral warning or anther can be found in re-naming the work The Millennium. The upshot of this vision of a "Paradise" of recovered innocence is revolutionary, and a time when . . .
"all things will be changed"
. . . including an integral and holistic mind, body and social experience expressed through sex and sexuality, reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich's SEX POL!
Wilhelm Reich's Orgone accumulator or "sex box".
Guy Debord, the Situationist, as mentioned above, while profoundly informed by Norman Cohn's historical work, refuted the thesis of Cohn's book thus:"Modern revolutionary hopes were not, as Norman Cohn thinks he shows in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the irrational consequences of the religious passion of millenarianism. Quite the contrary: it is millenarianism, a revolutionary class struggle speaking for the first time the language of religion, that is already a modern revolutionary tendency, but still lacking the awareness that it is historical alone. "
La Société du spectacle, §138; emphasis in original.If The Millennium and/or The Garden secretly present the potential of an embodied liberation, true emancipation when . . .
"all things will be changed". . . it's worth connecting to the lived experience of NOW and the inspirational music and lyric of Tupac's "Changes". This song has echoed down the years in the work of other recording artists.
This video montage begins with the first few seconds of audio and video from the "official" Tupac video of "Changes" and then cuts to the beginning of E-40's 1996 "Things'll Never Change" featuring Bo-Roc. As E-40's chorus ends, the beginning of Polo G's interpolated "Changes" on his 2020 song "Wishing for a Hero", with a thrice repeated intro. As the video of "Wishing for a Hero" ends the video of "Things'll Never Change" resumes, and as this video ends Tupac's video of "Changes" resumes.The common dialectic in these three lyrics, the samples, and chorus, is the juxtaposition of the loss of the innocence and joy of childhood with the reality of growing up and going out into a world that's a war zone. The condition of adulthood in a world of racial, social and economic inequalities, exploitation and injustice is equivalent to as a yet unidentified circle of Hell.
From the Garden of Eden to the Streets of Hell the chorus for change . . .
The chorus in each of these three interwoven lyrics is comparable with the Greek chorus found in ancient Greek tragedy, that is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action.
Ancient Greek theatre always included a chorus that offered a variety of background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance. They commented on themes, and demonstrated how the audience might react to the drama. According to Schlegel, the Chorus is "the ideal spectator", and conveys to the actual spectator "a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation" In many of these plays, the chorus expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as their hidden fears or secrets. Some historians argue that the chorus was itself considered to be an actor. Aristotle stated in his Poetics:
The chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, not in the manner of Euripides but of Sophocles.
Scholars have considered Sophocles to be superior to Euripides in his choral writing. Of the two, Sophocles also won more dramatic contests. His chorus passages were more relevant to the plot and more integrated in tragedies, whereas the Euripidean choruses seemingly had little to do with the plot and were often bystanders.
Let's party . . .
. . . in Paradise!
The Garden of Earthly Delights took on a new meaning in the context of the so-called counter culture of the 1960's and '70's, a revolutionary image and as a mass produced colour printed wall poster in a "new age", of "be-ins" and "love-ins" and anti-Vietnam War protests.
This video montage begins with a PBS documentary on the so-called "Summer of Love" and then followed by a trailer for the 2016 film Paradise Club.
This is a story about a young dancer who, ostensibly, finds herself in the heart of San Francisco in 1968 at the height of the sexual revolution. Dancing in the Paradise Club, Catherine's journey leads to her entanglement in an affair, protesting against the Vietnam War, and all the while struggling to find herself. Can she navigate a world burning down around her or will she lose everything?
Striptease in Paradise, and for money!
It's a strip club, a depressing environment where the mix of misogyny and money, in a sleazy world of sexual exploitation, overlaps with the idea, or gloss, of sexual liberation. It is NO such thing! This is a place and time where if there is any kind of freedom, it is the freedom to exploit. This film is one among many examples in popular culture NOW that re-writes history, just as in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood Tarantino turns history into a fairy story. A fake nostalgia uses glamour to cover the TRUTH.
The trailer for Paradise Club is followed by a scene, deleted from the film, that Re:LODE Radio considers to be an example of artistic realism tinged with an intended, or unintended, version of Berthold Brecht's distancing effect.
More commonly known as the alienation effect or as the estrangement effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt or V-Effekt), Brecht first used the term in an essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious".In Moscow, in the spring of 1935 Brecht had seen a command performance of Beijing Opera techniques by Mei Lanfang, that Brecht first used the German term in print to label an approach to theatre that discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what was being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do.The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, alienation effect, or distancing effect. In Brecht and Method (1998), Fredric Jameson abbreviates Verfremdungseffekt as "the V-effekt"; many scholars similarly leave the word untranslated.
The video montage ends with a fairytale version of a party at the Playboy Mansion featured in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Is this film a weird example of "the V-effekt" or is it just an example of escapism?
Love-in, or . . .
Across the 'Frisco Bay
Across the Bay in Oakland something was happening that was REAL and POLITICAL in a different way! It was NOT bourgeois and it was BLACK!
During World War II, tens of thousands of black African Americans left the Southern states during the Second Great Migration, moving to Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as Kaiser Shipyards. The sweeping migration transformed the Bay Area as well as cities throughout the West and North, altering the once white-dominated demographics. A new generation of young black African Americans growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them.
In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). In formulating a new politics, they drew on their work with a variety of Black Power organizations. Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at Merritt College. They joined Donald Warden's Afro-American Association, where they read widely, debated, and organized in an emergent black nationalist tradition inspired by Malcolm X and others. Eventually dissatisfied with Warden's accommodationism, they developed a revolutionary anti-imperialist perspective working with more active and militant groups like the Soul Students Advisory Council and the Revolutionary Action Movement. Their paid jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center allowed them to develop a revolutionary nationalist approach to community service, later a key element in the Black Panther Party's "community survival programs."Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man in San Francisco, Newton observed the violent insurrection that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of Black Power organizations. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a social force and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Williams' book Negroes with Guns, Newton studied gun laws in California extensively. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicised Little Red Book and reselling them to leftists and liberals on the Berkeley campus at three times the price.
According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops."
On October 29, 1966, Stokely Carmichael – a leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) – championed the call for "Black Power" and came to Berkeley to keynote a Black Power conference. At the time, he was promoting the armed organizing efforts of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama and their use of the Black Panther symbol. Newton and Seale decided to adopt the Black Panther logo and form their own organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Newton and Seale decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets.
Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton was their first recruit.
By January 1967, the BPP opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront, and published the first issue of The Black Panther: Black Community News Service.
Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression". In the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial caste subordination in the South with tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, and demanding full citizenship rights for black people. However, not much changed in the cities of the North and West. As the wartime and post-war jobs which drew much of the black migration "fled to the suburbs along with white residents", the black population was concentrated in poor "urban ghettos" with high unemployment and substandard housing and was mostly excluded from political representation, top universities, and the middle class. Northern and Western police departments were almost all white. In 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 police officers were African American (less than 2.5%).
Civil rights tactics proved incapable of redressing these conditions, and the organisations that had "led much of the nonviolent civil disobedience", such as SNCC and CORE, went into decline. By 1966 a "Black Power ferment" emerged, consisting largely of young urban blacks, posing a question the Civil Rights Movement could not answer: "How would black people in America win not only formal citizenship rights, but actual economic and political power?"
Young black people in Oakland and other cities developed study groups and political organisations, and from this ferment the Black Panther Party emerged.
The initial tactic of the party utilized contemporary open-carry gun laws to protect Party members when policing the police. This act was done to record incidents of police brutality by distantly following police cars around neighbourhoods. When confronted by a police officer, Party members cited laws proving they had done nothing wrong and threatened to take to court any officer that violated their constitutional rights. Between the end of 1966 to the start of 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense's armed police patrols in Oakland black communities attracted a small handful of members. Numbers grew slightly starting in February 1967, when the party provided an armed escort at the San Francisco airport for Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow and keynote speaker for a conference held in his honour.The Black Panther Party's focus on militancy was often construed as open hostility, feeding a reputation of violence even though early efforts by the Panthers focused primarily on promoting social issues and the exercise of their legal right to carry arms. The Panthers employed a California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. Generally this was done while monitoring and observing police behaviour in their neighborhoods, with the Panthers arguing that this emphasis on active militancy and openly carrying their weapons was necessary to protect individuals from police violence. Nevertheless, chants like "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!", helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organisation.
The black community of Richmond, California, wanted protection against police brutality. With only three main streets for entering and exiting the neighbourhood, it was easy for police to control, contain, and suppress the population. On April 1, 1967, a black unarmed twenty-two-year-old construction worker named Denzil Dowell was shot dead by police in North Richmond. Dowell's family contacted the Black Panther Party for assistance after county officials refused to investigate the case. The Party held rallies in North Richmond that educated the community on armed self-defence and the Denzil Dowell incident. Police seldom interfered at these rallies because every Panther was armed and no laws were broken. The Party's ideals resonated with several community members, who then brought their own guns to the next rallies.
Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly after their May 2, 1967 protest at the California State Assembly. On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "Mulford Act", which would make the public carrying of loaded firearms illegal. Newton, with Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, put together a plan to send a group of 26 armed Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly carrying their weapons, an incident which was widely publicized, and which prompted police to arrest Seale and five others. The group pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session. At the time of the protest, the Party had fewer than 100 members in total.
The Black Panther Party first publicized its original "What We Want Now!" Ten-Point program on May 15, 1967, following the Sacramento action, in the second issue of The Black Panther newspaper.
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
- We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
- We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
- We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
- We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
- We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
- We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
- We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
"In America black people are treated very much as the Vietnamese people, or any other colonised people . . ."
Are the Black Panthers . . .
Upon its inception the Black Panther Party's core practice was its open carry armed citizens' patrols ("copwatching") to monitor the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department and challenge police brutality in the city.
From 1969 onwards, a variety of community social programs became a core activity. The Party instituted the Free Breakfast for Children Programs to address food injustice, and community health clinics for education and treatment of diseases including sickle cell anemia, tuberculosis, and later HIV/AIDS. It advocated for class struggle, with the party representing the proletarian vanguard.
Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Newton declared:
Malcolm, implacable to the ultimate degree, held out to the Black masses ... liberation from the chains of the oppressor and the treacherous embrace of the endorsed [Black] spokesmen. Only with the gun were the black masses denied this victory. But they learned from Malcolm that with the gun, they can recapture their dreams and bring them into reality.
Huey Newton allegedly killed officer John Frey in 1967, and Eldridge Cleaver (Minister of Information) led an ambush in 1968 of Oakland police officers, in which two officers were wounded and Panther Bobby Hutton (Treasurer) was killed.
FBI infiltrators caused the party to suffer many internal conflicts, resulting in the murders of Alex Rackley and Betty Van Patter.
In 1967, the Mulford Act was passed by the California legislature and signed by governor Ronald Reagan. The bill was crafted in response to members of the Black Panther Party who were copwatching. The bill repealed a law that allowed the public carrying of loaded firearms.
In 1969, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." He developed and supervised an extensive counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics, designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate and assassinate party members, discredit and criminalize the Party, and drain organisational resources and manpower. The program was responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton, and is accused of assassinating other Black Panther members, including Mark Clark.
Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth, as killings and arrests of Panthers increased its support among African Americans and the broad political left, who both valued the Panthers as a powerful force opposed to de facto segregation and the military draft. The party enrolled the most members and had the most influence in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. There were active chapters in many prisons, at a time when an increasing number of young African-American men were being incarcerated.
Black Panther Party membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in 68 cities and thousands of members, but it began to decline over the following decade. After its leaders and members were vilified by the mainstream press, public support for the party waned, and the group became more isolated. In-fighting among Party leadership, fomented largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, led to expulsions and defections that decimated the membership. Popular support for the Party declined further after reports of the group's alleged criminal activities, such as drug dealing and extortion of Oakland merchants.
By 1972 most Panther activity centered on the national headquarters and a school in Oakland, where the party continued to influence local politics. Though under constant police surveillance, the Chicago chapter also remained active and maintained their community programs until 1974. The Seattle chapter persisted longer than most, with a breakfast program and medical clinics that continued even after the chapter disbanded in 1977. The Party continued to dwindle throughout the 1970s, and by 1980 had just 27 members.
This next video montage creates an apposition of the different conditions of everyday life that were experienced by African Americans living in Oakland, with the "counterculture" migration of white suburban middle-class young Americans who had the where-with-all to converge on San Fransisco in the summer of 1967.
Meanwhile . . .
This video montage begins with the sound track of "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", a song co-written by soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper. It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just three days before his death in a plane crash. The song was released on Stax Records' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first ever posthumous single to top the charts in the US. It reached number 3 on the UK Singles Chart.
Otis Redding started writing the lyrics to the song in August 1967, while sitting on a rented houseboat at commodore seaplane slips in Sausalito, California. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. In a September 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song:
Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. [...] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got he was renting boathouse or stayed at a boathouse or something and that's where he got the idea of the ships coming in the bay there. And that's about all he had: "I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again."
This montage then cuts to film documentation of the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco during 1967, accompanied by the sound track of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear [Some] Flowers in Your Hair)", an American pop song, written by John Phillips, and sung by Scott McKenzie. It was produced and released in May 1967 by Phillips and Lou Adler, who used it to promote their Monterey International Pop Music Festival held in June of that year. According to Paul Ingles of NPR;"...local authorities in Monterey were starting to get cold feet over the prospect of their town being overrun by hippies. To smooth things over, Phillips wrote a song, "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)."Phillips reported writing the song in about 20 minutes. The song, which tells the listeners, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", is credited with bringing thousands of young people to San Francisco, California, during 1967 and the late 60's.
The extinction of rebellion?
The demise of the Black Panther Party was assured by the actions of both state and federal agencies so determined to remove a potentially significant threat to the actually existing structures of power, privilege and the interests of a capitalist class. The Wikipedia article on the Black Panther Party acknowledges that:
The Party's history is controversial. Scholars have characterised the Black Panther Party as the most influential black movement organisation of the late 1960s, and "the strongest link between the domestic Black Liberation Struggle and global opponents of American imperialism". Other commentators have described the Party as more criminal than political, characterised by "defiant posturing over substance".
Re:LODE Radio considers this last point as "moot", that is, as in a specialised legal meaning, dating from the 16th century, where a moot is “the discussion of a hypothetical case by law students for practice; a hypothetical doubtful case that may be used for discussion”. And the Black Panther Party had more than style, more than a revolutionary aesthetic, "to beat a dogma with". Regardless of the criminality and criminalisation of the BPP the Black Panthers . . .
. . . spoke the truth to power!
When it comes to the TRUTH, and an unvarnished history, Re:LODE Radio quotes from a previous post published on Wednesday, 19 August 2020:
Seventy Eight Days to Save the Earth in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
Speaking truth to power
In this post for Re:LODE Radio's 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" it is worth quoting from the Marianne interview with Bernard Stiegler where he says of Greta Thunberg:
"I think she is telling the truth in the way of what the Greeks called parrhesia. She is out of step with a system which, as everyone knows, is going into the wall. She is accused of all the evils because in reality it challenges us all by this position of absolute radicalism which forces us to take our place - not in front of it, but in terms of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: "to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking".
Parrhesia has a particular value and quality in the work and thinking of Michel Foucault. This Ancient Greek word has three different forms, as related by Michel Foucault. Parrhesia is a noun, meaning "free speech". Parrhesiazomai is a verb, meaning "to use parrhesia". Parrhesiastes is a noun, meaning one who uses parrhesia, for example "one who speaks the truth to power".
The term parrhesia is borrowed from the Greek παρρησία parrhēsía (πᾶν "all" and ῥῆσις "utterance, speech") meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely", "to speak boldly", or "boldness".
The term first appears in Greek literature, when used by Euripides, and may be found in ancient Greek texts from the end of the fifth century B.C. until the fifth century A.D. It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.
Parrhesia was a fundamental component of the democracy of Classical Athens. In assemblies and the courts Athenians were free to say almost anything, and in the theatre, playwrights such as Aristophanes made full use of the right to ridicule whomever they chose. Elsewhere there were limits to what might be said; freedom to discuss politics, morals, religion, or to criticize people would depend on context: by whom it was made, and when, and how, and where.
If one was seen as immoral, or held views that went contrary to popular opinion, then there were great risks involved in making use of such an unbridled freedom of speech, as Socrates found out when he was sentenced to death for not adoring deities worshiped by the Athenians and for corrupting the young.
Michel Foucault developed the concept of parrhesia as a mode of discourse in which one speaks openly and truthfully about one's opinions and ideas without the use of rhetoric, manipulation, or generalization. Foucault's use of parrhesia, he tells us, is troubled by our modern day Cartesian model of evidential necessity. For Descartes, truth is the same as the undeniable. Whatever can be doubted must be, and, thus, speech that is not examined or criticized does not necessarily have a valid relation to truth.
There are several conditions upon which the traditional Ancient Greek notion of parrhesia relies. One who uses parrhesia is only recognized as doing so if holding a credible relationship to the truth, if one serves as critic to either oneself or popular opinion or culture, if the revelation of this truth places one in a position of danger and one persists in speaking the truth, nevertheless, as one feels it is a moral, social, and/or political obligation. Further, in a public situation, a user of parrhesia must be in a social position less empowered than those to whom this truth is revealed.
Foucault (1983) sums up the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia as such:
So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.
and
To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.
Foucault (1984) sums up that:
The Parrhesiastes is the person who says everything. Thus, as an example, in his discourse "On the Embassy," Demosthenes says: It is necessary to speak with parrhesia, without holding back at anything without concealing anything. Similarly, in the "First Philippic," he takes up exactly the same term and says: I will tell you what I think without concealing anything.
Bernard Stiegler says; “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”
For Re:LODE Radio this revelation, or discovery, of Bernard Stiegler, and quoted extensively in relation to his work applies to the information that frames the LODE Zone Line. Re:LODE Radio and Re:LODE Cargo of Questions are intended to create a psycho-geographical space for both the reader and the writer (along with the righter of wrongs), the looker and the listener, and speaker too. In this vein, in this way, along this LODE Line, we return, in the footsteps of others, to Death Valley:
Zabriskie Point (revisited)
Michel Foucault drops acid in Death Valley
Simeon WadeHeather Dundas
Editor’s Note: Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926) was one of the central thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Neither a traditional philosopher nor a trained historian, Foucault examined the intersection of truth and history through the specific historical dynamics of power.In France, Foucault was a major figure in structuralist thinking of the 1960s and in the years that followed. However, in the United States, especially in popular culture, Foucault is often thought of as an inciter of the “French theory” movement that swept through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Often controversial, Foucault’s analyses of the uses of power in society, as well as his concerns with sexuality, bodies, and norms have been pivotal in the development of contemporary feminist and queer theory.One early follower of Foucault’s thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner, musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical accuracy.
Boom: What can you tell us about the above photo?
Simeon Wade: I snapped the above photo with my Leica camera, June 1975. The photograph features the Panamint Mountains, the salt flats of Death Valley, and the frozen dunes at Zabriskie Point. In the foreground, two figures: Michel Foucault, in the white turtleneck, his priestly attire, and Michael Stoneman, who was my life partner.
Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?
Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.
50 years on . . .
Revisiting Zabriskie Point in Death Valley 50 years on from the making of Zabriskie Point, the title of the 1970 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni the echoes between then and now, of the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement, of the psycho-pathological denial of systemic racism, social injustice, inequality, police brutality and the suppression of dissent.
. . . the temperature itself has become a warning to the whole world of the future habitability of the planet for human survival!
In a room at a university campus in 1970, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panthers and wife of Eldridge Cleaver, appears in a documentary-like student meeting scene at the opening of the film.
The character Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is "willing to die, but not of boredom" for the cause, which draws criticism from the young white radicals.
Mark goes to a bloody campus confrontation between students and police. Some students are tear-gassed and at least one is shot. As Mark reaches for a gun in his boot, a Los Angeles policeman is seen being fatally shot, although it is unclear by whom.
Murals at People's Park
The atmosphere of police oppression that Antonioni achieves in this first part of the film is redolent of the events that had previously taken place the year before at UC Berkeley with the student protests associated with the campaign to create Peoples Park. In particular the event that came to be known as "Bloody Thursday" (May 15, 1969) when Alameda County Sheriff's deputies used shotguns to fire at people sitting on the roof at the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. James Rector was visiting friends in Berkeley and watching from the roof of Granma Books when he was shot by police; he died on May 19. The Alamada County Coroner's report listed cause of death as "shock and hemorrhage due to multiple shotgun wounds and perforation of the aorta." The buckshot is the same size as a .38 caliber bullet.
Governor Reagan conceded that Rector was probably shot by police but justified the bearing of firearms, saying that "it's very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter. He's got to have an appropriate weapon." The University of California Police Department (UCPD) said Rector threw steel rebar down onto the police; however, Time magazine claimed that Rector was a bystander, not a protester. Carpenter Alan Blanchard was permanently blinded by a load of birdshot fired directly into his face.
At least 128 Berkeley residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police. The actual number of seriously wounded was likely much higher, because many of the injured did not seek treatment at local hospitals to avoid being arrested. Local medical students and interns organized volunteer mobile first-aid teams to help protesters and bystanders injured by buckshot, nightsticks, or tear gas. One local hospital reported two students wounded with large caliber rifles as well.
News reports at the time of the shooting indicated that 50 were injured, including five police officers. Some local hospital logs indicate that 19 police officers or Alameda County Sheriff's deputies were treated for minor injuries; none were hospitalized.
In an address before the California Council of Growers on April 7, 1970, almost a year after "Bloody Thursday" and the death of James Rector, Governor Reagan defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell Berkeley protests:
"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."
Berkeley Tribe editors decided to issue this quote in large type on the cover of its next edition.
Mark flees the campus and rides a city bus to suburban Hawthorne, California where, after failing to buy a sandwich on credit from a local blue-collar delicatessen, he walks to Hawthorne Municipal Airport, steals a small Cessna 210 aircraft and flies into the desert.
Meanwhile, the character Daria, is driving across the desert towards Phoenix in a 1950s-era Buick automobile to meet her boss Lee, who may or may not also be her lover. Along the way Daria is searching for a man who works with "emotionally disturbed" children from Los Angeles. She finds the young boys near a roadhouse in the Mojave desert but they tease, taunt, and grab at her, asking for "a piece of ass", to which she asks in reply, "Are you sure you'd know what to do with it?"
Daria leaves them quickly and drives away in her car. Later, while filling the Buick's radiator with water, she is seen from the air by Mark flying above in the stolen Cessna aircraft. He buzzes her car, in an echo of Hitchcock's North by Northwest cropduster scene, and then flies very low over her as she lies face down in the sand. He throws a T-shirt out of the window of the aircraft for her to pick up. Daria's emotions quickly transition from being understandably upset and confused, to curiousity and she ends up smiling by the end of this sequence.
Mark and Daria then meet at the desert shack of an old man, where Mark asks her for a lift so he can buy gasoline for the aircraft. The two then drive to Zabriskie Point, where they make love. Meanwhile the landscape of geological formations seems to come alive in an hallucinatory orgy.
The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. In a campaign of political harassment, the United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act – which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes – however, no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed, given that Death Valley is in California.
State officials in Sacramento, no doubt with the blessing of California Governor Ronald Reagan, were also ready to charge Antonioni with "immoral conduct, prostitution or debauchery" if he staged an actual orgy. FBI officials investigated the film because of Antonioni's political views, and officials in Oakland, California accused the director of staging a real riot for a scene early in the film.
Returning to the stolen aircraft, Mark and Daria paint it with politically-charged slogans and psychedelic colours. Daria pleads with Mark to travel with her and leave the aircraft but Mark is intent on returning and taking the risks that it involves.
He flies back to Los Angeles and lands the plane at the airport in Hawthorne. The police, accompanied by some radio and television reporters, are waiting for him, and patrol cars chase the aircraft down the runway. Instead of stopping, Mark tries to turn the taxiing aircraft around across the grass but is shot to death by one of the policemen.
Daria learns about Mark's death on the car radio. She drives to Lee's lavish desert home, set high on a rock outcropping near Phoenix, Arizona, where she sees three affluent women sunning themselves and chatting by the swimming pool.
She grieves for Mark by drenching herself in the house's architectural waterfall. Lee is deeply immersed in a business meeting having to do with the complex and financially risky Sunny Dunes development. Taking a break, he spots Daria in the house and happily greets her. She goes downstairs alone and finds the guest room that has been set aside for her but after briefly opening the door, she shuts it again.
Seeing a young Native American housekeeper in the hallway, Daria leaves silently. She drives off but stops to get out of the car and look back at the house, her own imagination seeing it, and the contents of a luxuriously furnished and high maintenance materialist consumer lifestyle, repeatedly blown apart, floating in billowing clouds of orange flame, while household items seem to float in space. This cinematic choreography of destruction, rendered in high definition slow motion photography, is transformed by Pink Floyd's experimental musical score. Daria leaves this way of life and its materialism and drives into the sunset.
Zabriskie Point (revisited)
Toni del Renzio, one of the founders of the Independent Group at the ICA, London, was working in northern California in 1967 and 1968, lecturing on art and media at UC Berkeley and Santa CruzIt was there he witnessed the San Francisco hippie explosion at first hand, recounting his experiences in his 1969 book The Flower Children. A delay in publishing this work meant that his take on this cultural phenomenon, as a champion of Surrealism in the early 1940's, and one of the "Fathers of Pop" (sic), would have provided a significant starting point to an understanding of the political dimensions of what was happening.
And coincidentally, while teaching a class at UC Berkeley in 1969, on what turned out to be an experimental approach and exploration of "conceptual art", a class scheduled for the early hours on the instigation of the student group, Del Renzio's friend Antonioni was involved creating a version of the Millennium . . .
. . . in The Desert of Earthly Delights at Zabriskie Point.
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