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December 26, 2014
In This Issue
End Militarized Police
Two Police Killed
History of Police
Our Southern Strategy
Protestors Deny 'Ban'
War on Women
Stirring on Dem Left
Mercenaries in Iraq
Brecht's Love Poem
Film: Concerning Violence
The Whirlwind 2
The Whirlwind
by
Aliquippa's
Dorian Stevens


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Hating the 'Middle Class,' Why Socialists Run in Elections, Strategy and Tactics Slide Slow, Class and Privilege, the Green New Deal ...and other Short Posts on Tumblr by Carl Davidson

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 Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS  

 

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'They're Bankrupting Us!'
& 20 Other Myths about Unions
Tina at AFL-CIO

New Book by Bill Fletcher, Jr. 

By Randy Shannon, CCDS

 

 

 "Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."

- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

I. Introduction

The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.

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Tina at AFL-CIO

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Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy" proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of the box.
 
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Shades of Justice:  Bringing Down a President and Ending a War
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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement




By Don Hamerquist
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...

Fury in the
Streets Over
Policing and
Violence    

We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...
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Most of all, it's urgent that you support low-wage workers, oppose militarized police, the war on Gaza, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

We cannot expect today's police to turn this runaway train around. But we can push for a reversal of course from police militarization. Is this the predictable start of vigilantism?


By Dave Lindorff
Nation of Change

Dec 25, 2014 - Let me make it clear from the outset of this article: I'm against violence and killing, and I'm certainly no advocate of killing police officers.

But having said that, it must be stated that the combination of a national gun culture that makes obtaining guns and deadly bullets as easy as buying a newspaper, combined with the increasing availability of videocam evidence of infuriating police murders of innocent, unarmed people, including kids, is a recipe for the kind of vigilantism that we just witnessed in New York City, where a Baltimore man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, took it upon himself to wreak what he considered deserved vengeance on the NYPD by randomly selecting and assassinating two New York cops sitting in their squad car.

Random acts of retributive violence like this are only to be expected when you have police treating the public - and especially certain segments of the public, notably people of color - like presumptive criminals or a people under occupation.

This is not a question of right or wrong. Hell, the two policemen killed by the apparently mentally distubed Brinsley, ironically a Chinese and a Latino cop, had nothing to do with the killing of Eric Garner, a black man, by white police officer Daniel Pantaleo. It's simply a reality: If the growing murderousness and thuggishness of some (especially white) police behavior towards people of color, and towards the public in general, continues in this country, it is totally predictable that such acts of vengeance or vigilantism will increase, perhaps even becoming more focused to target the actual perpetrators of unjustified homicides, such as the recent killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Garner in New York and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, should their uniformed killers be given a free pass by prosecutors.

We all know why Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who killed the unarmed 19-year-old Brown with shots to the head when he clearly posed no threat to the officer, has left the department. This was not a decision based upon concerns about community relations; if he had tried to remain a police officer in Ferguson, Wilson would have had to work every day wearing full body armor, and backed by an armed escort.

There may be some hotheads who would argue that having police think twice about the potential consequences of killing unarmed suspects and people being arrested for minor offenses like the late Garner, who was simply selling single cigarettes on the street of his neighborhood, trying to feed his family when he was killed by an illegal police choke-hold, would be all to the good. But the end result of having citizens killing police in retaliation for police killing people would be a state of open war in inner cities, a war which would just result in more killing of innocents. Already, police are reportedly responding to this assassination of two officers with anger, with the NYPD police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Assn., calling for the adoption of "war policing" tactics, which would mean shooting first and asking queestions later.

Meanwhile, even from a practical perspective, vigilantism makes no sense, because the police will always be better armed, and able to use violence far more extensively and effectively than those who would attack them. We already saw what happened when the Black Panthers back in the 1960s and early '70s attempted to defend black urban communities against police violence. The entire repressive apparatus of not just city police departments but of the whole national security apparatus came down on them, and they were crushed as an organization, with many Panthers murdered outright by the government.

The problem we face is that today's militarized police, and the philosophy of aggressive policing in neighborhoods populated by the poor and especially by people of color, are creating a situation in which community anger is a once dormant volcano, now ready to erupt. At that point logic is going to be overwhelmed by emotion. We need only think back to the mid-1960s - when inner cities across the country were exploding in revolt and the government was responding like a nation at war by sending in the National Guard to restore some semblance of repressive order - to see where things are headed.

So much for the post-racial society supposedly inaugurated by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008....(Click title for more)

 

   

...But There Is No Blood on Our hands

 

By Frank Chapman

 

While we have joined 'Black Lives Matter' in condemning the murders of two Brooklyn police officers Rafael Ramos and Wejian Lui; we also find it necessary to state our opinion as to the dangers our movement faces at this time.

 

Patrick Lynch, President of the Policemen Benevolence Association, told the protestors they have blood on their hands and he said, "The Blood on hands starts at...City Hall." And he further stated, "For the first time in a number of years we have become a 'wartime' police department. We will act accordingly."

 

Is there really anybody in the struggle against racist injustice who is asleep on the racist, reactionary politics of the police unions? Well if so you are about to get a wake-up call because the harsh and insulting words they had for the Mayor of New York City is just the opening shot. They do not share our vision of justice and they are using, even as we speak, the cop killings in Brooklyn to create public hysteria so they can unleash vindictive acts of violence against African Americans and then brutally repress anyone who dares to protest.

 

We will be called upon to stop protesting so as not to further inflame the situation. We will be told that there are "Black terrorists" lurking in our movement and we will be asked to publicly denounce them without knowing who the hell they are talking about. And then we will wake up too late and find out that they are talking about all of us. The only viable weapon we have right now is mass protests and building a movement to end police violence and mass incarceration and all forms of racist, political and economic injustice.

 

We should not lay our weapons down when our enemies are calling for war. Let us continue to protest for the justice we deserve.

 

Frank Chapman works with the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression in Chicago ...(Click title for more)


Origins of the Police: Looking Deeper for Answers


The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 1827. New York's first free Black settlement, it became a mixed-race slum, home to Blacks and Irish alike, and a focal point for the stormy collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain control over neighborhoods and populations like this.

By David Whitehouse

Works in Theory

Dec 7, 2014 - In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades-roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn't lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That's

- strikes in England,
- riots in the Northern US,
- and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

I will be focusing a lot on who these crowds were, how they became such a challenge. We'll see that one difficulty for the rulers, besides the growth of social polarization in the cities, was the breakdown of old methods of personal supervision of the working population. In these decades, the state stepped in to fill the social breach.

We'll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public education to regulate workers' minds. I will connect those points to police work later on, but mostly I'll be focusing on how the police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and Philadelphia.

* * * * *

To get a sense of what's special about modern police, it will help to talk about the situation when capitalism was just beginning. Specifically, let's consider the market towns of the late medieval period, about 1,000 years ago.

The dominant class of the time wasn't in the towns. The feudal landholders were based in the countryside. They didn't have cops. They could pull together armed forces to terrorize the serfs-who were semi-slaves-or they could fight against other nobles. But these forces were not professional or full-time.

The population of the towns was mostly serfs who had bought their freedom, or simply escaped from their masters. They were known as bourgeois, which means town-dweller. The bourgeoisie pioneered economic relations that later became known as capitalism.

For the purposes of our discussion, let's say that a capitalist is somebody who uses money to make more money. At the beginning, the dominant capitalists were merchants. A merchant takes money to buy goods in order to sell them for more money. There are also capitalists who deal only with money-bankers-who lend out a certain amount in order to get more back.

You could also be a craftsman who buys materials and makes something like shoes in order to sell them for more money. In the guild system, a master craftsman would work alongside and supervise journeymen and apprentices. The masters were profiting from their work, so there was exploitation going on, but the journeymen and apprentices had reasonable hopes of becoming masters themselves eventually. So class relations in the towns were quite fluid, especially in comparison to the relation between noble and serf. Besides, the guilds operated in ways that put some limits on exploitation, so it was the merchants who really accumulated capital at that time.

In France, in the 11th and 12th centuries, these towns became known as communes. They incorporated into communes under various conditions, sometimes with the permission of a feudal lord�, but in general they were seen as self-governing entities or even city-states.

But they didn't have cops. They had their own courts-and small armed forces made up of the townsmen themselves. These forces generally had nothing to do with bringing people up on charges. If you got robbed or assaulted, or were cheated in a business deal, then you, the citizen, would press the charges.

One example of this do-it-yourself justice, a method that lasted for centuries, was known as the hue and cry. If you were in a marketplace and you saw somebody stealing, you were supposed to yell and scream, saying "Stop, thief!" and chase after the thief. The rest of the deal was that anybody who saw you do this was supposed to add to the hue and cry and also run after the thief.

The towns didn't need cops because they had a high degree of social equality, which gave people a sense of mutual obligation. Over the years, class conflicts did intensify within the towns, but even so, the towns held together-through a common antagonism to the power of the nobles and through continued bonds of mutual obligation.

For hundreds of years, the French carried an idealized memory of these early commune towns-as self-governing communities of equals. So it's no surprise that in 1871, when workers took over Paris, they named it the Commune. But that's jumping a little farther forward than we should just yet.

�* * * * *

Capitalism underwent major changes as it grew up inside feudal society. First of all, the size of capital holdings grew. Remember, that's the point-to make smaller piles of money into bigger piles of money. The size of holdings began to grow astronomically during the conquest of the Americas, as gold and silver were looted from the New World and Africans were kidnapped to work on plantations.

More and more things were produced for sale on the market. The losers in market competition began to lose their independence as producers and had to take wage jobs. But in places like England, the biggest force driving people to look for wage work was the state-endorsed movement to drive peasants off the land.

The towns grew as peasants became refugees from the countryside, while inequality grew within the cities. The capitalist bourgeoisie became a social layer that was more distinct from workers than it used to be. The market was having a corrosive effect on solidarity of craft guilds-something I'll take up in more detail when I talk about New York. Workshops got bigger than ever, as a single English boss would be in command of maybe dozens of workers. I'm talking about the mid-1700s here, the period right before real factory industrialization began.

There still weren't cops, but the richer classes began to resort to more and more violence to suppress the poor population. Sometimes the army was ordered to shoot into rebellious crowds, and sometimes the constables would arrest the leaders and hang them. So class struggle was beginning to heat up, but things really began to change when the Industrial Revolution took off in England....(Click title for more)

Liberals write off the South, but no justice can be achieved in the United States without progressive movements winning there.

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

Jacobin

In the aftermath of the Republican victories in the midterm elections, some liberals have been asking whether they really "need" the South. In electoral terms, should progressives essentially ignore the South and concentrate on other regions in order to ensure a long-term favorable bloc?

In a recent essay in The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky makes just that case. The frustration is perfectly understandable, but it would be a disastrous direction for progressives.

The South has always contained within it two diametrically opposed possibilities. On the one hand, it's been a seat of political reaction. The heart of slavery; the site of the infamous "Trail of Tears," the long march of Native Americans out of the southeast; the home of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and extreme anti-union animus.

But the South was also the region of slave resistance, including but not limited to rebellions; the magnificent democratic experiment known as "Reconstruction"; a very militant labor movement, which sometimes withstood the pressures of racial segregation; and a heart of the Black Freedom Movement.

The dominance of political reaction in the South has always placed constraints on the ability of a progressive, let alone left-wing, movement to grow and sustain itself. It has long created greater and more effective means of encroaching on social, economic, and political victories won elsewhere in the United States.

So-called "right to work" laws, for example, have roots in the South and the Southwest. Much of the trade union movement believed that right to work laws would remain relatively contained in those regions, but over time, like any other form of disease, these have spread.

Another critical example can be found in the 1968 presidential candidacy of former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Based in the South, Wallace tapped into the so-called white backlash against civil rights and progress, and moved North, demonstrating what Malcolm X had always argued: the South was everything south of the Canadian border.

The Richard Nixon campaign modified and adopted Wallace's approach as the "Southern strategy" of 1968, which would have been better called the "white people strategy." This orientation of making the Republican Party the non-black party has been with us ever since, evolving over time into a more racist and xenophobic phenomenon despite its periodic overtures towards various peoples of color.

So, we can't leave the South alone, even if we wanted to. And we shouldn't want to, because there are actually enormous organizing possibilities in the region.

The South has been a hotbed of labor struggles since the 1860s. Whether in the form of the spontaneous organizing and strikes by emancipated blacks; or the Knights of Labor that organized across racial lines; or still later the Industrial Workers of the World and their organizing in the Southern ports or the Louisiana timber industry; or during the iconic 1930s, the work of unions such as the United Mine Workers and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers; or in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the movement to organize public sector workers and health care workers - tremendous and often successful efforts have been undertaken by Southern workers to build labor organizations.

All of this took place in the context of fierce and frequently openly violent repression....(Click title for more)
Protests continue in New York despite Mayor's Call
Protests continue in New York despite Mayor's call for rest
  • Some Protestors Ignore DeBlasio

War on Women: The Creepy Misogynist Movement That's Making Conservatives Even More Sexist
 


By Amanda Nacotte

Alternet

Dec 24, 2014 - Denying that sexism is a real problem is a standard talking point on the right these days. But recently, it seems that simply denying the existence of sexism is not enough. Instead, conservatives on Fox News and other right-wing outlets seem to want to take it a step further, arguing that, in 21st-century America, women are actually oppressing men. It's similar to the long-standing habit of many on the right to declare themselves victims of "reverse racism."

In this case, many of the tropes and obsessions come directly from a fringe, online movement that calls itself "men's rights activism." MRA rhetoric is notable for being intensely paranoid, seeing women as a subversive group that is out to get men. They argue that feminism--particularly feminism that addresses the problem of violence against women--is not an egalitarian movement as advertised, but a darkly evil movement that invents the problems of sexism, rape and domestic violence in order to gain power over men. It's all very silly and hard to take seriously, except that some of the rhetorical gambits of MRAs are actually being trotted out by supposedly mainstream conservatives. The result is that the already misogynist right is getting even more misogynist.

The influence of MRA thinking was all over the recent story of Missouri state legislator Rick Brattin, who introduced a bill [3] that would require women to get permission from the man who impregnated them in order to get an abortion. The story was notable not just because this runs counter to what the mainstream anti-choice movement prefers to do--their line now is that they want to restrict abortion to "protect" women--but also because Brattin's explanations of his thinking were pure MRA paranoia and misogyny.

Brattin argued that men are the real victims of reproductive oppression and that his bill was just evening the score, by claiming men in Missouri [4] are not allowed to get vasectomies without their wives permission. (Never mind that his bill would go well beyond that, giving a man the power to force a woman to give birth even if she had only had sex with him once.) There is no such law in Missouri, and it's possible that Brattin confused his doctor's personal choice to ask for wives to sign off, with an actual law. But regardless of how cognizant he is of what actually happened to him, his argument was crystal-clear: Women are oppressing men and taking away their basic bodily autonomy, and so it's only "fair" for men to get to do the same to women.

Brattin also trotted out the idea, made famous in 2012 by his fellow Missourian Todd Akin, that women frequently lie about rape in order to cover up their sexual indiscretions. Explaining that he would graciously allow rape victims not to be forced into childbirth by rapists, Brattin told Mother Jones, "It has to be a legitimate rape," using Akin's election-losing offensive phrasing.

No big surprise there that a man who believes women oppress men would be a "rape truther." The notion that women frequently lie about rape in order to control and oppress men is one of the predominant obsessions of MRAs, one that is leaking into mainstream conservative media. As I wrote on Alternet last week [5], recent weeks have seen an explosion of conservatives making paranoid claims that widespread rape is nothing but a hoax concocted by wicked feminists in order to seize power, though how that works exactly is rarely explained.

In fact, rape trutherism has become such a big deal amongst mainstream conservatives that a full-blown rape truther was named Misinformer of the Year [6] by Media Matters. George Will is, in many ways, considered the gold standard of mainstream conservatism, appearing as a columnist in a respectable publication (the Washington Post) and appearing regularly on Sunday morning talk shows. Despite this, Will is an avid mainstreamer of the fringe idea that men are being victimized by a nascent matriarchy that finds its currency in accusing random innocent men of rape. Painting both men and colleges as victims [7] of the ever-powerful and shadowy feminist cabal in his Washington Post column, Will wrote, "that when [colleges] make [rape] victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate."

The implication was clear: Feminists are conquering men and universities, one false rape accusation at a time. The evidence on offer for this was nothing.

Rush Limbaugh is an important gauge to measure what is becoming mainstream rhetoric on the right. He has also lurched more toward this paranoid thinking about women taking over the world. One of Limbaugh's favorite new words is "chickify," wherein he argues that once worthy institutions are being ruined because women are supposedly taking them over. Limbaugh sees impending matriarchy in every corner. Feminists have "chickified" universities with--you guessed it--false rape accusations and have run men off campus [8]....(Click title for more)
After the midterm debacle, liberal insurgents say it's time to upend the Democratic Party.

By BILL SCHER
Progressive America Rising via Politico

Dec 08, 2014 - Even as they publicly condemn Tea Party Republicans as hostage-taking legislative thugs, the truth is that some Democrats are quietly jealous of them. Think of it: The Tea Party gang gets to intimidate party leaders, threaten legislation, block nominees, shut down the government and default on the debt if they don't get their way. They cause major trouble.

Boy, does that sound good.

The extreme right has power, and that's something the left hasn't had much of for a long time. But in the aftermath of the party's disastrous midterm performance, it's very possible that the Democratic Party leadership will be facing its own Tea Party-style insurgency from the other side of the spectrum. "You're going to get a fight within the Democratic Party. There is a substantial disagreement coming up," Rep. Jerry Nadler, an outspoken Congressional Progressive Caucus member, recently told the Wall Street Journal.

The only question is, how serious a fight will it be? Will it be a polite spat that results in what has happened most often before-the fast marginalization of the left, with the best elements of the various critiques being stitched together by a centrist Hillary Clinton, or whoever is the nominee in 2016? Or are the populists ready to stage their own grass-roots rebellion, setting their sights on eradicating all corporate influence from the Democrats and undermining any attempt by President Barack Obama to compromise with Republicans by any means necessary?

Progressive activists such as the feisty Progressive Change Campaign Committee would love to be able to instill some of their own intraparty fear, sharpen their populist pitchforks and prod Democratic leaders leftward. And there is reason to believe this could be their moment.

The rebels offer a message about the chronic unfairness of the system so potent that even the Koch brothers aren't above poaching it (a recent ad from the Kochs' political arm chastised newly deposed Sen. Mary Landrieu for flying in private jets, even though the brothers have a few of their own). The new liberal insurgency is savvy enough to stress issues that poll well and relate to the economic anxieties gripping the electorate, such as increasing Social Security benefits and shrinking the size of Wall Street, instead of chasing stale leftist pipe dreams like nationalizing the health insurance industry. And they have the good fortune of going up against rivals unable to match the intensity of their focus, with a sitting president managing a never-ending list of crises, a 2016 Democratic front-runner who is congenitally cautious, and an incoming Republican majority distracted with figuring out how to keep a government open.

With progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren's ascension to the Senate Democratic leadership, momentum would appear to be with the populists, and they will likely have multiple opportunities in the next Congress to plant their flag...(Click title for more)

By Warren Strobel and Phil Stewart

Beaver County Peace Links via Reuters

Dec 24, 2014 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is preparing to boost the number of private contractors in Iraq as part of President Barack Obama's growing effort to beat back Islamic State militants threatening the Baghdad government, a senior U.S. official said.

How many contractors will deploy to Iraq - beyond the roughly 1,800 now working there for the U.S. State Department - will depend in part, the official said, on how widely dispersed U.S. troops advising Iraqi security forces are, and how far they are from U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Still, the preparations to increase the number of contractors - who can be responsible for everything from security to vehicle repair and food service - underscores Obama's growing commitment in Iraq. When U.S. troops and diplomats venture into war zones, contractors tend to follow, doing jobs once handled by the military itself.

"It is certain that there will have to be some number of contractors brought in for additional support," said the senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

After Islamic State seized large swaths of Iraqi territory and the major city of Mosul in June, Obama ordered U.S. troops back to Iraq. Last month, he authorized roughly doubling the number of troops, who will be in non-combat roles, to 3,100, but is keen not to let the troop commitment grow too much.

There are now about 1,750 U.S. troops in Iraq, and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week ordered deployment of an additional 1,300.

The U.S. military's reliance on civilians was on display during Hagel's trip to Baghdad this month, when he and his delegation were flown over the Iraqi capital in helicopters operated by State Department contractors.

The problem, the senior U.S. official said, is that as U.S. troops continue flowing into Iraq, the State Department's contractor ranks will no longer be able to support the needs of both diplomats and troops. ...(Click title for more)

By William Giraldi
The New Republic

Nov 23, 2014 - Think of Bertolt Brecht and you do not think of Eros. A fervent Marxist playwright with a handful of masterworks-Drums in the Night, The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan-Brecht was also the most revolutionary drama theorist of the twentieth century. His misnamed "epic theater" posited a smashing of theater's fourth wall and a dispelling of the emotional abracadabra drama casts over its audience. A round-the-clock communist for whom literature was the manifestation of socio-historical pressures, Brecht believed that art should function as the instigation for revolt. Art must be useful, must serve the gritty aims of practicality. No self-important prettiness, no "willing suspension of disbelief," no Aristotelian catharsis. Brecht would rather you not be so bourgeois as to feel anything; instead, think about what you're seeing and then go depose your tranquilized leaders.

So viewing a Brecht play can cause the distinct, unsettling sensation of being lectured at by an ideologue, one too often immune to the swivet of love but on quite cozy terms with his own communistic bluster. Although eroticism sometimes pants in his drama-see Brecht's first play, Baal, and especially his version of Edward II-it comes as a surprise to behold Brecht's Love Poems, exuberantly translated by the poet David Constantine and the Brecht scholar Tom Kuhn. Spanning the years 1918-1955, this slender volume is only a tease for the dreadnought edition Constantine and Kuhn have planned.

Brecht's Muses seem never to have shunned him: he penned roughly 2000 poems, in a panoply of registers, in manifold identities and personae, on all aspects of human apprehension. The selection in Love Poems is a memorable and necessary reminder of the feeling artist in Brecht, the craftsman of humanistic, dynamic, erotic emotion-those roiling, fleshly impulses that mark us as animals of higher passion. Their individualist and anarchic vibrancy do much to alter the diffuse perception of Brecht as an apparatchik with creaky polemical aims. What makes Brecht irresistible in Love Poems is how he ponders and prances as if some disaffected offspring of Petrarch and Catullus reared by the Earl of Rochester.

In her endearing forward to this collection, Brecht's daughter, Barbara Brecht-Schall, writes: "Papa loved women, many women." Apparently they loved him too, which she finds peculiar because "he did not wash enough and wore long underwear, well after it was fashionable." (Plus, peek at Brecht's photo: He's a slightly less handsome Gertrude Stein.) But the wisdom/talent cocktail, when combined with passion for a cause, can be aphrodisiacal, as many an ugly gent has discovered to his shocked joy. (If ever you'd like to kill the mood, just think of Sartre in bed with de Beauvoir.) An attitude or disposition is one thing, a belief or conviction quite another, and Brecht was nothing if not convicted. As Hannah Arendt wrote of him, Brecht "staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done."

Brecht's love poems might just as easily be dubbed the death of love poems, since he is concerned with the vicissitudes of love, with the manner in which one is first defined and then destroyed by love. You get the feeling that sex for Brecht is not just a life-giving bliss in itself, but a private theater in which bourgeois morality is flouted and trounced. If he is never quite unique enough, he is also never unexciting: his plays set out to provoke and prod, and his best love poems match the provocations of his drama, prodding us from somatic complacency and the stultifying mundanity of our domestic lives.

"Like Goethe," write Constantine and Kuhn, "Brecht was always more or less in love," and in the poetry that love "is expressed, discussed, enacted in an astonishing variety of modes, forms, tones, and circumstances." That astonishing variety imbues Love Poems with their charismatic alloy of pathos and empathy, of ebullience and eroticism....(Click title for more)
Archival footage provides a damning indictment of European imperialism from the director of 'The Black Power Mixtape.'

By Peter Debruge
Variety

Dec. 12, 2014 - "The Black Power Mixtape" helmer Goran Hugo Olsson doesn't make documentaries so much as incendiary devices, diving deep into Swedish film archives for vintage clips that have sat like so much undetonated ordnance all these years and coupling them with politically charged audio to make a provocative new statement. In "Concerning Violence," Olsson adds the nuclear heft of Frantz Fanon's treatise "The Wretched of the Earth" to that cocktail, pairing passages read by Lauryn Hill with gut-wrenching eye-witness accounts of imperialism gone wrong, resulting in a festival hot potato engineered to rile even the most progressive arthouse crowds.

Picking up where "Mixtape" left off, Olsson's latest debuted at Sundance with the subtitle "Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense," making a nearly year-long world tour before opening at New York's IFC Film Center on Dec. 5. While not exactly a sequel, this follow-up docu reflects the shifting focus of Swedish activist filmmakers during the mid-'70s, who grabbed their cameras and traveled to the front lines of African independence, observing firsthand the fall of apartheid and liberation of a people who'd been exploited by white Europeans for decades.

Concerning Violence - Trailer (DE)
Concerning Violence - Trailer (DE)

In searching for a mechanism to unify this incredible footage, which has gone largely unseen by the general public ever since, Olsson seized upon Fanon's 1961 tract, a controversial anarchist cookbook which analyzed the psychology of occupation and identified violent upheaval as the only means to overthrow colonialism - a system Fanon referred to as "violence in its natural state." First published in 1961 and subsequently banned in France and the U.S., the book now seems less ominous than prescient, having accurately anticipated the bloody upheaval that many Third World countries underwent in order to shake off their white oppressors.

Attitudes have shifted considerably over the past half-century, allowing Olsson - operating in the mode of a provocative veejay - to find powerful new use for both Fanon's words and a wealth of disturbing 16mm archival material, organized into nine case studies. From the oxen machine-gunned for sport in the opening sequence to the aftermath of the Mozambique Liberation Front's resistance strategies, writ upon the face of an armless young mother as she nurses her badly injured infant, these are punishing yet necessary images for the Western world to consider.

Compared to the more humanistic depictions of Africa seen in recent decades (from Sally Struthers' anti-hunger campaign to character-driven Hollywood movies), it all tends to feel a bit cold and academic: articulately reasoned, and yet strangely dispassionate given the sheer shock value inherent in so much of the footage. Acting as an extension of those courageous reporters who did the original filming, Olsson lets the colonizers damn themselves, as when a white man looking for sympathy as he's forced to leave Rhodesia speculates, "I could take out four Affies before they take me out."

This interview, which takes place poolside while a black servant serves beers, reveals the sort of racist attitudes, once prevalent, that seem inconceivable to younger generations (as the relatively tame outbursts by George Wallace and other characters in "Selma" may to some skeptics). But they were once the norm, and nothing illustrates it better than cold, objective archival footage, serving as a sort of time capsule to the past.

There can be no rational debate with such people, entrenched in the illusion of their own superiority - which of course is Fanon's point, a direct contradiction of Dr. King's nonviolent tactics. Here, read by Hill and emphasized in bold white lettering onscreen, Fanon's words reinforce the fight against the bullies (the acceptable word when what might otherwise be called "terrorism" originates with those in power), as seen in the jungles of Angola and Mozambique, or in an extended chapter in which a Swedish television crew happened to observe a Liberian mining strike....(Click title for more)
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