By Stephen Lendman 

The Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, and his Polish counterpart Jaroslaw Kaczynski (r) inspect the guard of honour in Warsaw. Both politicians agreed to allow the US to install clearly provocative advanced missiles aimed at Russia in their territories. Would we accept a similar situation in Canada or Mexico? Photograph: Peter Andrews/Reuters

In 1991, after the Soviet Union dissolved, everything changed but stayed the same. As a result, today’s stakes are far greater, presenting much larger threats to world peace.

In America, neocons are still dominant. Obama is more belligerent than Bush, waging four wars and various proxy ones. The Israeli Lobby, Christian Right, and other extremist elements drive them. Conflict is preferred over diplomacy.

Congressional majorities support Washington’s imperial agenda, including global militarization against potential challengers and America’s main rivals – China and Russia, encircling them belligerently with bases and strategic weapons. It’s a policy fraught with danger.

NATO has 28 member states, including 10 former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact countries. Prospective new candidates include Georgia, Ukraine, and potentially others later to more tightly encircle Russia and China.

At the same time, the Middle East and parts of Eurasia have been increasingly militarized with a network of US bases from Qatar to Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond – a clear breach of GHW Bush’s promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that paved the way for unifying Germany in 1990 and dissolving the Soviet Union.

Washington’s promises, of course, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, a hard lesson many nations later learn painfully.

Moreover, the Pentagon has an expanding network of 1,000 or more global bases, including secret and shared ones for greater control. In fact, at a time no nation threatens America, trillions of dollars are spent anyway for what military planners call “full spectrum dominance” over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

Encroaching Belligerently Near Russia’s Borders

In late summer 2009, Obama suspended Bush administration plans for interceptor missiles in Poland and advanced tracking radar in the Czech Republic, both NATO members. Purportedly targeting Iran and other “rogue states,” they, in fact, very much aimed at Russia, what new ones will do when installed.

At issue is assuring first strike capability, preventing or diminishing retaliation if America attacks Russia or China, a potentially catastrophic possibility under any scenario, but especially if nuclear war erupts.

For now, according to Obama, Washington will pursue “stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America’s allies,” including Poland and the Czech Republic. Tactics alone may change, not hardline imperial policies.

Last September, Defense Secretary Gates explained a four-phase missile shield plan, including deploying Aegis class warships in the Eastern Mediterranean equipped with SM-3 anti-ballistic missiles and anti-satellite interceptors, followed by upgraded land and sea versions when available.

Moreover, stationing SM-3s in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland were announced. Last summer, in fact, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) interceptors and about 100 US troops were sent to eastern Poland, close to Russia’s Kaliningrad region, 200 miles from its border.

This same capability was installed in the Persian Gulf, including supplying regional allies with longer range Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems, the strategy being to have in place impenetrable interceptors from the Baltic to the Arabian, Black and Red Seas.

In addition, a warning system is planned for the Czech Republic and other countries as well as centrally controlled missile interceptors – from Southern and Eastern Europe through the Middle East to close to Russia’s borders, too close perhaps for comfort.

Instead of abandoning Bush’s scheme, Obama’s plans a far more extensive, sophisticated, flexible, mobile system to be developed through 2020. Included is nearly doubling the number of Aegis class warships to 38 by 2015, equipped with state-of-the-art missile interceptors.

As a result, America’s front line capability will shift from Eastern Germany through the Middle East to the Black Sea and other strategic waterways to the Caucasus and Russia proper, encroaching on Moscow with new Eastern European bases in Bulgaria, Romania and Poland.

It represents the most significant US presence there since WW II. Currently, only limited troop numbers are involved up to 150 or so permanently, but expect an expanded presence ahead.

Last March, in fact, Secretary of State Clinton said Washington will deploy missile interceptor elements and F-16s in Poland. Russia expressed concern, Dmitry Rogozin, its permanent NATO representative, saying US plans complicate dialogue regarding creating a joint European anti-ballistic missile system, adding:

“Mrs. Clinton’s statement contradicts the foundational relationship (between the) Russian Federation and NATO signed in 1997, (stipulating) that NATO must not strengthen the military structure close to the borders of Russia.”

A Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement also expressed concern, saying:

“We have known about plans regarding (an) anti-ballistic missiles system long ago and we plan to (react in response) in the network of the EuroABM project. As for the idea of (US) Air Force base deployment, it requires an additional explanation.”

In late April, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reacted as well, saying:

“The expansion of NATO infrastructure towards our borders is causing us concern. NATO is not simply a political bloc. It is a military bloc. No one cancelled the agreements on how the bloc reacts to external threats. It is a defense structure,” but it’s acting aggressively.

In a post-G-8 Summit press conference, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said:

“I am not satisfied with the American side’s reaction to my proposals and with NATO’s reaction in general. Why? Because we are wasting time. Even though I spoke about the year 2020 yesterday as a deadline, (the) year when the construction of a four-stage system of the so-called adaptive approach ends. After 2020, if we do not come to terms, a real arms race will begin.”

Perhaps much sooner as he’s gotten no assurances that Russia isn’t being targeted. As a result, he added:

“When we ask for the name of the countries that the shield is aimed at, we get silence. When we ask if the country has missiles (able to strike Europe), the answer is no.”

So “who has those type of missiles” interceptors wish to deter? “We do. So we can only think that this system is being aimed against us.”

He and other Russian officials worry about it expanding to Ukraine and Georgia with missile interceptors, attack aircraft, and US troops on its borders, threatening its security.

Obama in Poland

On May 28, Obama met with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, discussing, among other issues, reaffirming a US military presence with “American boots on the ground,” including a permanent aerial detachment of F-16s and C-130 transport planes.

White House national security official Liz Sherwood-Randall said:

“What we will be doing is rotating trainers and aircraft to Poland so they can become more inter-operable with NATO. It will be a small permanent presence on the ground and then a rotational presence that will be more substantial.”

On May 28, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said:

“To the east of the Oder River (dividing Germany and Poland), American forces will appear, and this at a time when America is reducing its overall military presence in Europe.”

In fact, redeployment with interceptor missiles, other offensive weapons, and boots on the ground close to Russia’s borders, not reduction, is planned, what clearly has Moscow officials alarmed.

On May 29, however, Obama disingenuously downplayed those concerns, reaffirming mutual defense and inviting Russia to participate in European missile defense plans, saying:

“I am very proud of (America’s) reset process (with Russia). We believe missile defense is something where we can cooperate with Russia….This will not be a threat to the strategic balance.”

Concerned Russian officials very much disagree, Vladimir Putin’s earlier sentiment likely again being discussed.

In February 2007, in response to US planned missile defense then, he said:

“NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders. (It) does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represent a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have a right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

At the time, his comments drew a storm of US media Russia bashing, as well as an article by this writer titled, “Reinventing the Evil Empire,” saying:

Russia is back, proud and re-assertive, not about to roll over for America, especially in Eurasia. For Washington, it’s back to the future with a new Cold War, but this time for greater stakes and much larger threats to world peace.

It’s especially true during economic hard times, especially with austerity policies addressing them when social stimulus is needed, provoking spreading discontent for change.

As a result, Western powers may invent threats to distract people, waging greater war for imperial dominance, Russia and China perhaps directly threatened this time.

Senior editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

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Another Breitbart Hit Job

Andrew Breitbart. A frequent guest of Bill Maher's and other supposedly progressive venues, he's rarely exposed for what he truly is.

By BRIAN TIERNEY

If you thought the bipartisan crusade against workers to roll back union rights would be enough to soften the saber rattling of corporate class warfare, think again.

Not content with the legislative assault on workers’ rights in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond, the corporate ideologues on the far right of the budget-cutting and union-busting onslaught are also going after the very history of labor struggle.
A reminder of the academic front in the war on working people was played out over the past several weeks at the University of Missouri where two labor relations professors nearly lost their jobs thanks to a right-wing smear campaign that involved an invasion of privacy and some crafty video editing.

Video footage of Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the university, and her colleague Don Giljum jointly teaching a class on labor relations was distorted in order to pull this out-of-context quote from the mouth of Ancel: “Violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when appropriate – the appropriate tactic.”

Leaving aside the fact that this quote would be utterly uncontroversial had Ancel been teaching a class on, say, U.S. foreign policy instead of labor relations, the reality was that this was not what she said at all.

The footage was obtained from the university’s video interconnect system, which allowed Ancel and Giljum to teach the course to two classes located on two separate University of Missouri campuses in Kansas City and St. Louis. And that video fell into the hands of none other than Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing blogger who has made a career out of defaming apparently anyone to the left of Sean Hannity.

“I was just appalled,” Ancel told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, describing her reaction to the video. “I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn’t saying what I had said in class.”

After posting it on his BigGovernment.com website, Breitbart’s hit job made the rounds on conservative blogs and talk radio, prompting a visceral right-wing campaign demanding the termination of the two professors along with the entire labor studies program.

The intense pressure nearly forced university officials to accept Giljum’s conditional resignation offer. But the university reversed course when it came to light that the video was doctored.

“The excerpts that were made public…were definitely taken out of context, with their meaning highly distorted through splicing and editing from different times within a class period and across multiple class periods,” the university said in a statement.

Ancel’s quote about violence in the BigGovernment.com video left out the fact that she was herself paraphrasing a statement made by someone interviewed in a film that she screened in her class.

“[H]e represented the kind of thinking that went into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and then later…he said violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s appropriate – the appropriate tactic,” the professor told her students.

The video’s distortion of Giljum’s remarks in class included statements acknowledging the violence in U.S. labor history and expressing his view that violence and “industrial sabotage” may have had their place at certain times.

Again, that statement left out Giljum’s comments that followed immediately afterward in which he said, “It [violence] certainly makes you feel a hell of a lot better sometimes. But beyond that, I’m not sure that, as a tactic today, the type of violence or reaction to violence we had back then would be called for here. I think it would do more harm than good.”

Before these distortions were exposed, the right was up in arms. Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder was interviewed on a Tea Party radio program saying, “They [the professors] sit around…matter-of-factly discussing violent overthrow of the capitalist order or the existing order, the workers taking to the streets and committing violent acts of industrial sabotage.”

In other words, these seditious labor professors were teaching students about the actual historical facts of labor history in the U.S.

On one level, this was just another sleazy attack by Breitbart and his cohorts. Recent attacks like this one involved edited videos to disparage ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood and NPR – attacks that revealed the vile racism, Islamophobia, and anti-women bigotry that are the bread and butter of right-wing attack dogs like Breitbart and his ilk.

But this story also points to the more entrenched history of blacking out labor history in education. Last year Texas conservatives managed to rewrite history as they revised social studies curriculum that would affect the content of textbooks used in high schools throughout the country. As historian Eric Foner noted at the time:

Judging from the updated social studies curriculum, conservatives want students to come away from a Texas education with a favorable impression of: women who adhere to traditional gender roles, the Confederacy, some parts of the Constitution, capitalism, the military and religion. They do not think students should learn about women who demanded greater equality; other parts of the Constitution; slavery, Reconstruction and the unequal treatment of nonwhites generally; environmentalists; labor unions; federal economic regulation; or foreigners.

Over the past several decades, numerous studies of the treatment of labor history in U.S. textbooks have found coverage to be woefully inadequate to the point of glossing over the subject altogether. In particular, various studies in the 1990s and a more recent report by the American Labor Studies Center found that textbooks generally omitted the role that the labor movement played in the Civil Rights Movement and labor’s efforts against discrimination against women and other oppressed groups in the workplace.

An American Labor Studies Center report in 2009 surveyed textbooks published by the four largest textbook companies and observed that labor’s role in social progress is given little mention, and major strikes are almost routinely treated as “costly failures, as violent, as lacking public support and backfiring against unions.” The often violent role of employers in strikes is also given short shrift, if it is covered at all.

Few people will remember having learned very much about U.S. labor history in their high school curriculum. What is considered essential U.S. history in most textbooks excludes the fact that fundamental rights like the right to collective bargaining, the eight-hour workday and the weekend were all things that had to be vigorously fought for, and those fights often entailed a great deal of violence for the simple reason that businesses and government forces would not give in to workers’ demands without a fight.

Academia in higher education has sometimes had a reputation of being immune to conservative impulses the permeate other areas of the education system, but this has become less true over the past several decades with the upsurge of robust and well-funded conservative activism on campuses.

Led by conservatives like David Horowitz, author of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, ultraconservative student groups on campuses around the country have been propped up to combat what they see as the entrenched left-wing radicalism and anti-American thought that dominates academia.

Horowitz’s MacCarthyite witch hunts have gone after the careers of many professors, condemning their “leftist indoctrination” in the classroom. Ironically, this attack on academic freedom by Horowitz and others on the right is seen by them as an effort to defend what they call “academic freedom,” or what others would describe as conservative indoctrination.

Unsurprisingly, the notorious billionaire Koch brothers – known for bankrolling the tea party movement and state-led attacks on public sector workers – are also pushing their right-wing corporate agenda on college campuses. In 2008 the economics department at Florida State University accepted a $1.5 million grant from a Koch-run foundation in exchange for giving Charles Koch the right to essentially conduct ideological screening in selecting professors.

And as Think Progress reported earlier this month, Koch also virtually owns George Mason University in Virginia through grants and think tanks within that school. Koch has poured huge sums of money into West Virginia University, Brown University, Troy University, and Utah State University in order to push conservative curriculum and other projects.

It was against this backdrop that Professors Ancel and Giljum found themselves in the crosshairs of the anti-worker war against academic freedom and labor history.

Two days after the video was posted on Brietbart’s website, Giljum, who also has worked for 27 years as the business agent for the International Operating Engineers Local 148, received a call from the international union president demanding his resignation. Although Giljum was planning to retire in May anyway, he complied and resigned several days before he was set to retire.

As Ancel explained in the interview on Democracy Now!, “We never were teaching violence in the classroom…We were talking about the violence in labor history, which is extreme in the U.S., and we were talking about the fact that, in many situations, there is violence, and it’s mostly directed at the workers.”

Ancel also pointed out the importance of the timing of this attack. The uproar around the professors at the University of Missouri coincided with efforts in the state to push right-to-work bills and other anti-worker legislation.

Indeed, this was not an isolated assault on academic freedom – it was an attack on labor education in the context of the wider offensive against public sector employees.

“I’m a public employee. I work for a public university,” Ancel told Amy Goodman. “The labor education programs throughout the country are almost entirely in public universities. And of course they’re going to attack the most vulnerable parts of those universities.”

Breitbart himself made his intentions clear in April when he announced on Fox News that “We are going to take on education next, go after the teachers and the union organizers.”

This most recent attack in Missouri comes on the heels of another anti-labor effort against academics in March when the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy made requests for the public disclosure of private faculty emails at the Labor Studies Departments at Michigan State University and Wayne State University. The Republican Party in Wisconsin made similar requests regarding labor professors’ emails at the University of Wisconsin. Conservatives were seeking access to emails containing terms such as “Wisconsin,” “Scott Walker,” “collective bargaining,” “rally,” and “union.” Also fitting into this pattern of attacks on labor history are the efforts of Maine’s governor to remove a labor-themed mural in the lobby of Maine’s Department of Labor.

The message of all of these anti-worker campaigns is clear: the right does not only want full ownership of our labor – they want the rights to our collective memory as well.

Knowledge about labor history among students is crucial at a time when heightened attacks on workers and unions are taking place throughout the country, including on college campuses. The vindication of Ancel and Giljum was due in part to the fact that their students organized in their defense, writing letters of support and using other means to pressure the university.

In the midst of the war on labor education, students on campuses throughout the country have been engaged in solidarity struggles with workers at their schools who face brutal working conditions, hostile management and anti-union activity. Over the last two months, student activists – many of whom are affiliated nationally with United Students Against Sweatshops – have staged sit-ins at the University of Washington, Cornell University, the University of Texas, Rutgers University, Emory University, Northeastern University, Tulane University, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University, and the College of William and Mary.

Twenty-five students were arrested after occupying the president’s office at the University of Washington earlier this month; they were demanding that the university end its contract with campus food-services provider Sodexo, a company that has a reputation of worker abuse. Other student-labor solidarity actions since April have taken place at the University of Chicago and at the University of Maryland where revelations have surfaced about rampant worker abuse, including sexual assault, racism, management intimidation and other abuses that have led to campus workers referring to their workplace as “the plantation.”

These campus struggles raise the urgency of protecting and expanding the academy as a place for teaching and learning the history of labor and workers’ struggle in this country. At a time when workers and unions are under attack, budgets for the poor are being slashed and politicians are recruited by Wall Street to safeguard the wealth of a few, our history of class consciousness and militancy is itself a dangerous weapon against the ruling class.

This is why, as we struggle to make our own history now – defending and advancing our rights and power as workers and other oppressed groups – we must defend the academics who are dedicated to teaching the instructive history of past struggle, especially when they are entrapped in the anti-education dragnet of the right.

In  A Peoples History of the United States, the late social justice historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”

Today, there are in fact concerted efforts being made to rob workers of our past. A fight needs to be waged to defend our memory.

Brian Tierney is a labor journalist in Washington, DC. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches, where this article first appeared.

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SPECIAL— BY MARK VALLEN 

Scott-Heron. Severe drug-addiction may have shortened his life considerably.

Gil Scott Heron died on May 27, 2011 at the age of 62. Some obituaries have referred to him as “The Founding Father of Rap”, but as the BBC put it in their coverage of Heron’s passing, “He was quick to reject some of the more grandiose epithets such as the ‘Godfather of rap.’” I think it proper to refer to Heron as a griot. In the traditions of West Africa, a griot is an itinerant musician and storyteller who keeps alive a people’s history through song and poetry. That was certainly Heron’s role in life, and his works had an enormous influence on my generation.

In explaining his artistry, he once said; “For the longest kind of a time, I have felt that people who said that they did not care anything about politics or were not interested in it were making a political statement in and of itself. The new poetry that evolved in our society, concerned the fact that folks wanted to use both words that people could understand, and well as talk about ideas that people could understand.” I shared Heron’s belief that art, in no small sense, sprang from an awareness of the world, and his music was the iconic soundtrack for my life as a politically engaged artist throughout the 1970’s and beyond.

 

Whitey on the moon, a poem set to music that brought attention to the contradictions of spending vast amounts of money on the space race while social and racial inequality festered in America’s urban slums. But the album’s real gem was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a raging spoken word piece set to conga drums that damned America’s commercial media and advertising empires and the somnolent effect they have over a confused population…

“The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.”

Winter In America.

We Beg Your Pardon America, a scathing indictment that lambasted the pardoning of Nixon by Gerald R. Ford – the only U.S. president recognized by official circles not to have been elected. For many of us, the righteousness expressed in Heron’s spoken word piece would be the only semblance of justice to come out of the Watergate fiasco. The album also contained the song, Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman, a still relevant warning to those who believe that a political superhero will come to our rescue.

Free South Africa poster at demonstrations against apartheid rule, protestors chanted a refrain from Heron’s song; “What’s the word – Johannesburg!” (a video of Heron’s live performance of Johannesburg can be viewed on the BBC’s website).

Shut Em Down (1980), the anti-Reagan Re-Ron (1983). Heron’s discography is much too extensive to list here, and I have not even mentioned his most recent recordings; those unfamiliar with his output are urged to take a closer look. His best works will no doubt become eternal, and it is difficult to imagine that there will ever be another Gil Scott Heron – yet times demand that other singer/songwriters step forward to play the role of griot.

MARK VALLEN serves as Arts & Culture editor for The Greanville Post. A well-known visual artist, he makes his home in Los Angeles.

####

RECOMMENDED CITATION:

Mark Vallen, “In Praise of Gil Scott Heron” (www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/2011/05/in-praise-of-gil-scott-heron.html )

– May 28, 2011). This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

______________________________

addendum / BONUS FEATURE

And From The New York Times, no less—
Gil Scott-Heron, Voice of Black Culture, Dies at 62

By BEN SISARIO
Published: May 28, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken
style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in
pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable
voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early
influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He
was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.

His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his
British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an
American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not
immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had
become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had
prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said
in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He
preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions
of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.

Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black
nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late
1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude
and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially
conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down
Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being
sampled by stars like Kanye West.

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil
Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the
leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last
Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical
bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee
and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his
estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.

In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his
work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the
Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100.
Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the
historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote
his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book
of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The
Nigger Factory,” soon followed.

Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned
to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk
at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small
label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by
conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a
full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr.
Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.

“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black
cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized
by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various
stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for
four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture
references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the
gullibly dominated:

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award
Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle
and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the
revolution will not be televised, brother.

During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with
significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult
popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of
the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after
starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at
Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at
Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star
anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”

But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his
recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled
publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been
convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at
Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.

Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of
the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also
horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged
questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile
reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so
troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided
mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr.
Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.

That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy
as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of
addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he
said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you
ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could
watch you die?”

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired
figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was
sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,”
his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by
Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at
Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.

Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather
of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.

“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids,
so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to
the jazz station.”

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By Stephen Lendman

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