Past in Present Tense with Murray Polner

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“This book”—“Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War” (0R Books)—opens with author Raymond Bonner explaining, “is about turmoil and revolution and the United States response. Though the focus is on the caldron in a country called El Salvador, the issues are broad, with parallels from the past and lessons—it is hoped—for the future”

For most of the nineteen eighties a savage civil war was fought in El Salvador, one of the poorest and most repressive nations in the hemisphere. Its government was supported diplomatically, economically, and militarily by the United States, which believed the rebels were communists. It was also a war that was bitterly contested in the US, where bruising battles between left and right were raged in politically sectarian magazines and by an assortment of pundits.

And so it went for twelve bloodthirsty years, when the Reagan administration, bolstered by neoconservatives in Washington and New York, often dismissed or covered up crimes such as the murder and rapes of four Catholic churchwomen, the killing of five Jesuit priests, their maid and her daughter, as well as the massacre of hundreds of peasants in the village of El Mozote by the American-trained and armed Atlacatl Battalion.

At war’s end, about 75,000 Salvadorans were dead, tens of thousands had fled north for safety, and as the Truth for El Salvador Commission reported in 1993, “The government forces were responsible for eighty-five percent of the atrocities and human rights abuses.”

Bonner, a longtime NY Times and New Yorker correspondent, was one of two intrepid reporters (Alma Guillermoprieto, then of the Washington Post and now of the New Yorker was the other) who were the first to tell the story of the El Mozote mass murders, when some 900 residents of the small village of El Mozote, were butchered by the Salvadoran army in December 1981. When their reports appeared the two reporters’ were disparaged as leftwing propagandists by backers of US policy.

Having learned little or nothing from the Vietnam debacle, the US read the earlier coming of the leftwing Sandinistas in Nicaragua as the start of yet another version of the “domino theory” and thus a threat to America’s absolute control of the Western Hemisphere. It involved as well the Catholic Church’s many practitioners of “liberation theology” with its emphasis on the impoverished and tyrannized, which was seen as a threat by the Salvadoran government’s moneyed and controlling elite.

Bonner’s necessary if one-sided book is replete with barely-concealed rage. About Mozote, “the men were blindfolded, taken away in small groups of four and five, and shot. Women were raped. …. 280 were children under fourteen years old.” Meanwhile, Washington assured Congress that the Salvadoran government was making progress in improving its human rights practices, a statement flatly denied by Amnesty International, Americas Watch and the admirable US Ambassador Robert E. White, who was fired after Reagan took office.

While Carter was a lame duck, the bodies of the four Catholic churchwomen — one of them a lay missionary engaged to be married—were found on December 4, 1980. The murders drew much greater attention to the “Dirty War,” as critics dubbed it, its military death squads, and the role of Roberto D’Aubuisson of the ultra-right Arena Party, who Ambassador White labeled “a pathological killer,” and was probably responsible for planning the assassination of Archbishop Romero and the Jesuit priests. D’Aubuisson died in 1992 of cancer at age 48 before he could be charged. Last year, Pope Francis said the Archbishop had died for a righteous cause and would be beatified, the last stage before sainthood.

“Top administration officials, even the President [Reagan] himself, gave tacit approval to the ineffective actions by the [Salvadoran] military high command against the fascist commanders, the death squad leaders,” writes Bonner, adding that Reagan, on C-Span, once blamed some of the death squad executions on leftwing rebels.

One of the President’s most important supporter was Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose article “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in Commentary, the prominent neoconservative magazine, was widely praised by backers of the American role. She argued that Carter’s emphasis on human rights rather than national interests had helped oust friendly regimes in Nicaragua and in Iran. Moreover, while “authoritarian” regimes could change, “totalitarian” regimes could not.

It was Kirkpatrick who, writes Bonner, “slandered” the dead churchwomen in saying, “They weren’t just nuns. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente” –the country’s leftwing coalition of rebels groups.

In this updated version of his earlier book on the subject, Bonner includes an illuminating epilogue about an American Foreign Service officer, H. Carl Gettinger, who outed the murderers and rapists of the churchwomen. The courageous Gettinger, a young, low-ranking, embassy official who would go on to receive the State Department’s highest award in 1982 for “creative dissent,” broke the story after he was approached by a knowledgeable Salvadoran officer and taped his information which named names. Larry Rohter of the NY Times then interviewed four of the men mentioned on the tape and wrote a Page 0ne story headed “Four Salvadorans Say They Killed U.S. Nuns on Orders of the Military.”

Years after, a high Salvadoran official living comfortably in Florida was found by a US Immigration judge to have “assisted or otherwise participated” in the murders of Archbishop Romero, the four American churchwomen and the mass killings at El Mozote. The same judge ruled that a second former Salvadoran official, also a Florida resident, had “assisted or otherwise participated” in the deaths of the churchwomen and in the practice of torture. In 2015, the two men were sent back to El Salvador, all the while protesting they had been American allies in the war against communism.

“It was all true,” writes Bonner.”The two men had been carrying out American policy, had been praised and feted by American officials, had been welcomed at the White House” and then makes his crucial point: “No American official has been held to account for the crimes committed by the American- backed governments in El Salvador or for the deceit emanating from Washington.”

But that’s the way it’s been since Vietnam. Our many misadventures have caused irreparable harm to ourselves and others yet we remain paralyzed, unable to change course.

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Contributing Editor, Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored with Jim O’Grady, “Disarmed and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ” We Who Dared to Say No to War.” He is the senior book review editor for the History News Network.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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=By= Thomas Baldwin

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]elcome Leap Year 2016 – an initiative to dramatically address climate change. It was started in Canada, but is morphing into a global movement. It has the backing of movement luminaries such as Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis (This Changes Everything), and Bill McKibben (350.org), and sponsored by Rabble.ca.leapyear2016.org. Check out this YouTube Hangout for the full low down.

Activists Heads Up for a very important new effort for progressive activists. Watch this recording of Leap Year 2016 which was produced today–February 5. It is very worthwhile and shows the incredible leadership given by Naomi Klein and her associates on organizing “progressives” of common purpose around the climate change issue.  No more small steps for the climate and economic justice movement: now is the time to leap. Check out Leap Year 2016.

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THE LEAP MANIFESTO

“We start from the premise that Canada is facing the deepest crisis in recent memory.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future.

These facts are all the more jarring because they depart so dramatically from our stated values: respect for Indigenous rights, internationalism, human rights, diversity, and environmental stewardship.

 

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Thomas Baldwin has a Ph.D. in Physics, an MBA (Management), and a lifetime experience in teaching and training with later emphasis on Leadership, Team Development, Organizational Development, and ownership of small businesses. For the last few years, in his “retirement” he has focused on writing blogs and posting articles on the internet related to political and socioeconomic concerns. He has three blog sites on WordPress: Proactive Activists Voice (focusing primarily on national issues), Proactive Voice Activists– Mississippi Edition (focusing primarily on MS issues), and his own personal blog site, Doctom2010’s Blog. He resides in Biloxi, MS and can be reached at doctom2010@yahoo.com.

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=By= Gaither Stewart

“Telling the truth is always revolutionary.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday I visited the tomb of Antonio Gramsci in the Poets’ Cemetery in Rome, a final resting place for artists, poets, writers and illustrious foreigners and lovers of Italy. January 22 is the birthday of the Italian professional revolutionary and founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. An inconspicuous urn resting in the center of the mound contains the ashes of the philosopher and Marxist thinker. The tombstone bears only his name and his dates—1891-1937. Fresh red flowers indicate that the site is regularly tended.

I visited the tomb of Gramsci also because I wanted to speak of the man who in my mind is most representative of the better side of tormented twentieth century Italy, an advocate of a new social-political-economic structure and a major figure in shaping progressive thought from the early XX century.

I wanted to speak of Gramsci because the Italy that many people love continues to be threatened by a contagious right-wing populism. Since the demise of the Italian Communist Party in 1991 and in the wake of successive right, center-right and center governments often led by populists, Italy has experienced depths of reaction and wishy-washy governments that would cause Gramsci’s progressive spirit to wing its way to other worlds.

The figure of Antonio Gramsci is emblematic of the profound dichotomy between progress and reaction that has marked much of Europe since the end of the nineteenth century. The Marxist Gramsci would have ambivalent feelings about his neighbors in the Poets’ Cemetery: lying near him are dozens of “White Russian exiles,” whose culture was dedicated to maintaining the hegemony of the Russian upper class over the masses, which Gramsci opposed. They were the adversaries of the Bolshevik revolution in Tsarist Russia in 1917, which Gramsci supported.

On the other hand, Gramsci must have had sympathy for the progressive English poets, John Keats and Percy Byshe Shelley, who lie under two pines in a distant corner of the same cemetery. Keats (“I saw pale kings, and princes too” from his La Belle Dame san merci) wrote, as Gramsci must have at some point, “I am ambitious to do the world some good.”

Keats arrived in Rome a sick man—as Gramsci was all his life—and died at age twenty-six after choosing the Poets’ Cemetery for his resting place. Shelley, who preferred “painful pleasures to easier ones”, also lived his last years in Italy where he died in a Mediterranean storm near Lerici and joined his friend Keats a year later.

As much as he appreciated their culture and admired Keats’ universal words, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Antonio Gramsci, did not worship all the names of the Western literary canon because, he believed, there was usually an unacceptable ideology involved in their canonization. In his Selections from the Prison Notebooks he writes of the difficulty of intellectuals to be free of the dominant social group (the major problem of western intellectuals today and especially in the USA!); he was mistrustful of the esprit de corps and the compromises running through the Italian and European intellectual community of his times.

While poetry, for example, in the Anglophone world has often remained distant from the political world in the popular belief that “poetry does not count”, in the world at large poets have often led the charge against colonialism, imperialism and fascism: like Martì in Cuba, Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, Federico Garcìa Lorca in Spain, Paul Eluard in France, Quasimodo in Italy, Pablo Neruda in Chile.

Poetry can and does fuel free-thinking and democratic strivings. The poet is an intellectual in Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci’s sense: “Non-intellectuals do not exist,” he writes, because “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.” Gramsci suggests that activism, not only eloquence, is a determining principle of the intellectual’s function “as constructor, organizer, permanent persuader, and not just a simple orator.”

Born in Sardinia, Gramsci moved to Turin in 1913. At the university there he came into contact with the strong Socialist movement. He was then a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its head the year after. He was elected to Parliament in 1923. Three years later he was arrested by the Fascist police and spent most of the rest of his life in prison.

Like most great men Gramsci hoped to change the world. His point of departure was the Marxist idea that everything in life is determined by capital. The class that controls capital is the dominant class. The capitalist class formulates its ideology to secure its control—or in Gramscian language, its hegemony—over the people. Class struggle results when the people try to change the rules and take power.

The task of intellectuals is to lead and act politically in order to change the world. “Let men be judged by what they do, not what they say.”

The Marxist Gramsci knew nothing of Lenin until 1917 and Lenin probably only learned of Gramsci when he founded the Italian Communist Party and while he was in Moscow. In any case, Leninism was only one ingredient in Gramsci’s theory for social change. While Leninism is now largely history, many of Gramsci’s contributions to Socialist thought are intact: the intellectual pursuit and culture.

Though Gramsci was interested in political action and believed in the necessity of a political movement, in his thinking revolutionary violence is not the only path to challenge the hegemony of the capitalist class. Though a revolutionary, not a pacifist, he did not advocate a Leninist totalitarian world outlook.

Gramsci amended Marx’s conviction that social development originates only from the economic structure. His distinction of culture was a major advance for radical thought, and it still holds today. His point was and is: although culture does not lead social change, it is just a step behind.

The Italian Marxist recognized that political freedom is a requisite for culture; if religious or political fanaticism suppresses the society, art will not flower. To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb to the allures and/or the coercion of the reigning system. For that reason most artists, like Keats and Shelly, are countercurrent. That is also why artists should stay far away from the White House or the Elysées Palace.

Gramsci like other Marxists insisted on the role of intellectuals to lead the way toward reform. Gramsci believed that mass media, the instrument used by the dominant class to spread its hegemony, can also be used to counter that hegemony. Throughout the world today we see the confrontation—still unequal—between establishment media on the one side and the spread of alternative media on the other: independent publishers and filmmakers and the free “alternative” press.

 

 

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

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=By= Matt Meyer, Natalie Jeffers and David Ragland

The triple-threat crisis of racism, militarism and materialism continues to define the American empire: unprecedented levels of racially-biased incarceration, increasingly disempowering and divided educational systems based on race and class, and statistics which show that Blacks are 9 times more likely to be killed by police. Despite a President (in an extraordinary act of self-denial) proclaiming in his final major address that there is no Black America, the evidence suggests that we are living in a particularly dangerous period of time, particularly if you are or know a young person of African descent.

2015 was not only a year of fear, brutality and injustice, it was a year of sustained resistance that honoured not only a strong national Black radical politics of organising, but also helped cultivate a new and thriving, nonviolent international movement for Black Liberation. As we enter 2016, the Movement for Black Lives must navigate itself in uncharted territory and hazardous spaces, but is accompanied by a vigourous knowledge of self, a thriving and committed community of activists and organizers who are cognizant of the need for guiding principles and the creation of a Black Radical national policy platform.

The Movement is malleable – to be shaped and reshaped depending on the needs of both specific moments and long-term, community-based goals. At the core will remain three essential demands: divestment from racist systems and investment in Black communities; community self-control and community-centered decision making; and the creation of alternative Institutions and radical spaces which express and reflect one’s right to live freely. These principles are inspired by a re-imagination of what it means to build radical democracy, laid down by a generation of youth organisers like Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, Kwame Ture and Angela Davis, and so many others.

It is fitting that on Dr. King’s 2016 birthday weekend, an intergenerational, intersectional movement of Black radicals and their allies are collectively organising to reclaim the moment, using MLK’s tools of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action to launch a “Year of Resistance and Resilience.” Coordinated actions taken across the US and the world will ensure that this birthday weekend is understood as a time for visible resistance to current injustices, not simply celebratory affirmations of past victories.

Building an Affirmation

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks as human, and an affirmation of our contributions to society, humanity, resilience, and resistance in the face of deadly oppression.

At the root of this movement is a critique of violence. At times this past year, it seemed that the empire commonly known as the USA has rarely been so divided. Alongside of the social divisions, however, it seems that the rising new movements may, at last, be in the process of uniting different struggles working across the many landscapes of oppression, and uniting philosophical approaches too often used to divide us.

The current movement emerging from the Ferguson uprising, #BlackLivesMatter and other Black Liberation formations have learned from the leader-focused movements of the past not to rely on single, charismatic, too-often-male leaders that centralize, mainstream or silo organizational life, principles or culture(s). Nevertheless, even though some youth organisers will say “This Ain’t Yo Daddy’s Civil Rights Movement,” the philosophical specter of past generations echo through modern debates about strategy and tactics. These include real differences of styles and preferences, including the efficacy of reform versus radical demands, the power of mass civil resistance and nonviolence versus the legitimacy and need for armed self-defense, and the different roles which solidarity and alliance-building can take. This differences, however, have too often been posited as do-or-die dichotomies, falsely suggesting that there is only one path to effective and lasting social change.

X Vs Jr

The images of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Minister Malcolm X are rolled out by the movement and their critics in equal measure. They swiftly and elegantly deliver historical visions which slot conveniently into particular, not-always accurate, not-often-useful, historical narratives. One is the Pro-Violence and Revolutionary, the other is Pacifist and Reformist.

We are too often instructed to forget the intersections where their actions, movements and messages met, and there is good reason why we are distracted from connecting these dots: to connect is to find new meaning in cooperation and collaboration between organising groups. Yet, there is much evidence we can draw from that bridge the gap between Martin and Malcolm, including one bright, smiling, brotherly, moment captured when the two men met and shook hands across the divides of their times. That moment – with two men committed to both racial justice and human rights for all, committed to an internationalism which understood the US empire and the struggle of Black folks in a global context, committed to an understanding that tactical differences should never stand in the way of principled unity – beckons us to a 21^st Century imperative.

We must REFUSE TO CHOOSE between Martin and Malcolm. This time is our time to reimagine and practice revolutionary nonviolence.

Rejecting and Accepting the Past

While rejecting the representation of two myopic heteronormative male narratives of liberation, Malcolm and Martin offer a recognizable context to begin a critical conversation about what our Black liberation past has inspired, and what popular culture can diminish.

Scholarship and common sense have already laid down most of what we need to know. As each of those two giants engaged with the world outside the U.S. borders, they grew in understanding that the problem of the “Black” world within the U.S. could not be solved merely through U.S. legislative or political remedies, nor through a single ideological or tactical approach. They clearly understood that the reforms of their earlier days would not be sufficient in ridding the U.S. or the world of white supremacy which lay at its very foundation; a revolution – whether of values or of arms or of a combined social resistance – would be needed for true emancipation on a Global, diasporic scale.

There is, of course, a dualism here which we shouldn’t simply avoid: armed and nonviolent approaches suggest different types of tactical considerations with likely different results. Missing, though, in almost all past tactical debates, but present in the #BlackLivesMatter movement is the creation of spaces that develop a revolutionary and militant nonviolence mindset and discipline, borne of highly organized mass civil disobedience and resistant direct actions to “shut down and completely disrupt ‘Business as Usual’, dismantle racist systems, and transform institutions through acts of self-determination and reparations.

Most historians agree that Malcolm and Martin were killed for beginning to make transnational, strategic, and philosophical connections, and that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program which hunted them both continues to this day, though in different names and forms. It continues to seek to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of all those struggling for Black liberation.

The US National security state went to outright war against the Black Panthers, their allies, and others who came after, but the spirit of the Panthers marches strong in the minds and on the t-shirts of youth organisers bearing such slogans as “Assata Taught Me.” It is also in the present, intergenerational radical learning spaces created to facilitate dialogue with the elders of past struggles.

By anchoring to the traditions of Black radical politics, the movement builders of today refuse to perpetuate the continued assassination of Dr. King, burying him in a soft-focused, nostalgic and “dreamy” 1963. We refuse to end King’s story with “I Have a Dream,” as if he never was a young radical who was imprisoned, beaten and discredited, as if he never grew into a powerful movement leader defying many advisors and funders by speaking out sharply against the war in Vietnam and in favor of economic justice for all. We refuse to go along with state-sponsored attempts to bury Black radicals behind bars as US political prisoners, or in exile with bounties on their heads, and so spotlight the words – sent from Cuba – of Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur. Her most recent writing implores us to remember that “this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting… the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace…r/evolution is love.”

In August 1963, as hundreds of thousands were marching on Washington DC to assert that “jobs and freedom” were still necessary for the descendants of enslaved Africans one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, Martin declared that America had offered Black folks “a bad check,” one marked “insufficient funds” in the areas of liberty and justice. On that day, when Malcolm was suggesting that the march itself was a sell-out, a conscious person wanting to take action would have had to make a logistical choice: to go to DC or stay home. A few months later, in Malcolm’s “Message to the Grassroots,” he clarified his differences with the civil rights leadership, and sharpened his own definition of revolution. “The Black revolution,” he stated, “is world-wide in scope and in nature. The Black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, rearing its head in Latin America…Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way…Revolution is based on land.”

More than fifty years since those thunderous messages, we no longer need to make a choice. The mainstream history textbooks would like to freeze-frame Martin in 1963, having his dream and nothing more. They would like to cut Malcolm out altogether, or else freeze him in some internal extremist, Muslim-based, fratricidal debacle. Martin came closer to Malcolm in his concern for what might be described as reparations or redistribution of wealth. Malcolm’s attempt to take the US to the United Nations for its violation of human rights offers a glimpse into his strategic, peaceful, coalition thinking, similar to King’s gathering of international support and cross-movement, interfaith work.

New Moments, Nuances, New Movements

Theologian James Cone taught us to look beyond the white-washed images of Malcolm-versus-Martin. Student activist Ashoka Jegroo told us that today’s movements need not dichotomize those men as opposing sentinels. Charles Cobb and Akinyele Umoja and Sally Bermanzohn and others have provided detailed works showing the nuances involved in the real movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, suggesting that today we can and must go beyond false dichotomies.

In 2016, we must do more than simply acknowledge that we need not choose between Martin and Malcolm. To be effective, we must actively engage in the texts of Baldwin and Fanon; Dellinger and Braden; Lee-Boggs, Butler and Lorde; as well as hooks and Abu-Jamal and West. We must learn from a diasporic history of resistance and rebellion, from Haiti, Trinidad and Jamaica; Ghana, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique; Chile, Costa Rica, and Brazil; India, East Timor, and Vietnam, and – yes – the streets of San Juan and Brixton. We must interweave, interconnect and intersect nuanced arguments, achievements and concerns, and be willing to critique and challenge one another as we reimagine society and explore our universe for new suns.

There is much debate about what makes for effective and transformative movement-building – on local, national, or transnational scales. This much at least, from the last half-century of history, seems clear: a merger of ideological and technical thinking will be needed, along with full access to and (re)distribution of all natural, material, and human resources. A revolutionary nonviolent praxis will require:

*A combination of reform and more radical measures, leading up to fully transformative and lasting change;

*A multiplicity of intersectional strategy and tactics that expand what we consider as nonviolence;

*A disciplined understanding and preparation for the fact that casualties and bloodshed occur in all revolutions, and that militarism on the part of revolutionaries is always a costly error;

*Massive training for mass organising between social, economic, political and environmental movements, by imaginative, creative, resistance-oriented means;

*Concrete, grassroots constructive programs, that seek to build new societies and alternative institutions, and that invest in Black communities and the communities of other historically oppressed peoples and nations;

*Explicit programs to eradicate white supremacy and hetero-normative patriarchy, with the goal of liberation for all people;

This is not to say that the U.S. today, despite the ebullient mood on some campuses, is – to use a favorite phrase of Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichel) – “ready for revolution.” It IS to say that radicals today, across different struggles and movements, might do well to step carefully around the dividing lines of past decades. We must find intersections and opportunities that exist in these new spaces, building unity where our elders could not. As the U.S. empire shows growing signs of decline, lashing out and closing ranks at anything beyond the 1% ruling elite, opportunities for radical change – as well as for vicious backlash and repression – will emerge with growing frequency. Let us not allow our people’s movements to be divided, co-opted, or conquered – especially not along historic fault lines so clearly set up to divide and conquer us.

Liberation educator Paulo Freire noted that “violence is the tool of the master,” and feminist poet Audre Lorde reminded us that “You cannot dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools” So, let us reimagine new ways to build a society where Black people can live freely and dream, and let’s find, as Barbara Deming implored, “equilibrium” in our revolutionary process.

Constantly the hegemonic status quo re-equips to co-opt, capture, and destroy our dissent. Today’s movements must not seek to be “brought into the fold.” The fold can only hold a few, and we no longer want the morphine of acceptance. Let us speak Truth to Empire, like the people of Ferguson and like U.S. political prisoners have been trying to do. It is time to refuse to fight our grandfather’s battles, and refuse to be limited by unnecessary past choices and false dichotomies.

It is time to build power, unite, and win!

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Matt Meyer is coordinator of the War Resisters’ International Africa Support Network, and serves as a representative of the International Peace Research Association at the UN; he is a New York City-based author and educator, locally affiliated with the Resistance in Brooklyn collective. Natalie Jeffers is the founder/director of Matters of the Earth, a global social justice organisation that places creative, innovative tools into hands to educate and empower people in organising, strengthening and building movements. She is a London-based activist with the Black Lives Matter movement. David Ragland is a co- founder/co-director of the Truth Telling Project based in Ferguson, MO, and assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College. He is also a Board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association

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Revolutionary Pen

=By= Gaither Stewart

The short biography: Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario in western Argentina on June 14, 1928 of well-to-do, leftwing parents, the oldest of five children, He died in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39. His family moved to Buenos Aires when he was 17. He learned chess from his father of Irish heritage, read from the family of library of 3000 books and was home-schooled by his radical mother. He read Pablo Neruda, John (I want to do the world some good) Keats, Walt Whitman, Jack London, Federico Lorca, Faulkner, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Marx, Engels, Lenin and many Latin American writers. He studied medicine and motorcycled through much of Latin America. He studied Marxism also while in the youth brigades in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz leftwing government before it was crushed by a CIA-organized coup d’état. In 1955 he joined Fidel Castro in Mexico where the Cubans began calling him el Che because of his constant use of the common Argentinean interjection, Che, that means something like Hey! Or, Eh? Argentineans use the interjection so often that other Latin Americans sometimes use the word for a man from Argentina. In effect, “Che” Guevara came to imply also something like “our comrade from Argentina.”. Despite their contrasting personalities he and Fidel formed a “revolutionary friendship to change the world”, which expressed their common desire. He sailed with the Castro brothers and Cienfuegos on the Granma to Cuba where they overthrew the corrupt Batista regime—the four who made the Cuban Revolution. Twelve years later, as a commander of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded, captured and executed by a Bolivian soldier on orders from the CIA.

CHE GUEVARA – A HERO OF OUR TIMES?

Some accommodating persons believe that there are more heroes in life than we imagine. Sophistic claim! Which I doubt. It depends on what qualities constitute a hero, which in my opinion include a consistent state of bravery, dedication and above all commitment to an ideal to which the person gives his or her life.

Superhuman requirements. Perhaps the real hero is still a figure of myth as in the ancient Greeks when the heroic was divine and there was no clear distinction between super humans and the gods.

More reductively we should speak of the heroic actions of which people are capable at certain moments, under particular emergency conditions. Heroic acts may be spontaneous and instinctive, or acts of desperation triggered by fear, or a one-time display of human decency or duty to dive into a raging river to save the life of a child. However, as often the case, the heroic action may be an ego-driven and temporary urge to perform an act of bravado, a pose for show. Sorry for that! In a way I hate that affirmation.

But then some solace! For there are those precious few persons so obsessed by a positive idea that they dedicate their entire (often) short lives to one idea in the most heroic of fashions. Lenin is an example: his life was the Russian Revolution … and he changed the world. Ernesto Guevara’s obsession was world revolution against imperialism. Neither family—parents, wives and children—nor even the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro succeeded in deviating el Che, the man from Argentina, from that one objective: revolution against imperialism.

So the real HERO does not exist only in myth.

While living in Buenos Aires in 2007 I acquired a book by the Argentinean journalist, Julia Constenla, Che Guevara, la vida en juego (Che Guevara, Life At Stake). Moved by her first acquaintance with Ernesto Guevara that lasted several days at a conference of the Interamerican Economic and Social Council in Punta del Este, Uruguay in August of 1961 and a lifelong friendship with Ernesto’s mother, Celia, the Argentine writer offers new materials about the Latin American revolutionary’s extraordinary life. Her three hundred-page biography is illustrated with hundreds of photos, letters, papers and drawings, many of which had never before been published, of the man who became el Che. The documentation for the book plus videos were then shown in an exhibit in the Centro Cultural of the Buenos Aires barrio of Recoleta in 2007 near my residence.

There is Ernesto in the video and photographs, the newborn child in his mother’s arms in Rosario in 1928, his features already recognizable. There he is on his bike traveling through South America; there he is with wives and children, with his companions, then, there is a victorious Che in Cuba, a defeated Che in the Congo, riding on donkeys with his rifle in his arms, and there he is reading, writing, revolutionizing. And there he is, at the end, a prisoner, weak, dirty and wounded, in La Higuera, Bolivia. He is about to be executed. And then, there he is, Ernesto Guevara, el Che, dead.

Posters hanging on the walls of youth of the world testify that Ernesto Che Guevara is widely considered a hero of our times. A profound explanation of the universal appeal and impact of this single Argentinean is found in the words of Jean Paul Sartre that “Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age.”

I have long wondered what took place in some brain cell of that young Argentinean, Ernesto, to transform him into the man of action who became the idol of generations of world youth. For if he had not become a revolutionary, he would most certainly become a great writer.

Let’s see: he arrived from the provinces to the metropolis of Buenos Aires, a handsome, smart young guy, both John Keats and Karl Marx in his head, who wanted to make good, to make a mark, to leave a footprint. He wanted to divest himself of everything provincial and to distinguish himself in the world at large. But such considerations are reductive, in fact not even applicable for a man who wanted the whole world.

From Buenos Aires he wandered off with a friend on their bikes and ended up in Guatemala at the time the small country was experimenting with Socialism under Jacobo Arbenz. And his life began to change.

Here I turn to Wikipedia for details: Elected President in 1950, Arbenz’s modest policies of land reform and other social measures like eliminating brutal labor practices, displeased the United Fruit Company and the U.S. government who considered it Communism. In 1952 President Truman approved a CIA plan to bring down the Arbenz government. The operation was aborted because it became too public.

Then President Eisenhower, elected that year on a platform of a harder line against Communism, authorized another CIA coup d’état (John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles in the lead) with an invasion, bombings of Guatemala City and psychological warfare. Arbenz resigned and the United Fruit Company and the CIA won. That coup reinforced Guevara’s anti-imperialistic instincts.

Those events had a galvanizing effect on the 22-year old Ernesto Guevara, prompting him to move up to Mexico City to the north where he joined up with Fidel Castro, only two years older than him.

Now Ernesto was helping to make a real revolution. He was one of its leaders. He walked the streets of Mexico City, a still rather provincial city, nothing like the Buenos Aires he had left, but it was another world capital to add to his “captured places”. A place to spend his personal ambition (he was still emerging from the distant provinces of Argentina) and at the same time to fight the Yankee imperialists.

The Cuban revolutionaries, Fidel and Raul Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos, took to calling him Che, the Argentinean comrade. He began smoking his symbolic cigar and adopted his famous beret with the red star. Perhaps he was still speaking in his Argentinean accent while learning the rapid fire Cuban of the revolutionaries; they were all heroic young men about to change the political landscape of all of Latin America.

In an article in the leftwing Buenos Aires daily, Pagina 12, Julia Constenla described her personal meetings with Ernesto Guevara across the Rio de la Plata in plush Punta Del Este in Uruguay where she was covering that conference organized by U.S. President Kennedy “to discipline the Latin American continent.” Though Cuba was not to have been invited, after complex diplomatic maneuvers, Che (by then a Cuban citizen) arrived to represent Cuba. Also Guevara’s parents came and they lived in the house of the journalist Constenla. There began her days together with Ernesto Guevara and his parents.

“I was not aware that I was involved in world history but only with one of the Barbudos of the Cuban Revolution. They had been in power two years in Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara. For days I had meals with Ernesto, interviewed him, conversed with him. He was very self-sure, with an extraordinary capacity to go straight to the point, had an acid irony, and was very seductive: when he entered the conference room everything centered on him.”

The journalist-writer says that by the mid-seventies, after Che’s death and the establishment of the dictatorship in Argentina, she realized he was one of the most important persons of the XX century. “He went down in history as the best our century could produce. In Mexico and in the mountains of Cuba, Ernesto became the famous Che.

“Before, he was a young Argentinean, brave, generous, intelligent and politicized, but not yet el Che. I see in him a level of commitment greater than I’ve ever known.” The video shown at the exhibit of him in Cuba shows a man constantly among the masses, talking, explaining, working. Electrifying speeches that many of us leftists dream of pronouncing ourselves. A man of the new state of Cuba who traveled to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung, met Nehru in India, Khruschev in the USSR.

“After his defeat in the Congo he could have returned to Cuba for a comfortable life of work and study; instead he chose to go to Bolivia. His level of commitment is incomparable. Therefore people who believe they are followers of Guevara because they have a poster of him sicken me.”

The Constenla biography denies the rumored rupture between Fidel and Che as the reason he went to Bolivia, labeling such charges as propaganda to denigrate the Cuban Revolution. She says that Che Guevara always recognized Fidel Castro as the chief. Castro on the other hand gave him the most important assignments. Though Castro did not agree with Che’s adventures in the Congo and Bolivia, he accepted his ideas.

Constenla also rejects the idea of Guevara’s suicide at the end: “He was in Bolivia to win or to die!” He lost. She recalled the strange coincidence that some eighteen people—Bolivians and others—involved in Che’s almost certain assassination died soon after in still unexplained circumstances.

Since Italy and Argentina are considered cousins because of the huge Italian immigration there, the Italian Left has strong feelings for the figure of Che Guevara. The Italian journalist Gianni Minà did a major interview with Castro back in 1987, which regularly resurfaces when news concerns Castro, especially since the Leader’s retirement.

In that long interview of many hours spread over several days Minà concentrated on the figure of Che Guevara and his revolutionary vocation. Castro stressed el Che’s altruism, his determination, his impulsiveness and his fear that the revolution in Latin America against imperialism would end like the others.

About Guevara the man, Castro recalled that when they were in Mexico together, Ernesto, despite his asthma, was determined to scale the gigantic Popocateptl peak near Mexico City. He never succeeded but he never gave up.

Che Guevara believed above all in the exportation of the revolution. And for him Bolivia was a stepping-stone back to his native Argentina. First Bolivia, then Argentina. As usual his foresight was striking. The explosive year of 1968 was just around the corner and Che Guevara was to be its symbol.

Now again today Leftists consider Bolivia a key to the future of a democratic Latin America. Readers might be aware that the socio-political movement of miners and peasants headed by Bolivian President Evo Morales emerged from the resistance that el Che had furthered forty years earlier.

Some political observers credit Che Guevara for transforming the Cuban nationalist Castro into the Latin American revolutionary he became. (Romantic thought!) Maybe it is true. For on every occasion Che’s slogan was ‘resistance to imperialism’. He must have hammered that idea into Castro’s head.

At the time of the great escalation in Vietnam in 1964-66, Guevara created the phrase of universal resistance: “Create two, three, many Vietnams,” a slogan that reverberated in Germany in the minds of the “terrorists” of the Red Army Faktion, and from there to the Red Brigades in Italy.

In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” the then newly formed Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a paper written before leaving Cuba for Bolivia, then published in April 1967 in the organization’s magazine Tricontinental, under the title “Create two, three…many Vietnams, that is the watchword,” Che wrote:

“How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!”

Che’s credo was, “Any nation’s victory against imperialism is our victory, as any defeat is also our defeat.”

Among Ernesto Guevara’s many epiphanies on the road to world revolution was that of “guerrilla warfare”. Resistance, resistance and again resistance. Guerrilla warfare was the shortcut to the victory of Socialism and the birth of the New Man. He must have first seen the light after the CIA crushed the Arbenz revolutionary government in Guatemala. Like Saul on the road to Tarsus, his eyes were opened and he became a revolutionary.

Maybe he left Cuba and a life of ease for Bolivia because his vision was broader in scope than that of Castro. In fact, he had never belonged exclusively to Cuba. From Guatemala to Mexico City, from Cuba to the Congo, East Europe, Asia, his vision became universal. In Algiers, nine years after the CIA coup in Guatemala, in his last recorded major speech he criticized the Soviet Union and socialists countries for doing too little to help developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa and for not supplying arms to the poor to rise up against their oppressors.

Shortly afterwards he left Cuba for Bolivia, where he died. Twelve, 12, only twelve fast years had passed since he experienced the CIA coup in Guatemala. That may have been the catalyst for his dedication to world revolution: he was a young leftwing university graduate looking for adventure before; he was a revolutionist afterwards.

Protest and resistance are major phenomena of the modern age, part of contemporary vocabulary. Though often linked together, they are not the same thing. In rich Europe and United States we are familiar with protest against injustice. Protest can be easy and immediately rewarding. But you can protest, then go back home to comfort and ease.

Resistance, as indicated by the dean of Argentine writers, Ernesto Sabato, against all-pervasive power, against the system that stands behind injustice, requires commitment. Resistance and commitment like Che Guevara’s are difficult, a hard way of life. His kind of resistance demands your life; its price is high.

Che Guevara was not a saint. He condemned to death traitors of the Cuban Revolution, according to his belief that in a revolution “you either win or you die.” And he allegedly once said that if the Soviet missiles installed in Cuba were under Cuban command they would have been directed to American cities.

True or not, that shows the stuff Ernesto Guevara was made of. And it underlines his belief in resistance and the revolution. Che Guevara did not become a model for the IRA in Ireland and other European leftwing terrorists as well as for Islamic fundamentalists because of saintliness. Revolution was not a tea party for el Che.

His real legacy was his own life. Most photographs of him show the man of action. Handsome like the photo above, intelligent, writer, doctor, political leader and revolutionary, traveling on his Homerian odyssey through all of Latin America and the Third World.

Movements of resistance, rebellion, revolt and revolution have always been rich in slogans and rituals and symbols that are more powerful and unifying than speeches: the red flag and the hammer and sickle mean resistance. A revolutionary movement needs symbols reflecting its ideology. The Cuban Revolution itself is such a symbol for resistance against imperialism everywhere. Che Guevara himself is a symbol. Since no movement is political without an ideology, we do not mistreat our symbols. They encourage the vanguard and work wonders on the people. The Internationale anthem stirs our emotions. Every society makes some objects sacred—totems, animal images, gods, holy books, flags, or even concepts such as freedom or democracy. Rituals bond members of the society. Symbols inspire devotion and loyalty among those who identify with them.

Ernesto’s beret with the red star and his eternal cigar gave vigor to the Cuban Revolution and linked it to world revolution.

As a result of my Buenos Aires experience and my love for Argentina’s great writers like Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Borges, I try to imagine what the conservative Borges might have said about his fellow countryman, Ernesto Guevara. He would have been curious and intrigued as he was about the Buenos Aires underworld but I wonder if the effete intellectual Borges would have been able to consider Che Guevara a hero of our times. …

Yet, yet, yet, just as I have wondered about Ernesto, who knows what ticked in that huge bourgeois brain of Borges. Both of them, at the end, had their sights set on Argentina and their ways might just have come together, arriving from totally different directions. I like to hope so.

 

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.