An unrecognised hero / Library snooping / Mission Statement muses

An unrecognised hero

What should be the attitude of Lefts to 'heros'? I think the word should have a restricted currency; to me it’s usually someone who risks their life to undertake a worthy task.

Like that ten year old girl who, long ago, ran back to try and get her sister out of that burning flat on a estate near me. She died with her younger sibling, arm in arm.

And whilst singers, writers and the like have their place, it’s only their end product that I may admire. I have never seen them as 'heros'. And why even bother reading an article about, say, a musician when you could listen to their music instead?

I find artists and the like generally often have no more than maybe four songs, three books or two films in them anyway. Dying in their 20s is the most sensible career option for many.

Those people that I do have the most time for are political activists - communists, of course. Many of those that I would list as people to be admired (although rarely as 'heroes') would be very familiar names, although many have never been known other than to their closet comrades - such as those who died defending the Bavarian communist revolution or strikers shot down by the Pinkertons in 20th century USA - and many others.

I’m also wary about making lists of people that I like, or even heroes. Things change over time. And I also think that sometimes we may invent, or project things, onto such people to fill our own gaps.

More heros?

I’ve always had time for Victor Serge. I’ve bought and read many of his books and I have even thought, on two separate occasions, after reading his 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' that it was the most interesting book that I had ever read.

But that was a long time ago. Does he deserve a place in the socialist Pantheon or is it that his reputation meets a particular need?

Serge was originally an anarchist. I have always had more time for some class struggle anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists than for many Trots. (Like those Trots from the Committee for a Marxist International whose Greek section has been fulminating about the 'hooligan' and 'anarchist' elements leading the current disturbances there - who the hell do they think started things going? It is also obvious to the best anarchists, without being patronisingly lectured by the CMI et al, that this movement will fail without the wider involvement of workers.)

Serge was an internationalist with a trans-national life. He stood firm against Stalinism and paid the price but he also made some apt criticisms of Trotsky. So he can be the perfect instrument on which to place our reservations about Lenin and Trotsky (such as Kronstadt), as well as our condemnation of Stalin, but whilst still remaining rock hard defenders of the revolution, advocates of communism and scourges of backsliders. I fear this may now be the purpose of Serge and there are others who fill similar gaps.

But what was Serge the man like? Would we have agreed with him on other things? Would he have made an interesting companion and a solid comrade? In the absence of evidence otherwise, I would presume that he would but it is wrong to think you could ever know just how he was. Was he a hero?

Unrecognised hero

Serge will make many a list of Left 'heroes' but there’s one figure that never gets a mention in any Left list of notables. In fact I don’t recall him ever seeing him being written about in a Left context, or as a Left. But he undoubtedly was a communist and he also meets my definition of a ‘hero’ as well. That missing name is Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald wrote to the Socialist Party of America, aged 15, as a "Marxist" asking for info. The photograph above, from March 1963, shows him holding copies of the publications, 'Militant' (US SWP) and 'The Worker' (CPUSA). He read Marx when young and joined the Young People's Socialist League. He later told a friend that his involvement in politics dated back to reading a pamphlet about the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In summer 1963, Oswald distributed leaflets for the (US SWP) sponsored, pro-revolution, 'Fair Play for Cuba Committee'.

The Warren Commission (which investigated JFK’s assassination in 1964) said Oswald attempted, in April 1963, to kill retired Major General Edwin Anderson Walker. The general was an extreme right-winger, a member of the John Birch society and an anti-communist. He was relieved of his command for distributing right-wing literature to his troops.

Oswald's wife is reported to have said to him about that incident, 'I mean how dare you to go and claim somebody's life, and he said "Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time? So if you don't know about General Walker, how can you speak up on his behalf?." Because he told me... he was something equal to what he called him a fascist."

Oswald was though also a Marine from age 17 until his defection to the USSR aged 19. He stayed there for four years.

In Minsk, Belaraus he is said to have written the following in his diary; it vaguely reads to me like the thoughts of communist disillusioned with Stalinism. -

"The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself! It has turned itself into the tradional lever of a foreign power to overthrow the government of the United States; not in the name of freedom or high ideals, but in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union and in anticipation of Soviet Russia's complete domination of the American continent."

"There can be no sympathy for those who have turned the idea of communism into a vile curse to western man. The Soviets have committed crimes unsurpassed even by their early day capitalist counterparts, the imprisonment of their own peoples, with the mass extermination so typical of Stalin, and the individual surpresstion and regimentation under Krushehev. The deportations, the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia, the murder of history, the prositution of art and culture."


Life - simpler than some think

Now of course some will say that Oswald wasn’t what he seemed, or even that he didn’t kill Kennedy. Just about all the facts that I have written about him here are disputed by someone, including the photo above that some say was faked. (All the information I write here is derived from www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk and www.wikipedia.org, with checks made elsewhere to ensure that these facts are generally agreed.)

Such inaccuracies in the record would, of course, be likely to change my view of him - especially if he was an agent of reactionaries, or if his Left record is a state smear, but I always think life is more straightforward than people think.

I remember once watching a 'serious' TV documentary - so serious that it convinced a couple of gullible 'Trots' that I was sat with watching it - that 'proved' that Kennedy was killed by the Corsican mafia.

You can just imagine the agenda of their planning meeting in Ajaccio -

- Item 16: Liaison with farmers about olive oil adulteration.
- Item 17: Whip round for village square Xmas trees.
- Item 18: Assassination of US president.

A review in the latest Lobster magazine of a new book ("It’s one of the most important books on the subject in the last decade") - 'JFK and the Unspeakable' by James W Douglass - claims that there was a Oswald double in the cinema where he was arrested and that this person was later seen in a car with switched plates that belonged to a friend of J. D. Tippit (the cop Oswald killed shortly after JFK and for whose murder he was arrested in the cinema). This friend was also a contractor for CIA boats smuggling guns into Cuba!

Maybe the 70s 'French Connection' was the result of said boatman later fleeing the Corsican mafia to Marseilles and there setting up heroin importing with the CIA, the New York mob and the Illuminati?

In fact I wonder whether I have spotted a book opening. I mean there have been thousands (or is it tens of thousands?)of books about the JFK assassination, like the thoughts of someone who was married to the barber who cut Oswald’s hair when he was a kid or analyses of bus tickets that Oswald may have used in the weeks leading up to the assassination. I am confident I pass that bar.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee is reported as being set up by the US SWP; an ostensibly Trotskyist organisation (although other reports say it was set up, as a trap, by the FBI or the CIA). Oswald unilaterally set up a branch of it in New Orleans and then sent guest membership cards to Gus Hall and Ben Davis, two leading figures in the CPUSA.

To expect these two figures, in the 'official' (or 'Stalinist') Left, to join a Trot lead organisation would only be contemplated by a political naïf and Oswald, with his long experience with the Left, would not have been that.

I don’t know what the meaning of this apparent contradiction is but I feel quite sure that I could pad it all out to a book, maybe by tying it in with all sorts of stuff about the early 60s US far Left which could be written up to have some sort of faint relevance. Book publishers (or film producers), with a fat advance only, are invited to contact me.

The synopsis I once read about another volume on the JFK killing, called 'Case Closed', sums up my view. ('Case Closed' - All the theories are just guff to sell books and I prove why. Oswald shot JFK and that’s it.)

JFK, the liberal?

Of course liberals mourn Kennedy but then liberals can be very stupid.

Memo: Obama to liberals (and even a few 'Trots') - Did you see how right wing my cabinet is? You cried at my victory; are you sobbing now, for real, you saps?

JFK threatened nuclear war, supported an invasion of Cuba, supported the Ba’athist revolution in Iraq (where the new regime used a CIA supplied list to massacre Lefts) and, most murderously of all, sent 16,000 military 'advisors' and Special Forces into Vietnam and also agreed to the use there of free-fire zones, napalm, defoliants and jets.

Like the (true) Vietnamese heroes in the resistance, just maybe Kennedy got to learn, if only momentarily as his brain exited towards Jackie’s coat, about the awesome power of US weaponry and military force.

The communist

The Lobster book review makes a pertinent point, "In discussing the assassination, the most striking feature of those who propagate the official 'lone, crazed, assassin' line is the omission of the crucial, wider issue of motive?"

I think that’s right. But I think the motive is very likely to be very straightforward. Oswald killed JFK because the president was a murderous scumbag and Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist hero.

Or as the Warren Commission stated, "his commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation (for killing Kennedy)."

It could be argued that Oswald should have realised that there are 'no short cuts to revolution' or reds should concentrate on being active in their trade union or that 'patient socialist propaganda work is the way forward'. In fact, I’m sure every identikit Trot would argue this. But then 'Oswald as a Left' has never occurred to any of them before.

Maybe Oswald just thought - 'Fuck this, I can see 50 years hence and nothing’s fundamentally changed. Let’s just take out one of the bastards.'

And don’t you wish that Iraqi had something other than shoes to throw, whilst exclaiming 'This is a farewell from the Iraqi people, you dog!' at war criminal Bush in Baghdad today?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Library snooping

Thinking about reserving a book about Islamism in your local library? Using the Internet there to research a student project about hardcore Greens? Maybe you should think again.

The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals has surveyed some of its members in the light of them having "received a number of reports concerning increased police or other security agency activity with regard to libraries and their users."

They go on to say "The results of the questionnaire have revealed that libraries are experiencing legitimate police and security agency activity."

"One library was asked to supply details of what Muslim patrons were reading. Another turned down a request for websites visited by library member as it was perceived to be a 'fishing expedition'."

"Earlier in the year we had reports of Special Branch officers visiting our individual libraries to introduce themselves and to encourage staff to report any suspicious behaviour on the part of customers directly to them, particularly if it involved terrorism, political extremism and animal rights."

"Only recent involvement with the police has been an enquiry from them about our policies and guidelines for internet use. The officer enquiring spoke to one of my colleagues and said his particular interest was extremist religious sites. He asked that we contacted him direct with any incidences of this nature, should we ever get any."

It would appear clear, from the above responses, that libraries are keeping records of the websites visited by each user.

I have commentated before that when web access was first introduced in libraries, the system was that you would just put down any name on a list to book a time to access the Internet but this has changed so that now you need to be registered and use your library card to get on the web in a library.

I speculated that the introduction of this new system was to be enable records to be kept of the sites you visit - the new system doesn’t give advantages over the previous one for the library or for its users, in fact it’s more hassle for all. This speculation would appear ("turned down a request for websites visited") to be confirmed.

Indeed libraries seem quite happy with these arrangements - "We have found the police to be entirely considerate and helpful on each occasion and have had no cause to question the procedures they have followed." Yes, officer; no, officer; three bags full, officer. Can I tell you who has being taking out the 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' as well, please, officer?

These procedures will be called something like 'local service providers in a joined up, multi-agency approach to community safety' or other such spiel. Communists call it police snooping, added and abetted by the council.

Did it ever occur to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals body to ask why they are doing this, and should they be doing this, instead of just pondering how frequently the cops do tap them for info?

(Prompted by a reference to the report in 'Lobster' 56, Winter 2008/2009.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mission Statement muses

I have had to spend too long going through 'mission statements' and other corporate twaddle. I have even, for my sins, written some. Whilst ploughing through this treacle, I have thought many things and have started having visions such has been my utter boredom - but I have never seen the beauty that lies therein.

But Nick Astbury, has managed this and gone beyond that which is immediately apparent. He has seen the poetry in the proprietary prose and has produced some verse from the texts.

I like his reworking of corporate statements from Lastminute -

You’ve got that dreamy look on your face.
You want to career down a mountainside
in a perspex ball: shake up the days,
dazzle the world with your escapades.
You wake up here, in a shabby career,
in a perspex ball, not travelling at all.

And from KPMG -

I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.
I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.
I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.
What am I?
I am the best.