Politics – Systems – education and deconstruction.com

Angela Davis

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The Book of the Week is “Angela Davis, An Autobiography” by Angela Y. Davis, originally published in 1974. Born in 1944, Davis, who is black, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Through the 1950’s, when black people began moving into the previously white neighborhood where she resided, hostile whites bombed the blacks’ houses; the place was dubbed, “Dynamite Hill.”

Davis became a political activist. Through the 1960’s, the U.S. government and law enforcement felt threatened by her because she was black, female, and a Communist. She moved to West Germany for two years beginning in 1964. However, she was unaware of the then-law that all foreign visitors were required to complete paperwork at the local police station informing the government that they were there. But as an American, she was able to travel to East Germany and return from it, too.

In summer 1967, Davis was at an anti-Vietnam-War protest in San Diego. When pressed, a control-freakish police captain explained why three people in the crowd had been arrested: “As long as you are standing on the sidewalk, you may be considered obstructing pedestrian traffic.” Times have changed somewhat regarding incidents occurring on public streets; video has likely been shot from security cameras, body cams and witnesses’ phones. Yet hatred between certain groups and law enforcement, and distortion by the media haven’t changed. So evidential video footage doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to future incidents.

Davis wrote that there were two unrelated groups in the United States that included the words, “Black Panther.” One was the Political Party, and the other, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, was the “Party for Self Defense.” Davis became a member of the former. She soon became disenchanted with its sexist men who expected her to be a cheerleader and babysitter, rather than an organizer of the group’s events, such as rallies.

When crimes were committed with a gun licensed to Davis, she was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. In autumn 1970, she was extradited from New York state to California to be tried for her alleged crimes.

Read the book to learn of what became of Davis, and much more about her activism, whose goal (at the time of the book’s writing) was to defend her “party, Cuba, the Socialist countries, the World Communist Movement, and the cause of oppressed people across the globe.”

We Were the Future

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The Book of the Week is “We Were the Future, A Memoir of the Kibbutz” by Yael Neeman, published in 2016. Readers might argue that the author and her cohorts were raised in a cult– brainwashed from birth. The kibbutz movement strove for 100% socialism– the economic system in which all the people (not the State) collectively owned everything; and collectively governed themselves.

In 1947, the total population of kibbutzim as a proportion of Israel’s (Jewish) population reached a high of 7%. It waned after Israel achieved sovereignty in 1948. The first half of the 1950’s saw global historical events (the trials of: Prague [1952], the Doctors in the U.S.S.R. and the Rosenbergs in the U.S. [both 1953]) that were jarring to Jews. The kibbutz movement split over ideological disagreements, especially after Stalin died in 1953 and his crimes were revealed in 1956. Adults around the author held zero discussions about this recent history.

Neeman was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Yehiam (founded in 1946) in Western Galilee near the border with Lebanon. Her kibbutz was a branch of Hashomer Hatzair (meaning “Young Guard”), the movement’s umbrella organization that began in 1913. Their motto was, “For Zionism, Socialism and Brotherhood Amongst Nations.” Her children’s group consisted of eight boys and eight girls, who did everything together, every day. She was raised among them by women who collectively took care of the kibbutz’s children grouped by age; she visited with her biological parents, but didn’t live with them in the same building.

The lifestyle encompassed a number of major ideas:

“Family and education in the rest of the industrial world were considered bourgeois institutions.”
“Everyone knew after all, that work [on the kibbutz] was more important than school, more important than anything.”
Egalitarianism for all the people was key– all decisions were made by committee.

Contradictorily:

There was a hierarchical division of labor– upper and lower. The former consisted of high-level positions in the fields and factories; held by the founders of the kibbutz, the (mostly Hungarian) First of May group. The latter consisted of low-skilled, dead-end jobs such as peeling potatoes.
The kibbutz undertook a number of enterprises through the years, including a banana “plantation” which was the most “profitable.” [these words with nuanced meanings were translated from Hebrew, but even so, these were capitalist endeavors.]

Kids whose behavior was troublesome were exiled from the kibbutz, and sent to a “special institution.” At twelve years old, all the conforming kids began to attend what amounted to boarding school, located off the kibbutz campus. They had previously received an eclectic education of hands-on instruction on a myriad of topics. Beginning in adolescence, they were allowed to shape their own education, or lack thereof.

Currently, analogous experiments are underway in American education in which adolescents are placed in front of computer screens with no teachers. Educrats and profiteers expect the software to teach them. At that age, most kids have neither the judgment nor the discipline to acquire the knowledge and skills required for becoming mature, responsible adults who can financially support themselves.

Kibbutzniks were afforded too much freedom and not enough guidance and supervision within their tiny, limited community in their early childhood. So they had a rude awakening when they were permitted (on rare occasions) to see how other kids in the rest of the world lived.

One other interesting factoid: Neeman wrote, “In our biological home, we [she and her three siblings] were already allowed to smoke on Purim when we were in the first grade.”

Read the book to learn about a boatload of other ways Neeman’s upbringing was extremely unconventional due to her fledgling homeland’s exceptionalism.

Shadows and Whispers

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“When I analyzed what passed for his domestic initiatives, it became clear that all of them were rehashings of earlier schemes and none addressed the fundamental problems of the country.”

-the author’s take on Konstantin Chernenko’s rule in 1984

The Book of the Week is “Shadows and Whispers, Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” by Dusko Doder, published in 1986 (prior to the historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight of the collapse of Communism).

As is well known, Soviet leadership in the 1970’s consisted of sick, old men desperately clinging to power. Leonid Brezhnev turned 75 in December 1981. He ordered that school textbooks on twentieth-century Soviet history be rewritten to omit mentions of Stalin and Khrushchev. His own name was featured prominently. He passed away in November 1982. Two possible successors competed to take the vacant top spot. Konstantin Chernenko (a powerful figure in the Communist Party) and Yuri Andropov.

Prior to becoming the Soviet Union’s leader by the end of 1982, Andropov headed the KGB. The KGB’s tentacles consisted of about a half a million James-Bond wannabes– er, uh– operatives, worldwide. They purported to be journalists, diplomats or bureaucrats. Andropov was a reformer who purged the Soviet government of Brezhnev’s corrupt clique. However, he was ill too, and died in February 1984. Then Chernenko got his chance to exercise ultimate power, beating out Mikhail Gorbachev. The latter represented the younger generation, but had to bide his time, as he hadn’t paid his dues.

It wasn’t long– 1985, to be exact– before Gorbachev put his ambitious plans into effect, going further than Andropov to eliminate the “dead wood” from the ranks of Soviet leadership. The Old Guard was incensed at his radical plans.

Read the book to learn much more about the power struggles and personalities that shaped the Soviet Union from the mid-1970’s up until the book’s writing.

The Impossible Takes Longer

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“The materialism here is dreadful, pitiless. To occupy oneself here with anything not directly connected with earning one’s bread, it is necessary to be either very rich or very talented.”

-Chaim Weizmann, commenting on England’s elitist, aristocratic bent– as opposed to France’s and Germany’s more meritocratic bent, at the dawn of the twentieth century

The Book of the Week is “The Impossible Takes Longer, The Memoirs of Vera Weizmann, As Told to David Tutaev” by Vera Weizmann, published in 1967.

This book’s subjects included both Vera and Chaim Weizmann. The latter was best known as the first president of Israel, but he was actually just a figurehead. His Zionism ought to be noted, though. His brand of Zionism harped on the fact that the “wandering Jew” was rejected most everywhere he or she sought refuge from oppression. By the twentieth century, Arabs, on the other hand, could find refuge in many countries which would gladly accept them if there was political turmoil in their homeland.

Vera, one of seven siblings, was born in November 1881 in Rostov, in the former Soviet Union. Chaim, one of ten siblings, was born in November 1874 in western Russia, in the Pale of Settlement.

In late 1932, Chaim delivered a lecture to the leaders of the Jewish community in Germany, raising the alarm on the dangers of Hitler’s rhetoric. Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, already provided a hint of his take on Jews. Chaim sat on various boards of Zionist-related entities. Controversies raged through the 1930’s, among myriad other goings-on, over violence in Germany, violence in Palestine, what to do about refugees, and whether to make Palestine a Jewish homeland.

In 1935, Chaim was pressured to become president again of the World Zionist Organization. He relented, but going in, he knew he would become a scapegoat for the wrongs committed by the British government. Great Britain was in a tough spot, as it wanted Arab oil and to keep control of Palestine, but part of fighting against fascism meant doing the right thing by helping the cause of freedom for all peoples of the world, including Jews.

In 1937, in a speech to the Peel Commission, Weizmann again urged Jews to leave Germany. He was the one who said there were approximately six million of them. At that time, pursuant to the British Mandate, a tiny percentage of them could obtain a certificate allowing them entry to Palestine. Between 1940 and 1944, only about thirty-two thousand people were allowed to move to Palestine.

Vera and Chaim’s Jewish ancestors had been oppressed in their native lands. The two moved to England at the start of the 1900’s to minimize the possibility of their own persecution. In 1900, when Chaim was in his late twenties, he helped found the Jewish National Fund, whose donors bought up land in Palestine for the Jews. Beginning in her late teens, Vera studied in Geneva, Switzerland to be a medical doctor.

Read the book to learn of what became of Vera and Chaim.

John Reed: Witness to Revolution

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The Book of the Week is “John Reed: Witness to Revolution, A Biography” by Tamara Hovey, published in 1975.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, and Bibliography), Reed was born in October 1887 in Portland, Oregon. The beneficiary of white male privilege, he graduated from Harvard, then bummed around Europe, and wrote stories and articles that were published in the magazines of the day; among them: American, Saturday Evening Post, Century, Smart Set, Colliers, and Trend. But he rebelled against the bourgeois values of his social class. The Masses did not pay its contributing writers, but featured short stories that realistically portrayed the struggling masses in America of the 1910’s. Many publications generously compensated their contributing writers, so Reed was able to scratch out a living.

Reed was given a press pass through the years by different publications to cover a few major historical events. In 1913, he wrote human-interest stories through immigrant workers’ eyes after witnessing violent labor trouble at the silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey.

Reed rubbed shoulders with the famous social activists of his generation. Showing their white-savior-complex– in June 1913, he, along with the independently wealthy Mabel Dodge (who owned a stately home on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) and Robert Edmond Jones, staged a pageant whose performers consisted of downtrodden laborers at the old Madison Square Garden. The three served as planner and director, funder and arranger, and set designer, respectively. Their goal was to improve working conditions for the poor. After the pageant, Reed, Dodge and Jones sailed to Europe.

Reed spent four days in New Jersey’s Passaic County jail (whose conditions were very disgusting) in order to write articles that publicized the plight of striking workers who were denied due process. He was unlike journalists at most newspapers, who were puppets of: management (rather than labor), government officials, and law enforcement. Reed physically climbed into the trenches with German soldiers during WWI to get their stories. He then turned into a pacifist.

Read the book to learn what transpired when Reed developed a reputation as a radical (hint: he acquired a press credential from the American Socialist press in August 1917 in order to cover the Russian Revolution).

Sunflower in the Snow

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The Book of the Week is “Sunflower in the Snow, Tales From A Wartime Childhood” by Rachel Patron, published in 2020.

The author was born in January 1936 in Bialystock (in Poland). Her family’s textile-dyeing factory was requisitioned by the Soviets when they occupied their portion of Poland in autumn 1939. The family moved in with extended relatives elsewhere in Poland. In spring 1940, they moved back to Bialystock to their prewar house. But the NKVD requisitioned that, too.

Good news: The family wasn’t sent to a concentration camp. Bad news: The family was sent to Siberia in summer 1941, where they almost froze and starved to death, anyway. Their way of life was turned upside-down, due to all kinds of political, economic, religious and linguistic changes wrought by the War; to name just a few:

After the Germans broke up with the Soviets, the former sought to arrest all Communists and Socialists. The author’s father and much older brother were taken away by the Commissar’s thugs to serve as slave labor, and in the Red Army, respectively.
There was bartering in black markets.
The atheist Soviets canceled Christmas.
The author’s family spoke Yiddish among themselves because the Soviets did not speak it, but they spoke Russian to local officials.

When she was an adolescent, after various long interruptions of her formal education due to the government’s closing of schools for ideological reasons, the author was told she was a Socialist Zionist. This entailed:

atheism, which meant the author didn’t have to observe a kosher diet; and
the Law of Return– automatic citizenship for all Jews around the world after Israel declared its independence in May 1948.

Read the book to learn: more details of the author’s experiences, traumas specific to her family, and what became of them.

The Six Days of Yad-Mordechai – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Six Days of Yad-Mordechai” by M. Larkin, originally published in 1965.

Passionate, mostly Polish Holocaust survivors who were able to make their way to the Gaza Strip in Palestine in late 1943 worked tirelessly to establish a new kibbutz called Yad-Mordechai. The socialistic ideal of their farm collective was this: “Since economic dependence upon the father was what gave him power, such dependence was abolished in their society.”

Still, the community fell short of total gender equality, as the males did the hard manual labor on the infrastructure; an all-male militia except for one female fought against attacking Egyptians, and females did all the food preparation and childcare.

In November 1947, a majority of United Nations (UN) members voted in favor of partitioning Palestine between an Arab state and a Jewish state. The situation was to become official in mid-May 1948, when the British were to withdraw its officials from Palestine. Arab countries broadcast propaganda that gave their fellow tribesmen the impression they were only temporarily evacuating their homes by that same deadline, and would eventually conquer the Jews and return to take over the entire strip of land that was slightly larger than the state of New Jersey.

The Yad Mordechai kibbutz just happened to be located in the Arab state. The Arabs refused to recognize the UN vote, and decided to fight the Jews for the entire territory. The villains of WWII– ex-Nazis and Italian Fascists, plus Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians and Trans-Jordanians fought on behalf of the Arabs. The Jews had poorly equipped militias and intelligence cells called the Hagana, Palmach, Irgun and the Stern group.

Nevertheless, as of this writing, Wikipedia says this kibbutz still exists today, and its population is 737. It might be recalled that pure socialism thrived for a short time when the State of Israel was born. That was an extremely special exception, for the following major reasons; the kibbutzniks:

were forced to work together in order to survive in the desert, geographically surrounded by enemies;

were like-minded– oppressed for their religion– seeking a safe place in the world;

had a common goal bigger than themselves– building a country for themselves from the ground up– creating the political, social and cultural systems and infrastructure when everything was simple and their population was low;

had in common the shared, traumatic experience of WWII and/or the Holocaust; and

had substantial financial and military help from the United States.

Lo and behold, Yad Mordechai has since turned to capitalism to survive, selling certain brands of foods. However, the dangers of capitalism become apparent when financial scandals and crashes plague the nation due to EXCESSIVE DEREGULATION.

As is well known, there was consolidation through the 1980’s and 1990’s of the corporate auditing industry, and “Big Six” became the “Big Four” eventually, prompting businesses across the country to become even more incestuous (corrupt) in their relationships with their auditors.

In 1994, the big-name auditor Ernst & Young fired their in-house legal department and hired outside legal counsel. They must have been hiring employees from the competition, who brought a certain corporate culture to their legal department. In 2002, the Enron / Arthur Andersen scandal broke.

Certain wise folks can see a scandal coming. Like Ernst & Young. They don’t know exactly when it will hit the fan, but they know they don’t want to be there when it happens. James Baker of the Reagan administration was one of those sharp individuals. He switched positions with Donald Regan so that he would be far away when the Iran-Contra scandal became publicized.

In 2019, BB&T, a government bond broker, merged with Sun Trust Banks. Excessive deregulation can do wonders for the bottom lines (when they go hog-wild) of any profit-making organizations in the short term. BUT– it seems as though as the decades pass, financial-industry-players gain more and more experience in preventing lawsuits brought against them from their customers and clients by:

having the latter sign legal documents they never had to sign before, and placing disclaimers galore on all of their communications. The latest disturbing trend is for (previously low-risk) government-bond(!) brokers to do this.

Anyway, read the book to learn of the spirited beginnings, independence-warfare death toll and traumas suffered by the Yad Mordechai kibbutzniks, and their eventual fate. [And stay tuned for more traumas in the government bond market.]

To Change the World

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The Book of the Week is “To Change the World, My Years in Cuba” by Margaret Randall, published in 2009. This volume recounted the author’s brief descriptions of different episodes of her life, and some of the reasons she decided to move to Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua and the United States.

In the 1960’s, the American author wanted to live in a nation that espoused the ideology of Communism, and she thought Cuba might fit the bill. In 1968, as a political activist and journalist, she attended the Cultural Congress of Havana. Beginning that year in Cuba, even in the hotels, there were severe shortages of consumer goods (that Americans took for granted), such as toilet paper.

In January 1969, the author visited again. Billboards sported public service announcements and slogans– similar to those one sees in Asia. The propaganda in the country “…never missed an opportunity to portray the U.S. as a cesspool of drugs and crime.” Cuba’s newspaper “Granma” (not to be confused with “Granta”) printed speeches of party hacks.

However, there was a government-sponsored education initiative to send all kids to school and make the whole populace literate. All the Cuban publishing houses in the 1960’s and 1970’s were Communist-Party-funded and run. But Cubans loved reading and books were affordable. The kinds of books available included Don Quixote, the autobiography of Malcolm X, and Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary. For some years in the 1960’s, magazines were generally permitted to publish dissenting opinions. But in 1971, one University of Havana journal was shut down (and other publishers were harassed) by the Communist Party for criticizing Cuba’s government.

In late December 1969, the author and her family made the move to Cuba. Christmas gifts were given to her four children via a neighborhood lottery. For, the stores lacked sufficient toys or books for everyone. In the early 1990’s, the Cuban Christmas holiday became a religious celebration only, and children got gifts on International Children’s Day in June instead. The author omitted information on how Cuban Jews were treated at holiday time.

Upon arriving, the author’s family was assigned to live in an apartment, through which they received a booklet entitling them to rationed goods when shopping. After a couple of months, because they were foreigners, they were allowed to move into a spacious but fully-furnished, dilapidated apartment (of a wealthy, pre-Revolutionary former Havana resident). Home-improvement items were difficult to acquire. They had termites and roaches that were difficult to eradicate. And worst of all, women were still expected to do most of the shopping, house-cleaning and childcare.

Whenever word got around among personal social contacts of the family, that certain goods such as lettuce or onions would be sold at the local market, there appeared long queues during business hours. Those waiting in line were older relatives who didn’t work. Each person was allowed a quota of eggs and meat on a regular schedule every one to two weeks. The family also received two packages of cigarettes, which they bartered for goods they wanted.

A lot of domestic violence in Havana was prompted by stresses caused by cramped housing– to which native Cubans were assigned. Even divorced couples were forced to continue to cohabitate due to a housing shortage.

Read the book to learn: why the author eventually moved where she did, more about her work, her family and her beliefs. For her, the ideal of Communism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She soon realized that Cuba had a drama queen (in the form of Fidel Castro) for a leader.

Speaking of drama queens, here’s a little song Donald Trump ought to sing at his rallies.

I RANT AND I GET WHAT I WANT

sung to the tune of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” with apologies to the Rolling Stones.

back-up singers:

[My foes-of-the-day give me conniptions.
I trash them all in my notes.
With my Party I make a connection.
At my feet are, a thousand scapegoats.

Yes, I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
And if you try-me for crimes,
I’ll waste your time.
You-won’t get what-you need.]

My foes-of-the-day give me conniptions.
I trash them all in my notes.
With my Party I make a connection.
At my feet are, a thousand scapegoats.

Yes, I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
And if you try-me for crimes,
I’ll waste your time.
You-won’t get what-you need.

I had to greet my fans at my rally,
and give my fair share of abuse
to Big Tech, the media and Joe Biden.
I delight in my propaganda ruse.

I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
And if you try-me for crimes,
I’ll waste your time.
You-won’t get-what you need.

I had to help my, lawyers at the hearing,
just to say your conflict, won’t-fly with me.
I was exercising my Constitutional rights,
and heroically trying to keep this country free.

You’re out to GET me! How dare you? I’m seeing red.
I sung my song to my loyal base.
Yeah, and they said I won the race-for-prez.

I’m so powerful.

I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
And if you try-me for crimes,
I’ll waste your time.
You-won’t get-what you need.

You-won’t get-what you need.

My foes-of-the-day give me conniptions.
In my arsenal is my Party’s war chest.
My rivals use the art of deception.
My victims know I won’t give it a rest.

I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
I rant and I get what I want.
And if you try-me for crimes,
I’ll waste your time,
I’ll waste your time,
you-won’t get-what you need.

The Last Idealist

WARNING: This is a long post.

“They watched him bang away at Berkeley and other campuses, a man nearing eighty-one commanding the attention of student crowds usually scornful of anyone over thirty.”

NOT Bernie Sanders. Norman Thomas.

The Book of the Week is “Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist” by W.A. Swanberg, published in 1976.

Born in November 1884 in Marion, Ohio, Thomas began attending divinity school in 1908, pursuant to his parents’ wish for him to become a Presbyterian reverend, like his father. He espoused the political ideology of a socialist, believing that antisocial behavior could be eliminated if people the world over were provided with a decent standard of living, as there would be no class resentment.

However, Thomas’ marriage to an heiress allowed him to live better than those he aided financially. Initially, the couple lived on an ethnically mixed, high-crime block in East Harlem, among Irish, Jews, Italians and Hungarians. He ministered to parishioners and established social programs at various churches.

Thomas was a charismatic public speaker and a pacifist, keeping busy “eight days a week” with all kinds of political, social and religious groups. He rubbed shoulders with the political influencers of the day, including president Woodrow Wilson. During WWI, he asked the president to refrain from conscripting conscientious objectors– both the devout and those who held sketchy religious beliefs like atheists (and agnostics like himself).

Thomas got in trouble and was forced to resign from his various groups for pacifist speechifying and distribution of pacifist publications (which were censored)– a clear and present danger once America entered WWI. Conscientious objectors and pacifists like himself were getting arrested and jailed. He railed that all Americans had a right to free speech (and later helped found the ACLU); hypocritically, the country was fighting the war in order to combat the fascist Prussians.

Although in 1917 Thomas endorsed the Socialist Party candidate Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City, Thomas actually delayed joining the Party until the end of the war. Hillquit thought Thomas could be instrumental in getting more Gentiles to join, as the New York City chapter was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Both the Socialist and Communist parties ran candidates for mayor even though they knew they would lose. Each hoped to convert the members of the other’s Party to join their own. The socialists’ enemies smeared them all as Bolshevists (though only a few were on the far left fringe), as the Russian Revolution heated up.

In the 1920’s, the ruling class committed a lot of violence against the working class when there occurred labor unrest. The Palmer raids resulted in beatings, arrests and jailings. The government reasoned that violence was a necessary (temporary!) evil in restoring democracy. That was the same thinking of the Communists in America who felt the Soviets were creating the right kind of political system, but that the oppression would eventually cease.

Thomas wisely stayed Socialist through the decades, as he saw that Communists were totalitarian. Nevertheless, he was conflicted, as he took heart in the fact that the Russians fought against Fascism: by aiding the Loyalists in Spain during its civil war, and during WWII. Some American Communists were thrown for a loop after Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939; others, when Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s human rights abuses and atrocities in 1956.

In 1920, New York State Assembly speaker Thaddeus Sweet, a Republican, took the undemocratic action of suspending five New York State Assembly members just for being in the Socialist Party. Their constituents included sixty thousand voters in New York City. The Assembly voted 145-2 to expel them altogether. They were accused of seeking to break up traditional families, being anti-religious, and opposing capitalism.

In 1933, membership in the Socialist Party reached its peak, numbering about nineteen thousand. But those who had been spellbound by the shrewd, entertaining Thomas, began to back FDR instead; the latter began to offer similar social programs and was already president. Many voters thought the evils of capitalism had caused the Great Depression. Others turned to hatred spouted by rabble rousers like Father Coughlin, Hitler and Mussolini.

In the 1930’s, there were heated discussions, debates and decisions that never pleased everyone, between and among all the different factions (Communists, Trotskyites, Old Guard, Militant-Centrist, etc.) in election years and at political conventions. Up until 1936, they used various communications outlets to spread their gospel: the Rand School, the Jewish Daily Forward, a radio station, publications like the New Leader, and a summer camp.

In 1940, the American Labor Party favored FDR, who supported capitalism and war. Thomas acted as a spoiler, as he was still an anti-capitalist and pacifist. He bristled at Britain’s colonialism in India. Jews in New York City felt the need to fight Hitler, so their allegiance lay with FDR, especially after December 1941.

Arguably, Thomas engaged in hypocrisy in his choosing to ally with the Nazi-friendly Charles Lindbergh, but only because the latter wanted America to stay out of the war. Lindbergh, and Joseph P. Kennedy were the kinds of individuals who attached themselves to Hitler because they thought Germany would win the war. That way, in the end, they’d be on the winning side. They would get the spoils. Fortunately, on WWII, they guessed wrong.

Fast forward to spring 1960. After the U-2 incident, Thomas wrote, “… in the widely played game of peacetime espionage, we lie and cheat like the rest of them– only better, we now boast, because of our technical skill. In the anarchy of sovereign nations there are no morals, there is no crime, except to be caught.”

In summer 1963, Thomas, a Princeton University graduate, got his article published in the alumni magazine. He expressed his dismay that the school received a bit more than half (!) of its total budget from federal grants. He wanted to know what proportion of those were made on behalf of the Pentagon. No word on whether anyone answered him. Later, Thomas was bothered that the younger generation was rooting for the NLF and the Vietcong rather than trying to lobby LBJ to stop the Vietnam War. He advised them to wash, instead of burn, the American flag.

In the mid to late 1960’s, Thomas was able to push his causes because his articles were printed in the national, high-circulation Life and Playboy and Esquire magazines; he also did TV interviews with highly rated shows. Unfortunately, publicity is only a small ingredient that is part of the planning process in getting people to adopt causes. Thomas, even with all his popularity, lacked the other ingredients on and off during the entire course of his career: funding and executing (actually getting elected to office).

Read the book to learn of the numerous elective offices for which Thomas ran as a Socialist and his adventures in connection therewith globally: speaking, publishing and socializing with diplomats; of the details of decades-long Socialist Party infighting; the shocking revelation that came to light about the CIA in 1967; and much, much more.

ENDNOTE: This blogger would like to clarify once and for all, what characterizes a few different economic and political systems.

First:

With SOCIALISM, the people collectively own entities, and share and share alike. These can be profit-seeking businesses. The government can own entities that provide essential services, that should not be profit-seeking (but some of their subcontractors are, anyway), such as libraries, welfare, healthcare, early childhood education, infrastructure, and social programs.

With COMMUNISM, the government owns profit-seeking entities (businesses) in whole or in part (as in the former Soviet Union and China). So yes, these include public-private partnerships in which there are clearly outrageous conflicts of interest that result in patronage and profiteering. So, arguably, the former Soviet Union and China have both Socialism and Communism to a large degree.

Also, see a bunch of this blog’s posts: Wikinomics, Here At the New Yorker (beginning with the 9th paragraph), Street Without A Name, Against the Grain, Crossing the River, and Patriot Number One. Lastly, see a bunch of excerpts from this blog’s posts:

Klima got a job with a construction crew [in Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s], where he got his first taste of socialism in action. “No one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence.” The government was stealing the economic surplus from the people. That was why corruption came into play. He was pressured into joining, surprise, surprise, the Communist Party. He said, “I was stunned by how the environment bubbled over with rancor, continual suspicion, malicious gossip, and personnel screening.”

Fast forward to 2007. Dubai’s small population of about a million citizens (mostly royal family members) allowed the government to adopt a socialist policy of generous entitlements, including an average annual $55,000 in stimulus money, and low-cost or no-cost: cooling of their lavish homes, car-fuel, food, education, healthcare, and water.

In late 1993, mayor Chirac [in Paris, France]– a socialist at heart– agreed to start a (no-charge) ambulance service for the homeless in Paris. By 1995, via the city council, against the wishes of the socialist (federal) government, he provided free medical care to 150,000 homeless people.

In the early 1920’s, “After 2 decades of debate and agitation, the rise and fall of Populist, Progressive and Socialist parties…” and lots of labor unrest, there was general consensus between government and American business “… that the role of government was not to supersede or control the corporation, but to legalize and legitimize it by regulating its excesses.” [As is well known, capitalism flourished until the late 1920’s.]

Because East Germany was a police state with a socialist mentality, the people availed themselves of a free university education. Merkel got hers, as well as a doctorate in nuclear physics. In exchange, she was required to work for the government for a specific period.

They examined democratic, autocratic and socialistic models of leadership. The most mature group was found in the first model. The second spawned a form of Nazism. The third model’s group members displayed resentment of lazy and non-cooperative individuals.

Although Communism preaches godlessness, the supervising Soviet government [in East Germany] allowed some religious activity among the local citizens. Merkel’s family was spied on by the Stasi- the secret police. It was cost-effective and efficient. For, all the socially dangerous elements (potential subversives) were in one place.

For four decades, Czechoslovakians forced to live under Communism had been told everything was great. In January 1990, Havel truthfully told his countrymen that the nation was in an economically, infrastructurally, environmentally and ethically horrible state. The younger generation who had been born into the Soviet mentality– unless they were dissidents– were obedient robots. So converting people to a capitalist, liberated, honest way of thinking was very difficult.

Blakely thought that bringing capitalism to them [Siberian people] would be a good thing. However, they soon developed an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Once they were made of aware of their severe deprivation by the media and increased their connections with the rest of the world, they became depressed. Previously, they had been happy due to their ignorance of how materially poor they were.

After the Korean War, the Communist Party of North Korea oppressed business owners– who were considered evil capitalists, but praised farmers and peasants– who were considered virtuous; they served the Party. Adults were forced to attend self-criticism meetings every Saturday morning. The meeting leaders punished them by making them stand up against the wall while others stared at them. Around the time she started school, Jang and her mother went to a theater for the first time. They saw a movie written by their fearless leader, Kim il-sung. Of course, it ended happily because the peasants conquered the landlords.

Once in power [in 2000, Communist] Putin actually kick-started the Russian economy by nationalizing oil companies, and taking control of the gas industry and television.

In order for any native (Chinese) to prevail at a journalism career, joining the Communist Party was mandatory. This involved attending Party conferences on some weekends.

Under Vladimir Lenin in 1918 Russia, “The very notion of pleasure from flavorful food was reviled as capitalist degeneracy.” Millions died of starvation under [Communist] Stalin in 1927 when he took over the means of grain production.

It examines the issue of whether Berlusconi practiced Fascism, not necessarily through creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, but through monopolistically broadcasting propaganda in the guise of education, to the masses. He combined his business dealings with politics to amass a staggering amount of power, with the usual conflicts of interest that come with the territory.

He [Charles Koch] became a convert to it [Libertarianism] in its most extreme form. It espouses the belief that a purely capitalist society is the best economic system. This means total deregulation, no entitlements such as government-administered retirement or medical plans, no unions, no socialism of any kind, no income tax, and a government whose role is only to protect citizens and property from each other and outsiders, and from fraud. As a result of their political mentality, Charles and David could have cared less about the environmental destruction and wrongful deaths their company caused due to poorly maintained oil and gas pipelines. Perhaps to salve his conscience, David made huge donations to cultural institutions, especially in New York City. The liberals (hypocritically) gratefully accepted the money, notwithstanding David’s political activities that led to rack and ruin.

In the early 1990’s, [Soviet] leader Boris Yeltsin became a convert of [Jeffrey] Sachs. The result was mass corruption. On the other hand, this has helped the United States and other nations with already evolved [mostly] capitalist systems to maintain their economic dominance in the world. This blogger is not saying such a goal is right or wrong, but merely suggesting that this might have been Sachs’ goal.

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Loyalties – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Loyalties, A Son’s Memoir” by Carl Bernstein, published in 1989.

Born in 1944 in the D.C. area, the author suffered the anguish of having parents who believed in Communism and were punished for it. They celebrated the following holidays: Passover, May Day, Paris Commune Day, July Fourth, and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution– October Division.

In March 1947, president Harry Truman signed the “Loyalty Order” which was a law that required all government employees take the Loyalty Oath. The Oath treated people as though they were already guilty, for starters.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was secretly feeding Truman information (which would help him get reelected in 1948) on his political enemies in exchange for enforcing the Loyalty Order. As is well known, Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy had whipped up a false frenzy of fear that lots of people who believed in Communism were plotting to overthrow the American government. So part of the excuse Truman could use for terrorizing (mostly wrongly accused) Americans, was that they were members of a political party (Communist) that was illegal.

The author asserted that Hoover’s real motive in holding hearings (from 1948 to 1950) in connection with people who refused to take the Loyalty Oath (different and separate from HUAC’s hearings) was to eliminate the government union– whose members were the accused. Such progressive community organizers were fighting for civil rights, etc. They were a bee in Hoover’s bonnet. The hearings trampled on due process in a variety of ways, a few of which included:

the accused weren’t told whom their accusers were (the finger-pointers remained anonymous) and the latter weren’t allowed to be confronted, either;

the accused weren’t allowed to have an attorney present; and

the accusation alone served as evidence (!)– no proof was needed for the accused to be subjected to punishment meted out by the Loyalty Review Board, an FBI committee.

Read the book to learn of the ideological tenor of the times that shaped the social circles of the author’s parents–their trials and tribulations, and the emotional trouble these caused the author.