THE FORM AND CONTENT apparent below typifies the form and content of future Dispatches, which will also include -- though not today -- some (clearly labeled) short fiction. Meanwhile, my profound gratitude to those readers who remain faithful enough to periodically revisit. Thank you so very very very much!
*****
Posted on CaitlinJohnstone.com in response to:
Tens of Millions Displaced by 'War On Terror'
-- the Greatest Scam Ever Invented
ACTUALLY, MS. JOHNSTONE, the so-called "war on terror" was only one part of "the greatest scam ever invented."
The ultimate "greatest scam" is the endless tsunami of Big Lies that hide the fact "American democracy" is naught but a clever euphemism for zero-tolerance white-supremacist Capitalist dictatorship intent on world conquest perpetuated by unabashed German-Nazi-style ecogenocide.
Anyone
with a lick of sense should know -- indeed should have known from the
beginning -- that the conquest of 13 British colonies by slavemasters
and banksters leading an armed rabble of lynch-mob anarchists would
either soon be crushed by more civilized peoples or be allowed to fester
into precisely what it has become: Global Public Enemy Number One. (To read more of Australian Journalist Johnstone's boldly outspoken international column and the responses to it, go here.)
*****
Newly Enlarged:
"Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity"
...MEANWHILE, MARION BARRY, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly.
But that report too was extensively censored, not by Blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality1 members Steve Wagner2 and Phillip Bacon, each of whom inadvertently revealed their own white-supremacist beliefs by insisting accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would be too much truth for Black readers and would therefore discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.”
In other words -- bottom line -- Moron Nation's meticulously conditioned hatred of the First Amendment had suddenly become as evident on the USian Left as it had always been on the USian Right.
Thus to my eternal regret I allowed the two CORE activists to cut several key passages from my original text. One of the most important disclosures Wagner and Bacon whited-out -- pun intended -- was the word-for-word report on my confrontation with Smith, in which the Nazi-sympathizing publisher/editor had made it clear I would either obey his command and fabricate a dangerously provocative Big Lie describing an interracial sex orgy that never took place, or I would suffer grave but unspecified afflictions in retaliation for my disobedience. Similarly, the two Caucasian CORE activists also suppressed my eyewitness account of the police assault on the Latin American diplomat who was among the party's invited guests. And their anti-First-Amendment fervor exceeded even that of Smith in their near-hysterical insistence no public mention (ever) be made of the post-party attempt on my life -- the incident that arguably confirmed attorney Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid.
Barry allowed these white bourgeois tyrannies only because I suspect he believed -- probably correctly -- such compromise was vital to retain the Caucasian support implicit in the slogan, "Black and White Together." The following, under my own byline, is all that remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it...
(To read the rest, go here.)
*****
The Courage of Our Revolutionary Forebears:
Songs of Human Survival (Spanish Variants)
THAT'S LA PASIONARIA with soldiers at 1:12; Ernest Hemingway at 1:36, clearing the jam of a panic-stricken soldier's Moisna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpYlIdYXIxQ You can tell they're under fire by the obvious tension on Hemingway's face. Look closely; it appears the soldier next to him, fumble-fingered under the terrors of combat, had jammed his clip into the Soviet service-rifle's magazine at the wrong angle, and now Hemingway has snatched it away from him, most likely -- given how in '44 he nearly lost his press credentials for joining a French Resistance take-no-prisoners Nazi-hunt immediately after he went ashore at Normandy --to return fire himself.)
And here is how the same song is sung by those who were there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubToRFKcdY
The above lyrics are a bit different from the version I knew, which the Weavers sang in earlier years:
If you want to drop a line
You must know where you can find me
At the battle of Gandessa
Where the fire tries to blind me...
The second verse, which I seem to have forgotten, describes a restaurant run by fascists:
The third and fourth verses I remember as follows:
At the entrance to the place
Stands a waiter who's a Moor;
He will murmur "enter, enter"
And recite the carte de jour.For the first course of the meal,
They'll serve exploding hand grenades
With a burst of rifle fire
That could send you to your grave...
Alas I have also forgotten the rest. (Save that the Moors -- then as fanatically Islamic as Pius XII was fanatically Nazi -- were commanded by their mullahs to side with Franco, an order most fervently obeyed, just as the Pope commanded all Catholics to support Franco, an order too few dared disobey.)
Here's another song from that war, a poem by the fascist-slain Lorca; scroll (way) down to poster Suat Can Ozcan for English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td6lN_U7Ecs The accompanying photos include at least one image (at 0:35) from the recently recovered work by Gerda Taro, aka "the Little Redhead," Robert Capa's lover who was killed -- run over by a tank in a disordered retreat -- a loss by which Capa is said to have been so devastated, he ever-afterward deliberately courted his own death, which came when he stepped on a landmine while photographing the fighting in Vietnam.
And this, same tune, different words, an anthem adopted by the badass Quinta Brigada (15th Brigade) and later by other units, with more relevant photographs, including Capa's portrait of an obviously war-weary Taro taking a momentary break at 00:39: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHNjKgJ5QM&list=RDZMH_9ODvU2M&index=16
And
another variant on the same song -- again valuable for its visuals --
celebrating the brigade's unusually large contingent of anarchist women:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQgSyUK08Rs&list=RDZMH_9ODvU2M&index=18
(Disclosures: my late father was of course a truly fierce supporter of the Spanish Republic -- another of the activities for which he was forever damned by the feds as "prematurely anti-fascist." Even so, I do not understand the curious intensity of my emotional connection to this event. First time I heard "Battle at Gandessa" -- probably at age 16 -- it not only raised my hair and gave me a powerful chill; it also brought instant tears. For whatever reason, whenever I hear this music after a long absence from it, I am wrenched again by the deadly weight of all our Masters have stolen from us, and again my eyes uncontrollably fill with momentary tears. Though as an agnostic I have dismissed most of my [apparent] recollections of places I've never been and events in which I never participated as nothing more than genetic memory, this -- like my visual comprehension of Russian as an infant -- I cannot so dismiss.)
LB/9 September 2020
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