LITTLE RED FIRECRACKER - ELECTRIC ______________________________________________ Little Red Firecracker 6666 Odana Road #371 Madison, WI 53719 E-mail MEONION@aol.com or David W Fields@macline.fullfeed.com all contents * 1994 little red firecracker, all rights revert to authors upon publication _______________________________________________________ Welcome to Little Red Firecracker, Electric! Little Red Firecracker is still in print, for any of you subscribers out there, but will not be out until the end of February. All folks who want to submit articles, art, comics, reviews, and so forth, feel free to e-mail it to me, or to send to the above address! The electric version of little red firecracker will consist mostly of reprinted articles for the enjoyment and pleasure of all that use Usenet, and subscribe to alt.zines. __________________________________________________________________ Editorial Sizzles by David Fields After two "explorations" here at last is the real "little red firecracker"! What is little red firecracker? Originally, when I started doing this, firecracker was no more than a one sheet hand out with a small, satirical article by me, and a couple of reprinted political cartoons. Not much, but it was fun for me to make, and my friends enjoyed the little "magazine". After looking at the state (or lack) of progressive commentary, humor, satire, poetry, etc. I decided to attempt to expand on my idea, and make a try for a "real" magazine. (Actually, what you see is what you get, and if you want to call this a "real magazine" that's your privilege.) We make no pretensions about being a great magazine. Instead, we promise to try to publish the best progressive material that comes across our desk. One question that I'm sure is on some people's minds is "what did little red firecracker mean when they said 'no politically correct jargon, please' in their Factsheet Five advertisement?" I don't look at "PC" the same as the right wing does. What we are trying to avoid is making people, look stupid, uncaring, selfish, and so forth because they do not hold the same views as we do (I'm talking about Joe Lunchpail here, not George Bush). Let's face it, the media is a pretty powerful tool, and that's where most of us get our education about the peace movement, labor, gay rights, left-wing parties, community organizations, and so forth. It's up to us to educate those folks, and we aren't going to do it by spitting on them or what they love best. So, if you have a problem with Joe Lunchpail going home from work, opening up a Budweiser, and turning on to the latest Redskins game because: a) the man should be at the latest peace rally, on your side, listening to Professor Lovejoy speaking about the horrors of war or b) the Redskins football team has a racist name or c) the National Football League is a multi million dollar corporation, and you don't cater to capitalists, and Joe shouldn't either or d) Mr. Lunchpail is a white, heterosexual male jerk, and he is immediately suspect, or ...(get the picture?) If that's the way you think about Mr. Lunchpail, this magazine probably isn't for you. If you look at Joe Lunchpail as your friend, or as someone that could be your friend or as someone that is decent, hard-working and deserving of our respect, then this is going to be an interesting trip. The challenge with Mr. Lunchpail is: how do we get him on our side? If you think you got the answer to that, or think you have an idea why it's difficult to convince people like Mr. Lunchpail to look at the problems of our country with progressive eyes, and want to submit an article (serious or satirical), poetry, cartoon, artwork or whatever, we'll be happy to hear from you. __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, tr. George Shriver, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 903, np (app. $20 pb). In one of his poems Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin's camps, labeled Stalin a monster. Roy Medvedev absolutely confirms, with horrifying detail and substantiation, the accuracy of Mandelstam's verdict of Stalin. This book needs to be considered essential reading for those interested in the history of this century as it has been influenced by the USSR. It should also be considered essential for those interested in understanding the process by which the principles of socialism were distorted and expropriated by Stalin for his personal dictatorship. One reason this book appeals to me is that its author is not opposed to socialism-- I am therefore provided some assurance of its fairness in evaluating the topic of Stalin's dominion. In fact, if the book has a singular fault, it is Mevedev's need to substantiate his assertions sometimes with an abundance of evidence that surpasses the requirements of reasonable proof. On the other hand, Medvedev is well aware of those instances and issues of controversy that haunt the history of Stalinism and at such times he provides the reader with the rationale and evidence to support his conclusions, often times excerpting the evidence or testimony for the reader to evaluate directly. One has the feeling that this book is an argument against many previous erroneous conclusions, written for the benefit of historians as much as the average reader. In fact, there are times when Medvedev seems to assume that the reader is necessarily familiar with the events. Medvedev's apparent sensitivity to previous claims about Stalin only provides me with more belief in his fairness toward his topic. The extent of Stalin's crimes have yet to be admitted and absolutely condemned by official organs of many Left parties. This reluctance to condemn Stalinism and refute its tactics is terribly harmful to the cause of socialism. However, I have no difficulty in concluding from this book that Stalin was a major criminal and an enemy against socialism. It is not without reason that Mussolini admired him. A conservative estimate suggests that in a two year period, 1937-1938 two thirds of a million people were executed (455). By 1939, 110 of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected in the 1934 Seventeenth Party Congress were executed (396). "Between 1936 and 1939 more than 1 million members were expelled from the party. Under the conditions of the time such expulsion almost always meant arrest. To this number should be added the 1.1 million expelled in the purges of 1933-34, most of whom were also arrested." (449). Stalin systematically attacked the veterans of the revolution, the party membership, the cadre of the Red Army, and finally the population at large. Short of the military campaign by which Hitler attempted to conquer the USSR, no one could have destroyed more socialists and done more damage to socialism than Stalin, and given the recent collapse of the USSR, which we must remember was built on a Stalinist foundation, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that Stalin destroyed the socialist revolution initially guided by Lenin, whose writings are not in agreement with the undemocratic tactics Stalin implemented under his name. It is clear that if socialism is going to be advanced as a viable answer to the brutalities of capitalism, which need no elaboration, its advocates must simultaneously refute undemocratic, and particularly Stalinist, tactics and instead come to trust the class such advocates purport to represent. To that end, this book is an education. -Dale Jacobson Paul Laraque, Camourade, Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1988, pp. 124, $9.95 pb. Paul Laraque was born in Haiti in 1920. His poetry speaks of the poverty and political oppression as deeply as it speaks of the potentials of love, as we can see suggested in the marriage of the two words "amour" and "comrade" in the title. His language might seem difficult at times to a U.S. audience, with its roots in the tradition of surrealism, a movement in poetry that never really took hold in our language, at least in the "recognized" culture. And yet, if we can look beyond Williams' insistence upon a limited kind of concrete language, and if we can allow our dream-mind to make associations through these poems, Laraque's language can startle us awake to a camaraderie, as the title suggests, that is deep within us even if it is contradicted by the political realities of our world. Regardless of those realities, Laraque recognizes this deeper, if future, reality waiting to be born: "dawn rises/in the look of our children." These poems, influenced by the great French poet Paul Eluard, continually invoke a haunting imagined world, in Blake's sense, more real than our "objective" political one. "I announce the dawn/where every black torch will become a red torch." - Dale Jacobson Rogue Dalton, Miguel Marmol, trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaff, 1987. Pp. 503, $19.95 cloth, $12.95 paper. (Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson Street, Willimantic, Connecticut 06226). This book is history as it should be written, the testimony of one who participated in shaping it, whose words are written out and given narrative vitality by someone who understands history as the struggle between the producing but exploited class and the profiting parasitic class. The writer is Roque Dalton, whose poetry is widely known (when I asked Yevtushenko during his visit to Grand Forks about Dalton, he acclaimed him as a great poet). Dalton, who joined the Communist Party in 1955, was himself active in the People's Revolutionary Army in El Salvador. He was assassinated by an extremist faction in 1975. This book is the story of Miguel Marmol, born in 1905, who was one of the organizing communists of the valiant, but disastrous 1032 insurrection in El Salvador, who never ceased his commitment to the socialist cause in Central America, which to him is one cultural entity, one nation artificially "cut up into five pieces by exploitive interests" (478). I mention this passing comment of his to provide a deeper understanding to the interest the U.S. government (with congressional acquiescence had in overthrowing the revolution in Nicaragua, a full half a century after the failed insurrection in El Salvador, whose then dictator Martinez the U.S. fully supported. If Central America is not technically one nation, U.S. policy toward it seems to consistently treat it as such. Mermol often traveled between Guatemala and El Salvador and "fought in both countries as if they were one"(478). However, such boundaries are available to the U.S. in its argument that revolution is fomented by foreign insurgents, a charge that becomes absurdly hypocritical when we consider the distance U.S. forces have traveled for purposes of counter-revolution. Marmol was twelve years old at the time of the Russian Revolution, an event much noticed in El Salvador,m and already by December of 1922, Marmol was forced to arrange an escape from arrest in San Martin, where his political activities had "earned the deep hatred of the local authorities" (87). He relates his political history up to 1954 and so provides a detailed accounting of the forces of oppression in El Salvador--and later in Guatemala--against which he continually struggled. His focus is nearly entirely social, political, and historical rather than personal. At one point he says "I don't have personal enemies, only political enemies" (483)--and while admitting to "aversions" felt toward certain individuals, this remark exemplifies his purposefulness, both in the telling of his story and as a revolutionary. While Marmol is certainly a man of talent and commitment who should attract our interest, we see him only secondarily, precisely because he sees first the historical processes with which he is involved. On one level the book is a wonderful testimony of a life, while on another higher level it is an elucidating and instructive historical document relevant not only to our knowledge of Central America, but as we fully should know, to our understanding of our own political forces, recently so chauvinistically championed, with great avuncular anecdotal style, by Reagan. It is more than an interesting irony that, while U.S. romantic literature seems intent on escaping or ignoring the class nature of history, we have in Marmol an individual whose life story contains all the elements that any fiction writer would envy. Marmol was, and still very much is, interested in changing society so that those who are exploited might instead benefit from their labors. I can think of not story that no more clearly illustrates the realities, and the irreconciliabilities, of the owning and exploited classes than does the story Marmol tells, sometimes with humor, sometimes with the conviction of anger, but always with deliberation, with political assessment. The history itself is shocking, the 30 thousand deaths (2.5% of the population) attributed to General Martinez in response to the 1932 insurrection (while our U.S. press, which ignored this mass murder, was obsessed with a possible 22 deaths committed by revolutionaries). It is a history of the U.S. even mentioning human rights, let alone advocating them. As I keep suggesting, this book is a clear and dark mirror to our nation. Marmol's personal story is an incredible one of endurance, perseverance, and chance-- several times he nearly starves to death, several times he is nearly executed, one time he is executed and survives by the purest luck, wounded but presumed dead from someone else's blood-- often on the run and hunted-- and despite all his sufferings and sacrifice, put under suspicion by the Party-- and still not losing his commitment as a Communist. One wonders to what extent an ardent capitalist would remain to capitalism, say Reagan or Bush, if confronted with even a fraction of the difficulties Marmol endured. Even so, he understands perfectly well that political events derive from political causes and can be assessed only in that context. Having noted the personal and historical aspects of the book, even more interesting to me-- and woven throughout the telling-- are Marmol's political analysis and assessments, which are reasoned, clear, and specific. As a communist he has the advantage of understanding in political terms the rationale, as murderous as it is, that determines bourgeois actions, without the confusions, the muddy reflections, of moral indignation or outrage. He understands without illusions the motivations of the ruling oligarchy (the 14 Creole families) for the massacre of '32: "The idea was to wipe out every vestige of popular organization, eliminating physically the actual and potential militancy of the democratic, popular organizations,including less radical ones. And the idea was to do it for good, in order to create a desolation that would last for years and years." (303) This brief comment explains much about the roots of the present day Salvadoran armed class struggle, particularly when we juxtapose the following observation by Marmol with the fact that voting lists were used, in the '32 massacre, as death lists: "...participation in the elections, and our work in petty bourgeois and bourgeois organizations has generally ended up bringing our grist to the mill of the ones we least expected." (477) The notion presented for U.S. popular consumption for the last decade that elective "democracy" is around the corner in El Salvador is particularly strange when there is evidence of Salvadoran death squad activity even within the borders of the United States, where democracy is supposed to be sacred. We can see the extremes to which our government, and by collusion our press, will go to put an acceptable mask on fascism. A similar attempt might be seen in Reagan's visit to Bitburg, where he seemed to suggest that the statute of limitations has passed on the condemnation of the fascist crimes of World War Two. Such statements by our government can only be intended to protect from U.S. popular objection and protest the oppressive forces that rule El Salvador, whose government our own government supports at the cost of a million and a half dollars a day. While Marmol is analytical about oppression in his country assessing it from the perspective of political cause and effect, he is equally discerning about Marxist politics, in a very critical, and again specific, manner. He is anything but a blind ideologue (and such types can be found in all camps), and to my mind, he confirms Lenin's-- and Engel's-- assertion that communism cannot be learned by rote. A few obvious realities present themselves through his often elaborate and thorough criticism and evaluation of Marxist political activities. We discover exactly how complex the political situation can be (usually was), how difficult it is to know how precisely most effective action to take, and how unpredictable can be the response of the bourgeoisie, as well as the masses, who may or may not contribute their energies in the politically necessary way. All of these elements in combination make revolutionary activity risky, variable and uncertain, a considerable exercise in calculation. On several occasions, while the necessity to act was urgent, no correct action or consequences were knowable. Such conditions existed during the '32 insurrection. As he relates specific struggles, one can understand how arguments over tactics develop. There are also difficulties of factionalism, mobilization, information and communications and resources-- many problems the bourgeoisie simply does not have, who nevertheless lack one resource indispensable: popular support. However, Marmol also knows that all impediments to freedom do not necessarily arise from the bourgeoise class: 'It shouldn't be forgotten, because of bourgeois nationalist prejudices, that the average Salvadoran is an individualist, firmly tied to the principle of small personal property-- even though he may have only a doghouse and a stool-- fucked-up and weighed down from all the inferiority complexes that hammer our brains and fill our heads with stuff about being "real machos" and useless fits of anger." (476) We can, perhaps, recognize some of the same qualities that come out of our tradition of the "wild west,"which was fairly safe and tame for those with the money. In terms of effective struggle, he presents an eloquent argument for the necessity of "mutual criticism" between communists, not only within each communist party, but also between parties, criticism which must provide for the growth and strength necessary to the struggle, as well as providing for an international solidarity and understanding: "And for the lack of this mutual criticism, the differences grown uncontrollably and when they become publicly known, it's because there's a split and then you aren't talking about mutual criticism, but mutual attack." (473) He refers to the historical division between the USSR and China as an example as he points out, "No one in particular owns the international communist movement, just as no one, in particular, owns Marxism." (475) There are many questions he raises regarding the most effective tactics and struggles. In themselves, these questions indicate the complexity of the struggle, the complexity of organizing and, if nothing else, they demolish the simple minded myth promoted by bourgeois intellectuals that Marxism is simplistic. One reality emerges from Marmol's discussion: Marxism is born out of the actual process of class struggle itself and certainly, therefore, it cannot be any more simplistic than is capitalism, which we know from a quick glance at the stock market, is not a child's game. So here is a very exciting book, one that should be considered absolutely useful for a comprehension of our times, particularly relevant now. The book also provides many examples of heroes an heroism, although none whose focus is isolated, singular, exempt from history and the result of lives in solitude...unlike so many characters in U.S. romantic literature. -Dale Jacobson __________________________________________________________ Epitaph Not this land hers, she learned at last. Vanished to dust, night, and the wind so vast! Said Karen Silkwood at twenty-eight: Plutonium poisoning augments the death rate. How right she was! the corporation grinned: And so Kerr-McGee did her in... -Dale Jacobson Comment Upon Taxes For all the damned paper in this country the bastards send to infiltrate our days, I'd think they could find a scrap or two and declare an outbreak of peace for the poor! -Dale Jacobson Night Vision of the Gulf War 1. They came to rearrange the dust and shadows. They were right because it felt good. They released the power of seven Hiroshima bombs, 88,500 tons, to alter the attitude of bridges, modify the roads and their vistas, amend the attitude of buildings... Some 200,000 buried alive-- no one cared to keep count, or could. Through the billowing smoke, the clouds of earth, the light shifted and the dust. Everything shifted. 2. In the capitals of the empire the trees dormant in their winter sturdiness waited in their branches for their green elaboration toward the sky. If the stars were the nation's pity they would be dark and hard like the dense core of the golf ball the Commander-in-Chief, "the great Ass-Kicker," shot around the green while on the desert soldiers died. It was a festival of death, yellow ribbons everywhere, the color of pale distance by moonlight, or the water-logged blade of a fallen windmill-- or the color of poison--easy hatred, easy love, the sentimental crime: the citizens, so angry lost or afraid in their own country, they raveled in bombing another-- power in their name, though they themselves had none. The million-dollar missiles rose over the sea, and the swift jets. The pilot said: "We own the night." 3. More likely the night now owns us... It is a country larger than the nation, more ancient than history, and flies no flag. In Iraq the night is owned by the corrupted water. It rises like a poisonous mist around the Iraqi children, hurries them away--55,000-- perhaps more than 170,000 within the year. The night belongs to the rising and falling of the wind, its additions and subtractions through which their deaths move, unnoticed. No stealth bomber is as stealthy as the night that comes home. 4. Near Fort Ransom, North Dakota is perhaps the oldest pyramid in the world. No one knows who built it. The Fort is long gone. The rains that fall on the absent Fort, and on the pyramid, arrive out of the horizon where the waters climb tiny ladders and everything is flat. The droplets spin through the immense shadow of the clouds. -Dale Jacobson __________________________________________________________ Advertisement! Advertisement! Advertisement! Advertisement!Advertisement! Advertisement! SPIRIT HORSE PRESS 810 FIRST AVENUE N.E. EAST GRAND FORKS, MN 56721 BLUES FOR TOM McGRATH ISBN 1-882191-01-3 $2.50 8 pages a poem in five parts by Dale Jacobson SHOUTING AT MIDNIGHT ISBN 1-882191-00-5 $4.95 55 pages a political poem in twelve parts by Dale Jacobson A MEMOIR FOR TOM McGRATH ISBN 1-882191-02-1 $4.00 30 pages a remembrance and a poem for Tom McGrath by his life-long friend Jack Beeching Postage: add $1.00 for one book. Additional books, add 50 cents per book up to $3.00 _________________________________________________________ Conferred upon Bill Holm the HIGH HONOR OF LOGICAL PERVERSIONS for committing in public fallacious obfuscation: "I watched Rush Limbaugh on television the other night. I had neither seen nor heard him before, but had heard writers and other friends bemoan the popularity of this redneck buffoon, this crypto-Nazi fear-monger. That's not quite accurate. Limbaugh is a canny showman, who in entertainment jargon, knows how to "work a house." For all anyone knows, he may go home and read Thorstein Veblen and R.H.Tawney in the privacy of his easy chair, but in public he simply shows his audience the cant, sentimentality, and pious blather of the left, then winks knowingly. Limbaugh does not lie; everything he points out is true. ... if the left will not do its own work, excoriating its own cant, satirizing its own PC piety, then nature (which so abhors a vacuum) will provide Limbaugh to do it for them. They ought to stop complaining and get busy, doing a little hackle and gut work." (Hungry Mind Review, Fall 1993, page 8) THE LIST OF FALLACIES FOR WHICH THIS HONOR IS CONFERRED: 1, If Holm has never seen Limbaugh previously, how does he know from one viewing that "everything he points out is true"? 2. Hitler was himself "a canny showman," and yet no one seems to rush (bad pun here, inordinate apologies) to suggest that this talent precluded him from being a fairly accomplished Nazi (not that I am suggesting that Limbaugh is) and fear-monger (not that I am suggesting that Limbaugh isn't). 3. Holm correctly points out that we don't know what Limbaugh might read and think in private (for which I am grateful), suggesting, therefore, that we should not draw conclusions from what he says in public. The illogic of this thinking is wondrous, the effect being that no one should judge what anyone anywhere or anytime says in public, because that person might not believe his or her own words in private. There is the suggestion also that Limbaugh,who might admire Veblen(something we don't know but also don't not know), might really sympathize with the left (a possibility that might come as a surprise to Limbaugh himself. Makes one wonder what we don't know about Reagan and Bush). 4. If Limbaugh in private is not committed to what he says in public, and if everything he points out in public is true, we can only conclude that he must believe what is false in private. Would such a person need help? We are also told that he doesn't lie, so we must assume that he believes to be true what he says in public, in which case he must believe what he believes in private is false. Is this a Zen koan? Could it be that the Sumerian tower at Nippur (the origin of the story of the Tower of Babel) was built this way? And the larger question: does marine life have these problems? 5. Holm asserts that the left suffers from "cant, sentimentality, and pious blather" (an easy enough charge given the reality that people are involved), which Limbaugh, who can wink knowingly, supposedly exposes. The erroneous premise here is in the implication that Limbaugh necessarily does not suffer from cant, sentimentality, and pious blather, someone whom Holm suggests "knows how to work a house" and might say in public other than what he believes in private. One meaning of cant and pious blather is hypocrisy and insincerity. Am I missing something? On the other hand, if Limbaugh really belongs to the left and is simply doing it a service by exposing its cant and blather, would we not equally need someone from the right who belongs to the right to expose the sentimentality and blather of the right, unless, of course, the right does not suffer from cant and blather? Would it be posssible for the right to rent Limbaugh for a session or two to do it some good work? Of course, such a prospect might further complicate his private life. 6. Holm praises Limbaugh for complaining about the left and yet suggests that the left shoud stop complaining about the right and begin complaining about the left. Has this been thought out? With the resulting imbalance, what would be left for the right to complain about? And since the right does not seem to be wrong but only right, it would hardly be right to expect the right to complain about the right. On the other hand, perhaps Holm is right and the left will then, by taking all the complaints away from the right, be the only side left to be heard. Go figure... Dale Jacobson John Lights Up the Night He burned himself with the whisky he was drinking and the match he was lighting his joint with a blue flame shot out from the bottle he started, let go and caught fire he was last seen running down the street the only light not broken for ten miles -David Fields While We Sleep The cup is full but not forgotten! -David Fields The Oxford Peace Program Writes a Note to the Pentagon Oxford has no prison but they do dissect cadavers if that would make your folks happy we'll arrange something -David Fields Denise's Last Day at the Bakery She made her last roll and now the boss will have to explain where all that rat shit came from without blaming her -David Fields Greed Rules- OK? A priestess in the temple of Greed Rules, Her eyes screwed tighter as her status grew, Loiters to finger a comelier morning face from coloured jars along her alter glass. A winter holiday in a wittier place? A more expensive, more aggressive car? A live-in friend who cannot answer back- Siamese cat a tricksy concubine? Stretch haggard sockets with astringent slime, Up the slack gizzard thumb a creamy dream, Whittle your tongue, and pit your lacquered brain For one more day against that long slide down. A clever mandarin. How could disdain Fall to hysterics in the lonely night? Who faked two criteria, wealth and power? Who changed the password? Where's my orgasm? Down the long drain, where all waste products go. Greed rules, OK? This is a greasy pole. Who kneel and claw to the top make one mistake. The pole is not a ladder, but a snake. -Jack Beeching ****************************** Mac Line BBS ****************************** 2400bps: (608) 233-9487 * 14,400bps: (608) 233-1798 [From FirstClass(tm) by PostalUnion Lite(tm) from Madison, WI USA] ******************************************************************************