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by Samir Amin

Samir Amin: “The last Marxist in the Arab world” according to a friend of mine!

The timing of this book couldn’t have been more appropriate. Amin has been writing about the use of political Islam as a tool of imperialism to undermine secular regimes for years, but in the decade following the second intifada of 2000, when armed jihad was raging against US, British and Zionist forces from Basra to Helmand, the thesis seemed counter-intuitive to say the least. The events of the past year and a half, however – with Islamists again acting as imperialism’s shock troops, in Libya and Syria, whilst simultaneously pushing neoliberal globalization to parts of Egypt even Mubarak couldn’t reach – have shown that ‘political Islam’ is as useful to imperialism as ever.

This book charts the development of the Middle East, and Egypt in particular, over the past 2000 years, from its rise and fall as a ‘hub’ of the world’s trading systems, through its stop-start attempts at modernization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the decline that followed Nasser’s defeat in the six day war. But the most interesting sections are those tracking the developments of the last 50 years.

Intriguingly, 4/5 of the book was written before the social explosions of early 2011. By outlining the growing social pressures and conflicts which preceded them, Amin shows that the explosions were, in fact, far from unexpected. But he also shows that if the capture of these uprisings by the Muslim Brotherhood was not exactly destined (Amin does not believe in such things), it was also eminently predictable.

Since the time of Sadat, Amin argues, the Egyptian state has actually been complicit in the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s power. Nasser’s defeat in 1967, and his death in 1970, resulted in a capitulation to imperialism, and a corresponding decline in living standards – and in the regime’s legitimacy. To compensate, the state sought instead to gain religious legitimacy by systematically handing over powerful institutions – namely television, education and the courts – to Islamist control. This whole process deepened following the collapse of the USSR, which led to a fresh wave of neoliberalism and impoverishment, along with a renewed attempt to channel opposition in a purely religious direction. Thus, for Amin, the apparent ‘contradiction’ between the Sadat-Mubarak state and the Brotherhood is pure theatre – Egypt has been run by what amounts to an alliance between the two forces for a long time.

Imperialism, meanwhile, has been complicit in the process, allowing its Saudi friends to pour money into the Muslim Brotherhood, who are then able to provide essential services (such as healthcare) where the state has been forced by IMF diktat to cut back. Today, they fully support the Brotherhood’s takeover of the country. As Amin explains, “the single aim of Washington and its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia is to abort the Egyptian democratic movement, and to that end they want to impose an Islamic regime under the direction of the Muslim Brotherhood – the only way for them to perpetuate the submission of Egypt”.

The Brotherhood – through their full support of Empire regime change policy in the region and the reduction of the Egyptian economy to an informal ‘bazaar’ market system – are the perfect allies for Empire in its quest to push back the possibility of Egypt’s emergence as a strong, independent state. Their programme is one of capitulation to the US military and globalized capital, whilst upholding the Zionist status quo. No wonder Cameron and Hague are so gushing in their support.

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Written by Martin Hill

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(For the trajectory of the Palestinian struggle, Abulhawa searches for lessons from the past, neo-liberal thought, and Black Consciousness)

By Susan Abulhawa

It’s safe to say that a book you can’t put down is a good one.  But I’ve come across a novel I can’t recommend enough, even though it took me months to finish.  TIME OF WHITE HORSES, by my friend, Ibrahim Nasrallah, was a fabulous read that I had to put down, repeatedly.

I read the first 300 pages of this translated work from the original Arabic in just a few days.  Then the world changed and I moved through the next 300 pages slowly, tiptoeing through lives I recognised and characters I came to love.  I turned these pages with trepidation for nearly a month, sometimes holding my breath and swallowing hard.  I was reading the unfolding of my own life, and the lives of all Palestinians.  I knew what was going to happen and in the strange ways of a heart touched by literature, I wanted to warn the characters.  I needed them to make different decisions to save us all from our fate; until, I finally came upon the last chapter and stopped.  I put the book down and left it there for another 2 weeks.  Along with other reading material, I carried this thick hardback with me on a flight to South Africa.  The final chapter was only 5 pages long, but I didn’t read them on the flight.  In my hotel room in Johannesburg, I put the book on the table by my bed, looked at its it’s beautiful cover, an image painted by Nasrallah himself, and I read other books instead.  I did the same thing a week later when I flew to Durban to take part in Time of the Writer literature festival.

Evenings at the festival started with panel discussions among invited writers.  A group of us would then continue on at a local bar or restaurant.  These were nights with new friends and meaningful discussions around the Black Consciousness movement, pan-Africanism, labor struggles, personal relationships, and anything in between.  After one evening of particularly intense discussions that were born from a single figure at the event – a Black Consciousness thinker named Andile Mngxitama – I decided to take the plunge for those final 5 pages.  I had been awake for 21 hours and exhaustion was conquering me.

My Land, “even if I just want to look at it”

Andile’s panel discussion had been an expose of his uncompromising position that has no interest in settlement or pragmatism toward black liberation from white oppression, which clearly remains the social and economic order in a post-Apartheid South Africa.  In a statement that some would examine the next day in conversation, he said that his position on land was that it belonged to blacks. Period.  And should be reclaimed from white ownership regardless of economic, agricultural, or social repercussions.   He said, “..even if I just wake up and look at it [the land].  Because it’s mine!”

Although I was aware of the discomfort of some in the audience around me, Andile grew larger in my eyes.  His words touched a rage and an outrage that lives at my core.  A wound that does not heal. I thought of that book on my hotel bedside table, 620 pages of Palestinian life spanning the Ottoman Empire’s occupation to the British, then Zionists.  A story of four generations of Hadiya, a Palestinian village, its leaders and traitors, weddings and traditions, songs and seasons, loves and scandals, and deep kinship with horses and the land – their land, even if they should choose to just wake up and look at it.

Andile Mngxitama spoke his truth eloquently without equivocation, without tempering his own outrage in order to be heard by those in the audience who were not already supporters.  Indeed, most only heard a lack of pragmatism in his message.  And they heard a threatening strength in his resolve, which was later trivialised as irrational and unrealistic.  He spoke of armed struggle if necessary and some in the audience heard only violence, misogyny and chauvinism.  I heard what his supporters in the audience must have: a liberated black man in full possession of his humanity, unwilling to concede an inch to those who have shackled, oppressed, raped, exploited and committed unspeakable and still untold crimes against one black generation after another.

I admired and loved Andile after that session, but others did not feel the same. Not surprisingly, his message and demeanor provoked visceral reactions from some personalities and a sort of drama ensued in the aftermath that left me torn between new friends for whom I felt sincere affection, and a desire to talk further with Andile.  I chose the former, but as it was my last night at the festival, I remained awake long after the others and found myself wandering in my own thoughts.  I called my daughter in the US.  I missed her and wanted to hear her voice.  I spent some time speaking with Aman Sethi, a brilliant and witty reporter and author to whom I had taken an immediate liking and who was feeling the same ambivalence about sleep.  Eventually, I had a conversation with Andile, however brief it was, and when I got back to my room, it was nearly 3am.
We died all over again, in the last five pages

Despite the assaults of fatigue, I picked up TIME OF WHITE HORSES and opened it to my bookmark.  A few agonising minutes later, I had finished the final chapter.  I closed the cover, put the book back on the bedside table, and wept.  I had walked around carrying that final chapter for over 3 weeks, wanting but unable to look at it.  I knew what was going to happen.  I knew zionist thieves and thugs were going to take everything and rip all our hearts out one generation after another for the next six decades after the last chapter.  I knew my grandmother and thousands of grandmothers were going to rot away as refugees in shacks until they died while European Jews occupied their homes.  I knew our lives were going to fall and crumble and we would be blamed for our own miserable fate while a Zionist boot pressed on our necks.  But I had hoped, for all those weeks, that the villagers of Hadiya would miraculously turn things around and stay and defeat those Zionist gangs and change the world.

Alas, Palestine was stolen and we all died all over again in the last 5 pages.  I fell asleep with the remains of that long day in Durban, the wreckage of that final chapter, and the lullaby of the Indian Ocean coming through my open waterfront hotel window.  A few hours later, my body’s annoying habit of rising with the sun had me dragging my mind to the breakfast room in the lobby at 6am.  I walked holding hands with the newly dispossessed villagers of Hadiya in TIME OF WHITE HORSES.  The ineffable sorrow and humiliation of being carted away, as if cattle, from everything they knew and everything they were so that new Jewish arrivals could take their place, was part of that morning in a Durban hotel restaurant.
Polite ironic violence

Aman Sethi had been my faithful breakfast companion for most of the week, because I would wake him (another habit that annoys my friends), but I didn’t have the heart to do so that morning.  Instead, 4 cups of coffee later, I was joined by a prominent white South African writer who was held in high esteem by other writers at the festival.  He was the only one of the writers at the festival with whom I had not really spoken at any length and I finally had a chance to do so, more or less privately, that morning over breakfast.  Reflecting on the previous evening panels was the usual breakfast conversation and this was no exception. I was interested in hearing his thoughts on Andile Mngxitama’s panel.  Quite simply, he completely dismissed Andile and Andile’s thesis, smiling as he said “No one here really listens to him [Andile].  He’s quite a fringe character.  If he shows up for a revolution, it would just be him and a handful of followers.”  From what I had seen and read, I didn’t think that was true.

In that same breakfast discussion, my colleague said I was intellectually lazy to use the label “colonised mentality”.  The accusation, of course, was said in a polite way, but he certainly used the word “lazy”.  It brought to mind what Andile called “polite white violence” and “ironic white violence”.  My comment about a colonised mentality was in the context of the recent Marikana massacre in which 34 striking mine workers were shot dead by post-Apartheid police. My white colleague at breakfast remarked that many people in the black townships expressed solidarity with the police, invoking colonial stereotypes of primitive blacks who needed to be put in their place.  That, to me, is the essence of a colonised mentality – the way oppressed people will often channel their own thoughts through the labyrinth of racist structures of their colonial past.  My colleague was quick to chastise me for slapping such a label because, he said, it ignores the complexity of human beings.  He said it was a lazy way to think because it disregards the nuances of what might be happening in the townships – although he couldn’t give an example of such a nuance which would provoke anything but outrage against the wanton murder of striking mine workers, much less satisfaction for it.  Instead, he said that by using the term “colonised mentality,” I presumed to be in their heads, as if looking down on black people them from above, labeling and moving on.

Who is “Intellectually Lazy”?

On the surface (and ignoring my white colleague’s broad brush stroking, non-nuanced wholesale dismissal of Andile Mngxitama) his argument sounds enlightened.  After all, as some intellectuals will happily (and quickly) tell you, using labels to explain human complexities is ignorant and unworthy of an intelligent discourse.   It is a discourse that does not point fingers or make judgments, but one that looks for clues to discuss and probe endlessly.  In this conversation project, people like me who pass judgment on human behaviour are unsophisticated (unless, of course, the judgment is made about individuals, like me, who make such judgments).  In this discourse, usually “white” in nature, it is not correct to explain societal (especially black or brown society) behaviour with terms that refer to described phenomena.  My colleague told me it was offensive.  He didn’t say to whom it is offensive, but I think it at least offends the neo-liberal sensibilities, replete with white guilt and a desire to separate from the epic historic crimes that lie just beneath the skin that burned under Africa’s sun.  It is understandable to want to detach from the label mentality that birthed centuries of perpetual misery on entire black and brown societies.  But what, then, should one do with the enormous body of evidence, spanning all of recorded human history, that human behaviour is actually quite predictable?  What should one do, then, with decades of social science data that demonstrate, both through controlled social experiments and real-world cross sectional studies, that given X, a certain proportion of people will do Y?

It is well-known that very frequently, victims become victimisers, both on individual and societal levels.  Who would have thought that Jews, fresh from concentration camps, would come to Palestine and preside over new forced labor camps for Palestinians, just 4 years after the last forced labor camps closed in Germany?  Who would have thought that these Jews who were dispossessed of everything and marched off into camps would turn around and dispossess Palestinians of everything and march them off into camps of a different kind?  And who would have thought that Palestinians, who were tortured in Israeli dungeons, would turn around and torture other Palestinians once they got a taste of some power, however illusory, following the ill-fated Oslo Accords?  It is a bitter truth that this is what human beings do.  While we are capable of self-reflection, change, and evolution, we remain subject to unconscious programs.

To ignore established patterns of human behaviour is intellectually dishonest.   This! is the lazy intellectual put-on that looks down from high above, insisting on nuance in order to avoid indicting victimisers who may have once been victims.
Neo-liberal “nuance”

I remember a talk I gave once at Smith College on the role of women in the Palestinian struggle.  During the question and answer session, a member of the audience, a professor at the university, remarked that my thesis lacked nuance.  She used phrases like “showing the other side”, “Ismalic terror”, and descriptors (like the ones politely leveled at me during breakfast) that stopped short of calling me an anti-Semite.  She was a brown woman with a classic “colonised mentality”.

There you go my white friend at the breakfast table!  There is no nuance, nor am I interested in finding nuance, in the fact that foreigners from Eastern Europe are living in the ancestral homes of Palestinians who languish in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rats!  There is no nuance in the daily savage violence that is inflicted by a Zionist regime armed with the most advanced technological death machines against a principally unarmed indigenous civilian population.  There is no nuance in five soldiers tying up a 13 year old girl and posing for pictures with their guns pointed at her, or nuance in the fact that over 500 children fester in Israeli jails without charge or trial, without access to their parents, imprisoned in solitary confinement or with adult criminal populations.  And there is no nuance in the indiscriminate shooting of mine workers engaged in a labor struggle. There is only a vulgarity that must be confronted.  The project of “finding nuance” in criminal behaviour then becomes a profound endeavor of obfuscation in the place where indictment should be.  Sadly, this is the essence of western neo-liberal discourse on the Zionist project that is wiping Palestine off the map.

My colleague finished his breakfast and left.  I stayed, nursing another cup of coffee (I had lost count at this point).

Black Consciousness versus a Colonized Mind

Other writers came down, looking fresh and energised.  I became more aware of my uncombed, un-showered, flip-flop wearing, caffeine junkie self.  I wished Aman would come down already.  He’d be the only other person in that room who would look like he just rolled out of bed as I had.  The conversation now was with two South African writers, one white, one Indian, and two writers from other African nations.  Andile’s words were still the topic of discussion.  Everyone more or less agreed that they disagreed with Andile and each gave different reasons.  The white South African was offended by a perceived reduction of the issues to a black versus white matter.  She said whites too had suffered and fought against Apartheid.  She didn’t say, but I saw in her a fear of being alienated or outcast in the only country she had ever known, for no fault of her own.  Others thought Andile was too rigid in his beliefs.  The comment about taking back the land even if “just to look at it” was foolish as far as they were concerned and examples were cited of economic collapse in other places where nationalisation or redistribution of natural resources had been implemented.  Some were offended by his insistence that armed struggle should not be removed from the equation.  These were writers who had witnessed the human cost of armed struggle.

I listened, the villagers of Hadiya still with me.

During the British Mandate rule, Jewish immigration was encouraged and the British, seeing Zionists Europeans as more civilised than the indigenous Palestinians, were happy to arm the newcomers.  Palestinian farmers in Hadiya were aware of the primitive tools they still used compared with new Jewish arrivals who employed heavy farm machinery on Palestinian land that the British government had designated for them.  And I thought of the Jewish settlers now, who live in fortified Jewish-only colonies in the heart of Palestinian towns, with their Israeli-only roads and Uzi-totting arrogance that rampages through our lives, painting racist graffiti on our homes, beating our mothers and sisters, and fathers, and grandfathers.  Shitting in our mosques and wiping themselves with pages from the Quran.

I picked up all these things, held them in my grip, and joined the conversation.  I thought the claim of white suffering in resistance to Apartheid was absurd and said as much.  That alienated me somewhat in the conversation.  I said Andile was right to leave no room for pragmatism or concession with racists.  There should be only liberation first and foremost.  I said I wanted my land back, even if just to look at it.  Because it is mine.  Because they are thieves and opportunists and racists who have destroyed our society.  Because they are terrorists with whom there should be no negotiation and no settlement.  Because justice must also be restorative.

“Writing a New World”

Aman finally awoke long after I left breakfast and separately we managed to clean ourselves up before heading off together to Andile’s book launch and subsequent panel with Ashwin Desai on a Black Consciousness article that got pulled from the Harvard Review at the first complaint from a prominent white South African.  That’s another story and Ashwin Desai is yet another agitating academic personality.  But I digress.

The theme of Time of the Writer literature festival was “writing a new world” and it turned out to be fitting that I carried a hardback of the past with me, even with only 5 pages to go.  TIME OF WHITE HORSES is made of short chapters, each a sort of self-contained story of different characters in the village of Hadiya.  The chapters are akin to individual pieces of a larger whole and as the reader moves from one to another, the pieces begin to fit together as if a puzzle, until a beautiful tortured nation emerges from the pages.  What emerges, too, are patterns of human behaviour, including the “colonised mentality”.  Given X, some people will do Y.  Given imperial power, some subjects will collaborate.  Given occupation and colonialism, most will resist. Some will want to negotiate and others will insist on a fight.   Heroes emerged from the story of Hadiya and the downfall of the village, indeed of the country, could not have been accomplished without the cooperation of collaborators.  The appeasers wanted to negotiate with the Ottomans or the British, and now zionists.

In hindsight, the ones who clearly had it right were those who stood defiant, in full possession of themselves as an indigenous people, heirs to their own lands and their own heritage.  They were the Andile Mngxitamas and Steve Bikos of their time and country.  Had we but listened to them and followed their lead!  Instead, we trudge in the molasses of a neo-liberal discourse of “nuance” trying to find our way through a maze of racist negotiations ands accords and settlements that are clearly wiping Palestine off the map.  If I could write a new world, I would start it with the closing line in my friend Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel TIME OF WHITE HORSES.  It is a quote we all know well, by David Ben Gurion, who was born a Polish man named David Grunn.  He said:

“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country…They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why, indeed?

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“Europe’s Blindness” (Editorial, Feb. 12) gave new meaning to the September 11 phrase “intelligence deficits”.  Many Israeli Jews support the creation of a Palestinian state.  Are they guilty of anti-Semitism?  Many of Israel’s political leaders appeared in the 1940’s in British wanted posters for terrorist acts.  Many Palestinians still have keys to the homes that Israeli terrorists stole from them.

While you noted an unacceptable increase in terrorists killing Israelis, you didn’t note the larger number of Palestinians who’ve been killed or had their homes bulldozed by Israel.  In 1994, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said:  “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”

By your failure to condemn the Israelis for their terrorism against innocent Palestinians, you are insensitive to the anger of the Arab world over Perrin’s outrageous remarks.  Where is your discussion of the trial in Europe of Ariel Sharon, known as the “Butcher of Beirut”?  The Zionists learned, after driving the British out of Palestine, that many in the world would no longer call you a terrorist when you have your own state.  The advantage of having your own state is that you can claim that your actions are acts of war, rather than acts of terrorism.

You mentioned Ehud Barak’s offer, but failed to refer to Arab leaders’ 1996 support for his opponent, Shimon Peres.  U.S. foreign policy should support a new generation of anti-terrorist Palestinian and Israeli leaders, support  advocates of peace and prosperity and oppose Israeli settlements in Arab land.

Paul Sheldon Foote, California State University, Fullerton, Calif.

Letter to the Editor published in Investor’s Business Daily, February 28, 2002, page A16.

http://www.investors.com/

More Dual Loyalties

“A Rose by Any Other Name: The Bush Administration’s Dual Loyalties”, by Kathleen and Bill Christison, named some members of President Bush’s administration who have worked for Israeli leaders and some of the links between American and Israeli media and think tanks (Counter Punch, December 13, 2002, www.counterpunch.org and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2003,http://www.wrmea.com ). The authors noted a few neoconservatives, other than John Bolton and David Wurmser, have made inroads at the State Department.  The best example of the struggle in the Bush administration over dual loyalties, not mentioned in the article, is the struggle between those who support and oppose an Iranian Marxist terrorist organization (as classified by the State Department) with an army and tanks in Iraq.  In the September 12, 2002 background paper for President Bush’s remarks at the United Nations General Assembly, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance”, the White House named Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK or MKO) as one of three terrorist organizations supported by Saddam Hussein.   Al-Qaeda was not on this list.  While the American media have reported that more than 200 members of Congress (Democrats and Republicans) have signed letters of support for this Marxist terrorist organization (with a registered office in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.), where are the American media reports of the American military operating near the National Liberation Army of Iran camps in Iraq?  If the neoconservatives support the Marxist terrorist organization named in the White House’s background paper, then the neoconservatives are neither conservatives nor Republicans.  The term “dual loyalties” is much too polite for use in discussing anyone claiming to be a conservative or a Republican who supports Marxist terrorist organizations anywhere in the world.

Paul Sheldon Foote

Published:  Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Volume XXII, Number 4, May 2003, page 94.  http://www.wrmea.com

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P0sted by: Prof Paul Sheldon Foote

by Joseph M. Canfield

Joseph M. Canfield’s thorough, critical review of the legends and historical inaccuracies about Cyrus Scofield and the Scofield Reference Bible (and later editions revised by others) included extensive documentation relating to Scofield’s divorce of his first wife and of his failure to provide for his daughters. Canfield observed that you will not find any Scofield Reference Notes (1917 Edition) for 1 Timothy 5:8 and for many other verses relating to Scofield’s personal failings. Even worse, Scofield’s notes have promoted dispensationalism and other false teachings used to promote endless wars and the destruction of Christianity.

As a boy, I bought a Scofield Reference Bible because of its cross-referencing system. This system meant that I did not need to carry with me a Bible and a concordance. Luckily, I ignored Scofield’s notes and Ussher dates as being only opinons. Unfortunately, many Christians assumed that anything appearing in a Bible was sacred.

Scofield’s Qualifications

Scofield claimed to have a Doctor of Divinity degree and used the title Dr. Scofield. However, researchers have been unable to verify any studies or any degree. Scofield did not study the languages of the Bible. Born in Michigan, Scofield moved to Tennessee, where he served in the Confederate Army during part of the Civil War (War Between the States). In Kansas, he was a lawyer, a member of the Kansas House of Representatives, and a United States Attorney for Kansas. He spent time in jail for fraud.

Divorce

Scofield’s first wife came from a prosperous fur-trading family. He spent long periods of time away from his wife and daughters. Later, when he decided to enter the ministry, he divorced his Catholic wife and married a woman who attended his church.

Free from the Law by Grace

Instead of advocating a straight and narrow path of moral behavior, Scofield promoted antinomianism. Since people can never be perfect, the saved are free from the law by grace.

Failing Churches

Scofield claimed that Christian churches were failing in a decaying world. However, if there will be a rapture soon, why bother to improve?

Avoid Politics

Even though Scofield had held political positions, he advocated that Christians stay out of politics because the world cannot be converted. While he supported having missionaries, his advocacy was based upon evangelizing, not on ultimate conversions. Powerful political elites will appreciate not having to worry about Christians who stay out of politics.

Rapture

Scofield must have been surprised on his death bed because he claimed to believe in the rapture. He wrote extensive notes about Matthew 13 and the Parable of the Wheat and Tares (weeds, used to refer to wicked people). In this parable, Jesus spoke of burning the tares first and placing the wheat in the barn. Scofield twisted this to meaning set aside the tares for later destruction and take the wheat first. Hal Lindsey and others have sold millions of books based upon Scofield’s notes and other proponents of dispensationalism, such as: The Late Great Planet Earth, The Rapture, and The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad.

Millennial Kingdom on Earth

While Scofield promoted the Postponed Kingdom theory, he provided few notes to the Bible to support the theory. Jesus disappointed those who wanted a Messiah to rule the world. Canfield critiqued the theory that Jesus will return to impose political or theocratic rule for 1,000 years and yet many will choose not to believe during that period.

Scofield’s Expensive Lifestyle

Canfield documented Scofield’s earnings as a minister and his royalties. Scofield could not have made trips to Europe and have lived in several homes on his income. Scofield was a member of The Lotos Club in New York City. Neither his wealth nor his literary achievements were similar to those of other members of this expensive club. Hopefully, future researchers will be able to discover the sources and the agenda of those who promoted the works of Scofield.

Peace or Endless Wars?

Scofield’s views ranged from having a world government and world police to Armageddon prospects for endless wars.

Words Have Consequences

Canfield provided detailed explanations of the errors and omissions in an earlier book about Scofield (The Life Story of C. I. Scofieldby Charles Gallaudet Trumbull), a thesis, and in articles. Charles Carlson has posted more recent critiques of Scofield and of the Scofield Reference Bible. After comparing these sources, readers will be able to decide whether Scofield rightly divided the word of truth:

2 Timothy 2:15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Charles Carlson, We Hold These Truths

http://whtt.org/newwhtt/

The Incredible Scofield and His Book

http://www.scribd.com/doc/54737546/The-Incredible-Scofield-and-His-Book

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http://www.cpgb-ml.org

Lincoln , Stephen Spielberg’s latest offering, hit US cinemas in October 2012 and opened in Britain in Jan 2013. From the outset, Hollywood was gearing up to declare it an epic – and at 2 ½ hours, it is certainly long. Early in the award season, it earned a ‘best actor’ Golden Globe for Daniel Day Lewis, and was nominated for a crop of Oscars.

In the event, Spielberg failed to secure the best director award, and lost the best picture award to Argot – an anti-Iranian ‘ patriotic tub-thumper’ that also fits well with the current US imperial agenda, of subverting sovereign governments in the Middle East. Lewis did however receive an Oscar – his third ‘best actor’ title – for his portrayal of Lincoln. This was recognition for his personal talents, no doubt, but also recognition of the propaganda value of Lincoln, the movie, perpetuating as it does, one of the great myths of American Freedom - that Lincoln freed the slaves.

We are asked to recognise this great act of liberation as the benevolent crusade of an equally great, wise and altruistic father of modern America, who goes so far as to quote Euclid in alluding his deeply held belief in the equality, we are led to infer, of black and white. “ Two things which are equal to the same thing must also be equal to each other.”

But its no accident that we are being treated to a dramatisation of this, one of the great founding myths of American ‘democracy’, from which the US colossus draws its ‘moral right’ to enforce its cultural, economic and military domination of the world – precisely as the US population reels under the effects of economic crisis, and wavers in its support for colonial campaigns against ‘lesser’ nations.

We note, in passing, that the storyteller is the same Spielberg whose great narrative of WW2 was not a moving portrayal of the heroic and crushing blow dealt to Nazism by the self-sacrificing Soviet people and Red Army – incidentally saving not only socialism, but civilisation, democracy, Europe, tens of millions of Slavs and several million Jews, as well as ushering in a period of universal upsurge in individual freedom and colonial liberation. Rather, he was inspired by the benevolence of a German capitalist – one Herr Schindler - who, although engaged in profiteering from wehrmacht war contracts, warm-heartedly saved several hundred of his Jewish slave-labourers – by not quite working them to death! Likewise, our criticism of Lincoln, the movie, rests not so much on what’s included, as what is omitted from the narrative.

The American Civil War and Slavery – battle lines

The film runs its course in 1864-5, the final year of the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln has been re-elected to his second term as US President by a landslide majority and the drama revolves around his legislative campaign to enact the 13th amendment to the US constitution – to abolish Slavery – and its interplay with the politics of an all-consuming Civil War.

The opening scene is perhaps the most evocative. Lincoln sits at night, under the awning of an elevated platform and discusses the fortunes of the Union with soldiers shipping out to one of the last major battles of the Civil War; the Union assault on Wilmington, North Carolina.

Wilmington was the last great naval port of the confederacy to fall, completing the naval blockade of the South and isolating the confederacy from its conservative supporters in Europe – notably, the British ruling class, whose Lancashire cotton mills had derived eighty percent of their raw cotton from the slave-holding southern states. [We note in passing, that British cotton workers, by contrast, despite enduring famine in the war years, were firmly with the Union, and for abolition, and held tempestuous meetings inviting abolitionist firebrands to speak.]

The powerful Northern Union, by contrast, led by the USA’s foremost industrial capitalists, had developed its industry to a point were the skill required of its working class could no longer be furnished by the forced labour of slaves, and its manufacturers were already presenting themselves on the international market as competitors to British capital.

Freedom for whom?

Lincoln is depicted expressing his admiration of the courage of the (116th US) coloured infantry to a mild mannered black private, Harold Green, and a straight-talking corporal, Ira Clarke.

The latter raises his objection to the discriminatory conditions of the coloured troops, their unequal pay for the first two years of fighting, from which – unlike their white comrades in arms – they also had to buy their own uniforms, and the fact that there are no coloured officers. “ I am aware of that, Corporal Clark,” replies Lincoln.

“It’s good that you are aware of it, but what do you propose to do about it?” He asks. “Now that white people have accustomed themselves to seeing negro men with guns fighting on their behalf, and now that they can tolerate negro soldiers getting equal pay, maybe in a few years they can abide idea of negro lieutenants and captains; in 50 years maybe a negro colonel; and in 100 years the vote ?”

His prognosticating was, tragically, over-optimistic. Despite the great sacrifices of America’s black population, and their signal, even decisive contribution to the Union’s victory, their reward was to be ephemeral and illusory. 100 years later, the South remained immersed in black poverty bordering on peonage, political disenfranchisement, and social segregation enforced by ‘Jim Crow’ laws and a compliant federal supreme court. Despite an emerging civil rights movement, in 1964 the racist legacy of slavery was patently in full force, and arguably exerts its influence until the present – notwithstanding the recent election of a black man to the White House. The reasons for this become apparent when one examines the conduct and motivations of the warring parties, North and South.

“ The northern elite wanted economic expansion – free land, free labour, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that; they saw Lincoln and the republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.” ^[1]

Free , that is, for exploitation by the moneyed capitalist elite. “ But un-heroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and the battles of nations to bring it into being .” ^[2]

Lincoln’s discourse with these historically anonymous soldiers, is interrupted by young white soldiers, who gush like groupies around the unassuming, but deeply confident Lincoln, telling him they were present at the Gettysburg Address and reciting it, verbatim:

“ Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …” [Thus far, the declaration of independence]

Lincoln: That’s good. Thank you.

“ Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war…“

Lincoln: Thank you.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is …”

The bugle calls the soldiers to fall in, and as they ship out, the coloured corporal finishes his lines:

“ That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth .”

Thus Spielberg sets the scene, and consciously or not, strikingly illustrates the different meaning of those often quoted words to so deeply divided a society, built as it was (and is) from top to bottom on the edifice of exploitation: of wage labour by Union capital on the one hand and on the other, by the Confederacy’s savage enslavement and exploitation of African-Americans by a ‘southern’ plutocracy of slave-planters.

After this fleeting allusion, however, little mention is made in Spielberg’s film of the political role that Afro-Americans played in winning their liberty, or indeed of fighting the civil war to a victorious conclusion.

“ By the Civil War’s end 178,958 African Americans – one fifth of black male adults under 45, a tenth of the Union army – had proven their courage in 449 engagements and 39 major battles, earning 22 Medals of Honor. Another 29,511 constituted a fourth of the (integrated!) Union Navy. And Black volunteers enlisted when the Confederacy had no reserves, faced mounting desertions, frontline casualties and bread riots at home. As early as August 1864, Lincoln had written that without his African American soldiers he would have been ‘compelled to abandon the war in three weeks’ .”^[3]

Although the civil war was triggered by Lincoln’s election, he made it quite clear that his prime motivation was to save the territorial integrity of the US – North and South, within a single Union – at any cost. Indeed he regarded the entire conflict from this legal standpoint, never recognising the legitimacy of southern secession.

Though he spoke in his electoral campaign (albeit abstractly, and inconsistently) about his moral repugnance for slavery, Lincoln was married to a large slave-owner’s daughter and, like the majority of white Americans, did not believe in the equality of black and white. In his 1860 inaugural address, he frankly admitted: “ I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. ”

And further, answering a letter in the New York Tribune in 1862, with the civil war already raging: “ My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union … I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free “ ^[1]

Lincoln presides over a Republican party split between abolitionist radicals and conservatives. The radicals are exemplified and led by Thaddeus Stevens (played ably by Tommy Lee Jones), who in the film cohabits with his black ‘housekeeper’ – as close an institution to inter-racial marriage as could be conceived in America at that time.

“ Stevens, one of history’s most maligned figures, had the power to infuriate and a tongue that reduced political foes to quivering self-doubt. On two occasions he had to fend off knife-wielding fellow Congressmen. In 1863 Jubal Early detoured his Confederate cavalry from Gettysburg so they could burn down his iron foundry in Chambersburg .

“ The real Stevens stood with abolitionists and pledged to “fight against slavery until Hell freezes over and then continue the battle on the ice.” He defended fugitive slaves in court, used his home as an Underground Railroad station, and was a staunch egalitarian. He also practiced what he preached: he worked with African Americans, had an African American common law wife, and asked to be buried in Lancaster’s only integrated cemetery. He and Senator Charles Sumner led Congress’s effort to free slaves, grant them equal pay as soldiers, and pass the 13th Amendment. In 1867 Stevens, father of the 14th Amendment, died short of his life’s goal: a democratic South ruled not by a planter elite but former slave and poor white voters owning “40 acres and a mule .” ^[3]

This latter demand was to become one of the Black Panther Party’s key “10 point program” demands: reparations for the enslavement, exploitation and long suffering black population of America. It is the kind of demand that cannot be granted by monopoly capitalism, and one that, rooted in American history, had profound and revolutionary resonance.

The Bostonian conservative wing of republicanism, by contrast, grow weary of the war, wishing above all things, to secure peace – and frankly care not a jot about the abolition of slavery. Indeed many openly assert their belief in white supremacy and the god-given nature of Negro enslavement. They urge Lincoln, in the latter days of the war, and prior to the passage of the 13th amendment, to invite a high profile confederate delegation to Washington to negotiate peace – on the basis of the preservation both of the southern plantocracy and their mode of production – capitalist slavery.

The film faithfully depicts Lincoln walking a tightrope between these two factions, determined to secure the passage of the amendment in the House of Representatives, using the means at his disposal – his own divided party, in addition to which he needs to secure 20 opposition ‘democrat’ votes.

By Lincoln’s own admission, the war was not about slavery – but about economic supremacy. His aim was to consolidate US production on the new and more profitable capitalist lines, winning the internal market for US manufacturers, and guaranteeing the huge territory of the USA as a base from which to project the country’s growing economic and military power. A decisive victory over the south was paramount.

But wars cannot be fought without willing troops. Many working-class white troops were deeply disaffected by conscription (and angry with the wealthy elite, who avoided it by the simple expedient of a $300 cash fee,) and antipathetic to the plight of their black countrymen.

But the zeal with which freed slaves and abolitionists joined the Union cause was shifting the whole landscape of struggle. The war propelled events by its own internal logic, and despite Lincoln’s will, and the endemic racism of the majority of the American people, the increasingly powerful voice and actions of the abolitionists, and above all, the clear demands and interests of the black population – slave and freeman – forced Lincoln from this delicate balancing act, towards eventual advocacy of the 13th amendment.

William Loren Katz, lecturer at New York University, and scholar of African American History, points out, in his brilliant review of the film, that “ Once ‘Lincoln’ concentrates on the 13th Amendment, important details beg for inclusion but, unfortunately, are absent. Senator Charles Sumner is mentioned once and Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony – who led campaigns to win over the public’s hearts and minds – do not appear. Only Lincoln is left standing . . . the sole hero.

“Also missing is the vital, rarely revealed, back-story. For two years Lincoln struggled only ‘to save the Union.’ Not only did he refuse to challenge slavery, but he also ordered Union officers to deny a haven to runaway slave families whose members had fled to Union lines.

“Then the ground beneath the President shifted. The sight of U.S. troops triggered slave stampedes to freedom, rebuking the planters’ myth of the happy, loyal, slave and igniting clashes between soldiers in Union camps and the Confederate officers who arrived to brutally reclaim runaways. Indeed, the Black urge for liberty turned the Confederacy’s greatest asset into its worst nightmare: an enemy within. ‘To see a black face was to find a true heart,’ reported Union soldiers caught behind enemy lines.”

No wonder that socialists and progressives – abolitionists and socialists, from near and far, including Karl Marx and the International Working-Men’s Association – rejoiced in the Union’s cause. Here was real movement, real progress. Notwithstanding the clear differences between Marx, whose bold words “ Labour in the white skin cannot be free if in the black it is branded“, contrasted so sharply with the reticent statements of Lincoln – it was clear that events on the ground were outstripping Lincoln’s modest position on slavery.

“ The actions of slaves began to dismantle the plantation system. The Confederacy was left without the thousands of slave labourers upon whose backs the agricultural oligarchy had rested. Abolitionist agitators used this news to broadcast a louder wake-up call to white northerners. Meanwhile, Lincoln’s officers reported ‘contrabands’ in their camps wanted to help as nurses, cooks, servants, construction workers, launderers, and blacksmiths. Some were eager to serve as spies and soldiers. This news also reached a war-weary northern public fearful they would find the names of their drafted fathers, brothers and uncles in the weekly Union casualty lists.

“ The most dramatic changes came first in the West. In the Indian Territory, only months after Fort Sumter, 10,000 African Americans, Native people and some southern whites battled Confederate armies. Survivors then fought their way to Kansas, where the young men among them joined unofficial Union units. Commanding those units were abolitionist officers who had gained military training a few years before riding with John Brown in Kansas. In the West, a multicultural Union army fought a type of war Lincoln had not ordered: They liberated enslaved people in Missouri .” (ibid.)

The fact is that the slave-holding south had been a fortified military encampment throughout its slave-owning history. “In 1831 [20 years before the outbreak of the civil war], Virginia was an armed and garrisoned state… With a total population of 1,211,405, the state of Virginia was able to field a militia force of 101,488 men, including cavalry, artillery, grenadiers, riflemen, and light infantry! It is an astonishing commentary on the state of the public mind of the time. During a period when neither the State or the nation faced any sort of external threat, we find that Virginia felt the need to maintain a security force roughly ten percent of the total number of its inhabitants: black and white, male and female, slave and free! “ ^[4]

The threat, of course, necessitating so massive an apparatus of state repression, was the internal contradiction between exploited and exploiter, and the ever-present spectre of slave revolt, which periodically shook southern white ‘society’. The extent of the militarisation reflected the extreme violence of the slaveholders’ repressive and coercive methods, and the implicit recognition of the barely-latent anger and just desire for retribution embodied in every slave. The civil war furnished, at last, the opportunity for the mass of enslaved African Americans to act out their long cherished desires to attain freedom; and the strength of their conviction made them powerful foes – and powerful friends.

In the words of Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery at 15 and became one of the most famous conductors of the underground railroad - leading escaped slaves to freedom in the north: “ There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. I should fight for liberty as long as my strength lasted . ”

William Katz furnishes further examples: “The Deep South faced new problems. In May 1862 in Charleston, South Carolina enslaved seaman Robert Smalls was thinking that his Confederate battleship, Planter, ‘might be of some use to Uncle Abe.’ One night, after the white officers had left, Smalls and his enslaved crew led their families aboard, sailed out of Charleston harbor and surrendered to the Union fleet. Smalls became Captain of the Planter, now a ship of the U.S. Navy. In light of fast-moving events white people began to reconsider their assumptions.

“In 1862, Congress took note of the runaways’offers of help and abolitionist pressure with two Confiscation Acts. These laws opened the door to emancipation and the service of black troops. Finally, President Lincoln acted. As a ‘military necessity,’ he announced, ‘We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.’ On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln became ‘the Great Emancipator’ – by performing one of history’s great catch-ups. Four months later he admitted as much: ‘I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.’”

This, in fact, is an admirable expression of the greatness of the man – that he was prepared to recognise and champion the moving spirit of the time, and enact its demands though they were not his own.

However, “ after the first scene, the only people of color who appear are pleasant, taciturn servants. Gloria Reuben plays Mrs. Lincoln’s quiet, subdued servant, Elizabeth Keckley. The real Mrs. Keckley purchased her freedom, that of her son and sent the son to college (he volunteered and died in battle). She was an accomplished seamstress who served the households of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee before the Lincoln White House, where she became a confidant of Mrs. Lincoln. She also organized the Contraband Relief Society that aided thousands of wartime runaways with donations from the Lincolns, prominent whites and free African Americans. In 1867 she published her Memoir.

“During January 1865 Lincoln welcomed some dynamic African Americans to the White House but they do not appear on screen. Among them were Martin R. Delany, whom he characterized as ‘a most extraordinary and intelligent man’ and had him appointed a Major, the highest-ranking Black Union officer. Today, Delany is considered the father of Black Nationalism. Three times the President met with ‘my good friend Douglass.’ History knows him as Frederick Douglass: runaway slave, noted speaker, author and editor, an early champion of women’s rights, and the foremost recruiter of African American troops. Lincoln regarded Douglass as one of his chief advisors and told him ‘there’s no man’s opinion I value more than yours.’ Some scholars consider Douglass the greatest American reformer of the 19th century. ” (ibid.)

Douglass’ omission from the film is perhaps understandable, when one reflects on his life’s work, championing the interests of the downtrodden and oppressed masses. In 1852, he gave a most stirring and poignant challenge to America’s ruling class in hisIndependence Day Address:

“ What to the American slave is the Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery ; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practises more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour .

“ Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practises of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival !” ^[5]

Looking at the origins of US imperialism, we can see whence came its current abuses. Not the stuff of self-serving Hollywood legend.

“ By overlooking the contributions of Keckley, Delany, Douglass and millions of others who helped end human bondage and win the war, Spielberg makes a white Congress and President the sole creators of history. This is not the evidence provided by the Civil War, nor is it the way Lincoln understood his march to freedom and victory .

“ Early on, Abraham Lincoln was a frontier lawyer who told ‘darkey stories’ and a Senate candidate who endorsed white supremacy. As President, he returned runaways to their owners and hoped freed slaves would leave the country. He rejected the reasoning of white and African American activists and resented their harsh language.

“ Later on, he began to listen, learn and change. And much to his credit, he never retreated from any advanced position he had previously taken. When he finally, finally advocated the right of black veterans and educated men of color to vote, he became the first modern President.

“ Sadly, this ‘Honest Abe,’ along with many known and unknown African Americans and their white allies, failed to make the movie’s final cut. Yet as runaways, soldiers and anti-slavery agitators they helped determine the course of a war, shaped public opinion, pressed Congress to pass laws and Constitutional Amendments, and altered the thinking and actions of America’s greatest icon. ” (ibid.)

Lincoln’s great work apparently accomplished, the film ends with his assassination, that familiar tool of the Modern American state. And again, we must reflect on why this film was brought to us now? The fact is that the US needs to paint itself as a great benefactor, democrat and liberator, to save its own conscience as much as to prop up its great national myth which is rapidly losing all global currency, as the dollar does likewise.

The briefest glance at American history, told in any objective measure, shows it in a very different light. Howard Zinn’s excellent People’s history of the United States illustrates only too clearly how Europe’s entire history in the Americas originated in genocide most foul, was built up and perpetuated by another genocide – slavery – and that slavery itself was abolished only in order to further extend the power and privilege of America’s monopoly capitalist elite on a new and grander, global scale.^[1] It is that same monopoly capitalist class that is behind the lion’s share of global exploitation, propping up corrupt and undemocratic states that will serve its interests, while destabilising and subverting democratic nations that refuse its hegemony.

As for the liberated African American slaves themselves, a brief respite period of ‘Black Reconstruction’ followed the civil war, in which some freed slaves were able to break the shackles of their penury, gain access to limited parcels of land and a certain degree of political freedom. But congressional policy, approved by Lincoln, was to return the confiscated property of southern rebels to their confederate heirs.

Ex-slave Thomas Hall told the Federal Writers Project: “ Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without the chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery “ ^[1]

Certain states permitted black voting and a handful of southern black congressmen and senators were elected, but after a brief period lasting perhaps two decades, the rights of Afro-Americans were rolled back, as the northern and southern elites once again allied themselves, under the leadership of the northern industrialists. The lasting legacy of slavery was to be the enduring poverty of the majority of African Americans, and their preponderance among the lowest layers of the exploited working class.

In 1868, just 3 years after the end of the civil war, Georgia voted to expel all its Negro members from the state legislature. Henry MacNeal Turner, an elected member, spoke powerfully against the rising tide of renewed racism in the south, and the proposed expulsion: “ I wish the members of this house to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights… I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood…

“ Why sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilisation here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! And what do we ask in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore you – for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not .We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our RIGHTS!” ^[1]

The words are a powerful expression of the profound justice of the cause of the oppressed, and a foretaste of the sentiments expressed by the civil rights movement. They particularly call to mind Paul Robeson’s testimony given before the House Committee for Un-American Affairs.

Ultimately, the descendants of the Fairfaxes of Virginia, with their millions of acres of land, and large capitalist farms, proved more powerful and natural allies for the monopoly capitalists of the north than the freed slaves. They won the withdrawal of Confederate troops from the south and legal concessions allowing them to roll out social apartheid.

America’s southern black population were economically forced into peonage in the south for the very same former slave-holding, exploiting class, often on the same plantations and with scarcely any improvement in their conditions. The racist southern plantocracy organised the Ku Klux Klan to subordinate the black population, enlisting poor whites as their foot-soldiers, and in so doing binding the poor whites also to their exploiting masters, as Harry Stanley and Malcolm X would later point out.

W E B Du Bois wrote of that time that “ God wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and is still weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism, and a new enslavement of labour .”

And regarding emerging US imperialism: “ Home labour in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labour, in lesser lands “. ^[6]

Frederick Douglass, dedicated the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln at Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1876 with frank criticism, but over-riding praise for the greatness of the deed facilitated by Lincoln.

“ It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man .

“ He was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government…

“But while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

“Fellow-citizens, ours is no new-born zeal and devotion-merely a thing of this moment. The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic…

“Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed. When he tarried long in the mountain; when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defense of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of its inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled…

“We came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States …

“Under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a coloured gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave-holders three months’ grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more.

“Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today.Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the emancipation proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness , forgot that the President had bribed the rebels to lay down their arms by a promise to withhold the bolt which would smite the slave-system with destruction; and we were thenceforward willing to allow the President all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honourable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress.

“I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race… Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. “ ^[7]

In the last analysis, only an end to all exploitation can remove humanity’s legacy of injustice; can wipe the slate clean. But all progress in the direction of emancipation will be generously remembered by history. Communists and progressives must never forget that all progress, all concessions to liberty and social justice are the fruit of struggle – and the more conscious the struggle, the swifter and greater the rewards.

In the earlier words of Douglass, speaking in 1857: “ The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle… If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will .”^[1]

NOTES:

[1]. Zinn H. A people’s history of the United States. Harper perennial modern classics: New York, 2003.

[2] Marx K. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1978.

[3] Katz WL. Lincoln, the Movie. Portside 2012(December): Week 3.

[4] Tragle HI. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831. 1973.

[5] Douglass F. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855.

[6] DuBois WEB. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. 1 Dec 1999.

[7] Douglass F. Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln. In. Washington:http://teachingamericanhistory.org/; 1876.

NOVANEWS

Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, why did the United States target the governments in Libya and Syria for destruction? Why did some “socialists” support these so-called revolutions that were backed by the Pentagon and NATO? Can the Pentagon ever play a progressive role? Brian Becker and Mazda Majidi make a unique contribution to the debate in Socialists and War. This timely piece answers important questions from a truly socialist perspective.

Socialists and war: two opposing trends tackles the issues through current events and historical analysis. Given that wars waged by the United States and NATO are a dominant feature of the contemporary era, this book could not be more important for those who seek to replace the current capitalist and imperialist world order with a new social system, one that is free from the scourge of militarism and endless war.

From Socialists and war: two opposing trends

“Every war waged today by the United States and the NATO powers is a class war. The foreign policy of NATO governments is based on the needs and global interests of their own bankers and corporate elites. Imperialism is a global system, and the United States government is the anchor and leading force.

“Every military intervention, covert intelligence operation, foreign military base and military assistance project by the Pentagon and the CIA is designed to strengthen the control and domination of the U.S. capitalist class over the globe. U.S. foreign policy is based on the calculations of empire. The Athenian and Roman empires of antiquity were based on the interests of the old ruling classes. The American Empire is based on the interests of the modern ruling class—Wall Street bankers, mega-corporations and billionaires.”

NOVANEWS

The British neo-fascist company Black House Publishing Ltd have published a new, 157 page glossy book, entitled ‘Stalin: The Enduring Legacy’, written by Kerry Bolton, a leading far-right author from New Zealand.

The book praises Stalin for his campaigns against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the ‘Jewish world revolutionaries led by Trotsky’. The publication is being distributed in the UK by Steven Books, the book service of the neo-fascist League of St George (LSG):

NOVANEWS