RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Yippie Pioneers Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan 'Tell It Like It Was'

 Judy Gumbo Albert, left, and Nancy Kurshan, photographed in Hanoi, January 2013, were our guests on Rag Radio April 13, 2013.

Rag Radio podcast:
Sixties activists and original Yippies
Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan

Judy and Nancy discuss their recent trip to Vietnam and reminisce about their experiences in the Sixties, the legacy of the Yippies, and their lives and work in the ensuing years.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2013

Writers and activists Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan, who were original members of the historic Youth International Party (Yippies) -- the theatrical New Left activist group that was founded in 1967 -- were Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, April 13, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan here:


Judy and Nancy -- and their respective partners at the time, Stew Albert and Jerry Rubin --  were original Yippies, along with Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, and Paul Krassner.

The Yippies were an anarchist-leaning Sixties group known for their street theater and symbolic political actions that merged New Left and countercultural values. They gained mass exposure through actions like throwing money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and running a pig for president.

Early this year, Albert and Kurshan visited North Vietnam as part of a delegation of activists who had originally visited the country during the war and were now celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. The two of them had also been part of a Yippie trip to North Vietnam in 1970.

In a photo essay about the recent trip -- which was published in The Rag Blog -- Judy wrote: "Everywhere we traveled we were warmly welcomed. The Vietnamese still feel grateful to the U.S. peace movement. I came to understand that while my trip in 1970 was life changing, this trip was life affirming."

Judy and Nancy discussed their trip to Vietnam with the Rag Radio audience, and also reminisced about their experiences in the Sixties and the legacy of the Yippies, and about their lives and work in the ensuing years. They also reflected on sexism in the Yippies and other Sixties groups and addressed continuing issues like women's reproductive rights and prison reform.

Nancy Kurshan, left, and Judy Gumbo Albert in Vietnam, 1970.

Judy Gumbo Albert, Ph.D., who also wrote for underground newspapers the Berkeley Barb and the Berkeley Tribe, helped stage the Women’s March on the Pentagon and the Mayday demonstrations in Washington D.C., in 1971.

In 1975, Albert discovered a tracking device on her car and was part of a lawsuit that successfully challenged warrantless wiretapping. She recently won an award for an essay, "Bugged," about the incident; her story will be included in an upcoming anthology of women's writings about the Sixties and seventies.

Albert has taught Sociology and Women’s Studies at East and West Coast colleges and for years was an award-winning fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. She is co-author of The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984) and is currently completing her memoir, Yippie Girl. Judy lives in Berkeley Cohousing in Berkeley, California.

Nancy Kurshan was a staff member of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, helped organize the 1968 Democratic Convention protests, and worked on the Chicago 8 trial. She attended the 1970 Stockholm Peace Conference and helped stage anti-war demonstrations outside the U.S. Consulate in Moscow and elsewhere. Nancy was also a founder of the feminist guerrilla theater group, W.I.T.C.H.

Nancy was a social worker for 20 years in the Chicago public schools. A prison reform activist, she was a founding member of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown; her prison work has focused on racist aspects of incarceration, the issue of political prisoners, and the proliferation of long-term solitary confinement. She is the author of Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons published by the Freedom Archives in January 2013.

See Jonah Raskin's fascinating and revealing Rag Blog interviews with Nancy Kurshan and Judy Gumbo Albert. Also see "Writing for the Hell of it" by Judy Gumbo Albert on The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, April 26, 2013: Activist and radio host Pedro Gatos and Val Liveoak of Friends' Peace Teams' Peacebuilding en las Americas on changes in Cuba, Venezuela & the Global South.
May 3, 2013: Free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass of Pacifica Radio's WBAI-FM in New York, with filmmaker Paul Lovelace (Radio Unnameable).
May 17, 2013: Political economist Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?
May 24, 2013 (RESCHEDULED): Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, legendary founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : 'Fearless' Yippie Pioneer Nancy Kurshan Battles Prison Behemoth

Nancy Kurshan speaks to the press during the Chicago Conspiracy trial, 1969. To her left is Anita Hoffman and on her right, Susan Schultz. Back row: Ann Froines, Tasha Dellinger, and Sharon Avery. Photo courtesy Nancy Kurshan.

An interview with Nancy Kurshan:
From Yippie street protest to
fighting the American prison behemoth

“The prisoner usually has no idea how long he or she will be there... The rules for exiting are unclear at best and impossible to comprehend at worst. I believe that control unit prisons are tantamount to torture and an abuse of state power.” -- Nancy Kurshan

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2013

Nancy Kurshan will be joined by fellow Yippie founder, Judy Gumbo Albert, as Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 12, 2013, from 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet. Also, please see Judy Gumbo Albert's photo essay, "Visiting Viet Nam, 1970-2013," published this week in The Rag Blog. Nancy and Judy recently returned from a trip to Viet Nam.

If someone asked me to describe Nancy Kurshan in a word, the word I would choose would be “fearless.”

Kurshan, now 69, and a founding member of the Yippies -- was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised by Old Left parents. She has been an activist since high school days. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t like prisons any more than anyone else I know, though she enters prisons almost routinely. You might well say that she’s leery about them. Indeed, she knows how antithetical they are to the very essence of the human condition, and yet how thoroughly they define the human condition. That’s what might be called the prison paradox.

If you’re reading these words in The Rag Blog you probably know that prisons are almost everywhere on the face of the earth. You may remember that zealous Puritan settlers constructed them when they arrived in America in the seventeenth century. “The founders of a new colony,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter,“ have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and another portion as the site of a prison.”

Graveyards and jails, cemeteries and prisons invariably go together.

Over the past 400 years or so, Americans have never stopped building prisons and American prisons, such as San Quentin, Alcatraz, and Angola in Louisiana, are world famous because of the books and movies about them and because of the harrowing testimonies by prisoners themselves.

Ask Nancy Kurshan. She has the facts and the figures. She’ll tell you all about America and its prisons. No one builds prison better than Americans, she says. No one builds more prisons than Americans, and no one builds the new generation of prisons, often called “control units,” with the same gusto as Americans.

When I asked her recently about her own prison experiences, she told me that she once spent 24-hours behind bars in Chicago and that “it drove me crazy.” Kurshan has been arrested so many times -- at least 15 times by her own count -- that they tend to blur in memory, though she remembers the incarcerations that followed street protests in the 1980s: the occupation of a Marine Corps office on International Women's Day; a sit-in in the street that blocked traffic around the Federal Building in Chicago; yet another protest when she and others chained themselves to an African consulate.

Image grab from the Marion Daily Republican, Marion, IL, April 28, 1989. Image from Freedom Archives.

Kurshan has never allowed her own personal feelings about prisons to prevent her from protesting in the streets. And she has never allowed fear to stop her from aiming to dismantle the American prison behemoth that has grown bigger, meaner, and more vicious over the past several decades. A sense of boundless optimism carries her over immense hurdles.

Kurshan describes her work -- you can’t really call it “prison reform” -- in a new book entitled Out of Control: A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons that’s published by the Freedom Archives in San Francisco, and that has a trenchant introduction by Sundiata Acoli, who is currently “serving time” at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.

I realize that “serving time” is probably not the most effective phrase for me to use here. As American Indian Movement activist and long time federal prisoner, Leonard Peltier, once said, “a prisoner doesn’t do the time. Time does the prisoner.”

Readers can order Kurshan’s informative, energizing book here, and you can learn more about it online at the Freedom Archives.

In the preface to the book, Kurshan says that, “In the end we lost every large issue we pursued.” But she’s not discouraged. She explains that her book “tells the story of one long determined fight against the core of the greatest military empire that has ever existed on this planet.” She adds, “If activists who stand in opposition to what Malcolm X called the 'American nightmare' can benefit from reading this and can move ahead with greater insight and effectiveness, then it will be worth while.”

Kurshan ends her preface with a quotation from the African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, who insisted, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.”

In this interview for The Rag Blog, Kurshan describes her political work and her thinking about prisons and prisoners. She also looks at her experience as a Yippie when one might say that she was a sweetheart of the Sixties. Her name and the name Jerry Rubin were nearly synonymous at the time of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in 1969 and 1970. Rubin memorialized Kurshan in Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution. Now as then her Yippie heart beats strongly.

This interview was conducted soon after Kurshan returned from a 2013 visit to Vietnam 40 years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accord that ended U.S. military presence there. To say that she was “high” would probably be an understatement.

Nancy Kurshan in 2008. Image from TimeOut Chicago.

Jonah Raskin: Aren’t all prisons “control unit prisons”?

Nancy Kurshan: There are at least two ways to answer your question -- by the way, they go by various names: Secure Housing Unit (SHU), Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Supermax, and more. And remember there are variations from prison to prison. Still, a “control unit prison” is one in which all prisoners are locked in individual 9’ by 9’ boxes about 23 hours a day under severe sensory deprivation.

No fresh air. No natural light. The prisoner eats, sleeps, and defecates in a windowless cell. Meals come through a slot in the door. In some cases, the prisoner may be out of the cell for solitary exercise, but in other cases the exercise area is attached to the cell itself. There is restricted, or no, access to education and recreational facilities.

How are they different from “normal” prisons?

In most penal institutions, prisoners are in the “general population.” They live among other prisoners, take their meals in a social setting, have visitors (sometimes even conjugal visits), and participate in recreational activities with others. Some prisons offer education and training for jobs, though that’s becoming increasingly rare. A particular prisoner might be placed in solitary confinement as punishment -- “thrown in the hole” in prison vernacular. The entire wing of a prison might also be “locked down” after an incident.

Is it a question of the degree of harshness and punishment?

All prisons are grim. Nonetheless, a control unit prison is qualitatively different than the rest. Control units limit the prisoner’s connection, not just with other prisoners, but also with family and friends in the outside world. Often only family members can visit and then only if approved.

The number and length of visits are limited, and no physical contact is permitted between prisoner and visitor. Visiting takes place over a Plexiglas wall and through telephones monitored by guards. Prisoners are searched before and after visits. They undergo body cavity searches and are often brought in shackles.

Sounds like psychological warfare and brainwashing.

It’s an endless hell -- a living Kafkaesque limbo. The purpose of the control unit prison is to make the person feel helpless, powerless, and totally dependent on the authorities. A control unit institutionalizes solitary confinement as a way to exert maximum control over as much of the prisoner’s life as possible. This is long-term, severe behavior modification, and it’s the vilest, most mind- and spirit-deforming use of solitary confinement imaginable.

The control unit prisons probably cast a long shadow on everyone in prison, and perhaps on the whole society.

Control units have the affect of controlling prisoners in the general population. They’re meant to terrify prisoners so that they tolerate intolerable conditions. The federal prison at Marion, Illinois -- and the word “Marion” itself -- was meant to strike fear into the hearts of prisoners throughout the whole federal prison system.

Nancy with son, Michael Kurshan-Emmer, wearing a Sundiata Acoli t-shirt, at 1998 Washington, D.C., march to free political prisoners. Image from Freedom Archives.

Can you say more about the Kafkaesque aspect?

Inside a control unit, the prisoner usually has no idea how long he or she will be there. It’s an indeterminate sentence and the rules or guidelines for exiting it are unclear at best and impossible to comprehend at worst. I believe that control unit prisons are tantamount to torture and an abuse of state power.

Amnesty International recently released its 2012 report, “The Edge of Endurance: Conditions in California’s Security Housing Units,” in which the conditions in two California prisons -- Corcoran and Pelican Bay -- are described as “cruel, degrading and inhuman” and a violation of international standards. Readers can check it out at the Amnesty International site.

Are there political prisoners in the American penal system?

Absolutely. Let me name a few: Sundiata Acoli, who was one of the Panther 21 in the 1970s; Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican patriot; and Native American Leonard Peltier. They have all been imprisoned for over 30 years each! By comparison, Nelson Mandela, the world’s iconic political prisoner, spent 27 years in prison.

I recently traveled to Vietnam to participate in the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords and met with people who were political prisoners in the Tiger Cages of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. Their situations were nearly identical to those of political prisoners in this country today. Leonard Peltier, Sundiata Acoli, and Oscar Lopez Rivera are probably the longest-held political prisoners in the world.

Albert Woodfox* has been in prison at Angola for more than 40 years. Warden Burl Cain, said he would never transfer Woodfox out of solitary because, as he explained, “He is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kinds of problems.”

What makes for a political prisoner? I ask because I often find it easier to recognize political prisoners in other parts of the world -- Ireland, Russia, and China -- than in the United States. I know individuals in the U.S. who began as conscious reformers and avowed revolutionaries and veered into crime -- theft, robbery, dealing illicit drugs, and more.

People have been arguing about the nuances of this for years, but generally speaking a political prisoner is someone who is imprisoned for his or her participation in political activity.

Why do you think that you chose to work with prisoners, to secure their release, and to protect them from the worse abuses of the prison system?

Once I was in prison -- as a result of my participation in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s -- it was difficult to turn away. At first, there were many amazing political prisoners that grabbed my attention. I felt that if our movement were to succeed, we could not abandon people behind bars. If we did, we couldn’t hope to move forward.

Imprisonment was chilling for everyone -- on the outside as well as the inside. To a large extent, Americans are afraid of prisons and political prisoners. I didn’t want to be one of them.

What did you learn as you became more involved?

That prisons are about racism and the social control of people of color. I felt that the work I was doing was an important way to be a principled anti-racist. It was also a way for me to express moral outrage about the fact that humans are treated worse than animals, though I don’t wish those same conditions on animals either.

When were you arrested and jailed in the 1960s and 1970s?

More times than I can remember. The first time was in 1967 for mass civil disobedience at the Pentagon. In 1971, I was arrested on the campus of Kent State for spray-painting the words “U.S. Out Of Laos.” I was charged with a felony -- malicious destruction of property with damage over $100 -- and told that they would break it down to a misdemeanor if I agreed to leave Kent, Ohio.

By then, I was happy to go. Our house had received bomb threats. Then, in the 1980s, I was part of a women’s group called “No Pasaran” and was arrested protesting U.S. wars in Central America. Most of the charges are not memorable. As I recall, they were for “disturbing the peace.” I got off completely, or had to pay a fine after pleading guilty.

What do you remember about your own jail time?

The Pentagon jail time, my first, was in what I call “white peoples’ jail.” There were about a thousand of us. The authorities created a men’s dormitory and a women’s dormitory. Ours was lined with hundreds of cots; I was there with Anita Hoffman. We stayed overnight, went to court, pled no contest, paid $25, and left. In Chicago in the 1980s, it was rougher. We were held at the lockup at 11th and State, like all other detainees, and single-celled with nothing to read and nothing but a bologna sandwich to eat.

We could talk to people across the cell, but I remember being cold and uncomfortable, lying on a cement bed. The guards were unresponsive to requests. You could call out to your heart’s content and they wouldn’t come. The longest time I spent there was about 24 hours and it drove me crazy. I can’t imagine what long-term solitary must feel like.

How do you feel about the Yippies now, looking back?

Nancy Kurshan and Jerry Rubin.

I love the Yippies! We were really onto something and reached many more people than we’re given credit for. Most Left history is written by people who were in what we considered the “straight Left.” They were not fond of us then and they still aren’t.

Our use of the media, creation of myths, comedy, and appeal to artists was fabulous. We levitated the Pentagon to allow the evil spirits to flee (clearly not high enough), ran a pig for President, and burned money at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street.

We also represented a segment of American youth that was in militant rebellion. We didn’t lead them. We were a part of them and we were not part of any official Left organization. Much of the Left dismissed the youth population. They criticized us for alienating older, middle class people. I think the youth movement was a vital engine of the anti-war movement, driving everything and everyone to the Left and forcing debate onto dinner tables.

Any criticisms?

My main issue, of course, is the sexism of the Yippies. But honestly, it was no worse than in the rest of the Left. Sexism was an Achilles Heel of the whole movement.

The Yippies seemed to me to be about couples -- you and Jerry Rubin, Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert, Anita and Abbie Hoffman. What thoughts do you have now about sex and gender and power in the Yippie universe?

Yippies weren’t any more about couples than the rest of the movement. Male supremacy was "normal." I had been a political activist beginning in high school; then in the 1960s and 1970s my role in the movement was compromised. At times, I went to work every day so that Jerry Rubin and the guys who were living at our tiny apartment could be movement activists!

After work I shopped. Then I came home and cooked. Then the men treated us like gophers and we accepted it. It was hard to find one's own voice and it was easy to "stand by your man" when conflicts arose. Until the women's movement burst on the scene, there were awkward distances between women.

When Robin Morgan quit the Yippies and published "Goodbye To All That" in the underground paper, RAT, I was uncomfortable. I knew she was right about the big picture, if not everything. It was embarrassing and I didn't know what to do. Change can be confusing and uncomfortable. Morgan’s piece and my 1970 trip to Vietnam really pushed me to fight male dominance and find my own voice.

To get back to prisons. In what ways have they changed over the last decades?

Two things strike me. One is the massive incarceration of people of color. In 1994, for instance, there were 85,000 people in federal prisons. Today. there are 218,000. In state and federal prisons there are 2.3 million people behind bars. We are the “Incarceration Nation.”

Albert Hunt stated in The New York Times (November, 20, 2011) that, “With just a little more than four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined.”

Prisons overflow disproportionately with black and Latino prisoners. According to the same New York Times article, “more than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.” One in every nine black children has a parent in jail!

What are the other trends?

The prison system has become much more punitive. When we began our work in the 1980s, Marion Federal Prison was the only control unit prison in the federal and the state system. When we argued they should shut it down, they argued that it would allow the rest of the system to function more effectively. We said no, it would function as an anchor and pull the whole system in the direction of tighter control. We would have liked to have been proven wrong, but unfortunately we’ve been proved right. Now, virtually every state has at least one control unit prison.

Is there hope?

Just recently there has been some motion. Two serious challenges have developed. One, that this form of imprisonment is too expensive. Our whole society is running out of money, thanks in part to our bloated military. Also, in some states, like California, prisoners have stood up by the thousands and said, “We won’t take it no more.”

There have been hunger strikes of 6,000 or more prisoners. Support on the outside has helped give voice to grievances. In response to hunger strikers at Pelican Bay, The New York Times, in an editorial on February 8, 2011, entitled “Cruel Isolation,” said, “For many decades, the civilized world has recognized prolonged isolation of prisoners in cruel conditions to be inhumane, even torture. The Geneva Convention forbids it.”

Is anyone rehabilitated through the effort of prison programs?

As Malcolm X said, “I ain’t never been habilitated, how can I be rehabilitated?” Sure, some people have come out of prison wiser than when they went in, or perhaps with some skills they didn’t have. But by and large, the problems are structural, not individual and have to do with whether or not society has room for ex-prisoners. Generally, when people get out of prison, no matter how good they are, their options are lousy. They face great obstacles.

The Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, shrewdly observed 150 years or so ago that, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” When you enter a prison what are some of the first things you hear, see, and feel?

Nancy in Hanoi, 2013, with
Agent Orange victims.

That Dostoevsky quote has always been a favorite of mine. When I enter a prison, I usually feel I’m entering a bastion of the military. There are gun towers, barbed wire, metal detectors, arbitrary rules, regulations, and tight surveillance. Then there are the pat-downs.

The first thing that comes to mind is that I’m on a slave ship -- a landlocked slave ship. The racial aspect is undeniable, from the waiting room to the visiting room. After all these years, you would think I would be used to it, but I’m not. For me there is no experience like it.

What degree of civilization would you say exists in the U.S.?

I would answer with a shrewd quote from Gandhi. When he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “That would be a good idea.” I’ve just returned from Vietnam, still a primarily agrarian, developing country. They have one of the lowest imprisonment rates in the world. Vietnam is a more civilized place than the U.S.

Since you're just back from Vietnam would you give us your impressions of the country?

Vietnam is beautiful and vibrant with more than half the population under 20. The legacy of the war is still enormous. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than on all of Europe in World War II. We visited the Highway 9 Cemetery of the Fallen Combatants where thousands of Vietnamese are buried. As I looked at the tombstones I noticed how very many were cut down in their youth. Somewhere between 2 and 4 million people were killed in the “American War” -- as the Vietnamese call it.

You met people and talked face-to-face?

Nearly everyone had a story to tell about their family's sacrifice, although they tell it after persistent prodding. We visited schools where children are suffering from severe birth defects as a result of the millions of gallons of herbicides such as Agent Orange that the U.S. used. These children are three generations removed from direct exposure!

We also went to what was the Da Nang Air Base during the war (now a regular airport) where the U.S. is just now beginning cleanup, 40 years later. That's a drop in the bucket because it's only one "hot spot" and to the tune of $43 million which is really nothing.

The country seems to have taken your breath away.

The experience was fabulous: the natural beauty and the energy and warmth of the people; the privilege to share in the celebrations of the Paris Peace Accords; the meeting with Madame Binh and many people who survived the Tiger Cages. I went inside the underground “Cu Chi tunnels” that testify to the ingenuity and determination of the Vietnamese to be free from of colonialism. Seeing the legacy of the war made me angry. I'm still processing my time in Vietnam.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

*UPDATE: As we went to press a federal judge ordered the release of former Black Panther and member of the Angola 3, Albert Woodfox. This is the third time Woodfox's conviction has been overturned in a federal court, but prosecutors successfully reversed the two previous court decisions and are expected to try once more to keep Woodfox behind bars.

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PHOTO ESSAY / Judy Gumbo Albert : Visiting Viet Nam, 1970-2013

From left: Genie Plamondon, Nancy Kurshan, and Judy Gumbo Albert in Viet Nam, 1970.

A photo essay:
Visiting Viet Nam, 1970-2013

Everywhere we traveled we were warmly welcomed. The Vietnamese still feel grateful to the U.S. peace movement. I came to understand that while my trip in 1970 was life changing, this trip was life affirming.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2013

Rag Blog contributor Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES), founded in 1967. See Jonah Raskin's April 17, 2012, interview with Judy Gumbo Albert in The Rag Blog -- and see Raskin's current Rag Blog interview with Nancy Kurshan, a prison activist and fellow Yippie founder who recently traveled with Judy to Viet Nam. Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, April 12, 2013, from 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet -- so mark your calendars!

In 1970, during the American War, I visited what was then North Viet Nam. It was a Yippie trip. I’m the one on the right above. Next to me is Nancy Kurshan, next to her is Genie Plamondon of the White Panther Party. This year I returned to Viet Nam. What follows are some of my impressions.

In Ha Noi and the surrounding countryside, I photographed the devastation wrought by the war:

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

And felt inspired by Viet Nam’s resistance fighters:

Forty years later, in January 2013, Nancy and I were invited back as part of a delegation of activists who had visited Viet Nam during the war. We were there to help celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords:

I met former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and filmmaker Jay Craven:

And my favorite hero of all time, Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh, a member of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam, a leader of the Viet Nam Women’s movement, and a negotiator and signer of the Paris Peace Accords. I told her, "Thank you for what you have done." She replied, “We will continue to do it," and squeezed my hand:

Everywhere we traveled we were warmly welcomed. The Vietnamese still feel grateful to the U.S. peace movement. I came to understand that while my trip in 1970 was life changing, this trip was life affirming.

At the same time, it was apparent that the outcomes of the American war continue to devastate the country.

With unexploded ordnance

that to this day kills and maims:

Agent Orange/dioxin, has remained in the soil and water of Viet Nam for 40 years, poisoning a third and fourth generation of children:

I was heartbroken when I met these kids. All I could think was, “We are responsible.”

Nor could I ignore the remnants of Diem and Thieu’s tiger cages:

Survivors of the tiger cages have managed to make a new life for themselves. “In order to close the past, we must be open to the future,” is what I heard them say. (The older woman in the center was imprisoned in a tiger cage for 15 years.)

Today Viet Nam integrates the new with the old. They are on the road to prosperity by means of what they call a “socialist-oriented market economy.”

I came home from Viet Nam understanding that every one of us can -- and should -- feel proud of what we did and continue to do to end all wars.

© Judy Gumbo Albert. See more of Judy's photos here.

Thanks to The Rag Blog's James Retherford for assistance with graphics on this article.

[Judy Gumbo Albert is an original Yippie, along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, and Judy’s late husband Stew Albert. Judy has remarried, lives in Berkeley, California, and is currently writing her memoir, Yippie Girl. She can be found at www.yippiegirl.com. You can contact her at judygumboalbert@gmail.com or on Facebook at Judy Gumbo Albert or Yippie Girl. Read more articles by Judy Gumbo Albert on The Rag Blog.]

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Nancy Miller Saunders : They Tried to Tell Us

Vietnam veterans testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1972. Image is a screen grab from the film, Winter Soldier, produced by the Winterfilm Collective.
Winter Soldiers:
They tried to tell us

We as a nation did not want to know the horrible truth of what we asked our children to do in Vietnam. To acknowledge it was to admit complicity, to take responsibility for it.

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2013

Forty-two years ago, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War tried to do what Nick Turse seems to have accomplished, judging by Jonathan Schell’s review of Turse’s book, Kill Anything that Moves, in The Nation and online at TomDispatch.com.

The veterans did not have access to the classified information or Pentagon reports Turse used to document the brutal horror the war really was as a result of government pressures. All the vets had were their personal experiences and DD214s (discharge papers that listed their assignments), which about 100 of them took to Detroit in the winter of 1971 for what they called the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI).

Every veteran who testified had to provide proof of service and whenever possible their testimony was corroborated by other veterans. VVAW was trying to tell the nation for which they had fought, killed, and sacrificed that My Lai was not an aberration, that it was U.S. policy they were ordered to carry out.

I was a member of the film collective, Winterfilm, that had come together to document the WSI, VVAW’s second major demonstration. Most of us had gotten to know the vets while filming their first action over Labor Day weekend 1970.

Video cameras had not yet come into their own for documentaries, so we were using 16mm film. Since the audio was taped separately, my job at the WSI was to take notes of the testimony so that our editors could synchronize picture and sound for our film, Winter Soldier. Thus, except for one panel, I listened closely to all three days of mind-wrenching testimony from men I had learned to respect.

In the process I saw the kind of documentation I needed to believe them. I looked at their firm, youthful cheeks, none completely hidden under beards. And then I looked into their eyes, which were those of old men who had seen too much grief in long lives.

I saw hardened combat veterans weeping on each others’ shoulders. I watched one veteran lean against a wall and slide down in moaning, “It’s no use. It’s no use.” And I watched other veterans kneel beside him, hold him, comfort him, and let him talk.

None of this was acting. Also none of it was the kind of documentation required to prove a point to those who were not there.

Winterfilm’s editors did their best to communicate this documentation while also including clips of the care VVAW took to confirm veterans’ stories before it would let them testify. In one debriefing a former Marine sergeant, Scott Camil, is being questioned while another Marine from his unit corroborates and adds to Camil’s stories.

But these debriefings were not credible documentation for those who did not want to believe that our troops -- our brothers and sons, friends and neighbors -- could possibly have done what these men were saying they had done and seen others do.

Therefore, the consensus had to be -- as veterans in cities around the country held their own WSIs -- that the men testifying were a handful of dangerous men, homegrown terrorists, a threat to national security. Either that or they were peaceniks smearing the reputation and dedication of our troops. Either way, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were not to be believed.

The Nixon administration saw them as a threat to its credibility. Twice VVAW’s exposure of military movements forced changes of plans. I can almost hear Nixon paraphrasing King Henry II: “Will no one rid me of these turbulent vets?”

Local and federal spies and provocateurs were infiltrated into VVAW. I knew two of them -- Bill Lemmer of Arkansas and Karl Becker of New Orleans. I personally saw both try to provoke the veterans into fights. I also saw FBI reports picturing VVAW as dangerously violent.

Six of VVAW’s Southern leaders, including Scott Camil, were indicted for conspiracy to provoke riots at the 1972 Republican convention, when VVAW had actually undertaken responsibility for keeping the peace among demonstrators at both conventions to avoid a repeat of the riots at the Democrats’ 1968 convention in Chicago just four years earlier. After two more defendants were added in a superseding indictment, they became known collectively as the Gainesville 8.

Lemmer and Becker were two of the FBI informers called by the prosecution to testify against the 8. Because I knew both of them, the defense attorneys hired me to help them with their cross-examinations of the two. Because the judge refused to admit the 8’s defense arguments -- that their plans were purely defensive, the result of information supplied by local and federal provocateurs -- cross-examinations to reveal the truth were crucial to their defense. The jury quickly returned a blanket acquittal.

The campaign against VVAW was revived during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign by the Swiftboat nay-sayers. The corroboration of Camil’s testimony they said was “proof” that Camil had been “coached.” Kerry’s interview with Pitkin, who had now turned against VVAW, was “proof” Kerry helped to slander our gallant troops

Despite condemnation of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, there seemed to be a national schizophrenia about the Vietnam War and its veterans. On the one hand they were our troops whom we should all honor for their dedication and sacrifice. On the other, they were “baby burners,” the villains in TV shows night after night. Scriptwriters no longer needed to provide motives for crimes the bad guys committed. All that was needed was a mention that a certain character was a Vietnam veteran and the audience knew he was the villain.

We as a nation did not want to know the horrible truth of what we asked our children to do in Vietnam. To acknowledge it was to admit complicity, to take responsibility for it. Peter Michelson, who attended the WSI, wrote in the February 27, 1971, New Republic,

As the testimony flooded over me for three days I kept saying, "I don’t want to hear this." I knew that what I was hearing was true; I knew it from other veterans, from published accounts, and from my own brother who had been there. What I was resisting were the ethical obligations that knowledge imposes. Like most people, I didn’t want to have to work out what I ought to do... I am afraid of what I ought to do.

[Nancy Miller Saunders is the author of Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers in which she tells of her years of working with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and includes stories entrusted to her by veterans to tell, which she lets them do whenever possible in their own words. Read more articles by Nancy Miller Saunders on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Vietnam Was Not a 'Mistake'

John Kerry, who parted ways with the VVAW, has served well in the halls of empire. Here he salutes the delegates at the Democratic Convention in Boston, 2004. Photo by Stephen Savoia / AP.
It was not a mistake:
Vietnam and U.S. policy

Kerry considered the U.S. policy in Vietnam a mistake. Much of the antiwar movement saw it as standard operating procedure. Obviously, each understanding depended on one’s interpretation of history.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / January 22, 2013

On January 15, 1973, Richard Nixon announced a halt to offensive operations by U.S. forces in Vietnam. Twelve days later a peace agreement was signed in Paris between the United States, North Vietnam, the U.S. client regime in Saigon, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. This agreement called for an immediate ceasefire and called for the Vietnamese to negotiate a political settlement regarding the fate of southern Vietnam.

The January 27th agreement was the same as one that Saigon had refused to sign three months earlier. The interlude between the two dates saw some of the heaviest bombing of the entire conflict by the United States Air Force (USAF). I vividly recall listening to the news broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and watching the German telecasts reporting the bombing.

In typical fashion, Nixon named the operation after a position in U.S. football: Operation Linebacker II. It is estimated that this particular round of carpet bombing killed more than 1,600 northern Vietnamese civilians, including over 200 at Hanoi's Bach Mai hospital alone. I personally attended two protests in Frankfurt am Main against the so-called Christmas bombings. Similar protests occurred around the world.

The peace agreement did not stop the war. It did provide Nixon and Kissinger with a way to complete their policy of Vietnamization. U.S. troops began to be withdrawn at a greater pace and South Vietnamese troops (ARVN) began to replace the withdrawing forces. U.S. forces on the ground were officially only serving as advisors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that USAF planes continued to bomb, although the missions were now officially led by South Vietnamese flyers.

As many a GI, sailor, or Marine who was stationed in (or off the coast of) Vietnam after the peace agreement was signed can tell you, the war did not end. However, the will to fight among South Vietnamese forces was rapidly fading. Since 1971, friends of mine returning from battle had been telling stories of outright refusal of orders by entire units of ARVN and U.S. forces. Others told me that their bosses told them to "just stay out of sight and stay alive."

The official word was that no U.S. combat soldiers remained in Vietnam after March 1973. Reflecting the mood among U.S. voters, Congress cut off all official military aid to the Saigon government in 1974.

I returned to the United States in August 1973 and began college in the Bronx. Although there were some meetings and even a small protest or two regarding the continued funding of the war against the Vietnamese (and the unofficial presence of thousands of troops), most of the political activity was focused on the CIA/ITT assisted coup in Chile and the growing calls for Nixon’s impeachment.

One memorable protest against the U.S. funding of the failing Saigon endeavor to survive the will of the Vietnamese people was a takeover of the Statue of Liberty by a small band of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and members of the Attica Brigades. Both of these groups were left anti-imperialist in nature and allies of the post-SDS formation known as the Revolutionary Unions.

John Kerry and the VVAW had parted ways many months before; Kerry had always represented the less-radical (some would say right-wing) elements of the VVAW and the antiwar movement in general. His departure from the VVAW was not a surprise, especially considering the growing radicalization of the organization’s membership.

Kerry considered the U.S. policy in Vietnam a mistake. Much of the antiwar movement saw it as standard operating procedure. Obviously, each understanding depended on one’s interpretation of history.

True to form, John Kerry’s understanding of history has served him well in the halls of empire. Indeed, he may very well become the next Secretary of State; successor to another of the anti-Vietnam war movement’s imperial apologists, Hilary Clinton.

Neither Kerry nor Clinton ever considered the argument that the U.S. war in Vietnam was part and parcel of a policy with economic and political domination of the world as its goal. Instead, they preferred to believe that the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese, the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the destruction of a land, was just a mistake. The overall policy was a good one, merely desiring to bring democracy and freedom to those same people being murdered and maimed.

Since that day in 1973, the United States has been involved in some kind of military conflict almost without a let up. Democrat and Republican, right wing and liberal, the battle for world hegemony continues unabated.

Low-intensity conflicts that included the massacre of Salvadoran farmers by U.S.-funded death squads and militaries; the murderous subversion of a popular government by CIA-contra forces in Nicaragua; the arming of religious extremists in Afghanistan to fight a secular and progressive government in Kabul; the imposition of sanctions against the Iraqi people causing the deaths of over a half-million people (leading Democratic Secretary of State Albright to state the deaths were “worth the price”); and the never-ending support for Israel’s brutal and Orwellian occupation of Palestine.

All of these elements and hundreds more are what describe US.. foreign policy. They are not mistakes any more than the U.S. war on the Vietnamese people was a mistake. Indeed, they are the price the world must pay.

In the weeks to come, there will be a parade of powerful men and women from the nation’s elites appearing before committees of the Senate. These individuals will be auditioning for their roles in the new White House administration. Some, like John Kerry, will face some loud opposition from the ultra-right members of that legislative body.

Don’t be fooled by the bombast. The proof that the individual being questioned and the individuals doing the questioning agree is in the history briefly noted above. As long as those in both seats believe in the ideology of empire, Washington’s march will never fall and only rarely stumble.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

A chapbook review:
Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

[Wicked Dew, by Steve Russell. (2012: Dog Iron Press, Georgetown, TX.); Paperback; 88 pp; $7.75.]

I've known Steve Russell since sometime in 1968 when he started showing up at The Rag office, a tall, gangly, very young Vietnam-era vet going to UT Austin on the GI Bill. Although Steve is incredibly bright and witty, and I've always enjoyed his prose contributions to The Rag and now The Rag Blog, I was nervous about reviewing his first book of poetry, Wicked Dew.

Steve is a Native American writer, and all of the previously published works in this collection have appeared in the Native press, where he is a regular contributor of weighty essays as well as occasional poetry. The book in fact won the 2008 Poetry First Book Award of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas (NWCA), and would have been published as part of the award; unfortunately, NWCA lost publication funding and the book is only now seeing the light of day.

I worried I might not be the right person to review poems that would obviously, just from these facts, be deeply rooted in Steve's experience as a Native American. My mostly Scotch-Irish parentage undeniably has Native ancestors as well, but in my generation, and even in my folks', as Russell writes in "Blood Quantum," the "thin red line" of Native genes became gray oblivion.

My unfamiliarity with contemporary Native American literature (these days, honestly, with literature in general!) added to my concern. Would this blue-eyed daughter of "the flood of European blood" really get it?

I needn't have worried, and neither should other poetry lovers. While a deeper knowledge of Native American literature would no doubt add to the grasp and enjoyment of these 37 poems, most transcend ethnic or tribal viewpoints, offering windows into the transformation of a poor "halfbreed" Oklahoma dropout into a multifaceted human rights activist and whole human being, rooted in and proud of his heritage.

"Heritage" for Steve is, I think, not just who someone's ancestors were or what they did, but what a person makes of it. He writes his own history, and defines his own family, too.

Steve Russell

Here are no paeans to Native purity or essential nobility. Only the lovely "Haiku for Walela" hearkens back before the European flood hit the Western hemisphere. One rather cynical poem, "Teach Me," begins, "Teach me, White Father, so I may understand. I understand slavery..." Slavery -- although not of the lifelong variety -- was commonly practiced among Native tribes long before there was any European contact. Of these critical looks at Native political correctness, the most powerful is "How to Succeed as an Indian Poet":

Don't say 'hunger.'
Write of the plump red strawberries
grown by Cherokees
in the Cookson Hills,
rather than rodents fried in lard,
garnished with herbs from the bar ditch,
government commodities on the side...
In "Probably Wolf Clan," "Indistinguishable Color," "Blood Quantum," and other poems, Russell mourns the ongoing loss of Native identity and weighs his own. The question of who is "red" enough to be a "real Indian" has parallels in other discussions: is Barack Obama a "real black man?" What does it mean to be "Hispanic" or "Latino?" And for goodness sake, what in the world is "white?" "When I'm Old" begins:

And when I am very old
will the drums outrun my feet?
Will the sweetgrass be just another smoke, and the sage a burning weed?
Does White Buffalo Calf Woman return for the civilized Indians?
A few selections distill the "wicked dew" of the title and cover illustration, inking the perfidy of European America in its true colors of bitterness and gall. "Bison Bones" excoriates oblivious conquerors who do not even know what they desecrate:

Were Dallas Texans born with neckties on
to be served in deep carpet
by smiling brown faces
where dishes disappear silently
and condiments come in tiny sealed jars
to dine on bison bones?
In other poems, Russell celebrates Native cultural values. "Disruption, Spring 1997," based on news accounts of an Albuquerque school girl not allowed to graduate wearing a traditional shawl by her grandmother, tells of family pride in the girl's achievement. Poems for two of Steve's (non-simultaneous) wives and one titled "Lust" are lit from within by wise acceptance of what-it-is. Another, "Cherokee Love," begins:

There is no love in Cherokee.
No falling in or falling out,
no marry now or live in doubt,
no changing weather love in Cherokee...
Some selections are rooted in Steve's activism as part of Austin's late 1960s-early 1970s anti-war movement. "Jailpoem 2," from 1970, was clearly written following angry protests of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and massacres of students at Kent State and Jackson State. Steve became a leader in the Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Steve Russell, front with VVAW flag, participates in a demonstration by Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the University of Texas Campus at Austin in the late Sixties. Photo from Mariann Wizard's files.
"At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" alternates flashbacks of a Southeast Asian village, a horse cavalry massacre in an Arapaho village, and tears for the fallen soldiers memorialized on the Wall. "Seeing Off the Troop Train" contrasts his youthful desire for heroic action with his grandmother's wisdom and his own fears as a father:

Twenty-eight years later, my son is a volunteer soldier.
Nobody elected Bush or his crew of 20th century retreads.
Granma is not here to say 'We got no business over there!'
But I hear her anyway.
Not everything is equally successful. "Not Juan Valdez," a clever idea, is marred by Spanish spelling errors and the misplacement of Colombia's iconic coffee grower to the Mexican state of Chiapas. Not Juan Valdez, indeed; this one confuses the reader and thus loses points.

A few poems with long, complex lines push against the borders of the printed page, seeming to demand spoken performance and perhaps hand drum punctuation, but add to the depth of the collection overall.

Wicked Dew charts a vision of optimism, traditional values, and endurance in selections such as "Indian Lawyer's Creed" and "A Matter of Faith." "To My Grandfather," the initial poem in the collection, is perhaps the most revealing of these:

I told him I wanted to be like Mickey Mantle,
who escaped the poverty of rural Oklahoma,
and appeared to own New York,
a grand place located near Oz...

I left Oklahoma
and as the years accumulate
Oklahoma almost leaves me.
The road home is distant and dusty and even more unlikely
than the road here...

I have seen New York.
And Oz.
And College...
And although I still cannot tie a necktie, Grampa,
I have taken your name...

and I want you to know
I am still playing batter.
Retired from a first career as an Austin and then Travis County, Texas, trial judge, and a second as a professor of criminal justice in San Antonio and later at Indiana University, and with a book of essays also just out (Ceremonies of Innocence: Essays from the Indian Wars, 2012, Dog Iron Press), Steve Russell bats close to a thousand with this collection of verse.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : What's Behind America's Gun Violence?

Image from Black Youth Project.
Remember the children...
What's behind America's gun violence?

In recent decades -- despite the fact that last year there were over 11,000 murders by firearms in the U.S. and another 20,000 gun deaths from accidents and suicide -- the great majority of American politicians have been too gutless to fight for tougher laws.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2012

There is more than the act of one individual involved in the mass gun killings that take place in America -- the most recent being the massacre of 20 young children and seven school workers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., December 14.

The main culprit, of course, is the late killer, Adam Lanza, 20. But such events occur within a context of shared responsibility for the unparalleled number of mass and individual shooting deaths that take place in the United States every year. This includes the political system and politicians, the National Rifle Association and other gun lobbies, and federal, state and local governments. Each has played an indirect role in the latest and earlier slaughters.

Of these other responsible parties, one is our political system that refuses to strengthen absurdly deficient federal and state restrictions on the possession of various types of arms. Another is the irresponsible politicians who make it relatively easy for criminals, people with mental problems, and those who are unfit to possess weapons for other reasons to accumulate a private arsenal.

In recent decades -- despite the fact that last year there were over 11,000 murders by firearms in the U.S. and another 20,000 gun deaths from accidents and suicide, not to mention many more injuries -- the great majority of American politicians have been too gutless to fight for tougher laws.

President Obama was moved to tears in announcing the deaths of 6- and 7-year old children in Newtown, and said he might take "meaningful action" of an undefined nature. But Obama is risk averse and has shown a disinclination to tangle with the pro-gun lobbies throughout his first term -- so there’s a chance all we’ll get is tears and rhetoric even though 80% of the American people want gun owners to secure police permits, and nearly 90% would require background checks on all gun sales.

On the other hand, the fact that 20 youngsters were massacred has shocked the nation to the extent that it may be politically advantageous for the White House and Congress to pass token legislation. Most conservative Republicans will do whatever is possible to block progress on gun control, but they may be less obstructive if a proposed law is weak and limited. No major changes are anticipated.

At one time, the Democratic presidents were willing to support gun control measures, in contrast to the recalcitrant rightists, but that’s changed in recent years. President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s was a strong advocate, seeking passage of national legislation demanding that firearms owners obtain licenses registering all guns and rifles. It failed.

After a mass shooting in the early 1990s President Bill Clinton fought for and won two gun control laws. The Democrats were quiet during George W. Bush’s eight years and silent during the last four.

Next in responsibility for the murders is the National Rifle Association and other gun owner or industry lobbies such as the Gun Owners of America, which sports an executive director, Larry Pratt, who actually made this comment soon after the school killings:

Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.

The well-funded and fanatically supported gun lobbies greatly influence the politicians through payoffs and the threat of uncompromising electoral opposition. In order to fulfill its function as the propaganda instrument of the firearms owners and industry, the NRA argues disingenuously that the slightest regulation will eventually lead to banning of all guns for civilians, including those for home defense, hunting, and target shooting.

A large percentage of Americans appear to believe the lobby’s extremist propaganda and oppose efforts to strengthen gun laws. They seem to think a constitutional amendment provides them the right to convert society into a modern version of the Wild West, where we can “stand our ground” with bullets even against the innocent and unarmed if we claim to have been threatened.

In this regard, writes Zack Beauchamp Dec. 14 in AlterNet:

The Second Amendment prohibits strict gun control. While the Supreme Court ruled in D.C. v. Heller that bans on handgun ownership were unconstitutional, the ruling gives the state and federal governments a great deal of latitude to regulate that gun ownership as they choose. As the U.S. Second Court of Appeals put it in a recent ruling upholding a New York regulation, "The state’s ability to regulate firearms and, for that matter, conduct, is qualitatively different in public than in the home." Heller reinforces this view. In striking D.C.’s handgun ban, the Court stressed that banning usable handguns in the home is a "policy choice" that is "off the table," but that a variety of other regulatory options remain available, including categorical bans on firearm possession in certain public locations.

The federal government, too, must assume responsibility for creating a national culture of guns and violence that leads to continuing mass murders and individual killings. They averaged 30 a month last year. For every 100,000 residents, the U.S. averages five murders. In England it’s 1.2 murders; in Japan it’s 0.5.

The U.S., working with the arms industry, is the biggest seller of weapons worldwide, mostly to foreign militaries. It also entertains the greatest military arms budget in global history. And by its glorification of the military and of war Washington has contributed mightily to the sense that we are a gun-slinging people, at home as well as abroad, on Main Street USA as well as al Rasheed Street Baghdad.

America is the most violent country of all the advanced industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). From slavery to the displacement and annihilation of the original peoples in order to seize the entire continent, to modern day wars, regime changes, and torture overseas, “violence is as American as cherry pie,” as H. Rap Brown once reminded us.

On July 30, Mother Jones magazine informed its readers that, in the U.S. during the last 30 years, there “have been at least 62 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii.” This includes 2012’s “horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado on July 20, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on August 5, another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis on September 27 -- and now the unthinkable nightmare at a Connecticut elementary school.”

State and local governments must assume responsibility as well for contributing toward a violent and gun-loving society. Considerable moves toward militarizing the police have taken place in recent decades as a result of the exaggerated drug wars and hyped-up terrorism wars. In the 20 years leading up to 2007 (the latest figures), special weapons and tactics teams (SWAT) have increased 1,500 percent.

Police brutality is a frequent reality -- mostly but not exclusively in urban areas and at political, worker, or popular protests and occupations. We’ve handed our police departments a huge array of violent instruments that are, to say the least, disproportionate to most situations. Here is some of their equipment:

For elite SWAT teams in their Darth Vader uniforms: submachine guns, automatic carbines or rifles, semiautomatic combat shotguns, sniper rifles, gas, smoke and flashbang grenades. For regular police: handguns, concealable off-duty handguns, shotguns and/or semiautomatic rifles, tactical batons, nightsticks, electroshock guns (Tasers), mace pepper spray, tear-gas. beanbag shotgun rounds, body armor, and loud noise devices. Beginning to arrive: aerial surveillance drones, soon to be widespread and weaponized.

In combination -- weak gun laws and a compliant political system fearful of powerful lobbies; a national history of violence, militarism, and frequent aggressive wars against smaller nations; and the gradual militarization of police -- these are factors that have significantly helped create the gun culture in the United States.

It’s time to change all of this, but it’s not on the immediate horizon. Enhanced gun control, however, has a chance over the next several years. The great majority of Americans call for expanded gun control. Today, 40% of gun owners have not even been subjected to a background check. It should be everyone. Every gun owner should also have a license from whatever authority issues them. At present, trade shows and private sellers don’t need registration or license information. This must change. And it would be good if there was one overall national law instead of different state laws.

Obviously there should be a reduction in the number of guns in the U.S. The purchase of assault weapons, and automatics with large magazines should be banned, as should large private arsenals. There used to be a law regulating assault rifles but it expired. It was very weak with many loopholes and a new one should be much tougher. A number of people think assault rifles should be completely banned.

Some gun control advocates see no need for concealed handguns at all on the streets at all, much less efforts to allow them in schools, sporting events, bars and elsewhere.

The American people are not seeking to place impossible obstacles in the way of gun ownership. They want tighter regulation and licensing. Banning all guns except for those possessed by the military and the police will never pass, and shouldn’t for a number of reasons including the fact that political systems can and do go wrong. At times, an armed citizenry is most necessary.

There are a number of good gun control groups in the U.S., such as the well-known Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, but they are small with not much clout. It is time for the American people, especially the liberals, progressives, and the left, to unify in action on this issue and organize mass political and electoral activism for as long as it takes to vastly reduce gun violence in America.


Postscript: 

I’m sure we all agree with these lines from an editorial in The New York Times the day after the shooting in Newtown: “There is no crime greater than violence against children, no sorrow greater than that of a parent who has lost a child, especially in this horrible way.”

It is good to remember this in terms of all children, not just our own. According to the UN, a half-million children, many even younger than those at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, died as a result of Washington’s 1990-2003 sanctions against Iraq. We don’t have the child death figures from the wars in Afghanistan an Iraq but we do have some regarding Vietnam from various online sources:

1. Ten percent of the child population of North Vietnam was killed, mainly by U.S. bombers. Another 400,000 suffered birth defects because of the U.S. Agent Orange defoliation campaign. Untold thousands continue to die to this day from accidentally detonating unexploded American land mines.


2. According to American estimates (the Pepper Report) there have been 250,000 children killed, 750,000 wounded and invalided for life in a South Vietnam of 14,000,000 inhabitants. The great majority were killed by U.S. bombers, which decimated (allied) South Vietnam in efforts to destroy the liberation army and its many millions of southern supporters. More than 10,000 sorties by B-52s of the U.S. Strategic Air Command have been carried out over South and North Vietnam, each plane capable of dropping over 30 tons of bombs; that the number of bombs dropped monthly by American planes exceeds that dropped by U.S. planes in the European and Mediterranean theatres in the Second World War.


3. On 27 September 1967 at 7:30 a.m., the day after classes reopened following the summer recess, while the children were happily bent over their first lessons, four U.S. jets, swooping in from the sea, fired rockets and dropped four CBUS (about 2,400 pellet bombs) on the first and second degree schools of Ha Fu (Ha Trung district of Thanh Hoa province) killing 33 pupils from eight to 12 years and wounding 30 more, including two teachers.

Remember the children -- from Newtown to Vietnam!

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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