1847: Three New Poems

Three more poems. These are all based on offensive material, I explain that and my poems in general here.

The rest of the poems are available by clicking on the "lyrics" label at the bottom. There are about 10 pages worth, so click on "older posts."

1. Black 47. About the Irish "Famine."
2. Still Right-Wing. About American politics.
3. 1945. About WWII.

“Black 47” based on “Six Million Lies” by No Remorse. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about the so-called “Famine” that Ireland experienced.
2. From elsewhere on my blog, here’s a fairly good summary:

During the Famine, 10-15% of the population died and 10-15% of the population would have died if they hadn’t emigrated. This was concentrated in the South and West of Ireland where there very few settlers- if you ignore the settlers and their descendents, it was probably closer to 15-20% and 15-20% of the population. Why did a potato blight result in something close to genocide? First, the indigenous Catholic population was still recovering from about 1.5 centuries of political and legal disempowerment that occurred because of the Penal Laws which denied them most of the rights enjoyed by most or all Protestants (it varied from right to right). “Catholic Emancipation” was only made about 90% complete about 15 years earlier. Because of this and general poverty, the indigenous population was largely dependent on land owned by land lords and the potato crop. For about 45 years before the Famine and during the Famine, Ireland didn’t have a devolved parliament, they were completely ruled from London. Crucially, during the Famine, MASSIVE amounts of food were being shipped from Ireland to Britain, something that involved seventy-five British Army regiments. …  the deaths only stopped when the blight stopped. … The British were more or less racist towards the Irish at that point in Anglo-Irish history and were more concerned about practicing Laissez-faire economics and feeding the British population than they were concerned about mass starvation among the Irish

3. It was close to genocide.
4. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a British Prime Minister apologized for British policy during the Famine. I guarantee you they weren’t being honest about it and not apologizing.
5. I’m not sure to what extent the British pushed the idea that the Irish are all alcoholics, but I’m sure they at least sort of did.
6. If you focus on the number of INDIGENOUS Irish who died or emigrated, it was a little less than three million.
7. As far as the American establishment pushing lies about the Famine, see this. As far as I can tell, a lot of Irish-Americans believe that the Irish chose to just eat potatoes.
8. I’m not saying that everyone who supports Northern Ireland being part of the UK also peddle lies about the Famine, but I think that most of them do.
9. During the Famine, people were offered money if they didn’t teach their children Irish (that’s according to a Sinead O’Connor song).
10. The 12 of July is a major holiday for N. Ireland Unionists, and is political and sectarian (it’s the anniversary of a battle in Ireland where a Protestant contender for the British throne beat his Catholic rival).
11. Orange is the color of anti-Catholic bigotry in the Anglo-Irish context.
12. Partition is the division of Ireland.
12. As I prove here only .3% of operations of the Provisional IRA resulted in civilian death. And I like referring to The Troubles as the Second Anglo-Irish War (the first being the War of Independence).
13. This isn’t ABOUT SF. It’s just saying that the cause of Irish freedom is strengthened by SF’s electoral success. It’s not saying SF believes this or did that, except that they will lead Ireland to unity (no member of SF is going to complain about that statement).
14. There is a theory I largely subscribe to, that the Unionists in N. Ireland are actually Irish, but I’m also comfortable with the idea that they can and (in a united Ireland) will develop a British-Irish identity which I’m sure the Irish will be willing to accommodate.
11. **78% of this version is me, 22% is the original. I took the first two lines of the original, combined them, altered them, and then created a completely new 2nd line.
12. No Remorse were British and supported the unionist and/or British cause(s) in N. Ireland.

Did the Irish really prefer potatoes or is it just a British lie?
20% left and 20% died
Genocide by the Brits, we have the proof
Why did they try to cover up the truth?
Scared that they would look like scum that they are
So they pushed the idea that the Irish can’t stay out of bars

Three million of the human race
Because the British Army had an iron grip on the place
They play down the fact that food was shipped across the Irish sea
They may have fooled you, but not me

The worst case of Laissez-faire economics in history
It was also racism and religious bigotry
American media and schools cooperate
With the lies of those who support the North being part of the British state
Well the beautiful Irish language didn't die
Fuck Margaret Thatcher and the 12th of July!

So let's make Ireland British Army free
We’ll make sure there's no return to an Orange society
The partition of Ireland is rotten to the core
Provos fought with courage and honor in the Anglo-Irish War
With Sinn Fein and global solidarity we'll surely win
And the Protestant Unionists will see us as their kin

**************

“Still Right-Wing” based on “Still Occupied” by Razor’s Edge. Original lyrics are here.

1. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is the address of the White House.
2. Fash is short for fascists.
3. I doubt it’s just a tiny minority of white people who worry about that. I think it might be around 20-30%.
4. “Right-to-work” is, in general, a reference to anti-union government policies. Specifically, “Right-to Work” laws say that someone can’t be required to join a union in order to get a job. This means that people who benefit from a union contract at their job don’t have to pay membership dues, which weakens the union.
6. As far as the racist, homicidal cops, see this.
7. A lot of GOP local and state elections officials pull fucked up shit. Not enough voting machines in certain precincts and few or no opportunities to vote early means long lines and people going home without voting so they can get up and go to work the next morning. There’s what happened in FL in 2000 where they were. WAY to quick to take people off the rolls because they MIGHT have been convicted of something. More recent fight-back against letting ex-cons vote, and creating a poll tax by saying that such people have to pay all the money they owe in connection with their conviction before they can vote again.
8.  In terms of racial equality, the FUTURE looked so bright when Obama was President. Trump took that and turned it on its head. Also, Obama (as a candidate and as President) was not a progressive, but nor was he a Clintonite. He was a liberal, as I non-philosophically define them here.
9. I’m not interested in an alliance with the obnoxious, extreme, sectarian anarchists. I think the moderate anarchists were SLIGHTLY happy with Obama being elected, because he was the first Black President, and as I explain above, he was not a Clintonite. And I think that most Marxists and almost all social-dems were at least sort of happy with him, for the same reasons.
10. **76% of this version is me, 24% is the original. The second-to-last line of both verses is brand new- it wasn't there before.
11. UPDATE 4/1/20 Just in case there's confusion, I'm not saying that everyone to the left of center and  opposed to the GOP is a leftist or more generally a progressive. It might sound like I'm saying that, but I'm not. I JUST CHANGED "WE'LL" IN THE COUNTY CLERK LINE TO "DEMS AND PROGRESSIVES WILL".

With Obama, the future looked so bright,
Finally, a President who wasn’t white.
But then, at 1600 Pennsylvania, Trump moved in,
Even though, the popular vote, he didn’t win.
Our society is being torn apart,
think this is bad but it's just the start.
Instead of health care fash worry that the white race will die
How can so many white people swallow so many lies?

Chorus
It’s still a “right-to-work” nation, workers aren’t free -
The working-class labor movement is on it’s knees
And it's hard, hard to defeat -
the murderous police departments patrolling the Black street!

With GOP County Clerks Dems and progressives will never have a chance to win
Their idea of democracy and fascism are almost akin
Hopefully the white working-class will awake, before it's too late,
And Labor will keep educating them, however much money it takes.
We’re trying to save the labor movement from homicide,
we're for comprehensive diversity and for class pride.
Whether we’re social-dems, Marxists or moderate anarchists
We're never ever giving in to the fucking capitalists!

*************

“1945” based on “Final Attack” by Final War. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about the last several months of WWII in Europe.
2. A bridgehead is either a position held to maintain the possession of a bridge at the front, or a position just behind enemy lines.
3. Many of them didn’t do any time because they were executed.
4. The Waffen-SS was the military (as opposed to paramilitary) component of the SS (the very ideological, official, domestic security part of the Nazi state).
5. Combined arms attacks involve more than one type of military unit (i.e. infantry, armor, ground attack aircraft, artillery)
6. The main weapon of a tank is its main gun. Bazookas were an early version of a Rocket-Propelled-Grenade type weapon.
7. Panzers were German tanks.
8. **71% of this poem is me, 29% is the original.
9. UPDATE 4/6/20 I need to say that as far as American servicemen opposed to anti-semitism, realistically it was probably just some moderate-sized minority of them.
10. UPDATE 4/6/20 The chorus is kind of out of whack chronologically (to one ridiculously large degree or another, knowledge of the camps was incredibly limited until the end of the war).

The day is approaching the day of victory
for the Poles, the Jews, and all those, opposed to the Nazis
gonna keep fighting gonna knock em dead
gonna reinforce the front and our bridgeheads

gonna take many prisoners when their lines we overrun
won’t stop till our mission is done
they took over Europe and made Jews wear an arm-band
now we’re gonna smash them with an iron hand

(Chorus)
Oh no, what are the Nazis gonna do?
when we find the concentration camps for the Jews
We’ll put them on trial for war crimes
After they’re convicted, they won’t do any time

we’ve got our sights set on the Waffen-SS
Arms factories, all those Nazis who oppress
we’re on a rampage we’re letting loose
And we’ll only accept unconditional surrender, without a truce

We carry out ambushes and combined arms attacks
they tried to take the world, now they cower at our artillery impacts
Main guns and bazookas are how we destroy Panzer tanks
And when we capture Krauts we love to interrogate their upper ranks

Taking Down Columbus: Three New Poems

I explain about my poetry here. The second is based on a song I agree with. The other two are not. The third one is about anti-racist skinheads. You might want to read the notes about that kind of poem here.

All the poems are available by clicking on the "lyrics" label at the bottom.

1. Indigenous Peoples Day. Opposition to Columbus Day Parades.
2. A Letter From Ardoyne To British Labour. An appeal by a Northern Ireland Catholic to the British Labour Party.
3. Taking Down the Boneheads. Anti-racist skinheads.

“Indigenous Peoples Day” based on “Freedom” by Brutal Attack. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about opposition to Columbus Day parades, from the perspective of a white ally, but not me (frankly, I LOVE those parades- just joking; the thing is, I practically never or never write from my perspective when I use the first person in my poems; in this case, the last line of the first verse is not something I have done)). For multiple reasons, you should read several paragraphs here, beginning a little more than 1/2 way down, starting with the paragraph “For many reasons…” and ending with the paragraph “For whatever it’s worth….” You should definitely read some of the material here.
2. Although this is about such parades nation-wide, in Denver at least, the group organizing the parade is or has been the Sons of Columbus (there seem to be groups using that phrase throughout the country) (UPDATE 3/27/20 It's been 15-20 years and I was wrong- in Denver it was the Sons of Italy, but the other phrase, in connection with the word parade, IS found all over the internet).
3. When Columbus was governor of Hispanola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), at least 99% of the indigenous population was killed.
4. I mentioned Irish-Americans for three reasons:

A: We’re awesome.

B: In the last 20 years or so, frequently local organizations of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (an exclusively male, Catholic and Irish-American group) have marched in Columbus Day Parades (see the very end of an article here). They’re more or less conservative (some are economically progressive) and this just pisses me off even more.

C: I think that sometimes Sinn Fein should intervene in American political fights considering A) how internationalist they are and B) how much time they spend here. Considering how Columbus Day parades stand for something worse than Orange Order parades, and the fact that many of their supporters are MARCHING in Columbus Day parades, I think it’s one of the few times that SF should speak out, IN AMERICA, about injustice here.

5. This isn’t written from MY perspective. But here’s a little story relevant to the last line of the first verse. After the controversy about Ward Churchill broke, I attended a rally and/or protest in support of him. I was wearing an anti-Columbus t-shirt and some College Republican said that Columbus was his hero. I explained what I mentioned above about Hispanola and the GOPer said that when he moved into his apartment he wiped out the “indigenous population of spiders.” I should have explained how offensive it is to compare that with killing brown-skinned people, but I just called him a motherfucker. He asked if I wanted to fight and then speculated that I don’t believe in fighting (I’m not a pacifist). I just stood there looking at the rest of the crowd until he’d been silent for 2-3 minutes and then I walked away.
6. As far as the FBI, in the 1970s the American Indian Movement was targeted for destruction by the FBI (exclusively or almost exclusively on Pine Ridge). On the Pine Ridge reservation, 1973-1976, the US government and its corrupt reservation allies were responsible for the murder of at least 69 AIM members and supporters (according to the chapter “AIM Casualties on Pine Ridge” in Ward Churchill’s 1994 book “Indians Are Us?”). The population of that reservation I would estimate was, at the time, about 20,000 (I can’t find anything for that, and according to the US Census Bureau via Wikipedia, in 2017 there were almost 20,000 people there, and between the fact that it was likely 1/2 of 1/3 that in 1975 and the fact that I have found some confusing facts indicating that it may be higher than 20,000 today, I’m just going to go with 20,000). In The Troubles, five years that saw 200+ deaths each year were 1972-1976 and since 1972 saw 480 deaths in the conflict, I looked at the years 1972-1975. During that time, almost exactly 422 members of the Nationalist community, including members of republican paramilitaries (including three from the South who were killed in the North; I mention that because I’m sure some AIM members on Pine Ridge were not locals), were killed by either the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries. Now, when considering population figures, if things were equal in terms of these sorts of deaths, the figure for N. Ireland would have been 1,725 (for good reason, I looked at just Pine Ridge and on the other hand, all of N. Ireland). I should also point out that AIM was not as militant as the IRA, and as far as I know, killed none or almost none of their opponents and probably ZERO civilians, and were not blowing up buildings. If they had been more aggressive and/or had killed civilians, I can only imagine how many of them and their supporters would have been killed (there’s evidence that around 90% of the Nationalist community, including republicans, supported republican paramilitaries TO ONE DEGREE OR ANOTHER, see the middle third of this for support of internees in the 1970s and hunger-strikers in 1981). UPDATE 12/19/20 I just got an email from Churchill saying that the population of Pine ridge at the time was about 10,000, so instead of 1,725 the hypothetical figure for N. Ireland is 3, 450.
7. In the last 25 years I celebrated the 4th 3-6 times. A) I have some slightly patriotic tendencies and B) I was hanging out with friends who were more or less liberal or my Mom who was (overall) fairly liberal. But I’m sure that most white allies who oppose these parades don’t celebrate the 4th and I agree that some of what it is symbolic of is fucked up shit.
8. Columbus may have been Italian, although according to Ward Churchill there’s some disagreement about that. MANY Italian-Americans (around 60-90 years ago), in response to bigotry against them, started talking up the idea that Columbus was Italian and began celebrating him. At a 2000 talk in support of a protest of the Denver Columbus Day parade, Ward Churchill said that there SHOULD be a celebration of Italian-America, but based on pasta, not Columbus. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted of murder in 1921 during a wave of anti-immigrant, anti-Italian, and anti-anarchist hysteria in America. It’s widely agreed that there’s plenty of reason to believe they were innocent.
9. Police body cams make it less likely that they’ll do fucked up shit. There should be some kind of serious penalty for the officers and/or department if they claim that the footage isn’t available (it wasn’t turned on, it broke, the computer doesn’t work, whatever their excuse is).
10. **80% of this version is me, 20% is the original.
11. This is dedicated to my late friend Chris O’Laughlin, who died of cancer in 2002. He was very progressive, and an opponent of these parades, and was Irish-American and Italian-American (and probably proud of both- I know he was an Irish Republican). RIP Chris.
12. UPDATE 3/27/20 I'm not real familiar with to what degree American Indians live communally today, especially those who live off the reservation, but A) I think that continues to one degree or another today and B) only about 150 years ago around 1/3-1/2 DEFINITELY lived communally and C) 300 years before that, they all definitely did and D) it's something that many Indians, to one degree or another, aspire to.
13. UPDATE 3/28/20 In case I need to clarify this, here it is. I have said, explicitly, in at least two other places on my blog, that I would feel better if there hadn't been any European settlement here at all. I mentioned westward expansion  for two reasons: A) A LOT of the time people focus on criticizing "Manifest Destiny" (the idea behind westward expansion) and B) the settlement of the 13 colonies was not something done by the government I recognize as mine, it was done by the British. But I DO feel bad about the settlement of the 13 colonies.
14. UPDATE 4/9/20 I imply in the poem that all American Indians want the parades banned. I'm not sure that's totally true. About 10 years ago an Indian I was friends with said she wasn't into the idea of blocking the parade. That might extend to getting it banned. But among Indians who oppose blocking it, there might be some or many who are sort of okay with it being banned by the city. In Denver I had been to a few other protests organized by the group (or the main group) that organized the protest of the parade (Colorado AIM) and was slightly familiar with the Denver American Indian community and I think that maybe around 1/3 or 1/2 of Indians in that area identified with them (most of the others hated them). It's possible that if the others opposed blocking the parade, for some of them it was because CO-AIM got in front of opposition to the parade at the very beginning, and like I said, a lot of Indians in Denver really don't like them (that might be because they’re fairly comfortable, in theory and at least once in practice, with militancy, and without being Marxist or social-democratic or anarchist, CO-AIM could be described, to one degree or another, as leftist). And if some people would say that the issue of freedom of assembly would indicate opposition to the parade being banned, I would say that it seems pretty popular among Indians to tell sports teams what they can do with their “Indian” mascots. The Native American Rights Fund, a group more moderate than CO-AIM, supported at least one lawsuit and supports creating a legislatively created and empowered committee in CO that would have the power of the law to approve or reject the mascots of public schools (including higher education). The streets are public, and Columbus Day is probably more offensive to American Indians than “Indian” mascots are. In any case, something like 99% of American Indians don't like the parades.

When the Sons of Italy want to march the city won’t ban it
But take a look at the genocide, Columbus began it
Now they’re afraid of us because we tell the truth
To the masses of white people, including the Irish-American youth
When I think about America’s westward expansion I feel some shame
But when I stand to make a speech the police ask me for my name

Chorus
Freedom from genocide is the very least they deserve
Capitalism and Imperialism joined forces, two things we should not conserve
The White man can try to suppress Indians with their police and the FBI
Indians will emerge victors- and fuck the 4th of July!

Communal Nations with a lot of respect for the land       
They’ll keep working until Columbus Day parades are banned
We don’t hate Italians-Americans and remember Sacco and Vanzetti
As Ward said, let’s celebrate Italian-America with a ton of spaghetti

So, let’s help promote the next protest against those parades
If we have to, we’ll keep doing this for many decades
We want a country free of bigotry, and based on community
We believe in police body cams and equal opportunity

**********

“A Letter From Ardoyne To British Labour” based on “Body Count” by Body Count (Ice-T’s heavy metal band). Original lyrics are here.

1. I removed a lot of Ice-T’s non lyrical talk, except for the very beginning.
2. Ardoyne is a nationalist/republican neighborhood in North Belfast.
3. This is basically in late 1970 and 1971, after British Labour were removed from power by the voters and yet, close enough to the beginning of the conflict that you could say the republican struggle was still growing, and when Orange is definitely the right word because Stormont, the Unionist-dominated regional devolved Parliament and Government, still existed.
4. As far as I can tell, there are some pro-unionist tendencies in BL, some pro-republican tendencies, some pro-SDLP tendencies (although officially they’re sister organizations, the SDLP doesn’t belong in the Socialist International and I think a lot of people in BL know that (that post also explains how, setting aside the question of the IRA’s campaign, getting behind the SDLP was not getting behind an effective path to equality, justice and freedom for the Nationalist population)), and some other tendencies (i.e. some wanted Labour to organize in the North, but British Labour, not Irish Labour).
5. The red, white and blue, in this poem and not the original lyrics, refers to the BRITISH flag.
6. Partition is the division of Ireland.
7. Orange is the color of anti-Catholic bigotry in the Anglo-Irish context.
8. The BA is the British Army.
9. AKs are AK-47s which are automatic rifles.
10. RA stands for “Republican Army” and is pronounced “raw.”
11. Loyalist refers to the paramilitaries that focused mostly on killing Catholic civilians because they were Catholic.
12. Squaddie is a British soldier.
13. I choose North Belfast because, behind West Belfast, it saw the most deaths in the conflict (compared to the other 3 quarters of Belfast, Derry, and Counties Armagh, Down, Antrim, Derry, Fermanagh, and Tyrone). But I think it was worse for Catholics in North Belfast than those in West Belfast because it was a mixture of Nationalist and Unionist areas, whereas the Nationalist areas of West Belfast were all grouped together.
14. **25% of this version is me, 75% is the original.
15. I have calculated that only about .3% of the IRA's operations resulted in civilian death.

You know, sometimes I sit at home, you know, and I watch the BBC
And I wonder what it would be like to live in some place like
You know, Manchester, Liverpool
You know, where the peelers come and got your cat outta the tree
All your friends die of old age
But you see.. I live in North Belfast
And unfortunately... SHIT AIN'T LIKE THAT!!
It's real fucked up!

God damn, what brothers and sisters gotta do
To get a message through
To the red and white and blue
What? I gotta die, before you realize
I was a person with open eyes?
Partition’s insane, while you drink champagne
And I'm living under Orange reign
The BA fears Irish people with AKs
Here the ‘RA's got ten stashed With a case of hand grenades

You'd know what to do
If loyalists killed your kid on the way to school
Or a BA sniper shot your kid in a rural barnyard
Shit would hit the fan motherfucker and it would hit real hard
I hear it every night, another gun fight
The struggle mounts,
on with the IRA’s squaddie Body Count

God damn what the Irish gotta do
To get a message through
To the red and white and you?
What? I gotta die before you realize
I was a Catholic with open eyes?
Orange society’s insane, while you drink champagne
And I'm living under Imperialistic reign
Don't you hear the loyalist guns?
You stupid, dumb British Labour politicians!!

*************

“Taking on the Boneheads” based on “Tearing Down the Flags” by Razor’s Edge. Original lyrics are here.

1.  This is about anti-racist skinheads. They might not exist anymore, but that’s not going to stop me from doing poems like this.
2. Bonehead is an anti-racist term for nazi skinhead.
3. Cardiff (Wales) is the home of Roddy Moreno and the Oi! band The Oppressed are based there. Moreno is the most popular anti-racist skinhead in the world.
4. Las Vegas is where in 1998, two anti-racist skinheads were killed by Nazis.
5. A large town in the Czech Republic is where, in 2008, an anti-racist skinhead was killed by a Nazi Skinhead.
6. Perth (Australia) rhymes with Earth.
7. Anti-racist skinheads are embarrassed (or something like that) by the existence of Nazis in their culture.
8. SHARP stands for “SkinHead Against Racial Prejudice.”
9. Fash is short for fascists.
10. Suss is a skinhead/British word for intelligence (or something close to that).
11. Around 95% of skinheads are working-class and even when it’s warped by fascism, have a strong sense of working-class pride.
12. The idea is that, since the skinhead culture started in connection with Black English people, if you’re a racist you can’t be a skinhead.
13. Bread is a term for economic justice. Although the average SHARP is only sort of political and only sort of progressive, Nazi skinheads are, for better or worse, very political and have a (racially narrow) belief in economic justice.
14. Ian Stuart was the opposite of Moreno, and died in 1993 in a hilarious car accident.
15. I think the fash (and, sort of separately, the Christian Right) try to ignore the way they have a lot in common with the Muslim fundamentalist Right (if you think I have a racist double standard, see the first third of this).
16. I don’t believe in Hell, but if it does exist Ian Stuart and Al-Qaeda members are there.
17. A patch on, for example, a bomber jacket (popular with skinheads).
18. Docs are Doc Martens, boots that almost all skinheads (and some non-skinhead fans of music that inspires moshing) wear (it’s possible that in the last 20 years, a LOT of other people are wearing them, too).
19. **63% of this poem is me, 37% is the original.

They wear their swastika patches, their symbols full of hate
Don't they f*cking realize, that their defeat awaits
We're taking on the boneheads, all across the Earth
In Cardiff, Las Vegas, the Czech Republic and Perth

(Chorus)
We're taking down the boneheads- we'll banish Skinhead’s shame.
We're taking down the boneheads- SHARP is our name.
We're taking down the boneheads- we’re never giving in.
We're taking down the boneheads- we’re gonna f*cking win.

Fash still marching on our streets, they haven't learned a thing.
Don't they f*cking realize, our fists will swing and they’ll swing and they’ll swing
They're just a bunch of wankers, who haven’t got the suss
To the skinhead culture and the working-class they’re treasonous

They shave their heads and wear Docs but they aren’t real skinheads
They don’t realize you can’t promote hate and successfully push for bread
We're taking down the boneheads, and we hate Ian Stuart real well.
So they can join Al-Qaeda, in the fascist motherfuckers hell

Most Oppressed People on Earth

In a recent post, which is largely about the question, Are Jewish Americans oppressed as Jewish Americans? I added something fairly relevant about US foreign policy in relation to Ireland, specifically the Famine years and The Troubles. I meant to attach the following update to the paragraph about the Famine, but for a few minutes or (more likely) a few hours it was attached to the paragraph about The Troubles:

(UPDATE 3/12/20 Some would say it was a different USA back then, but has any American President ever apologized for the failure of the US to do something? In some bizarre alternate history where the US sat out WWII and Nazi Germany was defeated anyway and there were a whole bunch of Holocaust survivors, the US would have at some point between then and now apologized for their inaction)

After moving that update to the Famine paragraph I added a brief note to the Troubles paragraph about the mistake. I don’t know if anyone saw the post before I fixed things but I worry that they did. Although I AM worried, it also occurred to me that it’s far from total nonsense to compare N. Ireland with Nazi Germany. First, here I’ll quote or describe and evaluate three statements by political figures who are more or less mainstream in Ireland.

************

1. During something called the Siege of the Short Strand, a senior politician of the moderate nationalist and Christian-/social-democratic party the Social Democratic and Labour Party (a year earlier they had gone from getting about 60% of the Nationalist vote to getting 40-47%) compared the situation to what happened with the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland during WWII. That article (it’s not the most widely respected news source, but A) at the TIME, I read about some SDLP politician making the comparison, B) I found another article online referring specifically to McDonnell, and C) I can’t find anything better) offers some info about the Siege, and I’ll provide more in a minute, but a VERY thorough description of what happened is available from a very credible, academic source here.

The Short Strand is an isolated Catholic enclave in East Belfast surrounded on three sides by Unionist areas and on the fourth side by a river. Although I believe the Short Strand might be slightly middle-class on average, as far as I can tell their most immediate neighbors and/or those about a mile away are on average working-class. The Siege lasted for about 3 months in the late Spring and early Summer of 2002. There were frequent periods where the sky was saturated by rocks and other missiles being thrown into the Short Strand. There were 1-2 incidents of of close quarters fighting, and a small number of shots were fired. According to the link right above:

As previously noted, ‘one consequence of the interface violence was the inability for people from the Short Strand to access crucial services due to a Loyalist blockade of the area’. These included the doctor’s surgery; chemist; post office; dentist; baby clinic and shopping centres. The knock-on effect was that many elderly people were unable to collect their pensions; people who were ill could not visit the surgery or collect prescriptions; and mothers could not receive baby food supplies. It emerged through further discussions that women from the area took it upon themselves to organise ‘the relief effort for the community’. They organised transport for people to collect their pensions at post offices not in East Belfast, and they facilitated the community centre as a makeshift surgery

At one point a Catholic funeral procession was attacked. There was some violence by the security forces aimed at the Short Strand and little was done to break the Siege (less than a year earlier, after the Ulster Defense Association (a loyalist paramilitary) killed a Catholic and a Protestant who was hanging out with Catholic friends, in separate attacks, the British government minister for N. Ireland said that the UDA cease-fire was intact) (In July 1996 during 5 days of loyalist rioting throughout N. Ireland, 662 plastic bullets were fired; immediately after that, during 3 days of nationalist rioting, 5,340 plastic bullets were fired, according to a report by the Pat Finucane Centre).

As I wrote elsewhere on this blog, I think that the SDLP politician went too far, but it wasn’t absolute nonsense. Especially because the Siege was, in the end, broken by the Jewish Combat Organization (the group that carried out the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto). … No, it wasn’t  :  ). But I love that clip and the movie in general.

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2. Michael Farrell is one of my top political heroes. He wrote an amazing book “Northern Ireland: The Orange State.” It’s a great book- it’s fairly introductory at the beginning and is a history of N. Ireland ending at some point in the 1970s depending on which edition you read. It’s also almost a labor history of N. Ireland, offers a lot of analysis, exposes the sectarian, brutal and near-authoritarian nature of the Northern state. It highlights the contributions made by Protestants and leftists to the struggles for justice, equality, and freedom. It exposes the role that capital played in creating and maintaining N. Ireland and the ways that capital benefited from the partition of Ireland and Orange rule in N. Ireland. Farrell was a leading member of People’s Democracy whose politics and activities I describe in the first half of this post (starting in the very early 1970s they expressed support for the Provisional IRA).

According to his wikipedia page:

After moving to Dublin and becoming a solicitor, Farrell was co-chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties from 1995 to 2001. He was appointed a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2001 and reappointed in October 2006, serving until 2011. In 2005 he was appointed to the Steering Committee of the National Action Plan Against Racism [according to his ECRI page, it was 2001-2003- TS]. He is currently working for Free Legal Advice Centres, Dublin, and has brought cases to the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. In 2011 he was appointed to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, and in 2012 he was appointed to the Irish Council of State by President Michael D. Higgins.

I can confirm pretty much all of it (including the Council of State part), and there’s also the fact that people who were (between 1970 and 1990) very vocal and active Northern supporters of the Provisional IRA are not appointed to the Council of State (by a mainstream Labour politician) 20 years later without being (for example) a ridiculously well respected human rights/civil liberties lawyer.

In “The Orange State” he writes on page 97 that in 1936:

The NCCL [the British National Council on Civil Liberties] commission commented that the Unionists had created “under the shadow of the British constitution a permanent machine of dictatorship.” They compared Northern Ireland with the fascist dictatorships then current in Europe. In so far as the total identification of party and state was one of the hallmarks of European fascism, the comparison was apt.

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3. Mary McAleese was a two-term President of Ireland, who was returned unopposed for her second term. She had grown up and spent probably half her life in the North when she was first elected. In 2005 she compared sectarian hatred of Catholics in N. Ireland with the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. She was seriously criticized by Unionists and quickly walked back the comments and apologized. She shouldn’t have. The best evidence of widespread hatred of Catholics is the following:

A: The popularity of the Orange Order, whose anti-Catholic nature and centrality to the Unionist community (for decades until about 2005 they had a bloc vote in the leadership of the UUP (then the largest of the two main Unionist parties)) is described here. (Orange Order parades were often forced through Catholic areas by the security forces including the local police)

B: In 1971 Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants, and in 1988 they were two and a half times as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. According to the documentary OFF OUR KNEES, in 1988, 17 out of 26 local government districts refused to sign a tame “declaration of intent” that as employers they would not discriminate, and I guarantee you that the 9 who signed it had a large Nationalist majority and that their populations added up to probably less than a 1/4 of the North’s population.

C: 1969-2005 722 Catholic civilians, only about 27 of whom were identified in the Sutton Database as political activists, were killed by the loyalist paramilitaries or the locally recruited security forces. A similar scenario in America during the same years would have seen 57,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) (A: based on what I’ll describe at the very bottom, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 57,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland). It gets worse. As I more or less wrote elsewhere on this blog:

1) In the early and mid 1970s, during internment without trial, 107 loyalists were interned, 1,874 republicans (and two leftists who were not republicans) were interned, and on average the republicans were interned longer because the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned. Practically all the loyalists did was kill Catholic civilians because they were Catholic (see this). As I proved here, the Provisional IRA only targeted civilian life in .3% of their operations and only .3% resulted in civilian death (when I say 
“operations” that doesn’t include things like keeping loyalist mobs or (towards the beginning of the conflict) the security forces outside Catholic areas or interface incidents with loyalist paramilitaries). Therefore, the government (either the local one or the State-wide one influenced by the local Unionist leaders) was more concerned about IRA attacks that almost never resulted in civilian death than about the sectarian slaughter of Catholic civilians because they were Catholics.

2) From its formation in 1971 until 1992, the main loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association, was considered a legal organization by the British government. In 1974, when the gov't finally got around to declaring Sinn Fein a legal organization, they "balanced that out" by declaring that the Ulster Volunteer Force, the other main loyalist paramilitary, was legal. That lasted for about 18 months, during which the UVF was blamed for about 50 murders.

3) This indicates that the Army and (crucially, in this post) the police, were sympathetic to loyalist paramilitaries. Some new information about collusion is in a new post here.

4) There was widespread and systemic collusion with loyalist paramilitaries and this definitely included the locally recruited police. And there is evidence here and there that then two main Unionist parties, who like to talk like supporting loyalist paramilitaries is a working-class thing, frequently hinted in different ways that the Unionist middle-class was into it as well. Large elements of the Unionist middle-class accepted the crucial role of the UDA in bringing down the power-sharing Sunningdale peace agreement in 1974. Middle-class Unionist leaders often shared a platform with people representing or associated with the paramilitaries. They never objected to the double standard of Internment, and they practically never called for the UDA to be banned until shortly before it was banned.

D) Between 1998 and 2018, with the exception of 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked), Northern Ireland Life and Times asked people if they prefer to live in a neighborhood entirely of their own religion, and in an average year 22% of Protestants said that they prefer a neighborhood that’s entirely Protestant. NILT also asked people (1998-2018 with the exceptions of 1999, 2000, and 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked)) if they would mind if a close relative married someone of a different religion, and in an average year 11% of Protestants said they would mind a lot and 19% said they would mind a little. And those surveys started the same year that the Good Friday Agreement was created and a year after the IRA went on cease-fire (as I prove here, in only .3% of their operations did the IRA target civilian life and probably 2/3 of that time it wasn’t aimed at Protestants who were INNOCENT civilians; but I’m sure that the now-permanent cease-fire by the IRA had a positive effect on sectarian attitudes among Protestants).

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If, in an alternate history, the Nazis had stopped at anti-Semitic propaganda, the various laws (like the ones named Nuremberg) that created a kind of Apartheid for German Jews (and stripped them of their citizenship), and periodic orgies of violence against Germany’s Jewish population like Kristalnacht (in 1938), Nazi Germany would have been only a little more anti-Semitic than N. Ireland was anti-Catholic.

People are probably shaking their heads and thinking of how the Nuremberg laws created what I would call a kind of Apartheid for German Jews and took away their citizenship. There was informal apartheid in N. Ireland (Stormont was the regional parliament and government):

1) Even in a majority-Nationalist city like Derry, in the early 1970s anti-unionist marches were banned from the city center.

2) There were laws (during almost all of the Stormont era (1920-1972)) about voting which, without mentioning Catholics, were anti-Catholic. In local elections, you had to own a house (remember the unemployment and some stuff below) to vote and certain kinds of businesspeople, who were disproportionately Northern Protestant, had MORE than one vote in local and regional elections.

3) There was clear evidence of discrimination in the allocation of public housing in the Stormont era (partly because of that it was incredibly common during the Stormont era for more than one Catholic family to be living in a small home and this may have continued to a small degree in the 70s and 80s, although apparently DISCRIMINATION stopped in the very early 70s).

4) Although it wasn’t formal, there was segregation in housing- crucially, Catholics in mixed areas were often intimidated out of their homes.

5) Although I doubt it was enforced more than 5% of the time during the conflict, until 1988 there was a law criminalizing the display of the Irish flag, and in the mid-60s twice riot police in Belfast raided a Sinn Fein election office in solidly Nationalist West Belfast and removed a tri-color that was in the window.

Were N. Ireland Catholics stripped of their citizenship during The Troubles? Yes, and they also picked cotton for master Paisley. :  ) …No, they weren’t and they didn’t (Ian Paisley was between the mid-1960s and around 2005 a very visible, extremely Unionist and anti-Catholic politician). But between 1975 and 1998, with practically zero influence on law and policy beyond local government, they were ruled by a state they quite reasonably saw as both foreign and hostile. And according to this, there was a small but significant gap in pay between Catholics and Protestants who were employed. As far as I can tell (no, I don’t have a finance or economics degree) the average employed Catholic made 75% of what the average employed Protestant made.

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Criostailoíche. That’s my half-assed attempt, using Google, at translating Kristalnacht into Irish. In August 1969, in response to the growing confidence of nationalists, the RUC police and a Unionist mob launched a determined attack on the Catholic Bogside ghetto in Derry. The area was successfully defended by local youths over 2-3 days, and the "Battle of the Bogside" sparked off similar confrontations in Belfast. There, where Catholics were more vulnerable, unionist mobs (led by the RUC) unleashed a wave of terror- in one night alone, 650 Catholic families were burnt out of their homes (in general, 83% of the homes and buildings either destroyed or needing re-building were occupied by Catholics; many of the Protestant victims were attacked by the same mobs as their Catholic neighbors were attacked by; but some were forced out in retaliation by Catholics (the odds are that the Catholic-occupied homes and buildings contained more families and a LOT more people than the Protestant-occupied homes and buildings)). Around 5-6 Catholic civilians were killed. That figure for deaths is either much lower than what happened to German Jews or almost nothing compared to what happened to German Jews (adjusting for the different population sizes). But (in July, August, and September) 1,505 Catholic families fled their homes (probably something like 18% of Belfast’s Catholic population, probably something like 1.8% of the North’s Catholic population). Kristalnacht was worse/much worse but not tons worse, especially if you consider what the police and loyalists had intended in Derry, which probably would have matched Belfast in terms of deaths and property destruction and people evicted from their homes.

Also, it would have been much worse in N. Ireland if there hadn’t been militant, and intermittently ARMED, resistance. I realize that if Jews in Germany had tried that, it almost certainly wouldn’t have saved them and there MAY have been more support among Gentile Germans for what Hitler wanted to do. But, it also MAY have encouraged those Gentile Germans opposed to anti-Semitism to resist. In the medium term it might not have stopped Nazi Germany. But IF there had been massive armed resistance by Jews and non-Jewish anti-Nazi elements, at a time when the German military wasn’t as strong as it was when the war started, it may have encouraged some European countries to attack Germany and since many elements of the German officer corps. considered deposing Hitler when it looked like he was leading Germany to disaster (and when there were fewer alumni of the Hitler Youth (who adored Hitler) than there were at any point between then and the end of the war), Hitler may have been removed from power by the military. Of course if it were the Soviet Union that attacked, that would have just united everyone remotely fond of Hitler, but they were pretty far away and seemed less than totally committed to the anti-Nazi cause. But liberal democracies may have threatened Germany enough that elements of the officer corps, with few Hitler Youth alumni in their ranks or the military in general, may have deposed Hitler.

I don’t mean to criticize German Jews of that time, but I do believe that what I just wrote is accurate (that is, how things likely would have worked out if there had been resistance), and I like talking about Nazi Germany and anti-fascism.

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So, yes, there are some small differences, some big differences, and one MASSIVE difference between what happened to Germany’s Jewish population during WWII and what happened to Catholics during The Troubles.

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What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?

1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).

UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.

Why And How I Organized A Very Successful Anti-War Rally in March of 2003

This post is an essay about a major success I had as a political activist which might actually be held against me at this point because I have become unpopular with progressives. So, this is a rare post where the personal agenda is bigger than the political agenda. Some might say it’s unfair to criticize CWP (see below) 17 years later, but A) almost everything I say here (except for the addendum) either I said back then (just not as well) or it was common knowledge among CU-Boulder progressives at the time; B) in 2005 and 2006 I said about 95% of what’s below (except for the addendum) in a massive set of documents about me or relevant to my politics that a handful of progressives read, B) I’m not using names, and C) I really should get a lot of kudos instead of criticism for this.

(when I say anti-war without saying anything more, I mean opposed to what Bush was planning and not necessarily against war in general)

In early March 2003 there was a national Day of Action to protest moves towards war with Iraq. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, I organized the rally component, something which was quite controversial among anti-war activists on campus and in Boulder. For whatever it’s worth, let me say that the main anti-war group on campus, the Coalition to Wage Peace could have handled it much worse than the way they did. I don’t know exactly what conversations took place at the meetings they had after they learned I had reserved the main rally space, but they were fairly positive about it.

I think I will start with a description of my activism in the 9 years before the rally. Between Fall of 1994 and Fall of 2002 I had done a lot of political activity at CU-Boulder (and some stuff off-campus and outside Boulder that I will sort of ignore in this explanation). About  1/8 was with (what would later be renamed) the Young Democratic Socialists in the mid-90s. That was largely about immigration and affirmative action and was slightly effective. Most of the next 1/8 was with a group I started called Students for Justice in N. Ireland and was 1997-1999 (or early 2000). For better or worse, that might have had NO effect on what progressive activists thought of me in 2003, but over all it WAS done in a very anti-racist and sort of anti-homophobic way, and was slightly progressive in some other ways (half of my NI activism is described in a post here between the paragraph “The second big thing…” and ending with the paragraph “In the late 1990s…”; Right below that section of the post is a description of my anti-racist activism). In 2000 and 2001 I swung back to mostly multi-issue progressive stuff with YDS. The biggest thing I/we did in those years was gay rights stuff. The semester before the rally, I started organizing SJNI again and A) we did one event before that rally that was anti-racist and progressive, and that attracted about 25 people, and B) we issued a statement that was anti-homophobic (for that statement and some relevant discussion, see the second half of this, starting with the paragraph “Now that that's over....”) and C) we endorsed the Coalition for Justice in Palestine. The SJNI meetings before the rally had an average attendance of about 8 people. Between 1994 and 2001, the average attendance at my N. Ireland events was 30 (it would have been higher, see the middle third of this (between the paragraphs “Going back to how much was done…” and “according to the Pew Research…”) and for everything else it was 75 (YDS-CU events in 2002 had an average of about 40 people at them, including one partly anti-war event (not the rally around Sept. 1st 2002) that attracted about 75 people).

At the 2001 National Conference of YDS in August I suffered three defeats and since that was in the context of continuing grief about my mom’s death 14 months earlier, the next semester I spent about 20 hours a day in my bedroom. Other things went wrong and it slowly became more and more of a “perfect storm” of things that were mostly personal tragedy and mostly not my fault. I had/have Tourrette’s Syndrome, OCD, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Depression, and these are all made worse by anxiety, stress, and sadness. The next semester I sort of organized the YDS chapter some although it didn’t go very well.

During the summer of 2002 there was a lot of talk about the US invading Iraq in the near future. I, and a very small YDS-CU chapter organized a rally on campus that took place around Sept. 1st in the UMC FountaIn area. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the kind of rally you might be thinking of. Even if there WAS a large crowd, we didn’t have more than a few signs for people to hold. We had about five speakers and when they all had spoken we still had about 10-15 minutes left, so we invited people from the small crowd (about 25-50 people) to speak at the mic. The speakers were great. One benefit of doing a rally there is that you might get an audience with a fair number of people eating their lunch- including people who might not normally go to a political event, but end up listening to the speakers anyway.

Although YDS-CU had a pretty successful (and student union funded) event in Nov. (at which the speaker talked about Iraq about 1/3 of the time), it was a very small chapter that I believe barely existed in the second semester of the 2002-2003 school year.

At some point in late Oct. or very early Nov. someone put up flyers and/or sent emails about a rally in the UMC Fountain area. It’s not clear who called for it. For a lot of reasons I wish it was clearer, but to a limited degree I am almost okay with that- if they didn’t want credit for it that’s okay with me (but I think there’s also an issue of taking responsibility for your actions). It involved about 30-50 people gathered relatively close together and instead of the PA system usually used, there was a megaphone (or whatever it’s called, it amplified people’s voices so everyone could easily be heard) that got passed around democratically. I only remember a small number of the comments made. The one I remember the most is where, after a woman made an anti-war statement that involved referring to herself as an American, someone told her not to identify as an American. There was another rally just like that one about 1-2 weeks later that I attended. Although considering how I ended up in some small degree of conflict with CWP I wish I was more familiar with it’s creation (some time shortly after the 2nd rally I just mentioned) and the next 1-3 rallies it organized (I went to 1-2 of their rallies). I was probably on their email list at some point towards the beginning. I must have also picked up a faIr amount of information about them when they were tabling in the student center. Lastly, I must have also gotten some info from the unofficial campus newspaper. I wish I could be more certain of these things and offer more specific examples but 18 years have passed. There’s also the fact that at various times between the Fall of 2002 and now, I have heard miscellaneous supportive things from other activists in Boulder and I don’t remember hearing practically anything critical of what I did, so I believe that what I say here about CWP doesn’t clash with what veteran activists (some of whom acted as referees between me and CWP) observed in CWP at the time.

Sometime just before and/or just after winter break I formed a LOOSE and very small alliance with a very politically visible Democratic Party progressive activist at CU-Boulder. I don’t believe he was considered a.member of the group I tried to launch but he played a role in the College Dems adopting an anti-war position. I’ll describe the name of the new anti-war group I launched shortly, but here’s what we did. An event that took place in late January or early February was a panel discussion sponsored by YDS-CU and possibly the new group. The senior College Democrat read the anti-war statement of the CU-Boulder College Dems at the beginning of the event. The speakers were either (then) current or former members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Although there was a misunderstanding as the result of the word liberal being defined one way by some progressives and another way by other progressives, 3/4 of the brief talks were pretty good.

The name of the new group is something I cringe at when I think of mentioning it to people now, as it could give people the wrong idea about my political beliefs at that time. It was Liberals Against War. The first thing I need to do is offer a definition of a liberal. My definition is very far from philosophical. A liberal is someone to the left of Bill Clinton and to the right of Elizabeth Warren. Some will say that Clinton is a liberal, but if you look at his time in the White House, he was not very liberal on social issues, he certainly wasn’t good economically and in general he was the candidate (in the 1992 primaries) of the moderate/centrist wing of the Democratic Party. His running mate in both 1992 and 1996 was married to one of the main people behind the “Parental Warning- Explicit Lyrics” stickers on certain music albums. I AM a socialist but I’m also fairly friendly to the Democratic Party and believe that sometimes, depending on various factors a fair percentage of liberals are allies of progressives. For more of my thoughts on liberals, see this.

LAW barely existed but was one of the sponsors of the March 2003 rally. I launched LAW because I felt like CWP was trying to win people over to the anti-war position by winning them over to the progressive movement. In a misguided attempt at being good white allies (I’m certain 95% of them were white) they adopted Mumia Abu-Jamal as an issue (although I did some stuff supporting him around 1998, a better expression of solidarity would have been supporting Affirmative Action, which I guarantee you is more popular with Black people than Abu-Jamal was at the time (the gap is even greater when you poll people of color in general (see the addendum at the bottom))). At the CWP rally I attended A) one of the speakers said that the only good war was the Civil War and B) someone (probably not a neo-Confederate) yelled “BOO!” (I couldn’t find a survey about Jewish-American opinions of the Allies, probably because no one is going to waste time on that since I’m sure that around 99% of Jewish-Americans are glad that Nazi Germany was defeated (I’m sure that 99% of Blacks are glad that the confederacy was defeated)). The guy who criticized someone for identifying as American became an active member of CWP. They were taking that approach (creating progressives) instead of convincing people that an invasion of Iraq (specifically and not war in general) would be wrong. They were not responding to the arguments being made by the Bush administration and its allies. Crucially, they were not challenging the idea that there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Shortly after the war began, a poll found that around 75% of Americans believed Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Although I’m embarrassed that I supported the first two years of the invasion of AFGHANISTAN, the fact is that response to 9/11 was a much more legitimate and helpful one than invading Iraq, and ignoring the desire of the American people to go after those responsible for 9/11 was just politically naive. 9/11 was overwhelmingly aimed at killing as many civilians as possible (if you think I have a racist double standard, A) go fuck yourself, B) see this and C) see the first third of this). Al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, and I can’t imagine a successful progressive response to 9/11 that wouldn’t have included either successfully convincing the Taliban to give up Al-Aqaeda, or an invasion. The invasion of Iraq was completely unjustified and unhelpful and was predictably a disaster for the Iraqi people and the region. Refuting the allegation that Iraq was connected to Al-Qaeda was necessary and doable- it was so ridiculous that Tony Blair didn’t use it in his pro-war argument. Some would say that pointing out the lack of a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda as a reason to oppose the Iraq invasion would have implied that the invasion of Afghanistan was okay. But anti-war activists could have said “invading Afghanistan was bad enough, invading Iraq is an even worse idea.” (UPDATE Feb. 2021 my recent thoughts about the US and Afghanistan are here)

So, I organized the March rally. I had organized 2-3 anti-war events in the previous 6 months and I got the main rally space reserved before (perhaps minutes before) CWP tried to do that. Almost immediately, I was asked to hand it over to CWP. I refused. I refused to let CWP co-sponsor the rally, although there was some dialogue and cooperation that I’ll describe shortly. Why did I refuse?

1. At the last or second-to-last CWP rally, a small, brief “riot” took place. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops were responsible for the confrontation turning violent, I am CERTAIN that A) the confrontation was the fault of some people in CWP and B) the confrontation was completely unjustified. Rallies in the UMC Fountain area with amplified sound are only allowed between noon and 1 PM because there are a lot of classrooms nearby. Some people in CWP decided that they would not end the rally and  give up the PA system at 1 PM. UMC staff did something to end it that resulted in a CWP member, joined by others, trying to get the PA back on that involved walking towards the UMC building, and some cops. Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the violence was started by the cops, but the confrontation was completely unjustified- partly because it wasn’t at any point described as a student strike, they just felt that in general rallies should have no time limit. Also, in general at the time, student groups at CU-Boulder at least 1994-2004 (probably before and after) had it better than student groups at other campuses (you didn’t need a faculty advisor, you could chalk, student government gave out lots of money with few strings attached, but they had some reasonable rules for student activism (the UMC is part of student government)) I thought a lot of people would be reluctant to attend a rally organized by the CWP and as I’ll explain, there is evidence I was right.

2. After the “riot” the UMC started to enforce a rule about scheduling rallies where you had to attend a formal meeting and promise to follow the rules. I was afraid that if I remained the lead organizer but CWP was a co-sponsor and some faction in CWP pulled the same thing with the PA system, I would be in a lot of trouble.

3. As I said, they were not trying to reach out beyond the progressive community.

4. I’ll go into why this was a good move on my part, but from the very beginning I intended to get the College Democrats to co-sponsor, and I did. IF and it’s huge if, anyone in CWP had suggested the group cooperate with the (anti-war) College Dems, he or she would have been laughed at. Even if I was the bridge between the two as the lead organizer, CWP may have refused to join the Dems in co-sponsoring the rally, and the Dems probably would have refused to work with CWP because of the riot.

Not long after I refused to involve CWP or just stand aside for them, a couple of professors invited me and a rep from CWP to sit down with them and they would assist us in working some things out. I was happy to participate. We agreed that CWP would sponsor the march after the rally and the “student strike” aspect. It was my idea to set aside two out of 10-12 speaker slots for anyone CWP chose to fill them with. The CWP rep. at one point said that they were going to refuse to cooperate with the UMC staff about the PA system (the UMC agreed to make the rally 90 minutes instead of 60). I just put my foot down and said “no you’re not,” and probably because of the presence of the two Profs. that was apparently enough.

I also agreed to attend a CWP meeting the night before the rally. As I sort of explained to them when someone asked why I didn’t just get involved with them, I felt neurologically, and intellectually and politically (slightly) impotent and knew I would get into arguments left and right with people in CWP and didn’t want to get into those fights on a weekly or daily basis. But it was just one meeting and if I hadn’t attended A) they and a lot of people would have thought I was a jerk, and B) it’s POSSIBLE that some CWP members would have skipped the rally and maybe even encouraged others to skip it as well (about 2 weeks earlier there was talk about them organizing their own rally elsewhere). So I did an okay job of briefly explaining why I hadn’t gotten involved in CWP. Also, the official but unpopular campus paper had been tipped off about how awesome I am and about 5 weeks before the rally they did a story about me. A big part of it was me criticizing CWP and probably not doing the best job of it either. Someone asked about that and I may have explained things half as well as I have in this post.

Before I describe the rally, I should say something about my brilliant move getting the College Dems to co-sponsor. First, I’ll be honest, it didn’t take any intellectual or political effort on my part. The progressive Dem leader I mentioned above had already laid the groundwork by getting the chapter to oppose the invasion. Some progressives would say it was a waste of time or actually counter-productive since it would allow the liberal (not progressive or Clintonite) Dems to mend their tattered record on war and militarism, and these progressives want to use that record against the Dems. But here’s the thing. A LOT of people who were against the war or who were very open-minded about opposing it were registered as Democrats. Having the College Dems co-sponsor the rally might have boosted attendance a little, and I’m sorry but if you combine the progressives and liberals in the DP, they vastly outnumber those progressives who just hate the Dems. Also, if we had any chance of stopping the war at that point (and we didn’t but it was the right thing to act like we did, and anti-war organizing at that point laid the basis for opposing the Occupation) we would have needed a MASSIVE majority of the DP. Having the College Dems co-sponsor raised the profile of the anti-war part of the DP within the DP.

The rally was petty good. 1,500 people were there, probably at least 95% were anti-war. I was busy with other stuff and heard practically none of the speeches. Twice there was a progressive song played. I screwed up and didn’t plan what I was going to say and probably about 1/3 of what I said was kind of stupid, but only kind of, and I’m sure the rest was good. After the rally, 200 people went on a march. At one point a CWP member suggested the low number was because of the riot. I’m sure some of the 1,225 anti-war protestors at the rally who didn’t join us for the march just couldn’t go on the march, but I’m sure around 800 of them didn’t go on the march because they didn’t want to be in a riot.

At the rally, a leader of CWP had encouraged people to go to the Engineering College (which has a lot of Defense-related stuff) and “take action.” As we were marching to that building, I told someone I knew with a hat saying he was a peace-keeper of sorts with the well-respected Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center (they may have added the word “Justice” after that date but I think they added it before, and today that’s what they’re called) about this and he said we should keep the marchers from getting in the building. I was later told it was stupid to do that, but I was concerned that A) it could lead to police attacking us, and B) it could damage the reputation of the anti-war movement. So, when he said we should stop them, I helped him. For better or worse, after making fools of ourselves for a few minutes, the marchers got in and nothing was done (no “action” was taken, we got a brief tour of part of a research/development/whatever area).

One miscellaneous thing is that a few days before or a few days after the rally, a leading member of CWP gave me a flyer. It was NOT a CWP flyer, I assure you. But it said something like “when war breaks out, people should go to the 16th St. Mall in Denver and destroy stuff.”

There is one thing that I need to address. I screwed up at one point and forgot that the rally was only 1/3 or 1/4 of that days' events. There was also the march, the Student Strike, and a series of teach-ins by Faculty And Staff Against War. There was a web-site for the national coalition of anti-war youth groups that called for the day of action and I said that YDS-CU, LAW and the College Dems were sponsoring that day’s events (I may have mentioned FASAW but I think I didn’t and I almost hope I didn’t because that would mean I was trying to deny CWP credit). That was later replaced by something saying FASAW, CWP and a High School chapter of Amnesty International.

In conclusion, I feel very good about roughly 90% of what I did. Especially getting the College Dems to co-sponsor. Also, I think I might write some poems about the Iraq War and the Occupation. UPDATE 10/11/20 Those are here and here.

**************

People of color and Mumia Abu-Jamal

Among Black people, support for Mumia was not as high as white progressives like to think. According to an article in Salon, Angela Davis and the Rev. Al Shaprton were unhappy that Black clergy in PA were not supporting Mumia. A lot of other stuff in there backs me up. The writer of the article did another piece for Salon opposing the execution of Mumia and called for a new trial.

According to a poll here, in 2002 70% of blacks supported AA and 64% of “Hispanics” supported it (that might include white Hispanics, so it might be higher for Chicana/os and Latina/os). According to an Aug. 2015 (which may be when the first poll mentioned below was conducted)  report by the National Commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islander Research in Education:                 

Support for or against affirmative action is as difficult to discern for Asian Americans as it is for all Americans. For Asian Americans, specifically, there is the issue of omission from most national opinion polls on affirmative action. One source for gauging the level of support for or against affirmative action is a multicity, multiethnic, and multilingual survey of political attitudes and behavior of Asian Americans administered by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The results show that 63.1% of Asian Americans indicated that affirmative action “is a good thing” as opposed to 5.7% who reported that it is a “bad thing” and 18.6% who reported that it “doesn’t affect Asian Americans.” These findings are consistent with a 2004 survey of 701 Asian American college studentsattending 169 colleges and universities. This study found that 62.6% of Asian American college students disagreed with the notion that affirmative action should be eliminated. Both of these survey results are consistent with exit polls during votes on state referendums to end affirmative action. In 1996, 61% of Asian American voters rejected Proposition 209 in California, and in 2006, 75% of Asian American voters rejected Proposal 2 in Michigan.

(I think the frequent exclusion of A-As from polls about Affirmative Action might be because of the Model Minority Myth (and to enhance that myth) and because people like implying that A-As don’t support Affirmative Action and because they want to give as many A-As as possible the idea that their community doesn’t support it and create a wedge between A-As and other people of color)

I wouldn’t be surprised if a massive majority of American Indians support Affirmative Action, but they’re probably less likely to be included in these polls than Asian-Americans are, and when taking 7 college courses partly or totally about American Indians I didn’t hear anything about them being different than other non-white racial groups in terms of their opinion of AA.

As far as my statement implying that support for Mumia is lower among non-Black people of color than it is among Black people:

Chicanos. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at some point in the last 25 years, some of them were driving Black people out of certain parts of LA. Ice-T rapped “And we gotta realize, the boys on the east side/You call em S-A's, I call em allies/Because the day that we all unite/Watch the pigs get real polite.” That’s a reference to Chicana/o East LA and directly and indirectly indicates tension between Chicana/os and Blacks. A lot of Blacks are anti-immigrant and I think that narrowly popular hostility is reflected among Chicana/os.

Asian-Americans. Around 1990 there was a lot of tension between the poor black community and the community of Korean immigrants (and probably their children) and that may have been found among the larger Korean-American community. Although I’ve been told there was a very small yellow-power movement around 1970 inspired by the Panthers, in general I don’t hear a lot about A-As being enthusiastic about what the Panthers were about.

American Indians. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as the most racially fucked over population in this country, a majority of them back Mumia.

In general, the idea that ALL people of color are in solidarity with each other is just, unfortunately, ridiculous. I got my degree in Ethnic Studies.

UPDATE 4/16/20 I did a post about Affirmative Action and the working-class here.

In Memory of FDR: Three New Poems

Below are three poems. They're about WWII. The second one is based on a song I like politically. The other two are not, see this for an explanation of my poetry.

The rest of the lyrics are available by clicking on the lyrics label at the bottom.

“Allied Unity” based on “European Unity” by Brutal Attack. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about progressives in America who supported FDR and America’s involvement with the Allies.
2. I could be more familiar with FDR, but it seems like he was the most progressive President this country has had. I don’t think there’s any doubt that economically he was good- not a socialist but something very close to a social-democrat. On matters of race he was disappointing as President- his (possibly unavoidable) alliance with segregationist Democrats, Japanese/Japanese-American Interment, etc. But he DID allow for the creation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (see the first poem here) and the creation of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces (see the poem in this post called “Three-Three-Two”) and the utilization as a combat unit in Europe of the 92nd Infantry Division (a segregated, Black unit of the US Army). It’s not irrelevant that his wife, who probably benefited politically from being the First Lady, was anti-racist, progressive, and politically active.
3. Blackshirts were Italian fascists.
4. The 6th line of the last verse is about my opinion of Irish neutrality during WWII. I should stress that the word mask can refer to a PROTECTIVE covering, so I’m not saying that the Irish were trying to hide their real motivation for sitting out the war. It might still be a tiny bit inaccurate, but at the most just a tiny bit (a tiny bit inaccurate because I think they're neutrality was principled instead of a way to protect their nation from harm).
5. Although I could attribute the statement against anti-Semitism to the progressives whose perspective the poem is written from, I also want to say that as far as American servicemen opposed to anti-semitism, realistically probably some moderate-sized minority of them.
6. Yes, I know that the UK and the US were/are imperialists. Ward Churchill was my faculty advisor and I’ve written this blog.
7. **66% of this poem is me, 34% is the original.
8. When I say "most" I mean most of those who fought for either side, and I think a large chunk, maybe majority? of the US male population fought in the Civil War.

You know our nation’s been put in the hands of someone so cool
Using his power, against the corporate tools
We were all together part of getting him elected
The poor, unemployed and unions have certainly been affected

Chorus
Allied Unity
Fighting with pride and dignity
Anti-Fascist Unity
European lands will be free from the Nazis

Most of our forefathers fought against the Confederacy
And now we’re fighting with the Brits against Nazi Germany
France, Libya and Poland were totally overrun
By Panzers and the Blackshirts, the Nationalist Socialist scum

So Americans, Brits and Soviets, listen very carefully
We need to stick together, with a unified strategy
United we'll win, all for one, and one for all
If we stick together the Axis powers are gonna fall
It wont be easy it'll be a long hard task
Unfortunately there are those fools who wear the neutrality mask
But we'll pull through, cos truth wins in the end
To anti-Semitism and Nazi Imperialism we will never bend

******************

“Three-Three-Two” based on "Belfast Brigade" I usually just provide a link to the original lyrics, but in this case I use a combination of two versions I found online (plus 3 more changes that I made myself), so the lyrics for the original are below.

1. This is about the 332nd Fighter Group of the US Army Air Force during WWII. It was a segregated, Black unit that saw combat in North Africa and Europe and towards the end of the war had an impressive record as bomber escorts. I saw two movies (twice) about them (“The Tuskegee Airmen” and “Red Tails”) and movies don’t lie, so I’m fully educated about them. Seriously, though, I don’t think I’ll do any more research about them.
2. Goring was Hermann Goring, the head of Germany’s Air Force. Messerschmitts were highly effective fighters.
3. There were efforts by American racists to keep the 332nd from participating in WWII, and when that failed, to keep them from getting bomber escort duty (after something like 1-2 years that failed as well).
4.  Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, was possibly their biggest advocate.
5. After I wrote the next line I learned that the name changed to US Army Air Force just before the war started. Goddamn fucking facts getting in the way of a good rhyme.
6. “Spit Fire” was. a motto of theirs, according to wikipedia.
7. There was the Hitler Youth, and I read a book about a member called “A Child of Hitler.”
8. Some German planes, towards the end of the war, were jets, and I think the first one shot down was downed by the 332nd. Also, the 332nd did NOT get the newest, most advanced fighters available.
9. Conflate traditionally means to combine, but according to my experience and this it can also mean to confuse two similar but different things.
10. As enthusiastic as I am when I think of the Allied cause, in all honesty, I doubt that more than half of American servicemen could have been called anti-fascist. But I think it must have been 100% with the 332nd. They volunteered and fought for the opportunity to fight the Nazis, and there’s no way they didn’t recognize Nazism as white supremacist.
11. **65% of this version is me, 35% is the original.
12. UPDATE 3/2120 The very original versions, which I combined and made a few changes to and THEN seriously altered to make this poem, say "men" instead of "those" in the chorus. But since women have (for at least110 years now) been included in republican armed groups like the IRA, I changed it (in my version of the original, which is below my poem below) to "those" and forgot to change it back for this poem. So now it says men in the chorus.
13. UPDATE 3/29/20 I already mentioned that I thought the pilots were part of the USAAC. Some would say, even if that were true, what about what the USAAC did BEFORE WWII? I don't know. Although WWI was pretty fucked up (politically) as wars go, America didn't go to France to keep Black people down or take the side of right-wingers in a conflict with left-wingers or something. And as far as all the times the Marines were sent into South American and Central American countries on behalf of US corporations, that was the Marines, not the Army, and considering the range of aircraft back then, the lack of aircraft carriers, and the very small and short-term nature of those interventions, I'd be surprised if the USAAC was involved, and if so, it would have been nothing, in terms of planes, pilots and missions, compared to what the USAAC (actually the USAAF) did in WWII.

Goring sent the Messerschmitts up to shoot the bombers down
He thought American racists had kept the Black man down
But he got a rude awakening, when, in their bomber escort debut
He met the Tuskegee Airmen of the Three-Three-Two

Glory, glory to the memory of Eleanor
Glory, Glory to the US Army Air Corps
Glory to the memory
Of the men who flew and died
“Spit Fire!” was the war cry of the Three-Three-Two

Messerschmitts came from Berlin, equipped with machine guns
Planes by the dozens, piloted by Hitler’s sons
But when they approached the bombers they found they had no clue
When it came to fighting the anti-fascists of the Three-Three-Two

Chorus

They had no jet propulsion and their secondhand planes were full of dents
They were ready to defend themselves no matter where they were sent
They were out for equality and to hell with Hitler’s Aryan state
Segregation and National Socialism were easy to conflate

Chorus

All you gallant African-Americans who joined the three-three-two
The world will always owe an enormous debt to you
We should know our country's history, and the sacrifice you made
In the anti-fascist struggle, never did you stray


original lyrics:

Craigavon sent the Specials out to shoot the people down
He thought the IRA were dead in dear old Belfast town
But he got a rude awakening, when with rifle and grenade
He met the first battalion of the Belfast Brigade

Glory, glory to old Ireland
Glory, Glory to this island
Glory to the memory
Of those who fought and died
"No Surrender" is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade

Specials came from Holywood, equipped with English guns
Men by the thousand, ammunition by the ton
But when they got to Seaford St. they were seriously delayed
By the fighting 1st battalion of the Belfast Brigade

Chorus

We have no armored cars or tenders for to show
We're ready to defend ourselves no matter where we go
We're out for our Republic and to hell with your Orange state
"No Surrender" is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade

Chorus

So come all you gallant Irish people and join the IRA
To strike a blow for freedom, when there comes our certain day
You know our country's history and the sacrifice it made
Come join the 1st battalion of the Belfast Brigade

********************

“ZOB” based on “Final Solution” by No Remorse. Original lyrics are here.

1.This is about the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII. ZOB is the Polish acronym for the Jewish Combat Organization. My knowledge of this comes from an extensive study of the European part of WWII and watching, multiple times, the movie “Uprising.”
2. The leadership of the ghetto occupants tried to appease the Nazis.
3. As I explain here (in a paragraph towards the top that begins with “Also”) it was possible to predict what was going to happen to the Jews and I think the ZOB understood that to one degree or another. If you think I’m being too harsh on the ghetto leadership, in that post I tear the Irish a new one based partly on my theory that it was possible to predict the Holocaust.
4. The Home Army was the non-Jewish Polish resistance and based on that movie, they were fairly supportive of the ZOB and I think that the Allied leadership told them to be. I think that the HA may have been grateful that the ZOB created another front the Germans had to fight on. They were probably also grateful for every German soldier the ZOB killed.
5. **67% of this poem is me, 33% is the original.

The Nazis will never care about your pleas and weak demands
They read Mein Kamph and will follow Hitler’s genocidal commands
You’re so blind, you don’t understand where it's gonna lead
You would just lay there dying And no one hears your pleas

Armed resistance
To make possible our continued existence

Our goal is not to defeat the reich we just want to survive
Got to make their determination tremble, when we attack we’ll leave none alive
We’re trying to educate the Jewish Council, But they cooperate with the scum
The Nazis ignore our pleas But they'll  be obstructed by the gun

Once we have guns and explosives the Jewish People will let loose
The traitorous and corrupt ghetto police will be hanging by the noose
The Home Army is out there and the Allies are concerned about our plight
They need to see Germans in body bags and see our people fight

"The Connolly/Larkin Brigade" A New Poem!

A new poem. I explain how I write my poems here. This one is based on a song that I like politically. For the rest of the poems, click on the "lyrics" label at the bottom.


"The Connolly/Larkin Brigade," based on “Last Lincoln Veteran” by David Rovics. Original lyrics are here.

PLEASE READ!! 1. This is a bizarre one. It’s about a very alternate history. Written from the perspective of an American socialist in, about, 2040, it’s about fictional events in the 1980s, (which is similar to the chronological perspective of the original (the original was written about 65-70 years after the events in it, when there were still some Lincoln veterans alive)).
It’s based on a song about the anti-fascist foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War (there was an Irish anti-fascist contingent, largely ex-IRA members, called the Connolly Column). The premise of this poem is that at some point in the 1980s, a similar call is made for people to fight in the North of Ireland. It IS possible that if the IRA had a launched a Tet-style offensive (in the Vietnam War, there was the Tet Offensive by the VietCong in 1968) as they had planned to in the 1980s, the conflict would have been transformed and it would have made sense to call for large numbers of foreign fighters.
3. James Connolly and Jim Larkin were senior or semi-senior leaders of the broad Irish republican family in the first 2-3 decades of the last century. Both spent time as union organizers in America.
4. May 1st is International Workers Day.
5. Dixieland is a racist term for the American South. Orange is the color of anti-Catholic bigotry in the Irish-British context. (UPDATE 3/18/20 I used Dixieland because A) it rhymed, B) I thought it would indicate that I was comparing the North with the South in the sense that they were both bigoted, etc.)
7. The West Bank refers to the 99% nationalist part of Derry, to the west of the River Foyle. It’s where 14 anti-internment/civil rights marchers were killed by the British Army on Bloody Sunday in 1972.
8. Chronologically three of the cities/places I chose don’t make much sense, since they were sites of ongoing struggles in the 1980s OR, the struggle hadn’t begun. Whatever.

Ramallah is in the West Bank in PALESTINE. There’s a lot of solidarity between the Irish and the Palestinians.

Paris. When Bobby Sands died (see this and the middle third of this), the socialist Prime Minister of France offered to attend the funeral, but he consulted Dublin and they said no.

Chiapas. In 1998 or 1999, on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo and the day in 1981 that Bobby Sands died) I went to a fundraiser for the Chiapas Coalition in Denver, CO (the CC were supporters of the Zapatistas, the EZLN). I asked if I could say something about Bobby Sands and they let me speak for a couple minutes. Later, another speaker who had spent time with the EZLN, said that they (the EZLN) were very concerned about the North.

Cape Town. The ANC strongly supported the IRA (see this). I think their military wing was large and I THINK they had trouble finding work for everyone and it MIGHT have made sense, in this scenario where a call is made for foreign fighters, to send some.

9.  Until late 2001 the RUC were the police in N. Ireland.
10. Orthodox republicans, if there are any left, believe(d) that the Republic proclaimed at the beginning of the 1916 Easter Rising still exists and has been usurped by the Northern State and the Southern State. I have never believed that, but it still seemed like a good adjustment to the original lyrics, and in the 1980s, I think that almost all Northern Sinn Fein members probably DID believe it, and probably a large minority of Southern SF members also believed it.
11. Margaret Thatcher was a hardcore Tory and British imperialist who was Prime Minister in the 1980s.
12. Ian Stuart Donaldson was, in the 1980s and early 1990s (until his hilarious death in 1993), the leader of the worldwide Nazi skinhead movement, and as a British Nazi, he was incredibly supportive of the British and Unionist causes in N. Ireland.
13. Ian Paisley was, between the mid-1960s and about 2005, a very visible, extremely Unionist and anti-Catholic politician.
14. In the late 1990s a US Representative, Donald Payne from NJ, sponsored legislation in the House that would ban the sale of plastic bullets to the UK. He had traveled to the North and I feel safe assuming that some US corporation was selling the plastic bullets used in the North (or he was just really cool and pro-active, but I bet they were being sold to the UK). (Payne is Black)
15. I mention they were Catholic because I recently decided it’s frustrating that American Catholics in general showed almost no interest in the conflict, frustrating because although there were other factors (anti-Irish bigotry, economic factors, etc.) to a large extent SECTARIANISM affected the lives of Northern Catholics.
16. I wanted to recognize the contributions made by gay members of the Nationalist community.
17. Here are some ways that Washington wasn’t neutral:

1) It seems that D.C. never privately put firm pressure on the British to dramatically change its policy in N. Ireland and/or create a significant role for the South in the affairs of the North (or even, better, begin a process of withdrawal). If they did this privately, it didn't work, and they should have done it publicly (it's possible that to some degree that happened between Clinton and Blair, and had some small effect on the GFA, but the GFA could have been much better, and then there's the ultimate goal of a British withdrawal).

2) Although at some point in the 1970s the President or Vice President of SF did speak at a committee hearing of the US Congress, from 1983 until 1994 the President of SF, Gerry Adams, was not allowed into the US. (he was first allowed into the U.S. in 1994). During this time SF represented about 35-40% of the Nationalist community, and probably about 60% of the poorest, most oppressed half of that community.

3) During the entire conflict, something like 20 former republican Volunteers went through either extradition or deportation proceedings. I think all the extradited were sent back to the UK, I think most of the deportation cases were deported. I know of at least one deportation, and this was probably the case with all of them, where the issue was that he said on the immigration paperwork that he was never convicted of a crime, and the U.S. government said that he in fact had been. The thing is, republican Volunteers don't consider themselves criminals, and even the British government, to some degree, has recognized this by treating them as prisoners of war during most of the conflict. But the U.S. Government disagrees. There's evidence that some very large majority of the nationalist community more or less supported the hunger-strikers of 1981 (see the middle third of this) whose struggle convinced the British to extend status as prisoners of war (or political status, basically the same thing), which makes me think that some very large majority of the nationalist community was more or less unhappy about the extraditions and deportations (also, the massive anti-internment march that was attacked on Bloody Sunday in 1972 was primarily organized not by republicans but by a senior SDLP politician).

18. I can’t abide praising Reagan for a lot of reasons. He and Thatcher were best friends.

19. Practically the entire last full verse was in the original, and the 95 yo is, I assume, someone David Rovics actually knew (possibly Robert Steck). That’s part of why I changed it to “she” and “her”. Like practically all of my poems, this is not written from my perspective, it’s some faceless American socialist character I invented. I don’t know any Communists- please tell the House Un-american Activities Committee that if they ask about me. :  )
20. The Short Strand is an isolated Catholic enclave in Unionist East Belfast.
21. I almost hate bringing this up, especially because the post I’ll link to needs some work but it’s massive and I don’t know when I’ll make it near perfect. I believe that during The Troubles, and especially after Apartheid was shattered by the ANC and before those assholes in Al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11, the world, to one degree or another kind of or totally dropped the ball when it came to solidarity with the Nationalist community. I focus like a laser on the American Left and to a lesser degree the west European Left. That post is here, and the relevant part starts with the mention of South Africa about 1/3 from the top.
22. I couldn’t make up my mind about how the story ends. But then I decided to make a few more changes and make it a happy ending- not what happened in the Short Strand, but Ireland being united in the end.
23. **36% of this version is me, 64% is the kick-ass original.
24. UPDATE 4/1/20 I maybe should have altered the very last part less than I did. I deleted the phrase "It's a place that we all know so well" because it's not well known among American progressives today, as I mention in note 21 above. I forgot that in this alternate timeline, it IS well known. But I'm going to keep it the way it is, I just didn't want anyone to think that I didn't like David's lyrics.
25. UPDATE 4/1/20 I deleted the word "most" from the 3rd line of the second verse. It implies, for example, that Hindus didn't fight. I was lazy and didn't alter that when I first wrote it, I didn't mean to exclude anyone.
26. As I prove in a fairly scientific way here, only .3% of the IRA's operations resulted in civilian death.

They were old when I was young Now they're all but passed away
Now it's just a second hand story we hear about on the first of May
When from all around the world They sailed off to Ireland
Where they fought against the Brits and to liberate Orange Dixieland
Who will recall the days When they all stood side by side
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died

Beside striking workers Or in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade
You could see those who made the journey To join the Connolly/Larkin Brigade
When men and women of many nations Of every creed and hue
Catholics and Protestants, Muslims,  Atheists and Jews
Joined together in the West Bank To avenge the fourteen who died
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died

The working class of many countries responded to the desperate invitation
With what weapons they could find They fought to unite the Irish nation
From Ramallah and Paris, Chiapas and Cape Town
Who will recall the Brigadistas Who bravely took the RUC down
There beside the Catholic people Even the sheep and cattle cried
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died

The 1916 Republic had the people But the British Army had the tanks
Thatcher and Ian Stuart got only some of Paisley’s premature thanks
'Cause the plastic bullets to take down rioters Came from the USA
And the boys and girls they knocked down Were Catholic and some of them were gay
Uncle Sam wasn’t neutral, and praising Reagan is something I can’t abide
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died

Some say people get conservative The older that they age
They say that being radical Is just a youthful stage
But the finest communist I've known Lived to 95
And she spent her whole life fighting For humanity to thrive
To forget these fallen heroes Is something I cannot abide
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died
Now that the last Connolly/Larkin Veteran died

There's a neighborhood in East Belfast called the Short Strand
It was there that we showed our solidarity Where so many comrades made their final stand