The following is a response to an article trying to enlist the poet Homer on the side of hawks by the Boston Globe’s resident neocon right winger Jeff Jacoby. This letter was not published.
Author: Marvin Mandell
Homer and War
The Rosa Choir, South Africa
Our correspondent and contributor in South Africa, Andre Marais, sent us the link to this recording of the Rosa Choir, a diverse group that sings in traditional songs in Afrikaans, Xhosa and English.
From the Editors
Too often we have witnessed the political reversal of men and women who began fully committed to liberty, equality, and fraternity and ended up as reactionaries. Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Wilhelm Reich…. We were saddened by their radical change. Benito Mussolini and Jacques Doriot were even more egregious examples. These are people who have besmirched what once were their core values.
From the Editors
In 1936 at a public confrontation with the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the Fascist commander of the Spanish Legion, José Millán-Astray reportedly responded: "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte! ("Death to intelligence! Long live death!") provoking applause from the Falangists.
From the Editors Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Women
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anaïs Nin, Diary, June, 1941
(during the darkest days of World War II)
Addicted to war
Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, claims that many men in Iraq and Afghanistan are addicted to war. If this is true, could it have something to do with the fact that GIs today do not face the endless bombardment from airplanes, field artillery, and tanks that World War II soldiers did?
I served in the 88th Infantry Division in Italy and I never met anyone so addicted. Had we met someone like that we would have considered him “Section 8,” that is, seriously disturbed.
Does that mean that many gung-ho GIs now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are Section 8?
From the Editors
Exactly 40 years ago we received an article from Poland with views of the Soviet system close to ours: We saw it as a new form of exploitation, and we opposed it with the same vigor we opposed capitalism. We published the article, by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, in our spring and summer '66 issues as "An Open Letter to the Party." When both men were released from prison, they founded KOR, an organization that succeeded in uniting workers and intellectuals. From that came Solidarity.
From the Editors
For more than 150 years socialists have insisted that only workers themselves can make any fundamental change in social relations because only workers organizing themselves in the process of struggle to become a governing class can ensure that the old class society isn't reproduced by a new class of exploiters; the new society created by them would have democratic workers' control over the means of production. Revolutions in such countries as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and N.
Our Run-Ins with Wilhelm Reich
Both of us had been in Orgone (Reichean) therapy for most of the 1950s, and we still believe it was efficacious. Orgone therapy involves tearing down the muscular armor of the body’s defense mechanisms – neck armor, jaw armor, chest armor, eventually pelvic armor, sometimes with the therapist’s palpitations of the patient’s rigidity. It is an attempt to go beyond Freudian psychoanalysis in that it deals not only with a patient’s dreams and free association but also with the physical manifestations of repressed hatred.
review
Anarchism and Socialism
WAYNE PRICE’S THE ABOLITION OF THE STATE is a well considered, well researched, and well written book. I shall try to summarize his major points in the first several chapters. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with the failure of revolutions in Russia and Spain and the success of the counter-revolution in Germany, and I shall discuss them as well.
Top
Please Donate or Subscribe to New Politics!
