This Can't Be Happening!

London contains many of the thousands of memorials located across the United Kingdom commemorating the sacrifices of millions of military personnel during the bloody struggles of World War I and World War II.

There is even a ‘Animals In War’ memorial in London’s famed Hyde Park recognizing the contributions to those wars from dogs, donkeys, elephants, pigeons, glow worms and others animals.

However, not one of these memorials to the world wars – estimated at over 70,000 across Britain by the Imperial War Museum – is specifically dedicated to the contributions of the thousands from the Caribbean and Africa who helped secure victories of England in those two horrific 20th Century conflicts.

That omission of a formal recognition honoring the sacrifices of persons from Africa and the Caribbean in World Wars I and II ended on Thursday, June 22, 2017 with the dedication of a special monument: the African Caribbean Memorial.

This two and one-half ton sculpture fashioned from Scottish Whinstone sits outside the Black Cultural Achieve in the Brixton section of South London. The dedication ceremony for the African and Caribbean Memorial came on Windrush Day – the annual celebration for the onset of large-scale immigration to Britain from the Caribbean that began in 1948 when immigrants came to help London/England rebuild after WWII.

The idea for the African Caribbean Memorial (along with the long work to raise funds for the monument’s creation and siting) came from the Nubian Jak Community Trust, a British organization that has erected over thirty plaques around London and in other parts of England recognizing various contributions of persons of African descent.

      When the legend becomes fact, print the legend
                  - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I attended a “Salute to Veterans” this past Memorial Day in Waldoboro, Maine, organized by the town’s Historical Society at the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and co-sponsored by the American Legion. For someone with my antiwar resume, albeit a veteran of a Vietnam combat unit, stepping over the threshold of a VFW Post can feel like crossing into hostile territory. I might exhibit a similar compunction about taking fermentation at certain blue color taverns in the Rust Belt, despite the fact that many of the regulars would pretty much look like me, white seniors with European roots – except maybe they voted for Trump and I didn’t. It’s not just politics; it’s a class thing. I spent my first eleven years in a working class subdivision while my dad, employed at a defense plant, “broke through the line” into management. We moved up and I went to college, then left my hometown in the dust.

The POW/MIA guest setting; and attendees at the Memorial Day event (Photos: Michael Uhl)

Most of those I sat among that afternoon in Waldoboro probably hadn’t been to college – an opportunity with far reaching class consequences – but they’d remained rooted in their communities. Being there, it was as if I’d been whisked back to some mothballed version of where I’d grown up in the fifties. All the musty forms and rituals were intact. The interior of the hall was a shrine to soldierly service. All manner of war and military memorabilia displayed on walls and tables. Mannequins outfitted full fig in uniforms of various epochs. Two rows of chairs faced the stars and stripes and the flags of all the services that stood tall across the front of the room. Stage-set on the left flank was an empty table with a single place setting and chair, the ubiquitous homage of the mainstream veteran service organizations to the MIAs.

One elderly lady saddled in beside me and sparkled brightly, “don’t worry, I won’t bite you.” Was she in the Ladies Auxiliary linked to one of the co-sponsors, I asked? She nodded yes without comment. The chair of the local Historical Society stepped to the podium, asked the body to stand, then summoned the Color Guard, having carried two flags to the rear, to proceed forward and return the standards to their stanchions. Two of the more senior men, costumed with bits and pieces of their old uniforms – both wore sergeant’s stripes – fairly dragged the heavy poles up the aisle. “It weighs a ton,” one of them grumbled under his breath, but loud enough to make his audience, including me, smile and nod in sympathy.

A bird flies up from the tall grass when I enter the field.
Somewhere deep in that wild place
Is a nest, I wanted to say “concealed” for the hidden rhyme
But the image is the important thing:

Me, barefoot. Bird, flying up.
Even if I were a predator
I would not be able to find her nest.
But I don’t need to find its exact location

Any more than I need to worry about rhyming.
This is a poem about a bird’s desperation
As the tractor mows closer and closer.
The farmer and I have agreed

To save one. Go around.
That is how I mow the stone circle

The British Labour Party and its party leader Jeremy Corbyn didn’t win Thursday’s snap election called last April 18 by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, yet it was it nonetheless a historic victory for Corbyn, the British left and for the concept of socialist revolution in a democratic society.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with a socialist, anti-war message, has upended British politics
 

From the time Corbyn, a long-time hard-left anti-militarism back-bencher and protege of the late Tony Benn, was elevated to the leadership position of the Labour Party back in September 2015, he has (like Bernie Sanders in the US last year) had to combat a concerted effort to unseat him by the Labour Party establishment. Only last year, 172 elected Labour Party members of Parliament (that was out of a total of 232) cast a vote of no confidence that forced Corbyn into a party leadership election which he resoundingly won with over 60% of the votes of dues-paying party members.

When May, back in April, at a time when polls showed her trouncing Labour by a 20-25% margin, called a snap election for June 8 (after earlier promising that she would not do such a thing), the Labour establishment figured it would turn out a disaster and finish off Corbyn as party leader. Seven leading Labour MP’s announced that they weren’t going to run for re-election on a ticket headed by Corbyn, with several even saying publicly that they preferred May to Corbyn. Virtually the entire British news media, from the BBC on down, piled on, deriding Corbyn as a ‘70s relic out of touch with British voters.

At first, amid all that Corbyn bashing, it did seem as though the contest would be a historic wipe-out for the Labour party, which was already on its knees following an embarrassing performance in the 2015 electoral outing which left Conservatives with a 330-vote majority (just 4 more than needed to form a government), and Labor, at 232 seats, looking like it might be down for good. But then Corbyn, who during the 2017 campaign came out with a truly socialist manifesto calling for improved funding for the gutted and struggling National Health System, an end to tuition for college and university, a major campaign of building more public housing, better funding for public education, and, most importantly, an end to reflexive British support for America’s endless and ever expanding global War on Terror, something started to happen. Suddenly his poll numbers turned around dramatically, and as the days until June 8 voting ticked off, the margin between Labour and the Tories kept dwindling. Meanwhile, Corbyn’s popularity kept rising, eventually passing Prime Minister May’s numbers in some polls.

Even two brutal terror attacks, in Manchester and then in London, failed to significantly dent Corbyn’s charge — in large part because instead of reflexively hunkering down and supporting more draconian security policies as US politicians of both parties do each time some terror attack happens or some alleged terror plot is “disrupted,” he declared that the attacks proved that “the war on terror has been a failure.” Corbyn also took the offense and denounced his opponent May who, as home secretary of the Conservatives before becoming prime minister had overseen the defunding of 22,000 ordinary police officer positions — furloughing roughly a fifth of the country’s police force. “You can’t keep people safe on the cheap,” Corbyn declared on the stump to loud cheering.

This article was written for Salon Magazine
 

A funny thing is happening on the way to the June 8 snap election in the United Kingdom. Despite two vicious terror attacks apparently inspired by ISIS — the Manchester Arena bombing that killed at least 22 people, many of them children, and another on the iconic London Bridge that killed seven and left 22 critically injured — polls suggest that British voters aren’t fleeing in panic to the current Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. In fact, contrary to all expectations, they continue to swing toward May’s hard-left Labour Party opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, with the latest poll showing the two parties neck-and-neck.

May launched her campaign on on April 18. With polls showing her party anywhere from 15 to 20 points up on Corbyn and Labour at the time, and the favorability gap between her and Corbyn even wider, she hoped for a blowout victory that would boost the Tories’ position in Parliament to a record level. But since then she and the Conservatives have been watching their support crumble as Corbyn’s has grown. Now many British news organizations are talking about a Tory “collapse.”

It’s now being suggested, even in the right-leaning media, that when the votes are counted Thursday evening, Britain could face an unexpected and murky situation…

Some polls have British PM Theresa May tied with Labour challenger Jeremy Corbyn in tomorrow's snap election
 

For the rest of this article, which appears in today’s Salon magazine, please click here or on the image above.

Hush-a-by baby
On the poor farm
The drought so severe,
Grasshoppers swarm.
When the grasshoppers leave
Nothing green will remain.
Where is the baby?
Where is the rain?
 
Two, four, six,
Eight, ten,
I’d throw the president
in the pen.
Twelve, fourteen,
sixteen, eighteen;
there’s no one better.
How very obscene!
 
Fake news, fake news,
President can
Make us feel like idiots
When his sh*t hits the fan.
Get mad, feel bad,
But make a mental note:
Next time find an honest one
Worthy of our vote.
 

Click here to go to My Vietnam War, 50 Years Later, PART TWO: “Memory, Writing and Politics”
 

Each of us carried in his heart a separate war which in many ways was totally different . . . we also shared a common sorrow; the immense sorrow of war.
                                        - Bao Ninh, The Sorrow Of War

It’s hard to believe that 50 years ago I was a 19-year-old kid in Vietnam sitting on a mountaintop near the Cambodian border in the forests west of Pleiku trying to locate equally young North Vietnamese radio operators with a piece of WWII RDF equipment I’d been told was obsolete. I was part of a two-man team, working in conjunction with two other two-man teams; our job was to listen for enemy broadcasts, which were sent in coded five-letter groups of Morse code. Sometimes we searched and located random operators. Other times, we’d get an intel lead on when an operator would come up. Using the silver-alloy rotating antenna of the obsolete PRD1, we obtained a bearing that was then plotted on a map; hopefully, the three bearings would provide a tight fix and locate the operator. We’d give the map coordinate to division G2, who would assign some death-dealing operation to search and destroy whatever was on or near the coordinate. Throughout it all, I remained relatively safe, while the men I most respect in this business of war — the mostly drafted infantrymen, or “grunts” — did the dirty work “humping the boonies” with weapons and packs. I went to Vietnam on a troop ship (a rust-bucket named the USNS General Hugh J. Gaffey) in August 1966 with an Army Security Agency company; once we arrived in division base camp in Pleiku, seven of us were assigned to a tactical DF team with, first, the 25th Division, then the 4th Division. I later spent some time at a cushy strategic DF site in Camrahn Bay.

Aboard the WWII-era USNS Hugh J. Gaffey headed under the Golden Gate to Vietnam, August 1966

In one operation, our teams hunted down an operator known to us as SOJ. It took us 30 days. Each day, the operator would use a different frequency and call sign; it always amazed us clueless kids that G2 Division Intelligence knew this. Sure enough, at the prescribed time, there he was. First thing, we’d locate our coordinates on the map by sighting on road intersections or hilltops. Our team sergeant inside a box on the back of a three-quarter-ton truck at base camp would plot our bearings and, hopefully, get that tight “fix.” The NVA radio operator we were looking for was attached to what was presumed to be a large dug-in unit HQ; the operator was transmitting to a larger HQ over the Cambodian border. They knew we were looking for him, so every day this operator with a leg-key and a comrade with a bicycle generator would go to a different location at some distance from his unit. Over 30-days, a pattern developed, and G2 figured where the dug-in unit must be. Some combination of long range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP), 105mm or 155mm howitzers, F4 Phantom jets and the ultimate weapon, infantry grunts, located the unit and destroyed it and all the soldiers in it — presumably including my counterpart radio operator, whose Morse key characteristics we had developed a sensitivity to. A large arms cache was discovered. My comrades and I were each given an Army Commendation Medal for the operation. Today, I actually feel pretty rotten about my part in all this. As I’m wont to do these days, I like to ask anyone who expresses anything positive about the war, can you tell me anything — anything! — that the Vietnamese did against us here in the United States. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerrillas were our ally in World War Two against the Japanese who had driven the colonial French army into its barracks as the French government collapsed and collaborated in Europe. Terrorist acts? Not a hint. Well they were communists, weren’t they? Yes, but they also quoted the US Declaration of Independence at the end of WWII, hoping the US would support their liberation from French colonialism. It was not to be; we supported French re-colonization, which led to 30 years of terrible war on the Vietnamese. And a US retreat based on the war’s ultimate immorality.

 
Click here to go to My Vietnam War, 50 Years Later, PART ONE: “A REMF Way Out In The Front”
 
                                                                  MEMORY, WRITING and POLITICS
 
That writer’s place inside the imaginative mind where things rise from the unconscious and find their way outward to the fingertips and onto the keyboard to become words — that place is neither fact nor fiction. This is a fact. Donald Trump has made this fact more clear than maybe anyone ever has in modern memory. In that writer’s place, I’ve always employed Bao Ninh’s character Kien from The Sorrow Of War and the ill-fated 27th NVA Battalion as stand-ins for the unit I helped locate for death and destruction. I see the lush terrain of Vietnam’s Central Highlands now in my mind as an opening master shot in a movie. The camera is looking out the open door of a Huey in the early dawn hours. There is actually no door at all on the chopper, and cool air is rushing into the passenger compartment where I sit on a canvas seat with no seatbelt holding my M14 rifle. (In 1966, REMFs still had long, wood-stocked M14s.) Everything is green and gold from the rising sun. I’m stunned looking at the winding Se San River like a golden snake slithering through the forest reaching to the horizon. This was probably the most amazing, most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. The image and moment is seared into the creases of my mind.

DF team member and jeep at a firebase in the Central Highlands, and Chinook lifting a load on a sling

Earlier that morning, I’d leaped up onto the top of our three-quarter-ton truck’s box, and as an olive-drab behemoth, two-prop Chinook slowly lowered itself down toward me, I’d slapped a metal ring onto a hook below the massive copter’s belly. Out the door of the Huey, over the Se San River, I watched the truck with its box containing maps and DF paraphernalia trailing in the wind on a sling beneath the Chinook; a jeep and trailer had been driven inside the belly of the beast. Our mobile DF operation was headed toward the border as part of a huge operation to engage and clear the NVA streaming down from the north via the Ho Chi Minh trail and into the Highlands. There is an amazing sense of power one gets — especially as a kid — from being a small part of such a powerful and immense army of men. I realize now we were looking for young Vietnamese men like Kien and the 27th Battalion.

Beginning today, June 2, the Left Form (formerly the Socialist Scholars’ Conference), will conduct a three-day event featuring panel discussions on all manner of topics. As the organization states on its website: “Continuing a tradition begun in the 1960s, we bring together intellectuals and organizers to share perspectives, strategies, experience and vision.”

Unfortunately, this year the board, or at least a majority of the board, of the Left Forum has caved in to pressure from a Zionist individual and a group in Germany to cancel panels that include two individuals whom these critics condemn as being “anti-Semitic” or “holocaust deniers.” All four of the cancelled panels were part of a group of five panels organized to discuss issues involving the so-called Deep State and its impact on US and global affairs. The two individuals who were the target of the complaints are Islamic studies scholar and Veterans Today editor Kevin Barrett, and Anthony Hall, a tenured professor of liberal and global studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, whose position was attacked by the Canadian B’nai B’rith organization.
 

According to the organizers of the banned panels, the first decision to ban three of the five planned Deep State events was announced by the LF board on May 8, in a brief email message that offered no explanation for the decision, and that was reached without first offering either the panel organizers or the individuals defamed a chance to respond to the unacknowledged charges. Here’s the note that was sent out by the board on May 8 (less than four weeks before the start of the Left Forum event):
 

Unfortunately, we are writing to inform you that your panels
A) Panel Title: 9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement
B) Panel Title: False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events
C) Panel Title: “Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars
have not been selected as a part of this year’s Left Forum program. We do not take for granted the time and effort organizers put in to the proposal process and understand that this news may come as a disappointment.
We do however want to express our appreciation for your interest in making a programmatic-contribution to the 2017 conference.

We wish you all the best with your work and in the future.
Registration fees already made for speakers can be refunded.

Thank you very much.
 

Note that no mention is made in this message of any reason for the “non-selection” (actually cancellation) of the panels, depriving the panel organizers and defamed individuals of any ability to challenge the decision.

Soweto, South Africa — During the late 20th Century struggles to end apartheid in South Africa the historic Regina Mundi church was a safe-haven for anti-apartheid activists who constantly faced brutal violence from the police and military of that country’s then racist white-minority government.

Recently Regina Mundi, known as ‘the people’s church,’ served as a site for a large rally called to end another form of brutal violence that is tearing at the soul of South Africa: an upsurge in rapes and murders of females, some as young as three-years-old.

Among the women, and men, gathered for that anti-violence rally at Regina Mundi, located in the Moroka neighborhood of Soweto, was Kamogelo Legodi, a Soweto resident and first-year University of South Africa student who is studying public management.

“It is import to raise awareness about women being abused, kidnapped and raped,” Legodi said, while standing outside of Regina Mundi, the largest Catholic Church facility in South Africa.

“As women, it is important for our voices to be heard,” Legodi said. “I have a friend who was almost abducted two weeks ago but she ran away.”

Although rape is a long-standing problem in South Africa, recent horrific incidents have sparked unprecedented national outrage, galvanizing people across the country to rise up against rape and other violence bludgeoning females.