I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.
By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, "How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don't blame you." I won't lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, "complete lack of solidarity" was striking.
It's long past time for the left to publicly acknowledge that tying its meager fortunes to the Democrats is a lost cause. You cannot fight a beast from within its belly. You can only be digested and shat out.
You may not like the suggestion I'm about to make.
But I'll make it anyway: Vote third party, a LEFT-wing third party. MAKE the Democrats' self-inflicted losses in November be because they were too right-wing and the public, having been lied to for too long, chose to leave for a party that represents its interests over those of Big Business.
You must do this not only to send the right message, but because it is the ONLY way any Democrat will be made to realize just why he or she lost and what the party needs to do to win and keep power. That's not going to happen by sitting out elections, which is what the powerful want us to do anyway and only allows the far right to keep shaping the narrative that Democrats lose because they're perceived as being too liberal.
I offer Memorial Day remembrances to those Americans who perished in the effort to meet fascism with steel and lead during the years when our national policy was neutrality.
In the summer of 1936, a newly-elected democratic government in Spain was challenged by forces of the far right. The German and Italian fascist states sent aid and arms to the right, Mexico and the Soviet Union supported the left. Volunteers from many countries, organized chiefly by communist and socialist groups, joined formations known as International Brigades and traveled to Spain to fight.
You're not going to do any fighting without something to eat. You're not going to do it. So what kind of hero are you going to be without the heroes who brought up the food and made it hot, or made it edible?
-Evelyn Hutchins
The Western powers in general maintained a policy of not risking the spread of any local war, and thus enforced an arms embargo against Republican Spain. The US went so far as to stamp passports of the day "Not Valid For Travel To Spain" and to harass volunteers as ''premature anti-fascists''.
But some 3000 came from the United States, and were formed into combat units known as the Washington and Lincoln Battalions. The generic term for these men and women is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, although it was not a "brigade" in the order-of-battle sense. With various crises of training and leadership compounding the fact of combat as a hazardous undertaking, the Lincolns lost nearly a third of their personnel by the war's end in 1939.
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