Gaza Under Assault--A Letter

[This letter was written earlier today by Mads Gilbert,  a Norwegian physician working in Gaza. Gilbert describes the effects of the savage attacks of the IDF and the desperate struggle to save men, women and children caught up in the bombings. This hasty translation of Gilbert's letter into English was done in Norway. I have left it exactly it came to me--the meaning is clear, and polishing it would only detract from the immediacy of this report.]


Letter from Mads Gilbert, Gaza, 21.11 2012:

Midnight passed. No truce.

Also no children rest, resting woman or man rest.

Drones buzzing insects as evil and we know they are followed by thunderous detonations. The curtains in the window where I am writing this follows pressure and I can clearly feel the pressure waves. All windows are open so they do not implode and spread deadly swarms of glass.

There are so many deadly swarms here in Gaza. Grenade and bomb shrapnel, drone swarms, swarms of flyers with threatening to further terrorize the civilian population dropped from heaven.

It's been a terrible day.

It's hard to describe 13 torn bodies, dekapierte, torn limbs, charred, toddlers divided in two - it all comes to Shifa. With a desperate cry for help, screaming in pain. Mamma'er coinciding paralyzed in despair when the dead children recognized.

We are working.

Intubated, cuts of clothes, cannulated, trying to understand where the damage is on those who still have signs of life.

Today there were 24 deaths and 189 injured. Not everyone is going to Shifa, but many.

We lost two "on the table" splinter damage to the pulmonary artery and debilitating head injuries. A cava inferior-tear were rescued with the help of skilled vascular surgeons in the group of 40 volunteers Palestinian doctors who came from the West Bank yesterday.

Solidarity. New alliances among Palestinians. Major Arab delegations whizzes through the hospital with shocked faces while bombthunders unstoppable reminding them of the imminent in their political responsibilities.

A family with children coming into the morning hours after Israeli jetbombers have crushed the largest bank in the center of Gaza City. Dad is furious, calling for revenge. Children listen horrified.

Timeout at 00:44: Damn now, the bombs right at us. Serial Bombs.

How are they able to comfort their children during this night?

I'm scared. Evil seems to prevail.

I do not know about if "the world" know how this million prison really is. It is not possible to find shelter, resort, flight, protection. And the same power that keeps everyone trapped bombs simultaneously unstoppable with one of the world's most powerful war machine.

What would happen if Michelle Obama was here last night with his two daughters? Lived in a house in Beit Lahia in the outskirts of Gaza City, porr peoples quarters, without light, without any security. What if she ran into Shifa with one of their beautiful child in her arms, penetrated by shrapnel - without any opportunity to get away?

Would there been a change then?

I do not understand that Jens, Espen and Inga Marte and others who said so much right about the struggle against terrorism and political violence awhile ago - how can they sit with all their influence either silent or expressing understanding for Israel's "right to to defend itself"?

Defend?

They attack the more, as they have attacked in the past 60 years.

Did we not learn that injustice must be stopped now, in our time, as we know and can act - not as an archaeological exercise with the hindsight lens and the cool, historian distance that makes the discomfort of betrayal easier to live with?

Do not send multiple bandages, doctors, lunches and meaningless statements.

Stop the bombing.
Open Gaza.
End okkupasjoen of Palestine.
Let the kids have peace.
Let the mothers breastfeed.
Let the old people drink clean water.
Let fishermen fish and farmers harvest.
Let teachers teach and children learn.
Let the youngsters travel and discover something other than siege, blockade and fear.
Let the soothing gentleness of the nights sleep lie like a rug over years of longing for rest of Gaza's people.

Then they do not need to defend themselves against superior power.

"Then the weapons sink impotently down

When we create human dignity
We create peace ", he wrote, Nordahl (Grieg).

Gaza, in the night's eerie.

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Poem of the Week: Underground USA, 1952

UNDERGROUND USA, 1952

Kenneth Neil Cameron

even in this small town
in the dark
its still twice around the block
before you ring
('cause, brother, they can get
you for that,
that dynamite you're carrying
that LITERATOOR,
you even got Marx in there.)


but when the door opens
and the light falls
on her dark, womanly face
(mother of two, 15 bucks a week
for keeping white folks kitchens)
and you see the deep, friendly strength in her eyes
and beyond, in the light within
the other faces, white and black,
laughing, yearning, unafraid
calling to you,
you are not afraid either.

from Poems For Lovers And Rebels

[Cameron, as befit a leading scholar of Shelley's poetry, wrote some fine rebel verse himself. There are at least two other I may use in future years, if I can keep this up, This is one of his less formal poems, and I chose it because I realize that to speak of the underground today is to call up the 1970s, the BLA and the Weatherfolk. But state repression of the Communist Party in the 1950s also sent hundreds underground. So this is a reminder that we must be prepared for it to happen again. It also is a deceptively simple poem, because it's actually about being afraid while organizing, the fear unstated until the last lines, where it is not, it seems to me, so much banished, as acknowledged and handled.]

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Elegy For Our Dead

ELEGY FOR OUR DEAD

Edwin Rolfe

There is a place where, wisdom won, right recorded,
men move beautifully, striding across fields
whose wheat, wind-marceled, wanders unguarded
in unprotected places; where earth, revived, folds
all growing things closely to itself: the groves
of bursting olives, the vineyards ripe and heavy with
glowing grapes, the oranges like million suns; and graves
where lie, nurturing all these fields, my friends in death.

With them, deep in coolness, are memories of France and
the exact fields of Belgium: midnight marches in snows -
the single-file caravan high in the Pyrenees: the land
of Spain unfolded before them, dazzling the young Balboas.
This earth is enriched with Atlantic salt, spraying
the live, squinting eyelids, even now, of companions -
with towns of America, towers and mills, sun playing
always, in stone streets, wide fields -- all men's dominions.

Honor for them in this lies: that theirs is no special
strange plot of alien earth. Men of all lands here
lie side by side, at peace now after the crucial
torture of combat, bullet and bayonet gone, fear
conquered forever. Yes, knowing it well, they were willing
despite it to clothe their vision with flesh. And their rewards,
not sought for self, live in new faces, smiling,
remembering what they did here. Deeds were their final words.


!938

from:
    Salud! Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers

[Much great culture came form the international campaign to save the Spanish Republic from falling to Franco's reactionary coup and its allies, Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s. The poetry is less known than, say, Picasso's Guernica, Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, the incredible poster graphics or the songs of the International Brigades, Some of it is mighty fine, though, including this piece by Edwin Rolfe, a young communist from the US who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.]

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PotW: Words (For Amadou Diallo)

WORDS (FOR AMADOU DIALLO)

by Veronica Golos

Forty-one bullets--
nineteen in the soft plaster
of his body.
Their ritual marks
link the cracked wall,
the bloody palm-print;
the heavy meat
of his heart,
cooled.

Blood flooded his lungs
their sea.
of cillia, air and water
rose to his eyes.
His flesh -
the blue bitter night.

All manner of speaking fails.
The sound of guns is near.

I would run through this city shouting
beware, beware, but I'd be telling a truth
we already know.

Tell me: Did he speak in his own tongue at the end?
Implore the stunned stars,
utter the unutterable name -
fire his whole life into a single,
final, vowel?

March, 2003

from:

    3 POETS 4 PEACE

                          poems

AGAINST THE TIDE

                          of war 

[Posted in observance of October 22, the national day of protest against police murders.]

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The Commune of 1880! (Their Nightmares Are Our Dreams)

I have been mucking about in the archives lately and, inspired by my bud Brad, sharing snapshots of this and that old flier or pamphlet of Facebook. Still, there are some things that can't be done justice by a photo of a cover.

Take for instance this booklet, entitled The Commune In 1880. Downfall Of The Republic. Written by "A Spectator" and published in NYC in 1877, it is a terrified response to the Great Railroad Strike earlier that year, with red flags flying on the Bowery, the Pittsburgh railroad hub in flames, and the city of St. Louis in the hands of the Workingman's Party for a week. And behind it, the specter haunting the author (or whoever paid the author to crank it out) is that of the Paris Commune of six years previous, hailed by Marx and Engels as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It is a capitalist dystopia. It starts with a description of the secret organizing done by workers and the general strike the unions call. All is peaceful until the employers issue a statement refusing all demands and announcing the militia will be called on strikers. That night quiet movements are heard in the narrator's neighborhood.

Do you hear a low murmur like a calm day at Rockaway? Yes! What is it? Wait! What is this they are bringing around the corner? Why look—look! A cannon? A cannon? Yes, a cannon. Then the arsenal and the armories are gutted. Look there! Look there! They fix it like a swivel on that car-truck. What is this? Good God, can it be a barricade? Then will it do deadly work in this narrow street. What flag is that they hoist above their entrenchment? I cannot see, it is so dark, but it appears to be all of one color. Ah, now a lantern shines upon it. Why, it is blood-red; it is the flag of the Commune!

Dawn reveals every residential street in the city held by the strikers. Efforts to mobilize the militia against them are hampered by the many desertions to the workers' cause. The women of the working communities shame those remaining, asking how they can side with the wealthy while their own children go hungry. Still the main forces of the organized proletariat are held in reserve, Finally, in the afternoon, they march downtown to City Hall Park, Wall Street and other areas still held by capital's forces. It makes for inspirinig reading:

Had the militia at this time had any orders, a great deal of damage would have been prevented and many lives saved. But no; there was no organization and thus they were kept on guard with no other orders but those from their residential commandants. The strikers, on the other hand, moved with regular step and seemed to have learned their duty by heart, for they never hesitated an instant. They were strong, muscular men, principally mechanics and laborers--carpenters to whom the musket seemed almost as familiar as the plane or chisel; rockmen and blasters to whom the smell of powder was by no means a rarity. The most powerful-looking were of course the blacksmiths and horse-shoers, who, at first unable to procure arms, had armed themselves with long sledge-hammers--terrible weapons at close quarters, particularly in the hands of those accustomed to swing them with as much ease as a professional ball-player can a base-ball club.

Kinda brings a tear to the eye, doesn't it?

After extended combat, despite heroic action by the narrator and other "patriots" they are driven back and defeated, "in fact, municipal, State and national governments had been swept away in the tremendous torrent of communism."

Of course, things must turn out badly (though not as badly as one might think), but I will leave the tale on this high note, and encourage anyone who wishes to read the whole thing, all 59 pulse-pounding pages, to help me find someplace that can scan it for me without breaking the spine, and I will post it here at FotM in its entirety.

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PotW: OLD MAN JOHN THE MELTER

OLD MAN JOHN THE MELTER

by John Beecher

old man John the melter
wouldn't tap steel till it was right
and he let the superintendents rave
he didn't give a damn about tonnage
but he did give a damn about steel
so they put him on the street
but he did have plenty of money
and he drove up and down in his "Wily Knecht"
a floatin pallus he called it
with a Pittsburg stogie in his whiskers
and played poker in the Elks club
and the steel got sorrier and sorrier
and rails got to breaking under trains
and the railroads quit buying
and the mill shut down
and then the superintendents asked old man John
to come and tell them what was wrong with the steel
and he told them
too many superintendents


from Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems, 1962

[John Beecher was a very good poet of working class life and struggle, notable for having kept the oppression of Black folk front and center in much of his writing--he grew up white, in Alabama. This one deals with another topic, the skills workers have and the power it gives them, which has driven so much of the last decades of capitalist deskilling and cybernation in the workplace. You can hear Beecher read it himself by clicking the little arrow by 102 here, and find five more of his best here.]

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Setting The Stage For Famine In North Korea

Reorganizing and purging my library recently, I came across a book I had made a mental note of years ago. Entitled Glorious Forty Years of Creation, Volume II, it is a rather sympathetic, to put it gently, account of Kim Il Sung's role in economic development and planning in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea from 1953 to 1966.

What struck me when first I read it, and the reason I hung on to it, is Chapter 7, "Maize Is the King of Dry-Field Crops." It describes certain policies adopted in the Three Year Plan put in place after the end of the Korean War, which had devastated the country's economy, South and North.

It was decided that the key in agriculture was the adoption of maize to replace millet, sorghum and other traditional grains as the main supplement to expanded rice production. Hence the slogan that heads the chapter,

So far, so good, I guess.

Nevertheless, the officials in the field of agriculture and scientists and technicians paid little attention to increasing the area in which maize was cultivated. To make matters worse, the anti-Party, counter-revolutionary factionalists said that if maize was planted every year, the yield would fall. They argued that crop rotation, which was not suited to our country with its limited area of arable land, should be introduced.

Naturally the great leader Kim IL Sung stepped in to "correct the erroneous view of the factionalists." The first few years' results, we are told, were good and thus "shattered the arguments" of those who insisted on crop rotation.

Okay, I'm no agronomist, no agricultural economist, but this is just tutti-frutti. Crop rotation is essential in maize and other high yielding grains. It's not just that they rapidly deplete the soil of nitrogen and other essential plant nutrients. These can be replaced, if imperfectly, with expensive fertilizer inputs. Rotation also interrupts the life cycles of harmful diseases and parasites that target one or another crop. It also, by extending the growing season, cuts soil erosion.

Even in giant corporate agriculture in the US, corn-soybean-corn (c-s-c) rotation is common although soaring prices can often tempt farmers to plant maize two or three years in a row (c-c, c-c-c) before rotating another crop in. Many farmers also add a third crop like wheat or red clover, as in this picture.

Now you might could argue for cutting some slack for 1953, but Glorious Forty Years of Creation was published in 1989! Advocates of crop rotation are still "anti-Party, counter-revolutionary factionalists."

The year 1989 is ironic. The broke and collapsing USSR, a major bulwark of the DPRK economy, has started charging market prices for petroleum, fertilizer and other agricultural inputs and within a couple of years will shut off the spigot entirely. And the great famine of the 1990s commences, causing many thousands of deaths and a sharp decrease in actual physical size among survivors who grew up during it. The DPRK is still far from self-sufficient in food production.

This is not a scientific study, just an impression, and I'd be interested to read arguments to the contrary, but until then, I'll stick with the idea that folks who have neither farmed, nor even studied farming in a systematic way, can be awfully dangerous when they pick up the cudgels of political and ideological line to determine how to feed a nation.

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