Leninism and Nazism: Opposites, Twins, or Siblings?
Leslie Evans
The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Vladimir Tismaneanu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 320 pp.
Vladimir Tismaneanu is a Romanian who grew up under the Stalinist dictatorship that ruled his country from 1947 to 1989. Born in 1951, he was almost forty when Ceausescu was overthrown. His father was an important propagandist for the Communist government. Vladimir headed the 2006 Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, which condemned the Communist period as a criminal regime. The report was highly controversial, denounced by high ranking former communists who were condemned by name, by liberals who pointed to Tismaneanu’s past as a convinced Marxist-Leninist, and by the far right because Tismaneanu is a Jew. He teaches currently in the United States at the University of Maryland.
In The Devil in History Tismaneanu spends almost no time on the fascist devil. Where he does reference them it is in sociological generalities about Hitler Germany, where the crimes of the Nazis are so well known they require no elaboration. He deals with them mostly by occasional paragraphs in which he establishes specific similarities and differences from their leftist enemy.
DAVID SIMON’S “TREME”: A FITTING ODE TO THE CRESCENT CITY
Trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendel Pierce) embodies the spirit of the New Orleans’ music scene
By Bob Vickrey
Almost nine years later, the CNN images are still fresh in our memories—the rising flood waters from Hurricane Katrina forcing stranded residents of New Orleans onto their rooftops, as a stunned nation watched in utter disbelief. Days turned into weeks in the recovery effort as futile governmental rescue attempts mounted and we asked ourselves how this could have possibly happened in America. Read more
Radicals in the Rose City: Portland’s Revolutionaries 1960-1975 by Matt Nelson and Bill Nygren (2013)
By WURDY MCGUFFREY
“Radicals In The Rose City: Portland’s Revolutionaries 1960-1970“, is available on EBay and NWHistoryPress.com (price $15).
The Rose City is the nickname the town of Portland, Oregon goes by and it has a long history of activism and radical politics, going back to Coxey’s Army in 1893, which began a cross country trek of protesters on Wash. DC against the bad economic conditions of the day. A similar march was again begun in Portland in 1932 by out of work WW1 veterans who became known as The Bonus Army and camped out, an estimated 43,000 strong, in and around DC until they were violently removed by Federal troops led by Gen. Douglas McArthur. Portland had a history of labor strife involving dock workers, known as Wobblies. Noted radical journalist, John Reed, grew up and graduated from high school in Portland and credited his inspiration as coming from his father, a top law enforcement official who refused to be controlled by the large timber barons of Oregon. Read more
BLACK FRIDAYS GONE WILD!
By Bob Vickrey
The Black Friday spectacle of the huddled and frantic masses lining the sidewalks outside front doors of big- box retailers sent an uncomfortable shiver down my spine as I observed this annual ritual on television news reports from the comfort of my easy chair at home.
Thanksgiving night has long represented the unofficial commencement of Christmas shopping for frenzied customers impatiently awaiting the midnight rush for what they perceive to be the best deals for items on their gift list. In recent years, the ante has been upped and the clock moved forward by retailers—all hoping to cash in on consumers who will push and shove their way toward that coveted 60-inch big-screen television. Read more
The Secret Behind L.A.’s Literature
Lionel Rolfe (left) with Gerry Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe,” the major biography of Jack Kerouac and the beats. The photo was taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice.
By LIONEL ROLFE
It all began in the coffeehouses a couple of centuries or more ago in London where such institutions as media and insurance took on their modern forms, for better or for worse.
The coffeehouses had names like The Fifth Estate and Lloyd’s of London. They all shared something in common. They imbibed a highly seditious drink, a coffee brew from Turkey called Kaufy. Most folks regarded the potent new drink the same way police viewed pot in the coffeehouses of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the ’50s and ’60s.
After the Gold Rush, Bohemia and coffeehouses developed in San Francisco with such characters as Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The bohemian was the foundation of good writing in California, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles. Read more
L.A. Woman
BY LIONEL ROLFE
Okay, it’s not all a tragedy. It’s the river of life. The only way to keep from dropping to the bottom like a stone is the pursuit of pure, unadulterated, unrestrained libido. Throw orgasms up in the face of the Grim Reaper, I say.
Fornicate until you and her swim in a river of Jism. During wartime, they say, people breed like cats. It’s biology. Perhaps in the face of death, or of divorce, the impulse is the same.
So, okay, one day I was so damned horny I went out prowling, with the full intent of finding someone. I did.
Her name was Eve. I found her sitting in a mall parking lot in Silver Lake. It was just natural for me to sit down beside her and strike up a conversation.
Eve was half-Irish, half-Mexican. And a kind of a street person. She had a most memorable face, one that I thought combined the most handsome aspects of the two peoples. Read more
MAKING UNLIKELY NEW FRIENDS ON THE BOOK TOUR CIRCUIT
Joseph Cotton and wife Patricia Medina
By Bob Vickrey
The day my old friend Frank Winans entered the front door of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with actress Shirley MacLaine clutching his arm, he turned toward me with a wry grin and coyly nodded, as if to say, “Ho, hum, just another day at the office.”
Frank was a publisher’s representative who was escorting Ms. MacLaine to her book signing engagement at Brentano’s Bookstore in Beverly Hills, which was located adjacent to the hotel lobby.
We publisher’s reps often found ourselves in unexpected and sometimes fashionable company when our authors were on their promotional book tours, as we served as media escorts in guiding them from venue to venue throughout the city. My company, Houghton Mifflin, was not a firm known for publishing celebrity biographies, but there were occasional exceptions that paired me with unlikely traveling partners for several days. Read more
Norman Geras, 1943-2013
Leslie Evans
Norman Geras died in Cambridge, England, on October 18 of prostate cancer; he had turned seventy in August. He was little known in the United States, but was a seminal figure in a decades-long battle to rescue the humanitarian and democratic traditions of the socialist Left from a drift toward support to right-wing totalitarian governments and movements in the Third World, particularly Islamic radicalism, in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. He was also a voice of reason in opposing the wave of demonization of Israel that has grown up into a distinctive form of left-wing antisemitism. Read more
Obama Will Go Down In History As One Of Our Greatest Presidents
In my mind, there’s little doubt that Barak Obama will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents. He is presiding over a country almost as torn by divisions as it was in the Civil War. Our greatest presidents come out of troubled times.
You would have to be totally blind if you ignored the fact that the source of the strident words is one thing–pure unadulterated racism. It’s there on the faces of the tea party goers. It’s there on the faces of even the suavest of Republican politicians. They can’t hide the otherwise inexplicable hatred writ large on their pasty visages.
Years ago I was much more tolerant of Republicans than I am now. As a journalist, I covered a lot of Republican politics. I became a drinking buddy with Ed Reinecke, the former California lieutenant governor and congressman who went to prison for 18 months in the Watergate scandal. I always felt he was a patsy, taking the fall for other higher ups who should have been not just been sent to jail, but given a fair trial and then hung. We both liked women and booze and had a belief that the Warren report lied about who killed John Kennedy.
As part of my duties in covering politics, I used to go to Republican parties in the late ’60s where I regularly flirted with Maureen Reagan, daughter of the then California governor. She loved her father, but also knew that he was not the sharpest knife on the shelf. She hated Nancy, her stepmother, who had turned her father from Democratic to Republican politics. Her mother was Jane Wyman, who divorced her husband in part because of their political differences. Read more
A Letter From A Mother To Her Son
Our Gaza correspondent, Mohammad S. Arafat
By MOHAMMAD S. ARAFAT
I don’t think that the story of mothers told in this article is unique to Gaza where I live. I think it’s a story that can be found not only in Arabic nations, but in many other countries in the world, in London and perhaps New York. The names of the mother and the son are being withheld, for reasons I think you will find obvious. A friend of mine got this letter from his mother and it affected him a lot. You’ll see when you read it. His mother called her son harsh.
To my dear son who I loved and still love and will love forever.
I don’t know where to begin. I’m not even sure how to say it. But I know there are things that must be said. I’m talking about things that have been on my mind for a quarter of a century. You should listen to what I say. My neighbours tried to persuade me to tell you my story, your mother’s stories, in the way they thought best, but I realised I had to chose my way so you can understand what I have learned in this lifetime. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
