Become a Thumbtack in the Heel of Fascism

(Note from Hartman: I didn’t write this. I cut it from a newspaper on May 6, 1981 (that’s the date I stamped on the clipping – I don’t know what date it was published) and it now exists as a yellowed clipping. I don’t think these words are anywhere online and I think they should be. So I transcribe it as closely as possible.)

YIPPIEE!

“…Become A Thumbtack In The Heel Of Fascism…”

By The National Resistance Conference, March 20-22

We the members of the Youth International Party, faced with a threat to everything we’ve known and worked for, call on the Real Majority, the majority in this country who did not vote for Ronald Reagan, to embark on a course of total obstinate non-cooperation with Haig, Reagan and the Moral Majority, wherever and whenever they strike. We believe that anyone that does not actively encourage resistance is in fact discouraging resistance, and for this reason we are setting forth the basic points of agreement the Real Majority have in common – to draw the line, past which we cannot compromise.

1. The greatest threat is not just war abroad, but regimentation at home. De-militarize America! Unionize the Army. We deplore the splits in the anti-war, anti-draft movement which are fostered by the attempt of one left-wing faction or another to take over the whole thing. And we feel that anything less than one hundred percent encouragement to draft resistance is doing the work of the Government.

2. We vow to stop Ronald Reagan from stealing from the poor to give to the rich. If he wants less government, snooping and intrusion, let’s start with the Feds, and the Defense Department. We will protest. We will demonstrate. We will haunt Reagan’s footsteps wherever he goes.

3. Uptight, upright bigots are the natural constituencies of the Haig-Reagan War Junta. Today’s attacks on the sexual freedoms we wrested from their control are the bigots’ payoff. Youth has a right to define their own sexuality! We demand full and equal rights for all people, gay, straight, and bisexual, to make love uncoerced.

4. We believe that any erosion of a woman’s right to choose contraception or an abortion is an attack at the underpinning of all sexual liberation. It was this right, more than any other, that cut the chains which bound us to a life of early, unwanted pregnancies, and a lifetime of working in factories to pay for it. Keep the government out of women’s wombs – stop forced sterilization of poor and Third World women!

5. The rising tide of racist incidents and murders shows that the Nazis, Klan and their friends amongst the authorities, have brought home to America the death squads of El Salvador and Soweto. We deplore and attempts to solve this problem by abolishing the Bill of Rights. We are working to build Rock Against Racism in this country to fight the fascists. We believe that these sick racists ought to be recognized as the genocidal maniacs they are, and treated accordingly. However we can no longer trust the government. We support neighborhood vigilantes like those in Atlanta.

6. Though we feel Nazis should be dealt with like “crazy people,” at the same time we oppose the use of phenothiazines against prisoners and dissidents in general. Nobody should be forced to take drugs to “cure them” that are more unhealthy than drugs they are already taking. No drugs should be forced on people at all.

7. The main drug that is being foisted off on our communities is heroin, by means of subtle media campaigns and deliberate and calculated diversion of enforcement by Reagan and such groups as the so-called War on Drugs. As long as 85% of all drug busts are still for pot, anyone who spouts the “War on Drugs” line is doing their work. Heroin is the ultimate commodity – the perfect instrument of neo-colonialist exploitation of our cities by the Mob, CIA Cubans, and neo-Nazis abroad. Both as a long-recognized tool of counter-insurgency, and because smack is controlled by World Fascism, we call for the formation of a new group, Citizens against Heroin, to struggle and educate around this issue.

8. At this moment, from the Indians of Dakota to the coal miners of West Virginia, people are being dispossessed by the energy barons and their cancerous conglomerates. The planet belongs to the people! We demand housing for the squatters, living wages and control of the workplace for the workers, respect for Native American Treaty Rights, land for all the dispossessed, and legal pot for the farmers. Multinationals out of North America now!

We will put out this call for resistance everywhere: Throughout the whole counterculture, throughout the schools, through the factories and neighborhoods, in the countryside, in the media, and the System itself – to all free-thinking people who are debating whether to go along or resist, wondering whether or not the Moralizing Majority is the majority, we call on you to rise up and become a stone in the jackboot heel, a thumbtack in the foot of fascism!

(NOTE: THE PHONE NUMBER AND ADDRESS ARE MORE THAN 25 YEARS OLD IN THIS HISTORICAL DOCUMENT.)

212-533-5028 P.O.B. 392 Canal Street Station N.Y.C. 10013

When a Poet is More Than a Poet

In Soviet Russia, poets were what they had for culture heroes in place of rock stars, movie actors and gurus, and poets were taken seriously enough to be exiled to the Gulag with regularity. In Chile, Victor Jarra was considered enough of a threat to be executed in a particularly public and nasty way.

Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis devoted thirteen years to the creation of a 33,333-verse epic, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. He also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, which was placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. His own Greek Orthodox church refused to give him a Christian burial, and according to one of my college English profs, Kazantzakis was buried on an island and every year a delegation of pious citizens would row over there to piss on his grave.

In pre-Soviet Russia, Alexander Pushkin was the perfect example of a poet who signified. Playwright Viktor Legentov said of him, “He penetrates every sphere of our lives.” His Eugene Onegin appeared in eight yearly instalments, between which all of literate Russia waited impatiently. He influenced even such greats as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol, and his prose works were translated into music by Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. His work inspired the creation of over two dozen operas. He wrote a drama, Mozart and Salieri, on which the movie Amadeus was based. Only about 10% of Pushkin’s enormous output was published during his lifetime. Today his papers are kept locked in a steel vault in the former St. Petersburg customs house, where they used to keep gold.

Unfortunately, in his poetry Pushkin found it necessary to condemn serfdom and other social abuses, which brought down the wrath of Tsar Alexander I, who banished him to a backwater in Moldavia. He was allowed to continue writing, but the Tsar himself decided to undertake the task of censoring Pushkin’s work. What an honor.

The “enemy of all authority,” as the secret police called Pushkin, was shot in a duel. It was the custom, as with Tolstoy, for thousands of people to surround the home of a great man who was on his deathbed. When Pushkin died in agony, the Tsar would not allow a funeral to be held in the cathedral, only in the church used by the stable keepers.

There are times and places when being a poet means something. In America, the worst thing we do to poets is ignore them.

Pushkin’s Monument by ancientsword Creative Commons License