W E B Du Bois’ Fight for Equality

W E B Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (Vol 2)

By David Levering Lewis

Henry Holt and Company (2002)

Book Review

Although Lewis depicts the early civil rights activist as personally flawed, he also heavily emphasizes his amazing flexible intellect. Even in advanced age, DuBois had a remarkable ability to adjust his world view with changing political circumstances. changed.

As Lewis puts it:

In the course of his long, turbulent, career, then, W E B Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism – scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation and third world solidarity. First had come culture and education for the elites, then the ballot for the masses; then economic democracy; and finally all these solutions in the services of a global ideal of economic and social justice.

Volume two begins after World War I,  when Du Bois was the founder and editor of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) magazine The Crisis: A Report of the Darker races. Initially DuBois fully supported the NAACP agenda to address racism by installing as many “Talented Tenth”* African Americans as possible in academic and professional positions. The NAACP reasoning was that professional African Americans would use their economic power and political influence to improve the lot of the Black masses.

In 1934, a dispute over his promotion of Black economic independence (which violated the NAACP’s strict de-segregation policy) and his growing interest in Marxism led to his resignation from the NAACP to teach at Atlanta University. Following the termination of his Atlanta University contract in 1944 (he was 74), he returned to the NAACP and his prior leadership role in the Pan-African Congress (which he helped found in 1919). He was formally dismissed from the NAACP four years later (just before his 80th birthday), after some of his articles caused the FBI to label the NAACP as a communist front.

In 1951, he was indicted by a grand jury for failing to register the antiwar Peace Information Center (disbanded in 1950) as “the agent of a foreign government.” Although the court dismissed the case, the State Department refused to return his passport until the Supreme Court struck down their policy (in 1958) of suspending passports of political dissidents. In 1961, the first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah offered him a position compiling an Encyclopedia Africana. He joined the Communist Party USA the day before his flight left.

At age 95, he became a Ghanaian citizen when the US, once again, refused to renew his passport. He died a year later.

The book discusses in depth a number of of Du Bois’s significant accomplishments in the second half of his life:

• His public feud with Marcus Garvey, largely over the latter’s financial mismanagement of a campaign to resettle African Americans in Liberia.**
• His introduction to mainstream American historians of the technologically advanced kingdoms across the African continent prior to the arrival of Europeans.
• His campaign, along with African American actor/singer and playwright Paul Robeson, to keep the US out of World War II.
• His publication of a definitive history of Reconstruction to correct its misportrayal in standard history books prior to World War II.
• His unsuccessful campaign to get a declaration of Black rights included in the UN Charter and Declaration of Human Rights.
• His open opposition (along with Robeson’s) to Truman’s hostility towards the Soviet Union (which Lewis blames largely on Truman’s incompetence and reliance on ultra-conservative advisors), the Marshall Plan,** NATO and the Korean War.
• His visit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1958, leading to the latter’s creation of an African Institute to support the growing Pan-African campaign of decolonization.

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*Talented Tenth – a term devised by white philanthropists designating the “leadership class” of African Americans in the early 20th century.

**As Lewis points out, Garvey was the first civil rights activist to mobilize large masses of poor and working class Blacks, hosting crowds as large as 25,000 in Madison Square Garden.

***Marshall Plan – although ostensibly a humanitarian aid program to war-torn Western Europe, DuBois saw the Marshall Plan as hostile to the Soviet Union (which was excluded, despite taking the brunt of human and economic war casualties) and apt to  polarize East/West relations.

 

Joe Hill: True Working Class Hero

IWW: Joe Hill’s Story

Directed by Ken Verdoia (1998)

Film Review

This documentary is about the alleged framing of International Workers of the World songwriter Joe Hill for a 1914  murder he didn’t commit. There were major protests around the world to win Hill a new trial and stop his execution.

The beginning of the film describes the massive waves of immigration the US experienced in the early 1900s (roughly a million immigrants a year), in part due to open recruiting by corporate bosses in poverty stricken Eastern Europe. Employers deliberately sought out illiterate Eastern European immigrants as strike breakers and for the most dangerous  and degrading work.

Founded in 1905, the International Workers of the World (IWW) were the first to offer union membership to immigrant, black and women workers. Unlike the fledgling American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW sought to form a single union representing all trades – with an ultimate goal of dismantling capitalism.

At the time, the US government viewed all union agitation for better pay and working conditions as treasonous. Thus it was common to deploy federal troops and National Guard to violently suppress strikes.

Joe Hill, who was 21 when he immigrated from Sweden, had to continuously travel to remain in paid work. To avoid being blacklisted for his union activity he changed his birth name from Joel Haagland to Joe Linstrom and finally, after becoming widely known for his protest songs, to Joe Hill.

He was arrested in Utah in 1914 for killing a grocer and his son during an attempted robbery. The prosecution case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence – a gunshot wound Hill allegedly received in a fight over a woman. Although ballistic evidence suggested otherwise, the prosecution claimed the grocer shot him before being fatally wounded.*

Most historians believe he was convicted because of his membership in IWW.

Hill was memorialized in the protest song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” recorded by Paul Robeson.

The film itself can’t be embedded but can be seen free at the following link: IWW: Joe Hill’s Story

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*Although Hill steadfastly refused to identify the the woman at trial, William M Adler would validate the alibi in his 2011 biography The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon.

 

 

How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac and Other Activists

by John L Potash

Trine Day LLC (2015)

Book Review

Drugs as Weapons Against Us is a virtual encyclopedia of the global drug trade. Author John L Potash devotes special attention to the long involvement of the British and US government in illegal trafficking – for the political and financial benefit of the elite families who control these governments. Most of the book focuses on MKUltra, the top secret CIA program devoted to developing and experimenting with mind altering drugs such as LSD, MDA (an ecstasy precursor), STP, PCP and scopolamine.

Although CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra records destroyed in the mid-seventies, 30,000 pages of documents were preserved in the CIA Finance Department. Meticulously researched and footnoted, Drugs as Weapons relies on an extensive variety of sources, including the 30,000 pages, FOIA releases, police files, whistleblower statements, media and alternative media investigations and other prominent researchers such as Peter Dale Scott, Alfred, McCoy, Alex Constantine, Catherine Austin Fitts, and the late Gary Webb and Michael Rupert.

Using MKUltra to Target Leftists and Radical Pop Stars

As the title suggests, Potash is mainly interested in the CIA’s use of LSD (with the help of British intelligence, which ran a parallel MKUltra program at the Tavistock Clinic) to “neutralize” leftists and activist pop stars, such as Paul Robeson, Mick Jagger, Abbie Hoffman, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.*

Like many activists, I am well aware of the CIA’s historic role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia and in cocaine trafficking in Latin America. However prior to reading Drugs as Weapons, I was totally unaware they were also responsible for most of the LSD produced between 1955 and 1973 – for the specific purpose of “neutralizing” the New Left in Berkeley, at Columbia University and elsewhere. This particular MKUltra project was conceived in response to a 1962 Rand Corporation study recommending that getting left wing leaders hooked on LSD could “cause them to resign or become inactive.”

The Haight Ashbury was a CIA Invention

I was particularly horrified to learn about the LSD distribution network MKUltra agents set up in the Haight Ashbury to lure Berkeley students away from the nationally influential Free Speech movement. The latter, originally formed in 1957 to protest the anti-democratic activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House on Un-American Activities Committee, went on to inspire the national anti-Vietnam War Movement.

In addition to various MKUltra scientists and agents, the CIA also relied on a number of high profile personalities – LSD guru Timothy Leary (an admitted CIA asset), author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and Grateful Dead band members – to promote and distribute LSD as an alternative to organizing against the Vietnam War.

How the Opium Trade Created America’s First Millionaires

Potash begins his book with important historical background on the origins of the global drug trade, which he traces back to 1500 and which European elites relied on heavily to finance imperial expansion and colonization. He also recounts the history of important Wall Street families – the Cabots, Cushings, Bushes, Astors, Russells, Pierponts (JP Morgan’s family) – who all owe their immense wealth to the opium trade the British involuntarily forced on China via the Opium Wars. The investment of these families in illegal drug trafficking continues to the present day, as evidenced by the involvement of all major US banks in multibillion dollar drug money laundering.

The Russell family, who would go on to found Yale and the Skull and Bones Society, openly used a skull and bones pirate flag on their opium trading ships.

The Vietnam War: Protecting Wall Street Drug Interests

Potash also carefully details the special relationship between these Wall Street families and the intelligence agency they founded during World War II (the OSS, which became the CIA in 1947) to protect their special interests. This comes out really clearly in the chapter in which Potash traces the origins of the Vietnam War. He makes a really strong case that this war (which began in the late fifties as a CIA intervention) stemmed directly from CIA determination to protect Golden Triangle opium production from efforts by nationalist leaders in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to eradicate it.

One of Mao’s first acts after winning control of China was to destroy the country’s vast opium network. With the support of the CIA, the nationalist Chinese generals who had controlled it moved their networks into Burma, Laos and Thailand.

The Link Between CIA-backed Nazi War Criminals and Colombian Cocaine

In a similar vein, the CIA assisted Klaus Barbie and other Nazi war criminals it smuggled out of Germany in setting up a cocaine production and distribution network in Colombia and later the Afghan Mujaheddin in turning their country into the world’s largest producer of heroin.

Potash makes a compelling case that the proximate cause for the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 was the Taliban’s successful eradication of opium production earlier that year.

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*The cases of radical pop stars and activists targeted with LSD and other drugs (in many cases along with witnesses and key investigators) Potash examines include

• Paul Robeson – African American singer whose career was destroyed when he was involuntarily dosed with LSD and committed for two years to a psychiatric hospital, where he received 54 electroconvulsive treatments,
• Richard Wright – African American writer involuntarily dosed with LSD who later died under extremely suspicious circumstances.
• Elvis Presley – became addicted to amphetamines and narcotics after covert intelligence officer became his manager.
• Mama Cass Elliott – died under mysterious circumstances at age 32 after starting to date an international drug smuggler with suspected intelligence links.
• Abbie Hoffman –introduced to LSD by roommate who worked for Army Intelligence research LSD effects on unconsenting GIs.
• Mick Jagger – involuntarily dosed with LSD and subject to numerous drug frame-ups and two unsuccessful Hell’s Angels (working closely with US intelligence) assassination attempts.
• Brian Jones – subject to numerous drug frame-ups and intense phone harassment and stalking prior to 1969 murder (which police covered up as “accidental” drowning).
• Jimi Hendrix – intelligence-linked manager strongly implicated in death related to involuntary drugging.
• Janis Joplin – introduced to amphetamines and heroine via intelligence-linked boyfriend, died after “friend” slipped her a bolus of pure CIA heroin.
• John Lennon – involuntarily dosed with LSD and framed on bogus cannabis charge. Lennon’s alleged assassin Mark Chapman had strong intelligence links and appeared to be under influence of scopolamine.
• Bob Marley – involuntarily injected with the cancer-causing chemical methlychoanthine (via a copper wire hidden in boots gifted to him by CIA asset Carl Colby) and subsequently died of fibrosarcoma.
• Kurt Cobain – involved in heavy drug use by his wife Courtney Love, who had shadowy underworld and intelligence connections. Cobain allegedly shot himself in the head with a shotgun after consuming so much heroin he would have lost consciousness before he could pull the trigger.
• Huey Newton – initiated into heavy cocaine use by girlfriend/undercover agent. Witnesses maintain he was shot after a failed attempt to kidnap him, discrediting police disinformation about “a drug deal gone bad.”
• Tupac Shakur – multiple assassination attempts and police frame ups. Coerced, as part of a bail agreement, into signing with Death Row records (see The FBI War on Rap). The latter was run by Los Angeles police intelligence unit and heavily involved in drug and gun trafficking. Killed in drive-by shooting instigated by US intelligence.
• Eminem – initiated into heavy drug use via undercover intelligence “friends” after helping Afeni Shakur (following Tupac’s assassination) to record many of Tupac’s songs.

Originally published in Dissident Voice