It's No Accident: Taking the Fifth

Because folks both locally and around the country have expressed an interest
in my columns, I have decided to make them available to people via the
amateur's version of syndication: the Internet.  The first offering is
below.  Since I'll be sending them to this list anyway, folks on this list
don't have to subscribe to see them; however, if you know anybody who would
be interested (I'll be doing one column a week, perhaps less if I don't feel
up to it), I'd appreciate it if people would let others know about the
column.  The website to sign up is at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lacny

The column is entitled "It's No Accident."  Here's the mission statement:

"It's No Accident" is a political column by John Lacny, a student activist
at the University of Pittsburgh. The title points to a fact that is more
disturbing than the most diabolical conspiracy theory ever could be: the
man-made evils of this world are not the result of happenstance, individual
mistakes or even run-of-the-mill incompetence. Rather, they are the result
of the ordinary workings of a fundamentally flawed social system, and can
only be eliminated when that system is replaced in its entirety.

The column is supposed to appear weekly, but keep in mind that the author is
not a professional writer, so at times its appearance may be erratic. Topics
will sometimes involve local issues in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and at other times will deal with issues of national or world significance.
If you read the author's column regularly in The Pitt News (the University
of Pittsburgh student newspaper), please note that you will be receiving the
original draft, before it goes under the editor's knife. Progressive
publications, websites, and the like are permitted to use the column for
free so long as credit is given, but the author would appreciate a shout-out
so that he can get an idea of just how much play his columns are getting (if
any). Bourgeois news outlets are expected to compensate the author at union
rates: since John Lacny currently earns no income from his writing, he is
not a member of the National Writers Union, but he is not about to undercut
people who make their living by writing.

These columns aim to be as radical as reality itself.   Expect nothing less
than ruthless criticism of all that exists.

John Lacny


---------- Forwarded Message
From: John Lacny <jplst15+@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 17:43:57 -0500
To: "It's No Accident" <lacny@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [It's No Accident] Taking the Fifth

It's No Accident, March 12, 2002

TAKING THE FIFTH
by John Lacny

When Kenneth Lay and his criminal cohorts slithered up to Capitol Hill to
plead the Fifth Amendment, a gaggle of third-rate minds attempted to make
the facile parallel between Enron CEOs and the victims of the Red Scare in
the late 1940s and 1950s. The comparison is an offensive one, although it is
indicative of the shallow mindset that is so prevalent today -- one that
mocks and degrades any kind of human commitment save the pursuit of profit.

The Red Scare of the early Cold War is often referred to by the misleading
term "McCarthyism." In reality, Senator Joseph McCarthy got in late on the
game of professional red-baiting. It all began earlier, with the purges and
loyalty oaths under liberal Democrat Harry Truman. And while Hollywood
figures were its most high-profile targets, most of the people who were
fired, blacklisted, jailed, hounded by the FBI or otherwise persecuted were
people of modest means, particularly factory workers and members of the
lower-paid professions, such as teachers.

Why were these people persecuted? We need to be quite clear on this: the
so-called "Communist threat" was not a mere figment of McCarthy's or Nixon's
imagination. In the lean years of the 1930s Depression, there were plenty of
people who were attracted to the idea of an alternative social system, and
US corporate and political figures were concerned that that appeal would be
revived after the Second World War.

And of all the people grappling with the horrors of the Depression and the
rise of fascism, the Communists and their allies were the most likely not
only to talk, but to actually do something.

When Western liberal governments stayed "neutral" in the war between the
elected government of Spain and the fascist generals, it was the Communists
and their allies who joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion to defend Spanish
democracy. Oliver Law became the first black man in US history to command a
racially-integrated military unit, and he gave his life in Spain along with
hundreds of other volunteers.

In the mass-production industries like steel and auto, where towns like
Braddock and Homestead were police states run as fiefdoms of the companies,
even hard-bitten anticommunist trade unionists like John L. Lewis knew that
the unparalleled courage of the reds was needed to build the industrial
unions. How much of what so many of us take for granted -- such as the fact
that so many young people can go to college rather than being stuck with the
backbreaking child labor that was the lot of their great-grandparents -- is
due to the pioneering work of organizers like these?

And of course, while middle-class organizations like the NAACP were
twiddling their thumbs, it was the Communists who were in the streets
organizing the pressure that saved the lives of nine black youths falsely
accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Throughout the
Thirties and then after the war, left-wingers -- both black and white --
played a conspicuous role in the picketing of whites-only stores,
lunch-counter sit-ins, and other militant activities which were to
characterize the later upheavals of the civil rights movement. We now know
that mass defiance was to do more to topple Jim Crow than a thousand court
cases or a million legal briefs ever could have.

Of course in each of these cases the movement became much broader than the
radicals who had initiated it, but the point is that each needed its
pioneers. The people who took those brave and necessary first steps did so
despite the objections of that most worthless of political categories, the
liberal, who professes adherence to human values but balks at any effort to
put them into practice.  How shallow and silly all those calls to "go slow"
sound now!

So make no mistake: those who defied the conventional wisdom and struck a
blow for fundamental social change in those days were human beings, and like
all human beings they made mistakes. But on balance they were genuine
heroes, far more sinned against than sinning, and that is why they were
persecuted.

Even now it is the timidity of the political cretins in Congress that will
allow the likes of Kenneth Lay and his political enablers to walk away
without calling to account a system that allows such outrages. It only adds
insult to injury to compare these thieves who preyed upon the people with
others who risked calumny to speak up for the downtrodden.


"Tell no lies, claim no easy victories."
-- Amilcar Cabral

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
lacny-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

---------- End Forwarded Message


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