The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

lumber camps, as well as working in mines and on the railroad.

Most young boys are encouraged to join cub scouts or boy scouts but two years before the stock market crash of 1929, Gus was recruited by his father into the Communist Pary of the USA, or CPUSA where he proved he had exceptional organizational skills for the Young Communist League. Now that his commintern internship was complete, it was time for higher Red-ucation, so in a 1931 socialist version of the Sorcerers Apprentice, he recieved an apprenticeship that allowed him to travel to the Soviet Union to study at the International Lenin School in Moscow where he excelled in sabotage (seriously! Sabotage! I wonder who he asked to the Proletarian Prom that year?) He also got straight A's in guerrilla tactics, all part of the curiculum of Three R's, Stalin style...Reds, Riots and Revolution!

Meanwhile, back in the States...Hall moved to Minneapolis and became involved in hunger marches, farmers rights and industrial strikes. The whirlwind of progressive politics caught up with him by 1934 when he was jailed for six months for taking part in the Minneapolis Teamster's Strike, a strike led by that madcap hot to Trotkyite, Farrell Dobbs. Eventually Gus was released and blacklisted which made it impossible for him to get any work under his birth name. So with the flair of creativity with the air of subterfuge, he shed his skin of identification, emerging with his new moniker..Gus Hall...which, by the way, was legalized in 1935.

He moved his activities to Ohio where at one point he ran for Mayor of Youngstown on the Communist Party ticket, and being the patriot he was, or at least ardent anti-Facist, enlisted in the US Navy during WWII and while serving in the Pacific theater of action he was elected to the Communist Party's National Committee in 1944.

While Gus was in the Pacific theater of war, an event was taking place that would eventually put two people on a Communist collision course. Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in January of 1944. A highly educated and passionate individual her name has become synonomous with the fight for civil rights and involvement with the hyper-activism of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, started in 1966 by Huey "Free Huey" Newton and Bobby "Gag Me Judge Hoffman" Seale. It was group that practiced and perfected militant self-defense of minority communitys against the US government and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizine and community based programs. The agenda was the revolutionary establishmnet of real economic , social and political equality across gender and color lines.

By 1946, Gus was elected to the Executive Board of the party. He didn't exactly have any red letter days in 1948, as that was the year that he was convicted under the anti-communist Smith Act and was sentenced to a five year prison term. So, he pulled a Trotsky and headed SOB, or South of the Border, down Mexico way. While in exile he was elected as the Communist Partys National Secretary in 1050. He was busted in 1951 and given three additional years of prison time. When released in the psychedelic Sixties he worked to rebuild the party to it's former glory after years of decline. In 1968 he tossed his fur hat into the fray and ran for President of the US. Being a liberated soul, he chose a female running mate, Charlene Mitchell but received a little over a thousand votes.

He soon became the red debutante of the new leftist ball and gained a new crop of young activists with the YCL, now known as the W.E.B. DuBois clubs, and among the crop of militants attracted to his orb was a young Angela Davis. Dubois was an intellectual leader of the black community in America fighting racism in the country. He was a scholar, a writer, and was founder and editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis.

Davis whose membership in the Communist party at the time led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the state of California. She was also tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad Brothers 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County.

In the 1980's she and Gus formed the dream team ticket to proletarian paradise twice, both times going down in defeat. By the early 1990's Davis moved away from party communism to other forms of political commitment and she has identified herself as a democratic socialist.

Hall ran the race four more times and it was during one of his campaigns that he uttered the infamous phrase..People Before Profits. His last race before being put in the proletarian pasture was in 1984, but in 1988 he steered the CP into full support for the Democratic party. He felt confident Jesse Jackson would win. In 1991, he led the anti-Gorbechev-Pro CPSU establishmet in the Communist Party. By now his planet was drifting further away in the political galaxy from for allies such as Davis and Mitchell. He did lead the party until his death. He passed awy on October 13, 2000. Halls family recieved condolences from as far away as Vietnam.

It was a red banner campaign where the Red Bear ran with the Black Panther through the jungle of politics, becaming the political third rail derailed by a two party political system that had no stomach for an upstart third party...especially one that espoused "power to the people" and "People Over Profits"..damn it..that just ain't American! Once again the Red White and Blue becomes the land of the red white and screwed!

Gimme an F!

..and it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for, don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!

Country Joe MacDonald sang it loud and and sang it proud along with "300,000 of you fuckers out there!" The hook and seed of the song, "Gimme an F" was screamed at the counter culture crowd, crowded, and packed tight in true cannery row style at a whacked out Woodstock. An ocean away, sat Vietnam, a divided country by external forces beyond it's control,that was also ripping to shreds the social fabric of the United States. The counter culture was encountering clashes in the streets between riotious police in Chicago and street fighting baby boomer men and boomerette women...yip, yip, hoo-ray Yippies, with Jerry and Abbie acting as it's fulcrum. They, combined, were a lefty act of leftover vaudeville of guerilla political comedy, destined to fade into the dark nightime of changing times.

The Chicago Seven, Angela Davis, jet Black Panthers, wild and wooly Woodstock, hap, hap, hempy Haight Ashbury, and a plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinagenic explosion caused by mushrooms, pills, tablets and crumbly weed and hashish for paper and pipe. Arlo was coming into Los Angeles carryin' a couple of keys, while numerous other Americans were heading north of the border carrying only a backpack, a pack of rolling papers and visions of a life free from war living under the maple leaf canopy of protection of the war resisters movement. Either way...we pleaded..."don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man.

Leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which led to the demise of the short lived garden of Hedon spawned by the tender loving care of love and peace of the Flower Power Generation would be trampled underfoot and suffer from Flower Power Degeneration as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations. Democracy is a noble movement, but as practiced in America, it's a diluted illusion of freedom, similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting it to dilute it's potency in order to stretch the softer product in a futher effort to increase volumn and thus, street profits. Uncle Sam is the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it. Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in the Sixties regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"

The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?

The answer to the last part is no! The Vietnamese are not only one of the most effective guerilla fighting forces on the planet but with a long history of unrest and revolution, they are some of the most resiliant as well. The "Vietnam Problem" didn't start with Dwight David Eisenhower, the golfing goofbag of Presidents, nor John F. Kennedy, the male whore of American history. The "problem", for the Vietnamese began over two thousand years ago, under the ruling thumb of a dynasty far, far away, and eventually ended with a victorious kick in the American red, white and screwed balls. Black and blue and all we have to show for it is untold buried dead of our young and a lousy wall with names of the not so grateful dead etched for eternity or not, which ever comes first. How do those t-shirts read? Oh yeah, "I went to Vietnam and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and a body bag!" As the song goes.."be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.." Today we are more enlightened and forward thinking with Iraq and Afghanistan.."now your wife, mother or sister can also come home in a box" Thank Gawd for liberation and equality, eh? Vietnam is an egomanical stain on the American conscience of a nation not used to loosing, a school yard bully that got it's ass kicked for once. It's never recovered it's national pride. America was born of revolution over 200 years ago, and the resultiant overthrow of an occupying force. Vietnams history goes back much further as revolution was fomented against a phalanx of formidable foes.

I will dispense with an in depth look at American involvement..that has been done to death on the History Channel, we know what happened, we know we got our ass kicked. Case closed. Move on, and now into the time machine we go for some information that may help understand the voracious determination of these Asian peoples, who believe me, if I had to go to war, I'd want them on my side!

Two-thousand and five hundred years ago, Vietnam was under Chinese control for over a thousand years. They regained independence in the early 10th Century, and complete autonomy after another century had passed. By the 19th century, the land was ripe for picking again for foreign intervention by one or another Imperialistic powers. This time the brass ring was won by France in 1854. This lasted into the 20th Century until WWII, you know, the big one, when those madcap Rape of Nanking Let's Bomb Pearl Harbor Japanese occupied what