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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY Former top CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful it is. Read how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier, exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories May 27 / 29, 2006 Kathleen Christison May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
Day
May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
May 22, 2006 Alan Maass William Blum Elaine C. Hagopian Stan Cox Chris Floyd Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
May 20 / 21, 2006 Patrick Cockburn Kathy Kelly Ralph Nader Hugh O'Shaughnessy Greg Grandin P. Sainath Greg Moses Stephen Philion Landau / Hassen Fred Gardner Missy Comley
Beattie Michael Dickinson Seth Sandronsky Luke Young John Zavesky Ben Tripp Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
May 19, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler José Pertierra John Ross Dave Lindorff Jeff Juel Alan Farago Eric Johnson-DeBaufre José Martî Jonathan Cook Website of the
Day
May 18, 2006 Bill Simpich Patrick Cockburn Christopher Brauchli Nora Barrows-Friedman Victoria Buch Eric Ruder George Wuerthner Juan Santos Website of the Day
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Smith Harry Browne Website of the
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May 15, 2006 Alexander Cockburn William Blum Tanya Golash-Boza
and Douglas A. Parker Dave Lindorff Debra Schaffer
Hubert Patrick Cockburn Tom Turnipseed Ken Livingstone Gideon Levy Mickey Z. Jeff Faux Website of the Day
May 13 / 14, 2006 Vijay Prashad Joan Roelofs Kathy Kelly Michael Neumann Dr. Susan Block Daniel Cassidy Christopher Reed Mike Roselle Saul Landau Robert Fisk Ralph Nader Evelyn Pringle Fred Gardner Stanley Heller Conn Hallinan Valentina Palma Novoa David Krieger Col. Dan Smith Christopher Brauchli Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
May 12, 2006 Michael Snedeker Dave Lindorff Leah Fishbein
/ RJ Schinner Brian Kwoba Chris Kromm Kai Diekmann David Swanson Virginia Tilley Website of the
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May 11, 2006 Sunsara Taylor Jonathan Cook Tariq Ali Wayne S. Smith Mike Whitney Pratyush Chandra Joshua Frank Mickey Z. Francis Boyle Edward S. Herman
/ David Peterson Website of the
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May 10, 2006 Werther Larry Birns / Michael Lettieri Ramzy Baroud Kevin Zeese Evelyn Pringle Amira Hass Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Sharon Smith Website of the Day
May 9, 2006 Ray McGovern M. Shahid Alam Moshe Adler Walter MIgnolo Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor William S. Lind Todd Chretien Dave Lindorff Ishmael Reed Website of the
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May 8, 2006 Kate McCabe Paul Craig Roberts Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Ingmar Lee Robert Jensen Ricardo Alarcon Will Youmans / M. Kay Siblani Alexander Cockburn Website of the
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May 6 / 7, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair Ariel Dorfman Joe Allen Fred Gardner Jeff Taylor Saul Landau Stephen Philion Trish Schuh Ralph Nader Robert Fisk Paul Cantor John Holt James Ryan Lawrence R. Velvel Greg Moses Laray Polk Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Mickey Z. Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the Week
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April 29 / 30, 2006 Peter Linebaugh Ralph Nader Robert Bryce Rev. William
Alberts Lee Sustar John Chuckman Eric Ruder Seth Sandronsky Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Fred Gardner Don Monkerud Tommy Stevenson Lettrist International Contratiempo St. Clair, Vest
and D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
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April 28, 2006 James Ridgeway Ramzy Baroud Sarah Knopp William S. Lind Werther April 27, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler Robert Fisk Juan Santos Robert Jensen Dave Lindorff Jose Pertierra
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Weekend
Edition Allen Ginsberg's Silly Liberal Side"Howl," 50 Years LaterBy LENNI BRENNER I don't remember the exact dates of my many encounters with Allen Ginsberg. But it would be hard for anyone to forget where we first met. I had run into a buddy, "Spade Charlie" Hameal. His woman, a white, owned the Cafe East, on Manhattan's 6th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues. It was a good-sized place, but hardly in business. Charlie wanted to sell marijuana from the kitchen without his gal knowing about it. Her bulb wasn't lit, and it was doable, if she had no reason to go into it. So I joined him as crime-partner and dishwasher. Months later in 1958, we closed around 3 a.m. and went across 6th to The $ Sign, a tiny all-night cafe. Owner Barron Buckholst descended from the Barrons of Wall Street and the money behind O'Sullivan's heels. Peyote was still legal. He bought it by the freight car from the Southwest and sold retail, discreetly. A customer came in. U.S. customs had impounded Ginsberg's poem Howl for obscenity in March 1957. When the feds dropped charges, the San Francisco police juvenile division sued publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti for selling lewd material. The ACLU won the case in October. Ginsberg's picture was everywhere. We asked his name. "Allen." We chatted for about two hours, beginning with his experiences after the publicity started. As Charlie's specialty was reciting Baudelaire in French and English, we got deep into poetry. But I particularly remember Barron's "I think people are gay to be chic" and Allan's low, sad "no one sucks cock to be chic". (We leave Barron here. A tad later he killed himself by shoving a pencil up his nose.) Sometime after it was published, I heard Allen read his Kaddish called that after the Jewish prayer for the dead. He wasn't a great voice. But he didn't have to be. The poem, listened to or read, automatically impresses anyone with the least interest in people. Later Charlie Foster, arguably the greatest poetry reciter of his day, privately read Howl to me. Inspired by his deep voiced rendition, I've read it in public to thunderous applause. But the credit belongs to Charlie. I met Allen some years later, at an antiwar rally in San Francisco. He made enough money from Howl to go to India. His bookish Buddhism became a certainty while burning the dead with the monks. That kind of basic reality can be a step on the path to fundamental human understanding. But in his case Buddhism was little more than a sublimation of his sexually-based passive character. He was a lamb who found the perfect philosophy for gentle baaing sheep, and he got ever deeper into bleating. In the 60s he was thought of as a radical pacifist. After the Hell's Angels attacked an anti-draft march in Oakland, he walked into their local HQ with some LSD and cooled them. They never bothered the movement again. But there was also a pathetic liberal side to Ginsberg that most of his present fans aren't aware of. I clerked in Eli Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop in 1972. It had America's biggest selection of contemporary poetry. Allen frequently came by. One day he told me that he was for George McGovern for President. As I knew of murders committed by Democratic administrations in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Indochina, I challenged him. "McGovern stopped coming to antiwar rallies in 1969 so that he wouldn't scare the public into thinking he was a red." Allen was glum for a couple of minutes, until a youth interrupted us to ask him a question about poetry. He excused himself, saying he'd be right back. In nothing flat he was happy, chatting with a fellow poet. Then and there I decided not to pull him away from what he was good at, to attend to politics, where he was as useless as the tits on a bull. After all, it is hard to envision Buddha voting, much less voting for a party that killed over one million people in Indochina, most of them Buddhists. If you believe that the goal of life is to escape from it, that victories and defeats are equally meaningless in the end, you tend not to bother to learn from either. But, as a sensitive person, he wanted the Indochina horror to end. Voting Democrat was what such touchy-feelies did when they came to the blank in the questionnaire where it asks, "what are you doing about it?", and they hadn't a clue as to what to really do to build the antiwar movement. Life was a photo-album. Snapshots on the road to death. "What's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else? Built-in dumb show." If the antiwar movement invited him to speak, good, that would be a photo in his album. If not, good, there would be an other in its place. With such it is as with the apostle John: "In the beginning was the Word." But in life it is Goethe who got it right: "The deed is all." One day in 1984, a fellow in Greenwich Village gave me a 'vote for Walter Mondale' leaflet. We chatted, and he introduced himself. "Carl Solomon." "From Howl?" "Yeah." Its full title was "Howl for Carl Solomon." Allen dedicated his 1956 masterpiece to Carl, then in Rockland, New York State's lunatic asylum. He met him earlier, in his own eight-month stay in Columbia Psychiatric Institute. There he was, off the printed page, quite sane and a nice guy, but plotting "the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha" he was not. As he told me to vote for his party, it controlled the congressional CIA oversight committee. Those Democrats and the Reagan White House were arming Afghani Islamic fundamentalists against the Soviet Union and women's rights. Sometimes a poet tells us about a character, sometimes his character tells us about the poet. The 50s and 60s saw an uprising of the most suppressed and repressed of Americans. The traditional official values re ethnicity and sexuality collapsed. But the whole of the insurgency was greater than the sum of its parts. The active minority of blacks who sat-in or rioted weren't bent on restructuring the whole of society. Nor were most anti-Vietnam war demonstrators seriously thinking about other aspects of U.S. imperialism. Still less were the Beats revolutionaries. They looked for the truest of the truest mantra-chanting holy men, not dross earthly power. Ferlinghetti and the ACLU's victory was the end of government literary censorship. But, unfortunately, the proverb remains true: "Better a leap over a hedge than a bishop's prayer." Although Allen was the most famous gay of his day, his "flower power", i.e., chanting mantras and playing finger cymbals at left demos, didn't liberate them. It took a 1969 riot, a swinging brawl against the cops in the Village's Stonewall Inn, to spark the mass movement that has achieved so much. Eventually the saner of "the best minds" of his generation lost interest in Allen's ongoing poetry, even while his fame grew among tens of millions of youths, worldwide, who studied his early masterpieces in English lit classes. Their separate actions shook America to its foundations, and blacks, women, the disabled and others gained much. Gays were decriminalized. But most in attendance in those stormy events were, like Allen, politically semi-literate Democrats, hurled into motion on their issues by the momentum generated by each other's gains. When their upsurge ebbed, as it had to, given their limited goals, Allen's "Moloch," ye rich, ye lawyers and ye hack politicians, still produced and directed the show. The profound poetic personal and social voice that won the public ear lost its strength when the people lost their strength. I ran into Allen again in the early 90s at PEN, the writers' organization. He had enough literary morality left to be a member of their Freedom to Write Committee. But he never criticized it. They were the English-lit class pretending to be the poli-sci class. They wrote letters to dictators, asking them to kindly please release some writers in their dungeons. Most gorillas flipped their letters into the round file. They didn't have to do a damned thing for some do-gooder committee in far off America, which would do nothing worse to them then sending another letter. I proposed that PEN's celebrity authors should testify before congressional committees, focusing on despotic regimes subsidized by Washington. If they demanded that the U.S.A. stop funding them and followed up with letters to newspapers in their home states, the hacks would worry about losing votes if they went on patronizing criminal regimes. But the Committee didn't want to antagonize the Democrats, domestically their lesser evil, better than the Republicans re the National Endowment for the Arts. Allen would sit like a lump, silently, while the chair and her cronies argued that PEN would lose its nonprofit status if they so testified. I knew it wouldn't have happened. But I said that, if they were worried, "we could set up another organization just so it could testify". After a few months I quit in disgust. I didn't see Allen again until a few weeks before his death in 1997. He was poking around in a Salvation Army store on 8th Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. I asked if he was still with PEN. "Yes." I said goodbye and headed for the art books. Who could hate Allen? And I sing his praises in that our last meeting was in a Sally. He had gotten huge bucks for his papers. But neither world fame nor material fortune changed that infinitely honest, humble soul. Unfortunately nothing could. By the end, oral fixation was all there was to him. Neo-con Norman Podhoretz knew him from their student days at Columbia University. His August 1997 Commentary magazine obit said that "as a poet, he never grew or developed (even most of his admirers think that nothing he wrote after 1959 was as good as Howl and Kaddish)." The rightist was right. Lenni Brenner is the editor of Jefferson
& Madison on Separation of Church and State: Writings on
Religion and Secularism and a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He also edited 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. He can be
reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org. |