Peter Linebaugh, "Against Defeat"

http://www.counterpunch.org/

May Day Edition
May 1, 2003

Against Defeat, Laughter
May Day at Kut and Kienthal
By PETER LINEBAUGH


Inasmuch as the historian's craft depends on written
records, then the answer to the question posed in the
title of V. Gordon Childe's classic book about the
Tigris and Euphrates, What Happened in History? is
well answered in the title of another classic book on
the same subject by Samuel Kramer, History Begins at
Sumer, because that's where writing began. With the
American 'liberation' of Iraq and the subsequent
destruction of the library of Baghdad and its museum
of antiquities, we could say, therefore, that history
while not quite coming to an end has become impossible
to write. However, there are other sources of
knowledge of the past, such as song and story, flora
and fauna, with which we'll have to make do, not to
mention what we remember. Baghdad scholarship survived
the sacking by Genghis Khan and there is no reason to
think that it will not persist after the burning of
the books by the U.S.A.

Still...Following the planetary mobilizations of
February 15 and March 22, on the one hand, and this
barbaric devastation of Iraq on the other, we don't
feel exactly like dancing around the Maypole. We need
that history which seizes hold of "a memory as it
flashes up in a moment of danger." While the storm
from paradise blows us into the future, the angel of
history turns its face to the past, commemorating,
remembering: May Day and the Haymarket hangings: May
Day and the 8-hour day struggle: the May Days of
soixante-huite: May Day and the struggles against
apartheid: May Day and the central American solidarity
movement. We do not smile. While the Americans are
wrapping the cradle of civilization in its winding
sheet, the angel of history stops at May Day 1916 and
the terrible siege, surrender, and slaughter at Kut on
the Tigris river.

Every May Day story has its point, and Rosa Luxemburg
expresses mine: "The brilliant basic idea of May Day
is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward of the
proletarian masses, the political mass action of the
millions of workers," she wrote on the eve of the
Great War, and wasn't it so just last month, March 22,
and the month before, 15 February, when we millions
around the planet autonomously stepped forward? And
why did we autonomously step forward? Peace in Iraq.
Yet, Red Rosa said that "The direct, international
mass manifestation: the strike [was] a demonstration
and means of struggle for the eight-hour day, world
peace, and socialism." Peace, yes; but we left aside
the 8-hour day and socialism. Is that why we failed to
stop the war?

In the spring of 1916 at Verdun two million men were
engaged in massive mutual holocaust; there were
676,000 losses. In Mesopotamia, tens and scores of
thousands of sepoys of the Indian Expeditionary Force
'D,' on behalf of the British Empire, disembarked at
Basra at the beginning of the war, with the strategic
objectives: 1) securing the oil supply from Persia, 2)
protecting the main corridor to India, and 3)
preventing a jihad combining Arab, Afghan, with a
rising in India. We could sum it up, as Connolly did,
"the capitalist class of Great Britain, the meanest,
most unscrupulous governing class in all history, is
out for plunder." A fourth objective emerged on the
sly. British government in India wished to annex
Mesopotamia, but British empire in London preferred to
operate from its lair in Cairo than Delhi.

The lure of Baghdad proved irresistible to General
Townshend, the commander. Foolishly (for the Persian
refineries were already secured) he led the re-named
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force up the Tigris River
extending his lines of communication far beyond the
powers of his base to supply it with food. Repulsed
before reaching Baghdad, he was forced to retreat a
hundred miles to Kut. There followed a four months
siege, a humiliating defeat, and surrender on the eve
of May first 1916. Parallel with this narrative of
disaster ran two sub-plots, a) the soldiers'
resistance, and b) the orientalizing derring-do of
Lawrence of Arabia and the charming wiles of Gertrude
Bell.

Townshend found keeping up morale "the most difficult
of all military operations" and one in which the
British soldier is "very prone to get out of hand."
They arrived and dug in at Kut after two days of
forced marches, and then suffered heat, exhaustion,
floods, disease, famine. The Indian battalions had
practically become "armed bands." The bulk of the
troops were Muslim. Seditious pamphlets in Urdu and in
Hindustani tempting the troops to rise and murder
their officers, join their bothers the Turks, who
would pay them better and provide grants of land. One
sepoy did attempt to shoot his officer, several
deserted, and twelve to fourteen soldiers cut off
their trigger fingers. Many were from Punjab.
Dysentery claimed fifteen dead a day, and twenty from
starvation. Townshend complained about the
"trans-border Pathans." He wanted them returned to
India. They refused to eat horseflesh, and though he
mixed Hindu and Mohammedan on picket duty and outpost
work, he could not break their solidarity. Altogether,
seventy-two deserted.

Moberly, whose three volumes on the Mesopotamian
campaign provides the official history, explained:
since the Pathans were without private property, the
British promise to assure rightful succession to their
property in the event of their being killed was
without effect! Behind this logic were imperial fears
of mutiny and commonism. Against these, terror was the
traditional remedy. The Arab inhabitants of Kut would
not sell their food. Townshend asked headquarters for
gold, and explained, "I could not flog 6,000 people
into taking paper money. All I could do was to keep
them in good behavior by shooting one now and then
pour encourager les autres when spies, etc., were
caught."

Gertrude Bell was the first woman to win a First in
Modern History at Oxford. Her grandfather was a rich
British industrialist, supplying one third of British
iron. She danced, she rode horse, she spoke Arabic,
quoted Milton, archaeologically discovered cities,
charmed imperious egos. She became the silken agent of
English guile. Gertrude Bell wrote from Military
Intelligence's Arab Bureau, next to the Cairo Savoy,
"It's great fun." In Cairo Lawrence intrigued to
encourage the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
Gertrude Bell was dispatched to India. The disaster at
Kut put a decided damper on its ambitions. "I hate
war; oh, and I'm so weary of it--of war, of life," as
she sighed from Basra, in March 1916 during the
frightful heat. That was the month that the British
government began to pay Sharif Hussein £125,000 gold
sovereigns a month, a deal she helped set up.

Gertrude dallied with Lawrence, "We have had great
talks and made vast schemes for the government of the
universe. He goes up river tomorrow, where the battle
is raging these days." A month after the surrender,
indeed, the Arab revolt began. Lawrence was able to
write a scathing report on the Indian army's
operations in Mesopotamia. The English political
officer, "Cox is entirely ignorant of Arab societies,"
plotted Lawrence. An obstacle to the Arab
revolt--Indian ambitions for the cradle of
civilization--had been discredited. "The most
important thing of all will be cash," quoth his
instructions. In April Lawrence was authorized to
offer the Turks £1,000,000 to quit the siege of Kut,
though he doubled it, Khalil Pasha rejected it
scornfully.

In March Lawrence read Coleridge, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, several parallels may be made--the
thirst ("Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to
drink"), the sun, the heat, the loneliness, the guilt
of the mariner for his responsibility in the wanton
murder of the crew. What sights had Lawrence seen in
Kut? Who were the starving and wasting men? The
English were from Dorsetshire and Norfolk, depressed
agricultural counties, hardy specimens of the English
proletariat whose experience was depression. There
were Punjabis, Pathans. The Inland Water Transport
Service employed in its Mesopotamian contingents men
from the British West Indies Regiment, the Nigerian
Marine Regiment, the West African Regiment, the
Coloured Section, the Egyptian Labour Corps. Lawrence
saw starve the motley international of an imperialist
army.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

Lawrence, clearly, would have his limitations as an
imperial servant: though it was oil they craved, in
his master's view empire was not slime!

February 1916 finds Gandhi speaking in Karachi. Having
returned to India the year before he vowed to be
silent for a year, and only recently had he begun to
speak out. Truth and fearlessness were his themes, as
only they could remove the demoralizing atmosphere of
sycophancy and falsity. However, these salutary
results required not--spitting. Self-restraint was the
necessary condition to national liberation, he taught,
"when we conquer our so-called conquerors." Earlier
that month, however, despite not--spitting, he created
a furious row with a speech at Benares Hindu
University. "It is necessary that our hearts have got
to be touched and that our hands and feet have got to
be moved"--the doctrine of satyagraha was activist or
nothing. "In her impatience India has produced an army
of anarchists," he continued. "I myself am an
anarchist but of another type." He contrasted himself
to the anarchist terrorists responsible for the
bombing campaign which before the war had annulled the
British partition of Bengal. "I honor the anarchist
for his love of country. I honor him for his bravery
in being willing to die for his country; but I ask
him: Is killing honorable?" Just as the argument in
front of the students was promising to get
interesting, Miss Annie Besant, the English liberal,
interrupted, "Please stop it." Later she explained she
had noticed the CID taking notes, "I meant to do him a
kindness and prevent the more violent interruption
which would probably have taken place, had I remained
silent." More slime.

Gandhi may have overlapped with Gertrude Bell in
Karachi, but where Gandhi derived nourishment from the
people, she pitied them: "Swollen with wind and the
rank mists we draw" is the phrase she remembers in
April from Milton's Lycidias. It is from a passage
about corruption between leaders and led which begins
with what? the slime of Wolf Blitzer from the desert?
a Pentagon briefing? Ari Fleisher?

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.

Not a glimmer of proletarian creativity could allay
the view of people as sheep. Milton at any rate went
in dialogue with the Levellers and Diggers of his day,
while Gertrude Bell used Milton as an another code of
ruling class mutual recognition.

She did not draw the parallel to the experience which
the surgeon at Kut remembered, namely, that the cats
became bolder as food became scarcer and they began
"with privy paw" to lurk about the windows and
doorways of the surgery. Major Barber, the English
saw-bones, was not pleased by his first impression of
Kut, "Approaching from the east, almost the first
thing that caught the eye was a gibbet." He spent days
with stretcher-bearers, bhisties, and women water
drawers. The soldiers called the place "Messypot," he
tells us. Night-time shelling they called "the hate."
He cursed war and the economic necessities that bring
it about. Famine advanced. Then came the slaughter of
the beasts--a thousand horses, mules, camels, all
except the officers' chargers, and Townshend's dog
whose daily walk counted among Barber's duties. He
composed a menu, reflecting the class of the rank and
file.

Potage aux Os de Cheval
Sauterelles Sautés
Starlings en Canapé
Filet de mule
Entrecote de Chameau

For Major Barber May Day 1916 was the arrival of the
hospital ship with jam, swag, and bubbly.

In 29 April after a siege of four and a half months
General Townshend lowered the Union Jack and burned
it. 23,000 soldiers had been killed in four futile
attempts to relieve the siege; then on the eve of May
Day 13,000 were taken prisoner. "It was one of the
great mistakes in British military history," writes
Barker, The Neglected War: Mesopotamia, 1914-1918. The
prisoners? Captain Shakeshaft observed them ragged,
barefooted, dying of dysentery. "One saw British
soldiers dying with a green ooze issuing from their
lips, their mouths fixed open, in and out of which
flies walked." Many were contracted to railway
construction for a German company working in Turkey.
Altogether the British empire lost 40,000 casualties,
concludes Moberley.

If in America the capacity to inflict terror in Iraq
while simultaneously denying it is called Liberation,
in England it goes by The Stiff Upper Lip. Gertrude
Bell and General Townshend didn't let the side down.
Despite having had her black silk gown rifled by
pilfering hands at the Delhi P.O., she cheerfully
wrote referring to the mulberries and blossoming
pomegranates, "Even Basra has a burst of glory in
April." As for General Townshend, he concluded the
Terms of Surrender with this: "Finally, I asked Khalil
Pacha to send my faithful fox-terrier "Spot" down to
the British force to my friend Sir Wilfred Peek, so
that he might reach home. He was with me in the
Battles of Kurna, he was at Ctespiphon and in the
retreat, and he killed many cats during the defense of
Kut. He reached England safely, and I met him on my
return to my home in Norfolk."

Gertrude Bell would become known as "the uncrowned
queen of Iraq," after the British took Baghdad in
February 1917. She wrote in words that could come Ms.
Robin Raphel, slated to run the Iraq trade ministry,
or Ms. Barbara Bodine, awaiting her assignment in
Wolfie of Arabia's Iraq, "we shall, I trust, make it a
great centre of Arab civilization, a prosperity; that
will be my job partly, I hope, and I never lose sight
of it." James Connolly explained on St Patrick's Day
1916 "The essential meanness of the British Empire is
that it robs under the pretence of being generous, and
it enslaves under pretence of liberating." Hence, the
flash song of liberation grates on the scrannel pipes
of wretched straw which we know are there not to sing
songs but to suck up you-know-what.

In "Mesopotamia--1917" Rudyard Kipling wet his
whistle, cleared his throat of anything that might
grate, and definitely raised his voice to express
grief and a very healthy specific --class hatred:

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their
own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to
power
By their favor and contrivance of their kind?

Mercifully, Kipling leaves God out of it. Plus, he
demands justice, not oil, to compensate for the
sacrifice of the young. Kipling told one half of the
story. The other half remains to be told. Is it too
late for the Subaltern Studies historians to recover
the oral tradition of the POWs who fled, deserted, and
escaped from Kut? Some people were ready to answer
Kipling's two questions.

They met in Switzerland, a center of internationalism
(financial, artistic, and revolutionary) but
unconnected by Internet or al-Jazeera or Robert Fisk,
with the disasters between the Tigris and Euphrates.
Their remedy for war and famine which only
anti-capitalist revolutionaries can provide was
offered up from the Alpine village of Kienthal. Two
such different ecologies, different elevations,
different temperatures, different flora and fauna, at
Kut and Kienthal would be hard to imagine, and yet as
human communities both in 1916 retained links with a
non-industrial commons--the booleying of the high
pastures in the latter, the marsh Arabs on their reeds
and islands in the former. The previous September
anti-imperialist socialists had secretly and bravely
met at Zimmerwald. The work of such intrepid souls as
Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg resulted in the Kienthal
Manifesto of May Day 1916. The manifesto was preceded
by debate and discussion.

Rosa Luxemburg published her "Junius" pamphlet in the
spring of 1916, as if with Bechtel Corportion and
Baghdad in mind. "Business is flourishing upon the
ruins. Cities are turned to rubble, whole countries
into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole
populations into beggars .. thus stands bourgeois
society as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as
a pestilential breath, devastating culture and
humanity." As for the proletariat, "no pre-established
schemas, no ritual that holds good at all times shows
it the path that it must travel. Historical experience
is its only teacher; its Via Dolorosa to
self-liberation is covered not only with immeasurable
suffering, but with countless mistakes."

None were bitterer than she over the betrayal of July
1914 when the so-called representatives of the
European international proletariat voted with their
national belligerents, sending millions of fellow
workers to slaughter one another. She noted that
socialism is "the first popular movement in world
history that has set as its goal, and is ordained by
history, to establish a conscious sense in the social
life of man, a definite plan, and thus, free will."
But it does not fall like manna from heaven. She posed
a choice: "either the triumph of imperialism and the
destruction of all culture and, as in ancient Rome,
depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast
cemetery. Or, the victory of socialism, that is, the
conscious struggle of the international proletariat
against imperialism and its method: war." Amid the
slaughter of Verdun and the starvation of Kut, she
returned to an axiom of history: human beings make it,
the conscious historical action by conscious
historical will. They did not pretend that peace was
patriotic, nor that they could win without struggle.

Lenin gave a speech in Switzerland in February 1916.
He quoted The Appeal to Reason of 11 September 1915.
Eugene Debs said, "I am not a capitalist soldier; I am
a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the
regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular
army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to
fight from the ruling class I am opposed to every war
but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and
this is the world-wide war of the social revolution.
In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the
ruling class may make necessary." Gloden Dallas &
Douglas Gill, The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the
British Army in World War I (Verso 1985) write that a
year later, also on 11 September, the English recruits
in France mutinously demonstrated. In Mesopotamia the
soldiers organized themselves to return home, when
ordered up country against the local population. One
of the veterans remembered, "We refused saying that we
had not enlisted for this purpose & as there was
always trouble there, we should have had difficulty in
getting back. We stood our ground & gained the day"

Lenin welcomed "The Junius Pamphlet," although he
argued the necessity of wars of national liberation.
In Zürich during the spring of 1916 Lenin wrote
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism which
would be used in the anti-colonial struggles of the
20th century--China, India, Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam.
He studied the growth of monopolies and cartels; he
studied finance capital: "It spreads its net over all
countries of the world." He observed its dynamics: 1)
"the more capitalism is developed the more desperate
the struggle for raw materials," or 2) "imperialism
is, in general, a striving towards violence and
reaction." He explained how the proletariat drew rank
mist and became swollen with wind. Super-profits from
plundering colonies enabled the metropolitan working
classes to become opportunist and susceptible to
nationalist appeals, permitting the betrayal of the
trade unions and socialist parties. "It has grown
ripe, overripe, and rotten," Lenin wrote. He noted its
two fundamental weaknesses, a) it bribed its lower
class into acquiescence, and b) its armies were
recruited from subject peoples.

Lenin lived around the corner from the Caberet
Voltaire where the artists and musicians in the spring
of 1916 thought up the name Dada for an art to cure
the madness of the age. Ed Sanders in volume one of
his beautiful America: A History in Verse (Black
Sparrow, 2000), described an evening there,

--a holy, mind-freeing rinse of nonsense
to laugh away
the stench of the trench
a Rinse heard as far away as
San Francisco

If theirs was the rinse, Lenin gave the scrubbing.
Lenin quoted Cecil Rhodes, "if you want to avoid civil
war, you must become imperialists." This precisely was
the pivot point: how to turn imperialist war into
civil war. Here was the transition from defense to
offense. Rosa Luxemburg too argued against the siege
mentality in favor of armed, free people on'amove. You
study Lenin and Luxemburg in that year and you do not
find sectarian bitterness or the irreconcilable
differences of gender antagonism. Among the many
things Luxemburg and Lenin agreed on that year was
denunciation of the Social Democrats for refusing to
intercede on behalf of a comrade in the Cameroons who
faced a death sentence for organizing an uprising
against the war. These are comrades denouncing war,
condemning betrayal of the official opposition,
analyzing imperialism, praising the creativity of the
working-class, and they search the world to find it.

From these discussions came the Kienthal May Day
Manifesto of 1916. If Kut describes a progenitor of
our problem, then Kinethal describes a solution. It's
words apply to us. Addressed to workers of town and
country, "You have only the right to starve and to
keep silent. You face the chains of the state of
siege, the fetters of censorship, and the stale air of
the dungeon. They try to incite you to betray your
class duty and tear out of your heart your greatest
strength, your hope of socialism."

"The governments, the imperialist cliques, and their
press tell you that it is necessary to hold out in
order to free the oppressed nations. Of all the
methods of deception that have been used in this war,
this is the crudest. For some, the real aim of this
universal slaughter is to maintain what they have
seized over the centuries and conquered in many wars.
Others want to divide up the world over again, in
order to increase their possessions. They want to
annex new territories, tear whole peoples apart and
degrade them to the status of common serfs and
slaves."

"Courage! Remember that you are the majority and that
if you so desire the power can be yours." By May 1916
Dubois and James Connolly had found the desire and the
courage. It consisted of a) defense against terrorism
and b) offense against imperialism.

DuBois had recently written that "Africa is the prime
cause of this terrible overturning of civilization,"
World War. He wrote "the white working man has been
asked to share the spoil of exploiting 'chinks and
niggers.'" Having invaded Haiti, Santo Domingo,
Mexico, and Nicaragua, the U.S.A. grew rank with
terror and racism. Marcus Garvey of Jamaica arrived in
New York in the spring of 1916, asking DuBois to chair
his meeting. Dubois called for a revolution,
"democracy in determining income is the next
inevitable step to democracy in political power." When
the Easter rebels were called fools, DuBois appealed
to the heavens, "would to God some of us had sense
enough to be fools!" May Day at DuBois' The Crisis was
entirely occupied in the struggle against lynching. It
inveighed against the terrorism in the U.S.A. The
April issue was against the lynching of six men in
Georgia, while the next issue, on "The Waco Horror,"
reproduced the most searing photographs of the
century, the charred stumps of mutilated, burned, and
hanged Texas proletarians.

James Connolly reiterated, A Rich Man's War and a Poor
Man's Fight! He discovered the war profiteers. He
analyzed the economic incentives for joining up
(unemployment + cash for women who sent their husbands
to war). He berated the union bureaucrats and praised
the Dublin dockers and London seamen. He recalled
British robbery of Irish common lands, and in that
stroke of genius which operates by observing the
obvious he noted that "the spirit of adventure" must
be counted a revolutionary force. He doubted that the
political leprosy of militarism could be excised
without the red tide of war. Opportunities are for
those who seize them, and so, on to Easter.

The rule of insurrection is audacity, audacity,
audacity! So, despite the capture on Sunday of Roger
Casement and the loss of the arms he was shipping from
Germany, the Easter Rising commenced anyway on Monday,
24 April 1916, asserting the right of the men and
women of Ireland to its ownership, in the
oft-reprinted proclamation. Though crushed in less
than a week, its reverberations thrilled the oppressed
from Jamaica to Bengal. In Dublin Connie Markievicz
was second-in-command at Stephen's Green. The Easter
rising seized buildings about the town which
communicated with one another by means of bicyclists.
To her disappointment she was spared execution owing
to her gender, and instead awakened on May Day in her
cell at Kilmainham Gaol to the sound of rifle reports
as her comrades were executed by firing squad. They
removed her to prison in England where she amused the
bread-and-water gang by extensively reciting from The
Inferno, as well as her own words:

Dead hearts, dead dreams, dead days of ecstasy,
Can you not live again? 
Nay, for we never died

Joe Hill, the song writer, was shot on 19 November
1915. James Larkin came over from Dublin for the
funeral where they sang his popular, "The Rebel Girl,"

There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as every one knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes.
These are blue-blooded queens and princesses
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearls:
But the only and Thoroughbred Lady
Is the Rebel Girl.

The proletarian revolution is not the restoration of
matriarchy, though it definitely entails the defeat of
patriarchy and Hausfrauiszierung (to use the phrase of
Maria Miess). And we can easily understand, given the
leadership of the women of the planet on the great
days of February 15 and March 22, that the term
'proletarian,' etymologically speaking, meant the
women or breeders of empire, but now taking steps to
realize our planetary power as a class.

We have looked back with the angel of history--at the
low siege, surrender, and slaughter at Kut, and at the
high Alpine manifesto of proletarian internationalism
of Kienthal, and still the wind blows us into the
future, which the ruins of the libraries of Baghdad
and the bleeding of funds for the municipal libraries
in the USA, have not yet destroyed, for we take the
treasures with us. The coincidences of May Day (Kut
and Kienthal) like the coincidences of September 11
(mutiny and terror) are not magic, though they need to
be discovered; they arise merely from probabilities.
May Day is one day in 365. 11 September is another
rotation of the planet. As the earth rotates prior to
our revolution, these are the constants: imperialism
and the struggle against it, capitalism and the
struggle against it, capital punishment and the
struggle against it. Meanwhile, against the slime,
Gandhi said clean up your act.

Against the flash song, Lenin offered economic
analysis. Against terror, DuBois offered unflinching
truth. Against the swollen wind and rank mist of
patriotism, Red Rosa offered the International.
Against all the odds, James Connolly offered audacity.
Against defeat, Joe Hill offered laughter.

We learn from Franklin Rosemont's magnificent Joe
Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary
Workingclass Counterculture (Charles Kerr, 2003) that
the cremated ashes of Joe Hill were put in envelopes
and sent to every IWW local in every country of the
world --Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe --and were
released to the breezes on May Day 1916. For the
followers of the sky-gods, Jahweh and Allah, we laugh
with Joe Hill,

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

As for the dirt-gods, Mammon and Moloch, not having
mopped them up, we have not yet earned our laugh.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at Bard College. He is
the author of the London Hanged and The Many-headed
Hydra. He can be reached at:
linebaugh@counterpunch.org.




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