[The world needs millions to join in this fight, this fight back!
In the United States, there have been models enough of genuine
patriots. There is a need for U.S. patriots who are at the same time
“world patriots.”]
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A PATRIOT’S FOURTH OF JULY  
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Victor Grossman
July 4, 2023
Berlin Bulletin #213
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_ The world needs millions to join in this fight, this fight back! In
the United States, there have been models enough of genuine patriots.
There is a need for U.S. patriots who are at the same time “world
patriots.” _

Woody Guthrie, playing a guitar that has a sticker attached reading:
This Machine Kills Fascists , Source: Wikimedia Commons.

 

No, I’ll not be exploding firecrackers on July 4th (nor on New
Year’s Eve either, when private rockets fill Berlin skies). Here,
too, I am safely distant from possible crazy AK15 attacks, though very
aware of many people’s fears on this date. Yet, despite all doubts,
despite fearful weaponry, at home or abroad, I consider myself an
American patriot! Many might see me as one of the least likely to even
want that description. A left-wing radical as a young man, I deserted
the US Army (one jump ahead of the McCarran-McCarthy bloodhounds) and
have spent much of my life in East Berlin, often writing polemics
against USA policies. Can I still call myself patriotic? In fact, is
that a good thing to be?

Like some lizard species my eyes can see things from two angles at the
same time. Even countries; my adopted home, Germany, but also my home
country, the USA. Somehow I cannot overcome this habit of double
vision.

For example, I have no love for the America of tobacco companies,
which hired hordes of lobbyists to bribe members of Congress and
enable them to spread smoking to more women, people of color,
youngsters and all the world, despite knowing that it is extremely
unhealthy. The State Department even supported them abroad, where
handsome Marlboro cowboys even had a political effect.

Nor do I love the America of Coca Cola, Pepsi-Cola, of McDonald’s,
Burger King, Wendy’s, which have knowingly poisoned millions,
especially youngsters, in the USA and around the world. And how can I
feel pride in fellow New Yorkers like the Sackler family, who used
every dirty trick to win doctors and spread their deadly OxyContin
opioids, ignoring the misery and death of tens of thousands while
raking in up to 13 billion dollars and bribing every famous museum
from the Louvre to the Metropolitan and Smithsonian to display their
name?

Nor do I feel close to Amazon and Walmart, whose low prices and swift
delivery reached the hearts and wallets of millions but drove their
workers to brutal work rates while repulsing every whiff of protective
unions – and wrecking countless retailers and healthier city centers
in towns and cities all over my country.

And while I recognize their sometimes amazing skill, artistry, even
genius, winning huge audiences in America and around the world, I
cannot see Hollywood or studios like Disney’s as objects of my
pride.

Downright alarming for me, in fact, are the amazing advances of
Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Apple, and now, looming ever
larger, AI, in controlling our social lives, or lack of them,
burrowing into our thinking processes and achieving unheard of
dominance in the everyday lives of billions.

And I feel real hatred toward the companies behind the NRA, buying
politicians by the dozen so as to sell warfare guns by the million,
frightening parents all over the country, but also  shoppers,
movie-goers, deliverers of goods like nowhere else in the world while
filling the armories of gangs plotting to “defend our America”
from any aspect of democratic rule.

Worst of all are those billionaire monsters, with five in the lead,
Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
whose entire mission is to encourage preparations for military
confrontation, even now opposing every move towards peace, encouraging
the provocation and continuation of any and every conflict, up to and
including an atomic one!

These companies, these billionaires – and the Congress, Supreme
Court, all the courtrooms and state houses they control, proudly
display their red-white-blue lapel pins even while wheeler-dealing and
merging with dominant siblings elsewhere. How then can I join in their
patriotic flag-waving?

It is another USA which I love! It is the one courageously co-founded
by 4000 ragged farmers, war veterans, who fought back in Shays’
Rebellion in 1786. It includes Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Harriet
Tubman and John Brown, who took up arms against the slave-owners,
Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, the Grimké sisters and William
Lloyd Garrison who used words as weapons, Thaddeus Stevens and Charles
Sumner who raised their voices in Washington.

 Nor can I forget Tecumseh, Osceola, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull,
Geronimo, all great Americans!

With the development of industry came the fight-back of working
people. We know only the leaders’ names; few today know even them.
The ironmonger William Sylvis founded the first one, the National
Labor Union. The Knights of Labor opened up to women and Black
workers. The railroad strikers of 1877, met by a “diet of lead” as
“Communards and Communists.” There was the May Day parade of
thousands for the 8-hour day in Chicago in 1886, the “naval
battle” of the Homestead steel strikers against boatloads of scabs
and Pinkerton goons. And so many dramatic personalities, like the coal
miners’ fighting old Mother Jones, or the one-eyed “Wobbly” Big
Bill Haywood with his closed fist as a symbol of unity of all
nationalities and beautiful young Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who with him
helped 25,000 miserably poor women textile workers in Lawrence win
their fight for ”bread and roses”. Also great Socialists like
Eugene V. Debs or John Reed (who later became a Communist). There were
men I saw and heard; Professor DuBois, and the incomparable singer,
actor and fighter for freedom and peace, Paul Robeson! They all
represent the USA I’m proud of - my America!  

Nor should we forget the martyrs, like those imprisoned and hung in
Chicago after the Haymarket Market trial, or the great songster Joe
Hill, killed by a firing squad in 1915, the part-Indian union
organizer Frank Little, lynched in Butte in 1917,  Ella May Wiggins,
murdered in a textile strike 1927 in Gastonia, NC, the ten peaceful
steel strike paraders killed by cops on Memorial Day 1937 in
Chicago.  Nor can we forget the murdered Fred Hampton, Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King, all fatally hated by the FBI. I would also include
both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, electrocuted in 1953 in Sing-Sing for
atomic weapon espionage, whose motivation was to alter a dangerously
one-sided imbalance in weaponry and thus to save the world from an
atomic threat endangering everyone - a belief that internationalist
responsibility and genuine patriotism need never contradict each
other.

These people and so many others unknown by name are my reason for
loving my America – whose history, language and culture are closest
to my heart, though without a trace of condescension towards my fellow
people with similar struggles in other countries around the world.

My life, for so many years away from home, leads me to unhappy
comparisons, but also hopes for my country. It is heart-breaking to
read of the thousands – primarily Black women with children – who
are evicted in one year in one US city alone! Or to watch it happen in
Michael Moore’s film! I can feel my tears arising when I see videos
of long, long lines of Americans, often in cars, waiting to receive
food charity. Or the lines on foot, circling whole city blocks, to get
needed medical or dental care they can not afford. I read of young
people graduating college burdened with $30-40,00 in debts they can
never pay back, growing with mounting interest rates. Or of working
people, forced by stagnant wage scales to borrow at months’ ends,
with obscene interest rates condemning them to constant worry, tears,
to fears of eviction. I think of children in poverty-stricken
neighborhoods; rarely if ever seeing green landscapes, hearing
songbirds, wondering at star-studded heavens - and forced into
hopeless lives of petty crime, police violence, prison labor camps –
or sudden death.

I saw samples of this in my early years, in East Boston, Black
sections of Roxbury, in Buffalo. Much more recently I was shocked by
the misery of homelessness I saw in Los Angeles, San Francisco and my
own hometown. It seemed to be almost accepted by many as a normal way
of things.

But my life had taught me that it is so unnecessary! It is not normal!
I lived nearly forty years in a small country, the (East) German
Democratic Republic, where such conditions were unknown. Though
war-wrecked, lacking almost any natural resources, discriminated
against by all the western world, it created a new form of society;
where rent cost at most 5% or10% of income, where evictions were
forbidden, where all education, from a nursery to a doctorate were not
just free but, for apprentices and students, was aided by
cost-of-living assistance, making jobbing unnecessary and student debt
unknown. Where an affordable monthly tax meant that all medical and
dental care, all physical rehab “cures”, all prescription drugs,
eyeglasses, hearing aids, were completely covered without paying a
penny extra. Women received six months paid leave after having a baby
(and if desired another half-year, unpaid but with job guarantee).
Food pantries for the needy were fully unknown, even the worst-off
group, usually war widows who had never learned a trade and did
unskilled work with low retirement rates were guaranteed a low-price
roof over their heads and, almost free, one big hot meal a day.
Abortions, after 1972, were free of charge and free of censure. Even
ex-convicts were guaranteed a home and a job.

When I reflect on such comparisons I must wonder whether my
super-modern homeland is, in some ways, still in a Stone Age. All the
advantages my family and I – and the others – enjoyed in the GDR
should be normal parts of daily life in the wealthy USA - really
tomorrow if not today!

But halt, many will say! Those achievements were accompanied by
repression, limitations on freedom of speech, a regulated media,
farcical no-choice elections, fear of an ubiquitously snooping Stasi!
A wall prevented its citizenry from traveling or departing the
country, even shooting some who tried. Why did so many want to leave
such a Utopia? And finally vote against it?

The complicated answer involves the history of Germany, pressures from
the East and especially from the West, the many family connections
with a West Germany pampered almost since 1945, with Marshall Plan
millions and more so as to act as a magnet for easterners, with a
commodity assortment, home construction financing and travel
opportunities almost unequaled in the world, and transmitted with a
proficiency in propaganda methods learned both from Goebbels and from
newer techniques from Edward Bernays and “Madison Avenue” – and
set against an apparatus of aging men, devoted anti-fascists and
socialists most of them but so hardened by their fight against the
Nazis - and by the Stalin era - that they rarely found successful
rapport with a population only just emerged from fascism, then
inundated by flashy US super-culture in all the arts, even in
language.

But I have an additional theory regarding all such comparisons.

The heads of every form of government - capitalist, communist,
democratic, fascist, open, repressive – have one basic motivation;
to stay in power, either individually for a king or dictator or for a
party structure, or for a social system. They must be watchful and
wary about any cracks or crumbling.

In the USA, in Britain, France, Australia, Canada, Sweden,
Netherlands, where two-thirds or more of the population are relatively
satisfied, with a home, a car or two, modern appliances and
electronics, vacation travel, a ruling government can afford to permit
many freedoms. “Let the radicals spout phrases at Hyde Park, Union
Square or wherever. Let them publish leaflets and newspapers which at
most a few thousand will see or read. Perhaps let them form little
leftist parties which often fail to outdo the 0.1 % level. Such
liberties, sometimes won by courageous battles in the past, like the
”Free Speech” fights of the IWW “Wobblies” in the Northwest,
may have become traditions; long may they endure! But, just to make
sure, have some built-in safeguards. One is an election system which
discourages poor people from voting. “What’s the use? They are all
crooked. They make promises and break them”. Then too, poorer people
read or watch less news, may not be fluent in the main language, may
have well-planned difficulties in getting registered and voting. Many
who do vote are caught in the “lesser evil” pattern. “He’s not
much good, or no good, but the other man is really fearful!” The
media plays a major part, distracting readers, listeners, viewers with
enthusiasm for “our team” in sports, or curiosity about the latest
royal wedding or film star scandal – or with details on every crime,
accident, catastrophe. All very human, but all distracting, very
skillfully, away from genuine problems or their solutions.

But what if new crises cause dissatisfaction, if prices soar, jobs get
scarcer, evictions multiply? One of the commonest antidotes is to
encourage, for the most part surreptitiously, divisive animosities;
southerners against northerners, working people in fly-over states
against elitists in coastal Ivy Leagues (currently labeled
“woke”), Protestants v. Catholics, Irish v. Jews – all have
played a part. And always, ever since the USA was born (and earlier),
against that ”Black threat” against “our” (white) women, our
(white) jobs and pay scales, our (white) status as superiors, even if
we are at the bottom of (white) society. Add on the variants: against
the Indigenous, against other incoming immigrants, especially poor
ones like (at first) the Irish, the Jews, Italians, Mexicans and
Central Americans, Chinese, Japanese, but always against Blacks, who
could least easily assimilate and ”disappear”!

If these methods do not suffice, if conditions worsen and
rebelliousness increases, one device almost always works; nationalism,
antipathy towards other countries, fears of being attacked, either
militarily or surreptitiously, as in the McCarran-McCarthy years (when
I was a victim) - and now perhaps again.

But if nothing else works then tough methods! Firing people, jailing
them, then batons, pepper spray, water cannon, bullets – as seen in
recent years in many countries of all political colors, from Minsk to
Portland, Havanna to Santiago, Barcelona to Stuttgart. And France!
Against “goodies” or “baddies!”

Yes, if the need is felt they all do it! But here we find an
interesting difference. It is far easier to achieve non-rebellious
satisfaction if there is plenty of food, clothing and other
necessities at prices a majority can afford, while still making plenty
of profits.

And this is more achievable if the economy can import cheap bananas
from countries where barefoot peasants carry heavy loads of
still-green fruit at sub-existence wages. Or where children help their
parents pick cocoa, coffee or tea for pennies instead of going to
school, where African villagers walk miles to dig cobalt or coltan,
almost with their bare hands, where young women sew and spin
fashionable apparel for hunger wages in shaky, fire-prone buildings
from Bangladesh to Cambodia, Vietnam, south China (though no longer at
such impossible wages and conditions in the latter). But also “at
home”, where Mexican and Central American laborers harvest luscious
Californian fruits, berries, nuts and vegetables but live in hovels,
fearful of deportation, while kids as young as
14                clean butchering machinery for long
hours and African-American men and especially women rotate from hot
Amazon Co. warehouses to the remaining assembly lines in the rust
belt.

What does this mean? Some differences are based on national traditions
and history – the open West in North America, immigrants who were
often the most daring and independent in their countries, a French
Revolution - as opposed to century-long repression and histories
marred by terrible invasions in Russia and much of East Europe.
Nevertheless, in the GDR I saw that a major factor of government
insecurity, hence pressures to preserve itself and its non-profit
system, was because the GDR did not – could not – provide its
population with products of the toil of miserably-paid pickers,
harvesters and palm oil toters or coltan diggers in southern
continents, nor were there sources of underpaid slum-based workers at
home, forced to take any job with no questions asked, including lower
wages for women and child labor. The GDR got no cheap bananas from
exploited Guatemalans, or tulips and roses from Kenya. Yes, it did get
towels and tea from China but no easily affordable H & M shirts or GAP
dresses while their makers got pennies, supermarket cashiers got low
wages – and the men at the top got millions.  

In the GDR this did not result in worse living or working conditions,
indeed, in many ways it meant the contrary, but it did mean a much
narrower assortment of consumer goods. Since the main staples were
kept at almost absurdly low prices, most people had money to spend,
which meant that high quality, modern and fashionable goods were far
rarer, disappeared quickly in the shops – or were absent. This
situation, worsened by the constant advertisement of more and better
items “on the other side” was a major cause of discontent, which
led to repressive measures aimed at preserving a far more humane,
truly modern social system, but one which was largely taken for
granted by those who grew up with it. 

This was a vicious circle which meant that the GDR was already
threatened in its existence from pre-natal days, hated above all by
the powerful corporations it had thrown out. In the end it was
defeated, broken, almost totally erased, industriously, socially,
culturally and if possible historically.

What about “my” USA? Though never threatened from without since
1812 or in its unified government control since 1865, its leading
lights resorted again and again to the KKK violence of the
Reconstruction and post World War I and II eras, to the mass arrests
of anti-war Socialists and Wobblies in 1917-1918, the arrests, prison
terms, thousands of lost jobs and broken lives from 1950 to 1960 (and
1100 pages of FBI files about me). There were long periods when
opposition was possible and some periodicals were never banned. But it
seems clear to me; the freedoms which, though attacked, only rarely
disappeared fully in the western democracies, may be partly products
of past struggles and present fight-back but also, in great measure,
are based on the poverty of millions in the southern hemisphere and in
domestic slums. Whenever those millions rebel – if they rebel –
the freedoms are reduced, limited, or eliminated. And by whom?

Major decisions today are increasingly determined by an ever smaller,
tighter group of multimillionaires and billionaires in every sector of
the economy. Their seemingly unstoppable expansion has resulted in
three giant menaces to all of us. One, of course, is  the threat of
climate change, of poisoned oceans, air and soil, due to policies
still pursued by the fossil fuel companies, who knew full well of the
growing, irretrievable damage they were causing but spent million
denying it, just like the equally pernicious, greedy chemical,
herbicide, insecticide and genetic seed giants.

The second main threat, overtaking the first one, is created and
pursued by the armament makers who need and want ever more warfare,
most dangerously now in the Ukraine, a conflict, pursued mercilessly
by Putin but purposefully prepared and provoked by the rulers of NATO
who, hand in hand with the Lockheeds and Raytheons, call themselves
crusaders for American-style democracy against “authoritarianism”
but who – for me – are America’s greatest enemies – and mine.

The third Behemoth or Goliath, already actively multiplying in one
country after the other, once again in Germany, also in the USA, is
moving to safeguard the power of the other two menaces. I mean the
menace of fascism. It is mostly in the wings as yet, but conniving to
move full stage as soon as it finds it necessary – as in Germany in
1933 or Chile in 1973. And all three are based fundamentally on the
power of the top 1%, rooted in the profit system, which is forced by
its very nature to continue growing and expanding. They must be
stopped, by vigorous Davids, but who, unlike the Biblical David,
achieve strength only by their numbers and their militant
organization.    

They can win small victories here and there, much to be welcomed. But
these Goliaths cannot be halted by small defeats. And certainly not by
compromises. If we turn again to the Bible we find the fearful Horses
of the Apocalypse – sometimes interpreted as meaning pestilence,
war, famine and death – all too relevant in today’s world! The
only real means of defeating these menaces – and in the final
analysis saving America, and not only America, means halting them,
breaking their power, totally removing their profit-based greed,
selfishness and disregard for the misery they cause. This ever tighter
group of multimillionaires and billionaires must be shorn of its
wealth and its power, which are much the same thing. No more private
yachts, jets, multiple mansions, skyscrapers in central New York, or
central Berlin. No more tourist flights into space! A halt to a system
which is poisoning, heating or flooding the world, one of ragged,
toiling children and drudgery-beladen women and men, must be sought
and, most immediately, with an end to the brutal conflicts before it
is too late, now worst of all in Ukraine but already threatening to
metastasize.

The world needs millions to join in this fight, this fight back! In
the USA there have been models enough of genuine patriots. There is
again a need for American patriots who are at the same time “world
patriots”. As a teen-ager I joined in Woody Guthrie’s wartime
victory song, ”When the Yanks go marching in!” He meant Berlin.
How the world has changed since then - and even turned me upside down
geographically! But I’ll still join in with his chorus lines:

“Boys, I want to be in that number when we set this whole world
free!“

And – as a patriot in Woody’s sense, I plan to stay in that number
as long as I am able!

_Victor Grossman, born in NYC, fled McCarthy-era menaces as a young
draftee, landed in East Germany where he observed the rise and fall of
its German Democratic Republic (GDR). He has described his own life in
his autobiography Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left,
the Cold War, and Life in East Germany
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Massachusetts Press, 2003), and analyzed the GDR and questions of
capitalism and socialism in Germany and the USA, with his provocative
conclusions, along with humor, irony and occasional sarcasm in all
directions, in A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee
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Monthly Review Press). His address is wechsler_grossman [at] yahoo.de
(also for a free sub to the Berlin Bulletins sent out by MR Online)._

_Thanks to the author for sending ths article to xxxxxx.  It was
also posted on MR Online:_

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* Fascism
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* socialism
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* GDR
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* Woody Guthrie
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* democracy
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