My dearest Slingshot:
Please use these portraits of dead slave owners/Indian killers to keep up the bulk delivery. Issue 90 is circulating across middle eastern New Jersey like disease in a factory farm.
Also, if it makes anyone happy to know, I am a substitute teacher and I have used several articles in the last issue to make emergency lesson plans when left unprepared and unsupervised. Period 5 Spanish IV learned a lot about biodiesel the other week . . .
— Mike
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Hi there. My name is James Trimble and I am an inmate on death row at Youngstown, Ohio. I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of the Slingshot. It really made my day. You all are right on with your views and stories. I am from West Virginia and have seen the horrible effects of mountaintop removal firsthand. The first time I saw it, I got sick to my stomach. It’s like a bomb had exploded on top of the mountain that I had hunted on as a child. I hunted not to kill but to help feed our family. Sometimes what I brought home was all we had to eat. The coal companies are destroying some of the most beautiful forests and streams on the East coast just to fuel our ever increasing need for energy. The Bush administration cares about nothing but making the rich richer at the cost of the country. They are selling our heritage for a few dollars. I gave my copy of the Slingshot to my mom. She’s 71 and she thought you folks kicked ass. So you folks have a lot of support from people you might not even think are on your side. Also, the article on biofuels was very eye-opening. People just don’t understand where are they going to get all this new farm land to grow all this corn and soybeans. Cut down what remaining forest we have, I’m sure that’s George Bush’s answer.
Your comrade, James
Dear Slingshot:
Bill “Knights” Templer is a crusader, determined to build a New Jerusalem in, well, the old Jerusalem. Crusading has always appealed to those who are frustrated at home. The anarcho-syndicalist lives in a lonely world on the fringe of the campus. The workers whom he would organize and liberate have never heard of him, and when they do, they laugh. Syndicalists are truly farsighted: workers look better at a distance. In Bolivia, or Nepal, or … in Palestine, where the Chelmer Rebbe and the Old Man of the Mountain are practically comrades already.
From afar, paradoxes dissolve in a blinding vision of peace, freedom, and full employment. “Beyond the dead end of the two-state solution,” Templer describes the open end of the one-state solution, which is actually a no-state solution. In a region devoid of syndicalists, syndicalism is, as always, about to burst from the class struggle, something else the region is devoid of.
Templer credits the HAMAS victory to “the vote by the Palestinian working masses,” then cites statistics showing that most Palestinians don’t work. Most who do, work for the government, so if the working masses elected the HAMAS government, they have elected their own employers, so they have syndicalism already!
Templer crusaders long ago learned word magic in the Holy Land of Kabbalists and Hashishin, and this one returns the favor today. HAMAS as an organization is nationalist, bureaucratic, authoritarian, terrorist and fundamentalist–but that is only the exoteric HAMAS. HAMAS, the acronym, the esoteric HAMAS, decoded, contains the word Resistance! (Also the word “Islamic,” which means, in addition to a certain unsavory religion, “submission,” but that is just literalist quibbling, like saying that “workers” are the people who work, not the people who write about them. Similarly, formulations like “Death to the Jews!” are actually occult references to “a veiled dictatorship of 15 families over the Israeli economy, media and politics.”)
The line is clearly drawn (in the sand, where else?). One the one side, “an entire population,” “ordinary people,” “a people,” and “the working masses.” On the other, “the Israeli plutocracy,” “the Israeli military and political class,” “the Israeli political elite,” and “a veiled dictatorship of 15 families.” Syndicalist class analysis does not get much more sophisticated than this, and I mean that sincerely. There are no elites in Palestine, no masses in Israel, but workers everywhere, except in the IWW.
Do the math:
Nationalism + Syndicalism = Fascism.
None of the above, i.e., Allah them are full of Shi’ite, — Bob Black, 3500 Main St., Suite 130-132, Amherst NY 1426, Abobob51@peoplepc.com