The Marxist Monster from Milwaukee

The Marxist Monster from Milwaukee

Professor Bertell Ollman

In 2005, as a protest against Israel, Ollman wrote and published a Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People, stating: "Socialist and ex-Jew that I am, I guess I still have too much respect and love for the Jewish tradition I left behind to want the world to view it in the same way as they rightly view and condemn what the ex-Jews who call themselves Zionists are doing in its name. And if changing my status from ex-Jew (current) to non-Jew (projected) stirs even ten good people (God's minyan) into action against the Zionist hijacking of the Jewish label, then this is a sacrifice I am ready to make."

This letter earned the professor the scorn of his Tribe, but he retained his position at NYU as he does till this day.

Last winter I was employed by the professor's loving son to elder care for the Professor at the NYU Bleecker Street professorial dorms. Our days together consist of lunch cooked by Raoul, watching TV, a bowl of ice cream and listen to poetry. We converse about the revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist system surrounded by thousands of books on Marxism, communism, socialism, histories and various fields of thought pertaining to the Struggle, and his hitting the bedroom for his afternoon nap.

Sadly the professor has lost much of his knowledge, but not his humor.

In December I decided to read his 2005 brilliant Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People. One hour at the end of which he nodded his head several times in sublime understanding. I was honored by his attention, but at the end he commented, "I don't agree with everything you read."

"But you wrote this, not me."

"I know that, " he smiled. "But my thoughts on some of it have changed."

"So you want to become a Jew again?"

"What? And give up Moo Shu Pork." We both have a good laugh and I was heartened to aid his quest for the overthrow of Capitalism.

"Workers of the World unite. You have nothing to lose, but your debt."

To read Professor Bertell Ollman's Letter of Resignation, please go to this URL

https://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol3-1/07Resignation-Ollman.htm

He begins the letter with this quote;

To this I would only add, “Noam Chomsky, Mordechai Vanunu and Edward Said are Jewish. Elie Wiesel is goyish. So, too, all ‘Jewish’ neo-cons. Socialism and communism are Jewish. Sharon and Zionism are very goyish”. And, who knows, if this reading of Judaism were to take hold, I may one day apply for readmission to the Jewish people.

“Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe”. ---Elie Wiesel, acceptance speech, Nobel Prize for Peace, December 10, 1986.

The Professor ends the letter with this paragraph.

As far as I’m concerned, the comedian, Lenny Bruce, provided the only good answer to this question when he said, "Dig, I'm Jewish. Count Bassie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor is goyish… Marine Corps – heavy goyish… If you live in New York or any other big city, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish… Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if Jews invented it… Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish.… Negroes are all Jews… Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jewish… Baton twirling is very goyish."

Like his son I love this man.

Duch Choi Châ' kai Anh

Written on Jun 11, 2017

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Svay Prey High School on the outskirts of Phnom Penh into the murderous Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. An estimated 17,000 prisoners had been subjected to the following code of behavior enforced by its administrator Comrade Duch or Kang Kek Iew and his killers.

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

In 1979 the Vietnam Army ended the horror and liberated Phnom Penh. Twelve inmates exited from the three-story building. S-21 prison's executed inmates had been buried in the killing fields. The architects of this genocide fled the reprisals of the Vietnamese in 1979 and the most notorious killer Comrade Duch sought refuge in Thailand. Pol Pot demoted his underling for having destroyed the incriminating documents at Tuol Sleng and Duch had escaped justice by teaching school.

During the Khmer Rouge reign teachers had been executed without remorse.

After the murder of his wife Duch had sought salvation with the Western religious fundamentalists of the Golden West Cambodian Christian Church pursuing souls in Cambodia, but his past chased him into a corner and in 1999 he was arrested by the new authorities ie ex-Khmer Rouge compatriots.

In 26 July 2010 an international court of justice in Phnom Penh sentenced Duch to life imprisonment. During the trial he said, "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished, but Mr. Kissinger and Richard Nixon backed Lon Nol, and then the Khmer Rouge took advantage of their mistake and victory was a golden opportunity for us."

Duch asked to be released by the tribunal, admitting his guilt.

"Kissinger was walking free. Why shouldn't he?"

He had a point, but he was sent to prison. Not SR-21.

After the end of the Civil War I visited Cambodia many tiems to renew my Thai visa and I've asked the few surviving older people what they think of the Khmer Rouge and their reply comes as a surprise to most westerners raising on the litany of 'never again' for the Nazis.

"It's over. We want peace. Nothing more," one taxi driver said waiting for two Dutch tourists visiting S-21.

"What about the trials?"

"We don't understand trials. All we know is that it's over." He was old enough to have lived under the Khmer Rouge as a teenager. He spoke a little French, which would have condemned him to the Killing Fields under the Khmer Rouge.

"Au revoir."

I doubted that I would see him again, but later that night we shared a beer on Quay Sisowith. Choi laughed with all the joy that five Angkor beers can give a man who has lived long enough to wake up from a nightmare with his humor intact.

Duch Choi Ch'kai Anh

Read THE GATE by Francois Bizot.

It says it all.

BLINDED BY THE SUN - KATHMANDU - NEPAL - 1995

In 1995 I traveled with a lapsed Catholic nun from Lhasa to Shigatse. After several days Dorothy returned to Lhasa. We woke at dawn and breakfasted on Momos or dumpling and butter tea. I wanted to get an early start and Dorothy accompanied me to the southern edge of town. The Asia Friendship Highway ran as a two-lane dirt road west across the Tibetan plateau to Nepal. There was no bus service between the two nations and I stuck out my thumb, even though I had seen no Tibetan traveling by this ancient mode. Traffic was non-existent that morning and the sun spread across the sere highlands. Not a tree to the south. I waited an hour contemplating my folly. Around 8 a tourist van driven by a Nepalese stopped and offered a ride to the turning for Mount Kailash. The Tibetan guide was picking up foreign tourists at the holy peak the source of four rivers; Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra, and Karnali. I handed him $10 and sat in the front.

We proceeded along a broad treeless valley imitating the surface of the moon. I divined our location from a Nell's map, as we crossed the Xiabu river and skirted a tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra, the Yarlung Tsangpo, Dirt, rock, and more dust. No traffic. The van stopped for tea at Lhakse for lunch, Thukpa, Tibetan noodle soup.

South of town they dropped me at a T-bone intersection. G-219 led to Mount Kailesh 1300 kilometers in distance. The driver said two-three days by van. Maybe more. Never less. He said $20. I knew the road and the food got worse off the Friendship Highway and I bid them, "Kah-leh phe."

The van roiled a trail of dust into the thin air. Within ten minutes there was no sign of Man save the untraveled road. Not even a turning sign pointing south to Nepal. The highway rose from the valley and I found out to where when another tourist van stopped to ask if I needed a ride to the border town of Zhangmu. It was a simple stupid question and I answered yes.

Two tourists slumped in the back overcome by the high altitude. They spoke not a word throughout the passage of G-318 to the Himalayas. We stopped for a bowl of soup at a forlorn filthy caravansary with a broad panorama from Everest to Phurbi Chyachu and farther to the east and west. The foreigners were barely breathing. The guide said this was 16500 feet. "From here down."

After traversing the unpopulated plateau we dropped through avalanche-ravaged ravines to sleep in Zhangmu, altitude 7600 feet. The increase in oxygen revived the foreigners, but something was amiss with my stomach and intestines. I self-diagnosed through my Rough Planet guidebook I had a giardia infection. By the time we reached Kathmandu the next day I suffered from severe diarrhea, gas, stomach cramps, nausea, and dehydration. I booked myself into the Snowlands and stay in bed for several days on a brown rice soup and beer diet. My lips turned yellow from the Sulphur bubbling from my guts. I was really sick, but after four days I felt strong enough for a tour of the city. I had last been there in 1990. The hotel staff were happy to see me on my feet. Giardiasis was responsible for 500,000 annual deaths. I wasn't one of them and was grateful to have the strength to walk upright, until I stepped out into the green sunlight. The walls glowed with an eerie emerald shine. Something was wrong with my eyes. I was wrong. It was a partial eclipse. I lifted my eyes to the union of sun and moon for a second. A solar eclipse. I had never seen one. not even a partial eclipse. It was October 24 1995. Kathmandu.

I celebrated with beer with the hotel's Tibetan and Nepalese staff.

Suk-bo de-thang or cheers in Tibetan.

Thankful to be alive.

DEATH IS NOT THE END,

Having died several times over my life I've always been surprised to be reincarnated into the same existence as before my demise. Never younger. Never older. Never another body. Shocked that I survived death to rejoin this life and damned pleased as well. - Lazurus II

To hear Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Shane MacGowan, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey - DEATH IS NOT THE END go to this URL

Roma January 1985

Rome January 1985

Tanino Liberatore and I traveled in his Fiat from Paris over the Alps into Italy. Tanino was the famed cartoonist of RanXerox a powerful android robot the love slave of the underage Lubna. We had collaborated on a graphic comic and were bound to the Eternal City to pick up money from the publishers. We rolled into Rome at night. The city slept under siege from the Red Brigades. He sought out whose on the Via Veneto. They were scared of nothing, having Albanian pimps. He went off into the bushes, while a sat guard in the car. After we went to a bar to score coke then crashed at his friends' apartment watching EVIL DEAD high on blow. scared me straight.

The next day I wandered through Rome; the Vatican buying a stiletto, lunch at Mario's by the coliseum then through the Senate ruins. Sunset up the Spanish Steps to the Hotel Farber for drinks, then back to party with Tanino.

After we drove to Pescara on the Adriatic to see his parents. We went to a freezing theater to watch porno and afterwards sat on the shore of a foggy Adriatic. Bone cold.

He was a monster. RanXerox that is. We were merely wicked when we were young and when we weren't so young too

The Three Rules of Wealth Acquisition

In a revolution traditionally the first ones against the wall are the landlords.

In our cities the only construction are luxury condos with 30% occupancy destroying whole neighborhoods by raising real estate taxes thanks to over-inflated values of empty apartments, so the elite can launder their wealth.

If you want to point fingers at why the people of the world are without money, it's because the corporation for the sake of profits are too greedy to care about anything more than the wealth cloud and the rise of stock prices. No one on the streets has any money. No one carries money. Every transaction cost 2-3% in fees to the banks.

No one complains about the .00001%, because the hoi polloi share a deluded hope that one day they might be Cronus, however the only three sources of wealth are birth, marriage, or theft. Although sports players are changing that equation as well as drug dealers. They attained their wealth through hard work.

ps Joe Biden has done a good job, except for his hand in Israel's regifting the Holocaust on Palestine. You can never get to the future by only looking in the rearview mirror.

Viva International Write-Off Day.

ps I'm a poet living off the state created by LBJ, the Great Society.

Photo by Aaron Slim

DRUNK DRIVING HOUR 2014

During the early 1970s my college comrades and I drank at the Hi-hat Lounge in Brighton. The girls were young, the drinks were cheap, and we sold 'ludes and mescaline at the bar. Neither of them were the best available in Boston, but we were always in supply, so the bands playing on Commonwealth Avenue visited us before and after gigs. I even sold LSD to AeroSmith and they invited us to their show. They weren't big yet, but the band attracted co-eds from every university within 25 miles.

That night my friends and I crammed into my VW Bug.

"Can you drive?" Peter Gore asked from the passenger seat. We had hitchhiked across America in 1971. A carload of drunks had begged me to drive their Riviera from Reno to San Francisco. Peter had sat in the back. We drank warm whiskey through the Sierras. He hadn't trusted me behind the wheel since.

"Of course I can drive." I had only dropped a 'lude and guzzled several whiskey cokes. Something about his question bothered me and I said I was going to run every red light to Kenmore Square.

"Don't do that." Peter buckled up his seat belt. No one in 1971 wore one. We had all seen too many films where the passengers burn in their cars, thanks to a defective seat belt. The other passengers were more enthusiastic, then again they weren't in the suicide seat.

I blew the first light at the BU dorms and then another by the Boston Club, however we were approaching the Charles River Bridge. This was a much busier intersection with cars coming all directions.

"Don't."

Everyone cried out with good reason and I braked too late to avoid slamming into the back of a Mustang.

"Asshole." Peter was pissed.

"Anyone you hurt?" I pulled over to the curb..

"No."

Everyone was fine.

"Sorry, I was an asshole." I got out of the car to examine the damage to both vehicles.

My front fender was slightly bent.

My friend at a body shop in Dorcester might charge $200, but the Mustang bore a major dent to the rear.

Maybe $1000, which was a lot of money.

Cars swerved around the Mustang. The driver was puking out the open door. I walked up to him and he wiped his mouth, saying, "Sorry, for running that light. Are you okay?"

"I'm good."

"I'm really sorry."

The drunken fool thought the crash was his fault.

"Don't worry about it." I was lucky.

"How much you want to fix your car?" He pulled out a wad of cash.

"Nothing." Peter pushed me back toward my car.

"Nothing isn't going to fix my fender." Five $20 bills seemed fair.

"Thanks." The Mustang driver got back in his car and drove off toward Cambridge.

Later at the Aerosmith show we laughed, when, Peter calling me, "Boston's worst driver."

"But I met my match with Mr. Mustang."

Drunk driving hour was a weekend ritual in the last century, but several years ago the Palm County police had a world-class violator in their sights. The driver refused to stop for the officers in pursuit. He ran red lights, crashed into anothercar, a fence, fled the scene, and when they finally stopped him, the cops cited the offender for fifty violations.

One was not wearing a seat belt.

All sounds too familiar.

I wonder if Peter Gore wherever he is thought the same thing.

"Asshole."

I don't drive anymore.

I drink no less.

Best for everyone if I walk and I'm sure that Peter Gore feels the same way too.

2024. Not a drink for almost three years. I don't run red lights anymore. I wonder, if there is a connection