John Simkin
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Posts posted by John Simkin
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How eclectic?
Well, I love everything from Frank Zappa to Adam Ant.
Some of my favorites:
Amazing Grace performed by the Royal Scots Dragoon Band
Khe Sanh by Cold Chisel
Listen to the Band by The Monkees
Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo
New York Mining Disaster by the Bee Gees
Spicks & Specks by the Bee Gees
Juke Box Hero by Foreigner
Angel of the Morning by Juice Newton
Take it on the run by REO Speedwagon
Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield
Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum
Metal Gods by Judas Priest
and many more.
Our tastes are very different except for Dusty Springfield.
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Here are some standards he performed in the early 1970s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFnGMXo_cSs
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When I was a teenager I thought that Gene McDaniels had the best voice I had ever heard. It still sounds good after all these years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K317zw5VYQ0
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Here is the list of my 10 favorite books on the Kennedy assassination:
1. Dale Myers, With malice : Lee Harvey Oswald and the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, Oak Cliff Press, 1998
2. Gerald Posner, Case closed, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1993
3. Jim Moore, Conspiracy of one, The Summit group, 1992
4. Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming history, Norton, 2007
5. Larry Sturdivan, JFK myths : a scientific investgation of the Kennedy assassination, Paragon House, 2005
6. Larry Sneed, No more silence, University of North Texas Press, 1998
7. Mel Ayton, The JFK assassination – dispelling the myths, Woodfield Publishing, 2002
8. Hugh Aynesworth, JFK : breaking the news, International Focus press, 2003
9. David W. Belin, Final disclosure, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988
10. Cathy Trost & Susan Bennett, President Kennedy has been shot, Newseum, 2003
Actually, to me Dale Myers's book is the best, but I'm not sure about which order I should sort the nine others out.
I do think that by reading those 10 books one can reach the proper conclusion, get rid of farfetched theories, and safely and seriously claim to know exactly what happened in Dealey Plaza.
Anyway, I have a question for James DiEugenio. You have included the book "Reasonable Doubt" by Henry Hurt, in your list. Then, let me ask, what do you think of the chapter titled "The Confession of Robert Easterling" ? Do you believe his story ? Just a question.
/F.C./
It is interesting that not one of your books was written by a historian. Is there any reason for this?
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Helen Keller at University:
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In the first few years of the 20th Century, Helen Keller was one of the most admired people in America. Whereas Anne Sullivan taught her how to communicate, her husband converted her to revolutionary socialism. This included her joining the Industrial Workers of the World. Keller wrote later: "Surely the demands of the IWW are just. It is right that the creators of wealth should own what they create. When shall we learn that we are related one to the other; that we are members of one body; that injury to one is injury to all? Until the spirit of love for our fellow-workers, regardless of race, color, creed or sex, shall fill the world, until the great mass of the people shall be filled with a sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice cannot be attained, and there can never be lasting peace upon earth."
Newspapers that had previously praised Keller's courage and intelligence now drew attentions to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller was furious and wrote a letter of complaint to the newspaper. "At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error.... Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent."
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Take a look at this penalty:
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an extremely popular writer at the end of the 19th century. However, she is now largely a forgotten literary figure. At the time she was considered to be one of the first feminist writers. Her most important story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Published in January 1892, recounts her own mental breakdown. She later claimed she wrote the story how women's lack of autonomy is detrimental to their mental, emotional and physical well being.
She was already out of fashion by the 1920s. However, she did write an impressive autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). It tells the story of how her father, Frederick Perkins, abandoned the family shortly after her birth and she grew up in poverty and received very little formal education. Her mother was so upset by her husband leaving that she brought her daughter up to deal with broken relationships. In the book she argues that her mother was not affectionate and to stop them from getting hurt, insisted she did not make close friends or read novels. Charlotte added that her mother only showed affection only when she thought her young daughter was asleep.
Suffering from breast cancer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide on 17th August, 1935. She left a note that said: "When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer."
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Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East. She does not seem to be aware that Israel was established by acts of terrorism:
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Ayn Rand on Religion
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Part 3
Ayn Rand on Racism
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In this section she makes Mike Wallace sound like a socialist:
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Interesting to compare Fromm with Ayn Rand in this Mike Wallace interview in 1959.
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You see a very interesting interview with Erich Fromm by Mike Wallace.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfromm.htm
Parts 2 and 3 can be found here:
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It is probably of no significance but Waldo Frank served as chairman of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960.
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John Spargo was a minor socialist figure at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet, he has a very detailed page at Wikipedia. The page includes 31 references. Nearly all of them refer to Markuu Ruotsila's book, John Spargo and American Socialism (2006). In fact, the page is no more than a detailed promotion of Ruotsila's book. Ruotsila is a NeoCon who has been attracted to Spargo as he was a Marxist who moved sharply to the right during the First World War. Nothing he says about Spargo is untrue but it just shows you the subtle use of Wikipedia as propaganda.
http://stupidest.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/the-wacky-world-of-markku-ruotsila-finnish-neocon/
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Bob:
I hate to tell you but number 36 by exposed forger Gregory Douglas is a hoax that was exposed a long time ago.
Here is my all time top ten:
The Top Ten JFK Assassination Books
By James DiEugenio
Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane (1966)
Accessories After the Fact, by Sylvia Meagher (1967)
Presumed Guilty, by Howard Roffman (1975)
Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers (1981)
Reasonable Doubt, by Henry Hurt (1985)
Spy Saga, by Philip Melanson (1990)
The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi (1993)
Let Justice Be Done, by Bill Davy (1999)
The Assassinations, Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, Eds. (2003)
Breach of Trust, by Gerald McKnight (2005)
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Jim, any reason why Larry Hancock's "Someone Would Have Talked" (second edition) is not on the list?
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I bwlieve John Dewey is one of America's most important philosophers. He was a communist in his youth but as a result of what happened in the Soviet Union he became a libertarian socialist. Steven Best has argued: "Philosopher Sidney Hook has gone so far as to argue that Deweysim is the genuine fulfillment of Marxism. But the similarities end abruptly on a key point: Marx insisting on the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and Dewey embracing pragmatic reform and rejecting Marxism as unscientific utopianism."
He had a famous debate with Leon Trotsky in the 1930s. Trotsky claimed that although Dewey's ideas had considerable value over previous bourgeois philosophies, he condemned his pragmatism as an insidious apology for capitalism and class collaboration.
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Aaron Copland was in fact an anti-communist but it did not stop him being blacklisted. He was a strong critic of Joseph Stalin and decried the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union and argued that censorship deprived artists of "the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong".
Why was he blacklisted? Could it be because he was Jewish? The vast majority of those blacklisted were in fact Jewish.
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Lincoln Portrait was written during the Second World War
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Appalachian Spring
Billy the Kid
El Salon Mexico
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After the Second World War the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to investigate people with left-wing views in the entertainment industry. In June, 1950, three former FBI agents and a right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organizations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. The names had been compiled from FBI files and a detailed analysis of the Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the American Communist Party.
A free copy of Red Channels was sent to those involved in employing people in the entertainment industry. All those people named in the pamphlet were blacklisted until they appeared in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and convinced its members they had completely renounced their radical past. Aaron Copland was one of those named and this ended his commissions from Hollywood.
You can hear some of his fantastic music here:
Fanfare for a Common Man (Classical)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzf0rvQa4Mc
Fanfare for a Common Man (Jazz)
Fanfare for a Common Man (Rock)
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BTW, are you the Robert Morrow who wrote First Hand Knowledge . . .?
I think he is too young to be that Robert Morrow.
Robert, you might like to see this thread on Brown:
Gene McDaniels on YouTube
in Music:Resources
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Gene McDaniels became very political during the Vietnam War and wrote the great song, Compared To What.
The president, he got his war.
Folks don't know just what it's for.
Nobody gives us a rhyme or reason,
Have one doubt they call it treason.
We're chicken feathers all, without one nut.
Goddammit: Try to make it real, compared to what?
There is also a great jazz version by Les McCann and Eddie Harris: