Charles Manson and Lt. Calley

This article was written by Stew Albert who was a political activist and major player in the New Left movement.  Albert along with Jerry Ruben and Abbie Hoffman founded the Youth International Party,  better known as the Yippies.   Throwing money off the balcony at the New York Stock Exchange and the Exorcism of the Pentagon were just two of the political statements that he made in the heyday of the '60's.

Army Lt. Calley was charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese men, women and children in the My Lai Massacre.  Calley had a military trial which began Nov. 17, 1970.  On March 30, 1971 newspaper headlines told of both the Manson jury voting for the death penalty and Lt. Calley being found guilty of the charges against him.

Good Times April 2, 1971, a San Francisco underground newspaper.  Vol. IV No. 13

LIFE AND DEATH

Charlie Manson is going to get locked up in the cyanide machine.  The patriots will drop a tablet and see Charlie choke.

How can the armies of technological blood judge a killer?

Lt. Calley is just an invention of a Henry Kissinger concept.

Lt. Calley is just some dust blown by Richard Nixon's ambition.

Charlie spent most of his life in jail because prosecutors suspected there was retribution in his eyes.  In the can he learned the incantations of revenge-- the white man must die/all women are bitches. 

It happens because from the small window in the hole all the tyrants are white and if you can't gently be near a woman for the next twenty years-- chauvinism and hatred seem to be a practical solution,

Lt. Calley's draft board quit in protest at his conviction.  If we can't in good conscience strip a young man of his humanity because once we take his soul a court marshal might still insist he be slightly moral, we will let young men of Georgia stay on their farms because the profession of robotry has lost its integrity.

"How the hell can you tell a gook from a Cong because our orders were to search and destroy everything." 

Charlie walked around Haight St. clearly a white man but his all black draft board was meeting in San Quentin and the order of the day was-- burn Amerika.  I guess Charles Manson is a flower killer.  Someone who read the I-Ching in a way of which our middle class background would never permit.

Lt. Calley is only 5ft 3 but he stretched real hard for an Amerikan medal.  He could never be a good athlete and what blond blue eyed cheer leader would bolster the prepubescent ego of a pimply runt?  But any Amerikan has the opportunity to make glory with a machine gun.

"No Amerikan GI was ever convicted of war crimes in Sega Magazine, why should Lt. Calley be an exception," screamed the defense lawyer.

Charlie Manson would never fight in whitey's war.  In jail the blacks taught him all you need to hate power elites, military industrial complexes, monopolies and jive assed liberals.

A prisoner's hatred is just a love song speeded up on wardens gramophones and made incomprehensible even to the prisoner.

Lt. Calley was taught that the enemy was dialectical materialism.  It wasn't human beings Amerika was killing in those jungles, it was bad ideas.

"Today 5 Amerikans-- 15 Vietnamese and 35 thousand Communists were killed."  They teach these John Wayne fans that it's some sort of morality play, with our enemies being absolutely so evil that they make the Sunday school devil seem reformable.  We used to hang witches now we burn Communists in Napalm-- it's in the service of white painted churches and small stores, so don't talk to Lt. Calley about genocide, he was too short to know what was going on.

Charlie Manson had no illusions about his jury, the Chicago 7 had its daydreams, they were going to protect western civilization, the family and Christianity in general from a man and his family who wanted to start a race war.

Do they want to poison Charlie's lungs because he has long hair, drops acid and runs a harem (a prisoner's hatred is a love song that even he doesn't hear) or because he believes in the moral superiority of the black race, which has had Lt. Calley on its street corner ever since this nation was founded?

For at least one week I don't want to hear pious holy bemoanings of Charles Manson's nihilism from refined phd candidates (who in good conscience could march for Caryl Chessman because he told them he never raped anyone) because Lt. Calley was never a guard outside your cell and how can you feel superior to these two orphans, to whom you denied both your love and your wealth,  and yet thought you were their father?