San Francisco's leading neo-con Alice Cooper impersonator, the former Steve Schwartz!

This is a letter in response to some bizarre, shameful and prolix apple-polishing of the egregious one-time Steve Schwartz, now known as Lulu Schwartz, by Bruce Anderson, the owner and publisher of Mendocino County's 'Anderson Valley Advertiser.'

To the Editor,

Thanks so much for your exhaustive and exhausting account of every single trivial encounter you’ve had with the former Stephen Schwartz going back to when Lyndon Johnson was President. (‘Off the Record,’ AVA, Dec. 7) In lavishing your admiration on Stephen-Sandalio-Suleyman-Ahmad-Lulu-Schwartz you managed to leave out all significant details of the one-time Stephen Schwartz’s life and deeds.

Schwartz is a long-term San Francisco bar scene nuisance and professional repentant former leftist, and was a minor league neo-conservative pom-pom girl for United States foreign policy violence against civilians on three continents over three decades. Now deep in his dotage, and with Schwartz’s junior varsity skills no longer marketable to Uncle Sam, Schwartz has undergone gender transition and operates under the appropriately-nutty-sounding handle Lulu as San Francisco’s leading Alice Cooper impersonator -- or, as can be seen in the photo you published some time back, at least it’s ugliest one.

1. In the early 1980s “red diaper baby” Steve Schwartz stank up the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood as “Comrade Sandalio,” the General Secretary of a wacky-slaphappy one man Trotskyist party with the grandiloquent name of ‘Fomento Obrero Revoucionario Organizing Committee in the United States -- ‘FOCUS.’ Up to this point Schwartz’s practical political activity consisted solely of hollering about himself, Trotsky and the Spanish Civil War in a loud voice in bars. This was enough to snow an easily played and wealthy Reagan rightist named Lawry Chickering, the Grand Poobah of a Reagan Administration-connected think tank called the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and Chickering offered Schwartz a job as an editor at his institute. This massive improvement in employment prospects occurred when Schwartz was a long-term resident of a North Beach SRO hotel, occasionally drove a taxi to pay the bills, and didn’t have an undergrad degree, but “Comrade Sandalio’s” new found enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan and the CIA’s atrocity-happy proxy army the Nicaraguan Contras allowed him to be presented as an “expert” on Central America at Reagan Administration-affiliated neo-conservative conferences. So, hocus pocus -- no more FOCUS! Schwartz spent the rest of the Reagan eighties furiously hopping up and down on his fat little fetlocks demanding an acceleration of violence by the United States government and its ghoulish proxies in Nicaragua and El Salvador, for example in an editorial in the April 11, 1986 SF Examiner, subtly titled, “Support Contras.” The then-Stephen Schwartz also bragged on camera to reporter Sylvia Chase in an investigative piece, titled “Private Spies,” broadcast on Nov. 10 1987 on SF’s KRON 4 TV’s 6pm ‘Evening Edition,’ that he spied on opponents of Reagan Administration policies in Central America and fed the information he’d acquired about them to the Feds.

2. In the 1990's territories of the former Yugoslavia became a focus of US national security concerns. Irresistibly attracted to the smell of human blood being shed in great quantities, the one-time Central America “expert” Schwartz relocated to Sarajevo and now styled himself as an "expert" on the Balkans with a full-scale fashion makeover, rocking a Bond villain Halloween costume consisting of a long beard and skull-cap. Schwartz also converted to the Sufi branch of Islam, changing his name -- for the duration of direct U.S. military involvement in the Balkans -- to Suleyman Ahmad Stephen Schwartz. Suleyman Ahmad’s Road-to-Damascus as a newly minted Muslim apparently qualified him to demand violence by the U.S. against various Muslim civilian targets in not-exactly-pro-Muslim publications like William Kristol's The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Also in his role as an apparent convert to Islam, Schwartz wrote a book titled (without apparent conscious ironic intent) The Two Faces of Islam. Schwartz and his 'Two Faces' elicited scathing and dismissive mention in a review of then-recent works on Islam by dean of U.S. anthropologists Clifford Geertz, in the July 3, 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books. Geertz bagged on Schwartz as “a strange and outlandish figure” and dismissed Schwartz’s “Two Faces” as a “monomaniacal tracing out, laborious and repetitive…” “without source references” other than the Koran.

From the collapse of the Soviet Union until his death in 2016, Islam Karimov was the dictator of Uzbekistan. Karimov allowed Uzbekistan to be a location for CIA black sites in the George W. Bush Administration’s ‘extraordinary renditions’ scheme during the ‘War on Terror,’ where ‘illegal combatants’ were kidnapped, delivered to black sites, and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, including torture.

Uzbek dictator Karimov’s Wikipedia entry states in part: “Craig Murray, the British Ambassador from 2002 to 2004, described widespread torture, kidnapping, murder, rape by the police, financial corruption, religious persecution, censorship and other human rights abuses. This included the case of Karimov's security forces executing prisoners Muzafar Avazov and Khuzniddin Alimov by boiling them alive in 2002.”

Craig Murray described the future Lulu Schwartz in his blog this way: “...Perhaps the greatest American apologist for Uzbekistan’s tyrant has been Stephen Schwartz, a one-time member of the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who is most celebrated for his purple prose advocating regime change in Saudi Arabia...As he wrote in the neocon journal The Weekly Standard in 2002, the situation in Uzbekistan was about as good as it could get. “Explaining away the grisly record of the Karimov regime, Schwartz asserted that “before freedom can be established, the enemies of freedom must be defeated. The fate of democracies that do not defeat the enemies of democracy is illustrated by the histories of Germany and Italy after the First World War. Democracies can grant mercy to their enemies only from a position of unchallengeable strength...Since September 11, the United States no longer accepts the claim that the free exercise of terrorist agitation, incitement, and organization outweighs the benefits of legal sanction,” Schwartz wrote.

(Schwartz, quoted here in Murray,) "The United States, which has entered into a military alliance with Uzbekistan, must support the Uzbeks in their internal as well as their external combat, and must repudiate the blandishments of the human rights industry.” (!) At this time tough guy Schwartz was still on the payroll of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which some wags at the time suggested should be re-named the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies that Boil People to Death.

3. You wrote: “I also liked his “Brotherhood of the Sea, A History of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, 1885-1985.” But his is the only book on the subject I’ve read.” Indeed. If you read more than one book on the subject -- perhaps Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930's, by Bruce Nelson, published by the University of Illinois Press, you’ll see that the Sailors Union of the Pacific, fondly nicknamed the ‘Brotherhood of the Sea' by its partisans, was a systematically racist entity that practiced what was called ‘checkerboard unionism.’

On pages 246 to 249 of Nelson’s work: "When the unions seized full control of hiring after the 1934 strike, blacks were often barred from even entering the Sailor's and Marine Firemen's Halls… "In spite of considerable pressure from the Federal government's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the SUP adamantly refused to accept black seamen in its ranks...a federal agency reported that "[a union official] called his office and said that the SUP was not hiring Negroes and were not going to hire them.”

“...Sailor's Union official Maxie Weisbarth acknowledged that there were no blacks in the SUP ‘because Negroes aren't sailors. It's not their kind of work...Them? Work? Real Work?' "

After World War II, according to an SUP veteran quoted by Bruce Nelson, "Racist types could make a name for themselves (in the SUP) and win the favor of the leadership" by encouraging hostility between the segregationist SUP and the racially integrated Marine Cooks and Stewards. SUP propaganda of that time included descriptions of SUP members engaged in waterfront brawls with "spics." None of this is evident in Schwartz's palace history of the Sailors Union, Brotherhood of the Sea… As the official historian of the Sailors Union of the Pacific there was no way Schwartz couldn't have known these indicting facts. If a Truth-in-Packaging law got applied here Schwartz’s brown-nosing song of homage to his then-employer, SUP union bureaucrat-in-chief Paul Dempster, and to this right-wing, racist, scab-herding labor brokerage would have to be titled "Aryan Brotherhood of the Sea.”

Recent depictions of Steve Schwartz/Lulu Schwartz in the AVA depict Schwartz as some kind of colorful, quirky, harmlessly obnoxious Northern California weirdo of the type that supplies the Anderson Valley Advertiser with so much of its material. To do this you have completely disappeared large portions of Schwartz’s real world track record, from Reagan and the Contras to the torturer-tyrant Islam Karimov, down the memory hole. You totally blank out any reference to episodes of state violence and mass murder, the vast majority of it targeting working class and poor people, that Schwartz, however vicariously, enthusiastically attached himself to for a buck over a thirty-year long period. You have nothing to say about the only reasons that anyone could possibly have for acknowledging Schwartz's existence. For some unfathomable reason the repugnant multiple decade long track record of contemporary San Francisco’s most illustrious Alice Cooper impersonator has clearly earned Schwartz the respect and admiration of the William Allen White of Mendocino County.

Kevin Keating,

Buenos Aires, Argentina