Things Have Changed ~~ PAUL STREET

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/27/things-have-changed/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

 

Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – CC BY 2.0

The near octogenarian Joe Biden may well already be toast. He is on the economy and COVID-19 as the white supremacist Amerikaner Party of Trump (the APoT, formerly known as the Republican Party) moves to cancel and nullify nonwhite votes across much of the nation in the name of Donald “Save America” Trump’s big Hitlerian Stolen Election lie. Biden refuses to use the considerable power of the presidency to cancel student debt, block the right-wing attack on minority voting rights, or pass legislation that would relegalize serious union organizing and boost the pathetically inadequate minimum wage.

Biden prematurely proclaimed victory over the pandemic and holds back from aggressively advancing urgently needed vaccine mandates even though such mandates are supported by a strong majority of Americans. The fourth surge, likely to expand this fall and winter, is slowing the jobs recovery, giving the APoT economic ammunition with voters along with rising inflation. And Biden’s political stock price is falling further in the wake of his transparent bungling of the American exit from Afghanistan. It’s not clear he can even pass an early centrist pork-barrel infrastructure bill.

As the Democrat Biden dithers in the pathetic and despicable name of bipartisan cooperation with a party that crossed over to fascism years ago, the white-supremacist election-nullifiers “across the aisle” are licking their chops. They really expect to take back the U.S. House in 2022, an achievement that will position them to launch revenge impeachments (perhaps including one around “the betrayal of our troops and the people of Afghanistan”) and to pilfer a close presidential election on behalf of Donald “Perfect Call” Trump or the vicious covidiot Ron DeSantis in 2024-25. The APoT’s state-level machinations are likely to produce contested state Electoral College slates in the 2024 election, possibly throwing the outcome into the House, where Republicans will prevail under the Constitution’s rules even without holding a majority of the body’s members (the APoT only has to hold the majority of Representatives in more states than the Dems). It is difficult to imagine a Republican-controlled House agreeing to certify a Biden-re-election in January.

It is equally difficult to imagine the dismal Weimar Dems putting up much of a fight when the APoT takes back full power. Fighting for democracy (even its oxymoronic bourgeois variant) is not what the Democrats are about. Like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama before him, Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden is proof that Sheldon Wolin had it right in early 2008, as the fake-progressive Obama’s stealthily conservative star rose across the land. “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin wrote, they would not “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin added, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The nominally “in-power” corporatist Democrats would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”

Thirteen plus years later, the Republicans are clearly not just a “populist”-mimicking corporate party but a full-on white nationalist, eco-cidal, pandemicist, and eliminationist outfit. The APoT and its demented, Ashli Babbitt-trumpeting backers see the attempted putsch of January 6, 2021 as a rough draft prologue to a far more sophisticated campaign to stamp out the last embers of democracy. The white-power APoT is not F’ing around. It is engaged in what it considers a last-ditch “Save America” struggle to “take back our country” and preserve Caucasian white political and cultural hegemony in the “homeland.” Going for broke and ready to die on a cross of whiteness, its resolve is only intensified by the latest decennial US Census, which shows that people of color now make up 43% of the US population, up from 34% in 2010 (a significant jump). The Census data reinforce white supremacist Republicans’ determination to practice voter suppression in it various forms and to make the rollback of nonwhite voting rights the first order of business. They must ever more egregiously rig up the (already rigged-up) US elections system as their noxious ideas become more and more marginalized in the face of demographic decline.

Nothing is beyond the pale for this Nazified outfit, not even the partisan politicization and fanning of a deadly pandemic that increasingly targets small children.

And after it takes back full national power there will be no more “normal” bourgeois democratic elections.

“Come on, man,” a jaded, semi-political liberal acquaintance writes, “the Republicans are backed by just a quarter of the electorate. Relax. You’re hysterical.”

Sound familiar? Remember when one was accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for suggesting that the 45^th POTUS would refuse to peacefully accept defeat in the 2020 election?

Consistent with the liberal’s comment, the latest Gallup poll shows that 26% of the US electorate identifies politically as Republicans. Yes, but so what? Just 27% identify as Democrats. Biden and the Dems are losing Independents, who make up 43% of the electorate. The nation’s electoral and governing system is tilted starboard even without the white supremacist voter suppression measures currently being advanced and passed at the state level. The system was already fixed rightward even before the latest and ongoing assault on voting rights in the states, the soft underbelly of what’s left of American “democracy.” The all-too constitutional mechanisms of Republican minority rule include the Electoral College, the mass over-representation of the nation’s most reactionary, rural and white states in the absurdly powerful US Senate, the rampant gerrymandering of House districts, the denial of voting rights to millions of Americans with felony records, the free reign given to dark campaign finance money, and the powerful appointed-for-life Supreme Court, whose right-wing super-majority stands far to the right of the citizenry.

To tip likely outcomes further rightward, the Republicans and their base are far more organized, strategic, passionate, zealous, determined, united, and generally ready to fight for what they believe in than are the more divided, flabby, and passive Democrats. They are far more armed and have far more allies in the nation’s giant police and military state, which may well come into play in suppressing popular resistance to the APoT’s theft of coming elections. They are far less squeamish about the use of political violence.

Add in the horrific state-level measures (including the insidious gerrymandering about to be decennially revised) that are being left intact by Biden’s refusal to challenge the arcane and racist Senate filibuster so as to pass major voting rights reform (the “For the People” Act) and it doesn’t look good, to say the least, for the bourgeois Democrats and whatever it is, exactly, that they believe in.

What to do? Telling people to vote defensively against a fascist party in general elections and for more progressive Democrats in primary elections seems to me pretty much on par with telling people to wipe their rear ends with toilet paper after defecation and to wear jackets and coats when the weather turns cold. Go ahead, liberals and progressives, I’ll probably join you (out of my quaint belief that it is easier to organize for socialism when you aren’t being thrown out of helicopters). But do so without the illusion that voting is close to the kind of political activism and human agency required in this moment. You can’t defeat dedicated white-nationalist authoritarianism with a definition of politics that’s about marking polyarchic/bourgeois-democratic ballots once every two or four years and about hoping for withered old national charters and politicians to save us from rising and dedicated American-style fascism. Come on, man: it’s going to take thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people organized and ready to fight on multiple levels for a radical vision of democracy that goes far beyond major party politics and well past anything the dismal Democrats ( Wolin’s “inauthentic opposition”) entertain – and well past what’s possible under the nation’s absurdly venerated 18^th Century Constitution (itself crafted by and for slaveowners and merchant capitalists for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare.)

It needs to sink with liberals and progressives that a considerable portion of the American ruling class is quite alright with a shift to full-on authoritarian, white nationalist rule. If it wasn’t, a mass-murderous, truth-obliterating, pandemo-fascist white power monstrosity like Donald “Fight Like Hell” Trump wouldn’t still be free to hold hate rallies. The neo-Confederate RepubliNazis wouldn’t be free to repeal hard-won Black voting rights states across the country. The right-wing has already launched the “cival war” they promised if America didn’t follow the dictates of its declining white majority by giving the orange reptile a second term. This Amerikaner disease is a novel, unprecedentedly virulent strain of a horrible political virus that cannot be cured with the old electoral and reformist medicine. The ground has shifted. Things have changed. We figure out how to fight back in radical ways, dropping our fears of being accused of “alarmism” and “extremism,” and confronting the whole damn system thar birthed this madness, or its game over.

Operation Tradewinds: Collective Militarized White Supremacy and Black Neocolonialism in the Caribbean ~~ Gerald A. Perreira

https://blackagendareport.com/operation-tradewinds-collective-militarized-white-supremacy-and-black-neocolonialism-caribbean

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

  

Operation Tradewinds: Collective Militarized White Supremacy and Black Neocolonialism in the Caribbean

The People of the Caribbean and Latin America Must Say No to U.S. militarism and Subversion.

Except for the hum of US helicopters flying overhead, there was a deafening silence throughout the Caribbean region, during the recent Operation Tradewinds, Progressive and Pan-African forces did not utter a word, as soldiers from Guyana, Brazil, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago participated in this region-wide military exercise with army personnel from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and the Netherlands.

We were told that Operation Tradewinds was “a US Southern Command sponsored combined joint exercise conducted with partner nations to enhance the collective ability of defense forces and constabularies to counter transnational criminal organizations, conduct humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief operations.”

The catch-phrases “transnational criminal organizations,” “humanitarian assistance” and even “disaster relief operations” are worn-out euphemisms for the neo-colonial presence of the US Empire and its European allies in Guyana and throughout the region. Military exercises and CIA manuals are a vital part of the game plan to ensure the continued strength and influence of the hegemon.

Their lackeys in the region follow suit, utilizing tactics of disinformation. Often, when people from poor and marginalized communities in the Caribbean and the Americas resist neo-colonialism and its persistent, debilitating poverty and oppression, they are labelled “criminals,” and legitimate grassroots movements are described as “criminal gangs.” This then acts as an excuse for State repression, extra-judicial killings, imprisonments and political assassination. In Colombia and Brazil, activists, and in particular, African and Indigenous activists, are targeted for elimination. According to Africa Globe, an African-Brazilian is killed by the police every 23 minutes. Operation Tradewinds was a tacit reminder that if things get out of hand in the “colonies,” the Empire is there to back up their local “governors,” who pose as presidents and prime ministers.

The poverty and suffering throughout the region is largely due to the persistent imperialist plunder and exploitation of our abundant natural and human resources, as well as the imposition of political and economic systems that maintain dependency and dysfunction, while widening the gap between rich and poor. Countries in the region that have dared to break these chains, such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, suffer the Empire’s full wrath. Speaking for Guyana in 2021, the most apt description would be a neo-plantation, where the colonial structures, institutions and systems remain firmly in place, and where the president, prime minister and other government officials are no more than governors, viceroys and overseers for the Empire, as in colonial times. That is why Caribbean liberation theologian, Kortright Davis, could have proclaimed, “emancipation still coming.”

Geopolitical and historical fatalism
It’s hard to fathom the seeming acceptance, across the political spectrum, of this provocative military exercise, coordinated by the world’s major imperialist powers. The very same powers that worked together as a well-oiled machine in the destruction of the Libyan Revolution. Provocative, because the exercise was so obviously staged in an attempt to intimidate Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and any other nation in the Caribbean or the Americas that dares to dream of sovereignty and the right to self-determination.

To remain silent, is to acquiesce. A dangerous acceptance of the absurd notion of historical and geo-political fatalism is in the air. The acronym TINA (There Is No Alternative) was concocted so it could be transplanted into our thinking and sure enough it is manifesting itself. Even amongst Pan-Africanists across the region I am sensing a kind of “this is the reality we have to deal with.” Really? With this self- defeating approach, they are actually legitimizing and “Pan-Africanizing” neo-colonialism and in so doing, forfeiting our inalienable right to authentic independence and self-determination.

Joe Biden has now tightened the noose around Cuba’s neck. It’s no surprise that the planned distribution of Cuba’s vaccines, Soberana, Abdala and Mambisa, to the Caribbean, Central and South America and Africa, sent the Empire’s machinery into overdrive, accelerating its attempts to create chaos in Cuba. As far as the imperialists were concerned, this phenomenal achievement by a small, truly sovereign and socialist nation had to be disrupted and discredited.

US imperialists, be they Democrats or Republicans, displaying the fact that their wickedness knows no bounds, have actually hindered Cuba’s access to syringes and other supplies to assist in the manufacture and distribution of life-saving vaccines in the middle of a global pandemic. Cuba’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, rightfully described this as an “act of genocide” and said that “like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills.”

Worldwide, youth are rejecting capitalism
If anything has laid bare capitalism’s contradictions, it is COVID-19. Capitalism’s failure is on show as never before. Youth around the world are rising up in large numbers with the word “socialism” on their lips. And most worrying to the ruling classes and the imperialists, is that the youth movements in their own countries are among the largest. According to recent polls, a majority of youth in the US are rejecting capitalism. More than half of those polled view socialism positively. These young people in advanced capitalist countries such as the US, the UK and France are struggling to make ends meet. Unemployment figures are soaring, social and economic inequality is growing at an unprecedented rate, and even those who have employment are forced to have a side hustle or two. The inarguable connection between racism and capitalism is highlighted everywhere they turn. In the early 60s, when Malcolm X said, “you can’t have capitalism without racism” he had to argue that point in order illustrate it, in 2021, the nexus between capitalism and racism has surely become self-evident.

Increasingly, youth in the West are no longer blaming themselves for their situation, as neo-liberals and conservatives have encouraged them to do, but are instead turning their disdain towards the economic and political system which they see as being rigged against them. They are laying bare the injustice perpetrated by the ideology of White supremacy, which allows Africans in the US to be shot in their homes, neighbourhoods, malls, playgrounds and streets by agencies of the State. Chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “No pride in genocide”, Black and White youth in the citadels of capitalism are tearing down, burning and smashing symbols, icons and images of this system.

The blatant way in which Bernie Sanders was sidelined and rigged out of the US presidential race, despite overwhelming support, contributed to the huge wave of disillusionment. It was a bitter pill for the thousands of young people who were actively involved in his campaign. After witnessing this electoral charade, the numbers of disenchanted youth soared, causing many to turn their back on any remnant of belief they still had in the US political system and bogus liberal democracy. In increasing numbers, US citizens are simply no longer able to close their eyes to the fact that the US is a plutocracy, not a democracy.

When detractors claim that socialism does not work, I ask them for just one example of a place anywhere on earth where neo-liberal capitalism is working. I’m still waiting for a case in point! In fact, if socialism is such a failure, why do the imperial powers spend millions trying to derail it – surely it should fail of its own accord?

Truth be told, it is White supremacy that came into the world as capitalism that is failing, and it is the US Empire and its European allies that are in crisis—directionless and floundering. Despite their bravado and victorious rhetoric, the question is not if this Empire will fall, but rather when? Forced to withdraw their troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq, having failed to achieve their objectives, they are mired in humiliation and defeat. Old Joe is a fool, as are Boris and Macron. Of course, no Empire goes down without a fight. As the Empire falls into the hell of its own making, for the vast majority, life on this earth will get even harsher than it already is. In its dying throes, we can expect the Empire to become even more vicious. All progressive and revolutionary oriented governments and movements understand that the Empire’s fight back will intensify in this historical period.

The Empire fights back to no avail
It is in this context that the Empire’s most recent assault on Cuba took place. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, the imperial powers are more determined than ever that no alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism can be left standing.

Imperialism’s policy has always been to nip socialist and revolutionary oriented governments in the bud, by ensuring that they are never given a breathing space.  However, despite economic sanctions, covert and overt acts of sabotage, campaigns of disinformation, funding and support of insignificant counter-revolutionary entities and fake NGOs to the tune of millions of US dollars, CIA orchestrated coups, political assassinations and contra-wars, it has not been easy, to say the least, to nip the revolutions of the Caribbean and the Americas in the bud.

Although concerted efforts have been made and millions of US dollars spent, Biden will be the 12th US president who has tried to bring Cuba to its knees. After the waging of a brutal and unrelenting CIA sponsored contra-war against the Sandinista government for more than a decade, today support for President Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua is stronger than ever. In Venezuela, under enormous pressure, as the Empire continues to unleash the full extent of its destabilization arsenal on this nation-state, the Bolivarian revolution has survived, In Bolivia, following the US-backed electoral/constitutional coup that forced President Evo Morales from office, the Movement Towards Socialism party that he led, is back in power. In Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and across the region, the resistance continues.

‘Look for me in the whirlwind…’
What the imperialists fail to understand is that the Caribbean and the Americas have an extraordinary legacy of resistance that has unleashed an historical revolutionary continuum that they can never defeat. Revolutionary leader, Maurice Bishop asked, “When will imperialism learn?” He went on to explain that, “they can kill our bodies but they can never kill the spirit of a people fighting for their liberation…”

In 1987, addressing revolutionaries from the Caribbean and the Americas gathered at the World Mathaba in Libya, Muammar Qaddafi alluded to this impressive and defiant legacy, stating, “I have the feeling that the new world will begin in your region. It is there that the new outlines that will shape the world – outlines that correspond to our aspirations – shall be etched out.”

There can be no doubt that the spirit of Tupac Amaru, Agüeybaná II, Hatuey, Cuauhtémoc, Cahuide, Guaicaipuro, Lautaro, Dessalines, L’Ouverture, Boukman, Bolivar, Marti, Sandino, Bussa, Kofi, Atta, Bogle, Nanny, Makandal, Garvey, Guevara, Castro, Allende, Bishop and so many others rage on. Marcus Garvey told us to look for him “in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of Black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.” It brings to mind the ancient phrase: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Exhausted playbook
The most recent attempt to destabilize Cuba simply illustrates just how exhausted the imperialist playbook is—floods of hashtags, bots, automated trolls, doctored photographs and videos, large cash payments to insignificant counter-revolutionary groups etc. The oppressed masses throughout the Caribbean and the Americas know exactly what is going on. In 2021, there is no nation on earth not facing huge challenges, let alone a nation that has withstood more than 60 years of harsh and comprehensive economic sanctions. Cuba’s survival under such harsh and intolerable conditions, is proof of the resolve and resilience of the Cuban people and the revolution they gave birth to. No matter how high the price they are forced to pay, they refuse to surrender their God-given right to true independence, dignity and self-determination. There can be no doubt that the Cubans have come too far to turn back, and will resolve their own issues and challenges on their own terms.

Declaration of war
On July 22nd, when Biden intensified the embargo by introducing new sanctions targeting individual Cuban officials and entities, he declared war. Sasha Tirador, a well-known Miami based counter-revolutionary, exclaimed, “This is huge!”

Another high profile and outspoken Miami based counter-revolutionary, Orlando Gutíerrez-Boronat and Miami mayor, Francis Suarez, called for US airstrikes on the island-nation.

Contributing to the war-room like discourse, in an interview with MSNBC, Marco Rubio commented that “at the end of the day, the key…is to go after the loyalty and the confidence of those in the security apparatus in Cuba.”

The Biden administration is doing everything it can to provide internet access to the Cuban people to “circumvents the regime’s censorship efforts.” This is rich, coming from a US administration that is tagging what it considers to be “inappropriate messages” on Facebook for referral to Facebook management. The US State has, in effect, become an extension of Facebook in its attempts to censor.

In a clear directive to US partners in the region, Biden, referring to Cuba, Venezuela and others, said that “advancing human dignity and freedom is a top priority” for his administration, and the US would work closely with its “partners throughout the region” to achieve these goals. And there they were, US military helicopters flying overhead in in Guyana, not far from the Venezuelan border, as part of Operation Tradewinds.

Never tiring of hypocrisy, Biden of course is speaking as president of a country with the largest incarcerated prison population on earth, including many political prisoners, where censorship and State-sponsored disinformation has become the order of the day, where the entire population, and in particular dissidents, are targeted for Orwellian type surveillance, and where demonstrations are put down with brutal militaristic force. Nowhere on earth is the “fascistization” of the State more evident than in the US of A.

#UnBlockCuba
We must intensify our fight back. Words, resolutions and statements of solidarity are important but not enough. Revolutionary and progressive forces across the Caribbean and the Americas must mobilize and organize a mass movement around just one single demand that we can all agree on: An immediate end to the United States illegal embargo on Cuba.

We must call on our progressive and revolutionary brothers and sisters worldwide to take up this campaign with such thunder that the Empire comes under pressure to relent. Only then can we demonstrate that there is indeed an alternative, and that we are determined to defend that alternative.

Revolutionary Pan-Africanist and socialist, Kwame Ture said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.” He was of course not only referring to the medical brigades and other humanitarian assistance, but also to Cuba’s unprecedented military assistance in the fight against the South African Apartheid regime, and the decisive battle at Cuito Cuanavale. Now, when after six decades of illegal sanctions that have crippled Cuba economically, and are fomenting unrest among Cuba’s youth, as they were designed to do, Cuba is calling. Let us answer with a resounding and sustained campaign of resistance until the illegal embargo is lifted. In doing so, we will send a definitive message to the US rogue regime, that in the words of Grenadian freedom fighter, Maurice Bishop, “we are in nobody’s backyard.”

Remembering the Battle of Blair Mountain ~~ DAVID ROVICS

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/06/remembering-the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~ 

 

At the beginning of August, 1917, a multiracial group of tenant farmers and other people mostly from Oklahoma, including the infamous abolitionist John Brown’s grandson, began what they hoped would turn into an armed uprising in Washington, DC, from different parts of the country, with the aim of putting an end to the imperial, capitalist war machine.

Hard-pressed tenant farmers from all backgrounds — white, black, brown, indigenous, women, men, including prominent indigenous women organizers — were involved with this abortive effort that became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.  Less well-known than even this virtually unknown Oklahoma uprising is the fact that it was born out of a secret multiracial network known as the Working Class Union, with an estimated 35,000 members in Oklahoma alone, which had been waging a campaign of armed resistance and industrial sabotage against the landed gentry and the mine operators of the region for years.

Although most people reading this are probably people already fairly knowledgeable about historical events a lot of other people have never heard of, my guess is most of you have never heard of the Working Class Union in Oklahoma or their campaign of sabotage and armed struggle, or the fact that it was a consciously multiracial endeavor.

One hundred years ago this month, in August, 1921, in another part of the US, a multiracial uprising of union coal miners commandeered trains and cars across the state of West Virginia and emptied armories of their contents, as they marched to the town of Mingo, where a hundred of their fellow union miners were being held without charge by the corrupt authorities.

Somewhere around 15,000 miners engaged in three days and nights of crossfire with thousands of the more “well-to-do” members of West Virginia society, including every cop in the entire state and all the gun thugs the mine operators could find available to hire.  It was an explicitly multiracial uprising, led by a union movement that had for decades been explicitly antiracist, acutely aware of the ways the bosses used the racial divide in the US to keep the working class in a constant state of conflict.  So much of the labor movement of the day rejected this strategy and employed their own strategy of radical inclusion.

How thoroughly did the black miners of West Virginia feel about their part in the union movement in 1921?  Of the 15,000 or so people laying siege to Mingo at the end of August of that year, an estimated 2,000 of them were black.

This was a multiracial uprising of unprecedented scale.  During the three days that the miners were trying to liberate their comrades imprisoned in Mingo, dozens of people were killed, the total numbers never to be known.  Thousands of women of all backgrounds were actively involved with the struggle, coordinating essential logistics like food and medical care for thousands of men under arms.

Just three months earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, planes dropped explosives on the black community of Greenwood, razing the entire neighborhood to the ground, killing hundreds of black people from the community in a racist lynch mob consisting of thousands of members of the white community in Tulsa.  Refugees were interned and treated terribly by the authorities.  People whose lives, homes, and businesses were destroyed never saw any compensation for their losses, or even any apologies worth mentioning.  The intergenerational trauma stemming from this pogrom continues to this day.

The impact of this racist pogrom on the black people of Oklahoma and beyond is incalculable.  The impact of learning about this horrible event — one of so many similar horrors throughout the history of this settler-colonial empire we call the United States — is also hard to calculate.

This is especially true when all you know about the history of 1921 is the Tulsa Race Massacre.  Everyone should know about this massacre, in all its horrific detail.  Everyone should know about the planes dropping explosives, and the systematic destruction of the city.  Everyone should know about later efforts to hide the history, to pave over what remained of Greenwood with a highway.

But everyone should also know that the second time planes were used to drop explosives on people in the United States was in August, 1921, in West Virginia.  And these planes were from the US military, flown in from bases hundreds of miles away, to drop bombs on a multiracial uprising of union miners.

There is so much more that can be said about what led up to both the Tulsa pogrom and the multiracial uprising in West Virginia, which both happened within months of each other in 1921.  The impact of the unspeakably horrendous bloodbath known as World War 1, along with the terribly devastating global pandemic that it gave rise to, would be hard to overstate.  Massively traumatized populations are more likely to take up arms in whatever circumstance.  History demonstrates this pattern abundantly.  Which doesn’t explain either of these events, but understanding 1921 in the context of 1918 is absolutely essential.  1921 didn’t happen in a vacuum.

The main point I would venture to make here is that we cannot begin to understand the realities and complexities of the present day, to say nothing of the history of this country, if when we think of 1921 we remember the Tulsa Race Massacre, but not the Battle of Blair Mountain.

And why would we do that?  Don’t ask me.  Ask the corporate and so-called “public” media in this country.  Ask them why they ignore the biggest multiracial uprising in the history of this country.  They’ll say they’re not ignoring it — look, West Virginia Public Television did a barely-funded little documentary about that, they may say.

But barely mentioning a major historical event is more or less the same as ignoring it, in terms of the impact on the populace.  At this point, given the media coverage and the speeches of prominent politicians and so much more, the Greenwood pogrom may be said to have achieved the historical notoriety it so richly deserves.  What an extreme example of what a white supremacist, settler-colonial mentality can achieve, under the right — that is, wrong — circumstances of population-wide PTSD and widespread poverty and unemployment, on top of the centuries of racist brainwashing from the top that has characterized colonialism from the beginning of the practice.

But in the face of such a longstanding history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism, is it not worth mentioning that so much of the labor movement explicitly rejected that nonsense?  Is it not worth noting that an interracial army of union miners spontaneously organized an uprising in August, 1921, that had to be put down by federal troops?  Is it not worth mentioning that none of the organizers of this multiracial uprising could be convicted by a jury anywhere in the state of West Virginia afterwards?

What do you think of when you think of West Virginia?  Let me guess.  Racist white hillbillies.

There is another America.  You will not hear about it on television.  PBS — and all the corporate networks — almost completely ignore labor history.  Multiracial uprisings are completely ignored, as if they never happened.  If we don’t learn about this side of our history, and only learn about the lynchings, nothing good will come of this “education.”

I have never heard Al Sharpton give a speech where he doesn’t mention the martyrs, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.  Reverend Sharpton is not pandering to anyone by mentioning these three names like a mantra in every speech.  He is educating the people, whoever is listening, about the multiracial history of resistance to class- and race-based oppression in this country.

Just as no one can understand the relevance of the Civil Rights movement without knowing about the multiracial Freedom Riders and other such efforts, the idea that so much of a society can know about the racist pogrom in Oklahoma in 1921, but not about the multiracial uprising in West Virginia three months later, tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with how education, and the media, function in this capitalist society.

For whatever it’s worth, in my role as a topical songwriter, I have written songs about all of the events I’ve mentioned here — the Green Corn Rebellion, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the Battle of Blair Mountain.  I did that because I think it’s so important that all of these things be remembered.  I shudder at the thought of only knowing about one of these events without knowing about the others.  What must that do to the spirits of so many people, led to believe that our history consists of nothing but racial division and subjugation.

There is another America.  Remember it.  Whether Jesus ever lived or died, I don’t know.  But those miners died for you.  You should at least know who they were.  And then let’s all follow in their footsteps.  Long live the multiracial uprising in the hills of Appalachia in 1921.  Long live the Battle of Blair Mountain.

  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2jxSGvg_-czWhkYXBFvYe14JnFDit4h

From What to Why on the Trump Proletarian Narrative ~~ PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/21/from-what-to-why-on-the-trump-proletarian-narrative/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The wrongheaded but ubiquitous notion that the Republican Amerikaner Trump base is the (um, white) “working-class” drawn to “populism” has been disproven in study after study showing that the Trumpenvolk are relatively affluent, not proletarian and poor, and driven by an ugly, mutually reinforcing mixture of racism, sexism, nativism, fundamentalism, and authoritarianism.

Those who have habitually called the backers of Trump and his white nationalist party “working class” have tended to badly conflate education level and region of residence with class. They have fallen for the foolish notion that someone is working class and economically anxious simply because one does not possess a college degree and/or lives in a region that does not contribute much to the national gross domestic product.

They ignore evidence available in social science and everyday observation showing that the main thing driving the right-wing and frankly (though they won’t say so and indeed often recoil against the description) fascist (not “populist”) sentiments of the Amerikaner Trumpenvolk is racist patriarchal authoritarian nationalism, not “economic anxiety.”

What’s it all about? I get why the “working class [well, um, white working-class] Trump base” narrative is strong on the right. Snotty corporate Republicans in the Fred Whirlpool Upton-Liz Cheney-National Review mode like to blame the takeover of their right-wing party by the lowbrow variant of white nationalism (Trumpism) on uncouth “trailer trash.” Classism provides them a convenient explanation for how the racist and reactionary politics they helped cultivate for decades became a tariff-bashing, coup-plotting Frankenstein’s monster beyond their control.

At the same time, Republicans in the Trump mode enjoy and embrace the “populist” and “working class” mantle, wrapping their virulently racist, sexist, ecocidal and stealthily plutocratic politics in the deceptive flag of the “forgotten” working men and women (but men primarily) of “the heartland.”

But why is the false (um, white) Trumpenproletarian narrative so widely shared in the center and even on the left? Neoliberal Democrats in the Clinton-Obama-Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations-Third Way mode like the empirically unsupported storyline because it helps to justify their own long “progressive-neoliberal” (historian Nancy Fraser’s clever if oxymoronic phrase) flight from working-class causes and so-called populism to the corporate and managerial center-right. If the (um, white) proletariat is a reactionary “basket of deplorables,” to use Hillary Clinton’s colorful but impolitic 2016 language, well, then the Hell with the working-class and with populism.

Okay, but what about Bernie Sanders, and several progressive intellectuals I’d rather not name, who seem irretrievably fixated – basic data and social science be damned – on the notion that the Trumpenvolk is composed of potentially progressive proletarian “victims of neoliberalism” to whom Democrats and the left must “reach out”? What is their foolish, anti-science judgement all about?

I have theories about this. Part of it, I suspect, is a kind of intellectual laziness and a certain data-phobic innumeracy related to a faux-left refusal to engage with quantitative social-scientific findings generated by the bourgeois academy. There’s work involved with data, work that has nothing to do with how many volumes of Marx or David Harvey or Chomsky or Zizek you’ve read. Without digging into the data, or at least into the work of people who dug into the data, one is left with the dominant and superficial political reporting, which has been running with the Trumpenproletarian (white) narrative from day one. The idea of Trump’s base as working class has been planted by sheer repetition in the heads of even leading Left thinkers by the mainstream media. It resonates with the lefties’ memory of “that [excessively praised 2004] Thomas Frank book on Kansas” (What’s the Matter with Kansas? – which left out race) and perhaps with their anecdotal knowledge of some local white guy Teamster who voted for Obama in 2012 but for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Another part of it, I suspect, is that many people on the left, and this applies particularly to left intellectuals and academics, have little if any contact with actual human beings on the Trumpist right. They rarely or never talk to or closely observe the real socialism-loathing Trump base, much of which is far from proletarian and poor and little of which can ever be won over to Medicare for All and a Green New Deal (or even to the re-empowerment of unions). This also predisposes them towards acceptance of the ubiquitous mainstream narrative of Trumpism as white-proletarian populism.

Another part of it, I suspect, is the widespread refusal of many on the Left to acknowledge that Trump and Trumpism were and are neofascist. If you buy into the silly academic and journalistic notion that Trumpism is “populism,” you are likely to see “working-class” (um, white) content in it and blow-off actual research proving otherwise.

Another part of it, I suspect, is the tendency on the left to automatically associate any legitimate concerns with sexism, racism, nativism, transphobia, and homophobia with “bourgeois identity politics.” As you try to explain that reactionary social sentiments and related political authoritarianism, not economic populism and anxiety, are the real driving passions behind the Amerikaner base, these leftists curl up their faces in disgust and charge “identity politics!” – as if being a Lefitst interested in building popular solidarity against capitalism-imperialism doesn’t mean steadfastly opposing racism, nativism, sexism, trans-bashing, and homophobia.

And here, at the risk of being accused of that horrible sin – bourgeois/“PMC” identity politics (false: I am a full-on communist opponent of capitalist class rule) – I will (yes, anecdotally) observe that preponderant majority of avowed lefties who have curled their lips and advanced to me the empirically unsupported Trumpenproletarian thesis are themselves older and straight white males. Sometimes I wonder if they hold the thesis in part because they share at least some of the right’s white patriarchal revulsion against anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-nativism, anti-transphobia, and anti-homophobia. At the same time, their white male privilege (the ones I hear from are typically quite comfortably situated) insulates them from the dangerous white nationalist sentiments and forces afoot in the land. Calling Trump’s base “working class” gives them a way of stealthily putting a left spin on white male reaction and indifference. How pathetic

The Things You Are Getting Wrong About White Supremacists Is What Allows Them To Grow ~~ Gwen Frisbie-Fulton

https://gwenfrisbiefulton.medium.com/the-things-you-are-getting-wrong-about-white-supremacists-is-what-allows-them-to-grow-553fa1cf54c8

~~ posted for collectivist ~~ 

White mob before breaking into the US Capitol on January 6th, 2020.

Twelve years ago, I packed up a Uhaul and left the home my son was born in. I drove across the country with him in a car seat, singing hours of nursery rhymes to keep him entertained.

I loved that house — a big, collapsing, and beautiful Victorian farmhouse that my friends and I had sunk years of work into to make it a home. I loved that neighborhood; sweet neighbors who would holler at me to join them on their porch or come over late on New Year’s Eve with Jello shots and gossip. I loved that city — a big, heaving post-industrial city with greying art deco buildings from a more prosperous yesteryear. But it was time to go.

There were ten thousand personal reasons why I packed up that house and sold it, but there was also one troublesome thing that had been on my mind. A few years earlier the Vinlanders — a white power hate group — had set up a clubhouse only a few blocks away. They were disruptive, violent, and scary and they were recruiting the neighborhood’s poor white kids who they hoped had no other offers or chances in life. As a young, poor single mom of a white son, I knew he could eventually be a target.

I’ll take a lot of risks, but not that one.

Only days ago, a white mob marched from the White House to the Capitol building in order to break in and disrupt the Electoral College count. Some of the mob had zip ties to, apparently, take hostages. Some had guns and other weapons. Some chanted that they were going to kill the Vice President. Someone erected a platform with a noose. Five people died. The nation remains shocked. How did we get here? We each have asked. This is not us, we each have hoped.

Twitter users helped crowdsource information to figure out who the man carrying zip ties into the Senate chambers to, presumably, take hostages.

Then, the day after the attack on the Capitol, the Indianapolis Star — the reputable, award-winning paper — ran a run-of-the-mill story including an interview with a man named Brien James. It was reported that James had joined about one hundred other Trump supporters and Proud Boys at the Indiana statehouse to oppose the Electoral College count and he spoke to the Star as the assault was occurring in Washington. The Star then also quoted James again the next day, documenting him as just another voice in this moment in history. It read like a benign human interest story: Some men, who you may or may not agree with politically, holding a protest at the statehouse — as we do and will continue to do in our American democracy.

But I know plenty about Brien James. He was my old neighbor.

Brien James was the founder of the Vinlanders Social Club — he is one of the ones I would see goosestepping outside the local bars in steel-toed boots ready to fight. He was the one who selected my neighborhood as a place for his hate group to target. It is documented that James created the Vinlanders after he was kicked out of the Outlaw Hammerskins for being too violent — he apparently nearly stomped someone to death for refusing to do a Sieg heil in the early 2000s. He later founded the Hoosier State Skinheads. For anyone who doesn’t know or doesn’t remember, “skins” are neo-Nazis. That’s not hyperbole, that’s what they call themselves.

White supremacists pose in front of the Vinlander’s house. Photo from South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action.

The Vinlander house had a flag pole in the front yard and they flew Nazi and SS flags. They would blare Skrewdriver songs out the windows and sit up on the front porch drinking and glaring at passerbys. My neighbors and I regularly had to paint over swastikas that had been spray-painted on our garages and fences.

In 2007 and just a few blocks from where the Indianapolis Star interviewed James for their story this week, a gang of Vinlanders attacked a Black man in broad daylight, stomping him unconscious in the middle of a downtown street. Three Vinlanders went to prison for that attack. One later confessed to another murder and is serving that sentence, too. Plenty of Indianapolis residents remember the vile beating — when bystanders tried to call the police for help, they were attacked or threatened by the group.

Brien James continued to lead the Vinlanders even after many of his core members were in prison. Two years after the incident in downtown Indianapolis, another Vindlander (who was also a correctional officer) was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and their child and put on death row. Police found Hitler memorabilia all through the man’s house. Later that same year, two more Vinlanders were indicted for murdering a woman because she was dating a Black man.

Brien James (left in center photo) poses with another Vinlander. Source: ADL

Both Indianapolis Star articles this week failed to include any context about who Brien James is or about his movement’s extremely violent history. That context has become extremely important as this long legacy of community violence has once again turned into clear political violence and, for the first time in history, has targetted the symbolic center of our democracy — something prophesied in The Turner Diaries, the Bible of the racist right.

We, as a nation and as individuals, are very adept at ignoring white supremacy (it may be the communal skill we have excelled in most). Even though our country experiences white supremacist violence regularly, we still can barely name it when we see it. The FBI confirms that the vast majority of terror attacks in the United States are committed by far-right white supremacists, but we continue to have no national or community plan to stop this.

From Charleston to El Paso, white nationalist terror is often incorrectly described as “lone wolf” incidents, in contrast to the broad brush that we use when we see acts of property destruction or the rare acts of physical violence at Black Lives Matter protests. Seeing white nationalist terror as incidental, organic, or outside of having a sophisticated and strategic radicalization process is not only misguided; it’s very dangerous.

Most white Americans have a good instinct to distance themselves from white nationalism. However, to do so they often use incorrect shorthands and stereotypes to denounce the “other.” Since Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol, I have seen the mob described as anything from “bubbas” to “hicks” to “uneducated trailer trash.” However, just today I saw a CEO, a district court judge’s son, a pharmacist, a mayor, and a woman who flew on a private jet to the rally all be doxxed on Twitter for their participation in the mob. Our rush to distance ourselves from unsavory racists and discounting their intelligence ends up framing the threat incorrectly. And it is allowing the white supremacists to get ahead.

It turns out that Brien James left that old neighborhood just like I did. However, unlike me, he didn’t move to another working-class neighborhood with make-do houses, he moved to the suburbs. Brien James did what lots of Nazis did about a decade ago: He rebranded.

Sure, the neighborhood where the Vinlanders set up and where I lived was a poor, white neighborhood in a decaying industrial city. I am sure that my neighbors and I probably meet most of the stereotypes people have of who is racist in America, at least by physical appearance and income level. But the tiki torches in Charlottesville were overwhelmingly carried by frat boys and orthodontists, and the Capitol was just vandalized by veterans and small business owners in MAGA hats, Phish teeshirts, and Columbia jackets. America needs to come to terms with the idea that some cleaned up Vinlanders might live next to you, too.

One Vinlander, Bryon Widner, who frequented the house in my neighborhood, left the Vinlanders in the late 2000s and had all his white power tattoos removed: Hate across his knuckles, Blood & Honour across his neck, other white power and Odinist tattoos across his face. By all accounts, Widener managed to leave hate groups and, hopefully, hate itself behind after his well-documented transformation.

But at the same time, other white nationalists also began to realize that looking like prison-tatted skinheads or Klansmen wasn’t working for them either. Their reason was more sinister than Widner’s, however: They weren’t recruiting enough members.

The groups began to restrategize. How could they move from being fringe groups and into the mainstream? Unreasonably obsessed with the fear of becoming a white minority, these groups moved towards more fascist tendencies hoping to secure minority rule. This meant, however, that they needed more white people to join them to secure power.

Derek Black, a former white supremacist, the son of the founder of the Stormfront online community and the godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, explains that white power extremists didn’t try to recruit people who already shared their beliefs, but instead recruit people who would say “I’m not racist, but…” The point of recruitment was the “but.” To do this, however, white supremacists needed a new look so as not to first scare these new recruits away. Nobody wants to think they are becoming a fascist, after all.

The two crossed meat-cleavers of the American Guard logo references “Bill the Butcher,” a fictionalized version of William Pool, the leader of the Bowery Boys, a New York City street gang infamous for its violent attacks on immigrants. Source: ADL

Trying to find a more contemporary and palatable white nationalism, Brien James ditched the neo-Nazi Vinlanders and founded the Indiana American Guard. He began claiming he was no longer be racist but instead a “nationalist” and a “patriot” — language that we all should be becoming familiar with today. To prove he was no longer racist, Brien started posting content on his social media channels from far-right conservative Blacks like Candice Owens and the Hodgetwins, mixed in with dog-whistle content everywhere else. His kinder, more gentle facade, of course, was mostly talk and his actual agenda didn’t seem to change. The first time I saw Brien James after leaving my neighborhood was nearly a decade later: He marched with his American Guard right into the fray, armed with sticks and batons, in Charlottesville.

Now, the day of the attack on the Capital building, Brien James is the head of the Indiana Proud Boys and talking to journalists — something Briend James of 20 years ago never would have been able to do. The Indy Star interviewed him as if he were just a protestor or another guy with an opinion that needs to be heard in the interest of fair reporting. A quick Google search, however, reveals that just a month ago, James was promoting the Million Maga March in DC (another event that turned into dangerous street violence) with a video that used the fascist Mannerbund Anthem as its soundtrack.

Do we believe that Brien James’ endeavors now are any different from his last five renditions of white nationalism? This man has been in versions of explicit fascist movements for 30 years, remaking himself to fit the times. It seems dangerous and risky to give him a platform in the local paper with no context of who he or what this movement is.

James is a case study in how fascist movements rebrand and try to stay relevant in mainstream culture. He is just one of many, but he just happens to be the one I lived by. When the shaved heads and white power tattoos stopped doing the trick of recruiting young kids, they changed up the game. They took a tip from Richard Spencer and cleaned up to make themselves part of the contemporary political landscape — but their views are still very much the same, repackaged and reworded. White nationalists change their look and language to stay ahead of the backlash. When we don’t look at the full picture, when we don’t educate each other about these movements and mutations, and, frankly, when we try to pretend that they are far removed from us — we are letting them get ahead.

We tend to want to believe that white supremacists and white nationalists are the backwoods Deliverance rejects of our society. However, over and over again our desire to paint ourselves as different means we don’t manage to reject them at all because we are letting them sneak in. The far-right is not dumb: Racism is not a result of ignorance, it’s the result of people seeking to manipulate power in their favor.

These movements are complex and their recruitment is a methodologically confusing and skillful strategy of memes, internet culture, normalizing violence, jokes and swearing they don’t mean what they say, pseudo-intellectualism, and insisting that they are part of the political spectrum. James may have nearly killed someone for not Sieg heiling in 2000, but in 2020 he knows you should never ask someone to do a Nazi salute at the first meeting. You’ve gotta ease into it.

Brien James seemed more inspired on January 6th than he came across in his interview with the Indianapolis Star.

The entire strategy of the alt-right in the last four years is evident in their name. They no longer want to be seen as extremists, they want to be considered a legitimate alternative on the political spectrum. That opportunity was offered to them through Trump as well as through press outlets from NPR to Fox to the Indianapolis Star each of which has conducted interviews with people who explicitly want a white ethnostate as if it were part of canonical political discourse.

I’m not a journalist and don’t know much about it: I’m just a mom who lived next door to a neo-Nazi and who knows what that does to communities like mine. I am not asking for journalists to be activists, but if the Indianapolis Star and other publications provide a platform without putting people like Brien James in context, and if people in my community continue to focus on outdated tropes without looking harder, then these movements grow and grow and grow until…Well, this week we saw what happens when we let it grow.