A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

2010 Free Press

Book Review

(This book review is divided into three parts. Part III discusses Martin Luther King’s little publicized campaign to rid black people of “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits.)

Part III

For me, the most interesting section of A Renegade History of the United States is the chapter about Martin Luther King and his little known campaign to persuade so-called “bad niggers” to embrace the puritan work ethic and cult of responsibility and sexless self-sacrifice that has characterized the dominant American culture. In 1957 Reverend King launched three projects simultaneously: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to coordinate a nonviolent campaign to desegregate buses across the South, the Campaign for Citizenship to campaign for voting rights and a church-based campaign to rid African Americans of what King referred to as “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits. In 1957 he delivered a series of sermons condemning blacks who led “tragic lives of pleasure and riotous living” (see Problems of Personality Integration). In 1958 he wrote articles in Ebony and published his first book, Stride Towards Freedom, in which he claimed black poverty was as much due to laziness and a lack of discipline and morality, as to institutional racism. He also condemned rock and roll.

The Role of Violence vs Nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement

Russell also weighs in on what has become a hot issue in the “diversity of tactics” debate in the Occupy movement. He lays out compelling evidence that 1) only a tiny minority of southern blacks participated in King’s nonviolent movement and 2) it was “bad niggers” and violence, rather than King’s nonviolent campaign, that won the first major civil rights victories in 1963. According to Russell’s careful review of Birmingham police records, the years between 1958 and 1963 saw a dramatic escalation of incidents in which black residents of both sexes punched, kicked, bit, stabbed and shot white residents who infringed on their freedoms, even in minor ways. He describes a number of these incidents in the book.

He also points out that the most famous image of the civil rights movement – of Bull Connor spraying protestors with a fire hose – culminated a week of rioting during the first week of May 1963. These weren’t nonviolent protestors being hosed but black rioters who, over a week, had injured nearly a dozen cops with rocks and bottles and who were arming themselves with knives and guns. The official history books quibble over the identity of the black people Bull Connor attacked with fire hoses, describing them as “bystanders,” “onlookers,” “spectators,” or “people along the fringes.” Yet police records make it really clear that Connor was dealing with a full blown race riot his officers were unable to quell.

Why the Chamber of Commerce Negotiated with King

According to Russell, this record of increasing black violence in Birmingham and other southern cities casts King’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in a totally new light. In it he gives the Birmingham city fathers a clear choice: they can negotiate with him or face growing civil unrest.

“[I]f they [our white brothers] refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.”

Russell also quotes a fascinating Wall Street Journal interview with Sidney Smyer, the president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer brokered the deal with King and the SCLC. The Chamber of Commerce president talks of the desperation of the Montgomery business community to end the racial violence, owing to its extremely negative economic impact.

A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

2010 Free Press

Book Review

(This book review is divided into three parts. The first traces white America‘s puritanical work ethic and tradition of self-denial. The second discusses the debt of gratitude Americans owe prostitutes and ex-slaves for many of the liberties we currently take for granted. The third discusses Martin Luther King’s little publicized campaign to rid black people of “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits.)

Part I

I absolutely loved A Renegade History of the United States. This is definitely my kind of book. It think it’s a great pity it didn’t receive more attention in the progressive and so-called “alternative media. In my view, it’s even more important than Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, due to its examination of social influences that cause the disadvantaged to reject middle class rules and convention. I think it should be required reading for all progressives who are serious about recruiting white and minority blue collar Americans. It turns all the “rights and responsibilities” claptrap we hear from liberal and progressive pundits on its head, including all the “moral high ground” talk. The notion that virtue and moral purity have any role to play in radical change is ludicrous. It appeals to beliefs and value systems that have never held any sway with the working class.

Thaddeus Russell’s second book offers a totally unique but compelling perspective on the expansion of personal liberty in the US and other English speaking countries. Unlike Zinn’s The People’s History and similar “working class” histories, Russell argues that that most of the person freedoms we enjoy originated, not from political movements, but from the refusal of renegades, degenerates and discontents to accept the puritanical work ethic the founding fathers tried to foist on us. In other words, we should thank America’s drunkards, prostitutes, pirates, slackers, “shiftless” slaves and juvenile delinquents for the unprecedented levels of personal freedom Americans enjoy.

I was really surprised by many parts of Russell’s book, especially where he describes the uptight, repressed social conservatives (including Martin Luther King) who led American campaigns for abolition, women’s suffrage, labor rights and civil rights. Despite their high profile campaigns for specific legal “rights,” the leaders of these movements worked nearly as hard trying to correct the “inappropriate” behavior of the masses they claimed to represent.

Our Socially Conservative Founding Fathers

Russell sets the stage by reminding us that the Puritans first left England due to the profound corruption in their homeland, as evidenced by liquor consumption, public holidays, communal feasts, sporting events and public festivals such as May Day. Most of the colonies they established in the new world glorified the ideal of hard work and strict frugality and scorned all forms of pleasure, including music, dancing and the purchase of luxuries and wearing of colorful apparel. The founding fathers who laid out the workings of our republican form of government were all steeped in these influences. Their writings universally condemn the lower classes of the colonies for the failure to live up to these precepts. Some examples:

• John Adams writes about the “corruption” and “depravity” of ordinary Americans being a worse enemy than “famine, pestilence and the sword.”

• Alexander Hamilton called the behaviors of lower class Americans “vicious” and “vile.”

• Samuel Adams wrote about a “torrent of vice” running through the country.

According to Russell, what the founding fathers referred to as corruption, depravity, viciousness and vice were behavior many of us would consider personal freedoms, such as drinking, dancing, non marital sex (especially between different races), prostitution and homosexuality (both were legal in the 18th century). What I find most fascinating about Russell’s description of early industrialism is that factory workers, not their bosses, decided when they would show up for work and when they would go home.

The Internal Restraint of Citizenship

One of the primary aims of the founding fathers, according to Russell, was to stem this libertine way of life by establishing a system of government that replaced the external controls of the monarchy with the internal restraint of citizenship. They were all part of a transatlantic movement, heavily influenced by British philosopher John Locke, which believed that “self rule” was the most effective method of instilling self-discipline. This comes out most clearly in Russell’s description of the Freedmen Schools the Republicans established in the South, in order to persuade ex-slaves that freedom meant renouncing pleasures such as music, dancing, and unrestrained sexuality.

The ratification of the Constitution set up a system of government that placed a number of uptight sexually repressed lawmakers in control of state and federal government, the legal system and, to a large extent, public education and the press. Most states moved to enact strict laws against many of the “depravities” the founding fathers found so offensive: prostitution; taverns that allowed “suggestive” music and dancing and the intermingling of races; birth control; homosexuality and the right of women to own property, enter male identified professions and engage in sex outside of marriage.

To be continued.

In How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007 South End Press), Peter Gelderloos takes up where Ward Churchill’s 1985 Pacifism as Pathology leaves off – expanding on Churchill’s basic premises (see “Pacifism as Pathology” http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/04/27/pacifism-as-pathology-book-review/) with more recent historical examples. Like Churchill, Gelderloos bemoans the determination of nonviolence proponents to impose their ideological views across the entire progressive movement. He blames this mainly on The Nation magazine and other “alternative” media outlets, which falsely frame the debate as a question of “nonviolent” vs. “violent” political change tactics. What Churchill, Gelderloos, Jensen and others actually propose is an organizing approach that incorporates a diversity of tactics.

Gelderloos divides his book into seven chapters, each debunking a specific myth about nonviolence:

Chapter 1 Nonviolence is ineffective – Here Gelderloos exposes the falsified history of supposedly successful nonviolent resistance movements. On close examination, none of the examples commonly promoted by nonviolent proponents is either exclusively nonviolent or successful. In the case of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign in India, Gelderloos points out that the Mahatma was elevated to fame by the British press, who chose to focus on his acts of civil disobedience, rather than the hundreds of freedom fighters alongside him who were planting bombs and assassinating British officials and native civil servants. Gelderloos also points out that India (and Pakistan) remain deeply oppressed and exploited countries. That their “independence” in 1947 merely transferred them from direct colonial to neo-colonial rule (economic domination enforced by the World Bank and IMF).

Gelderloos describes a parallel process occurring in the case of Martin Luther King, highlighting that the mainstream media never reported on the Birmingham civil rights marches that degenerated into riots – but which were always the real trigger for both local and federal law changes. Among numerous other examples, he contrasts the millions of peaceful demonstrators worldwide who were unable to stop the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – with the single 2004 train bombing that led the Spanish government to withdraw their troops from the “coalition of the willing.”

Chapter 2 Nonviolence is racist –  In this chapter, Gelderloos agrees with Churchill that the vast majority of dogmatic nonviolent proponents are privileged middle class whites, for whom the full repression of the capitalist state is never a genuine fear. He cites the example of black looting (usually for food and basic necessities) being condemned as violent, whereas actions in which white activists cut a chain fence to trespass on a military based are embraced as “nonviolent” and acceptable. Similar condemnation of third world autonomy movements is extremely common among white progressives. As an example, Gelderloos highlights the near universal condemnation of both the Iraq and Afghan insurgency against US occupation. He also points out that by refusing to engage in violent resistance themselves, US antiwar activists essentially abandon Iraqi and Afghan insurgents to battle the US military industrial complex on their own.

Chapter 3 Nonviolence is statist (i.e. serves the state) – Nonviolent activists share the fundamental view that the state (via police, FBI, CIA and military) should hold the monopoly on violence. In addition to frequently calling on the police to protect their privileged status, in moments of conflict, they always line up with state authority. Among other examples, Gelderloos describes the Poor Peoples March at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg handed out badges to protestors willing to commit to nonviolent protest, and where the police manhandled and arrested protestors (without badges) who were either black, covered their faces or refused to submit to arbitrary searches. Not only did the nonviolent marchers fail to come to their defense, but they essentially blamed the arrestees for the police decision to target them.

Chapter 4 Nonviolence is patriarchal (i.e. supports male oppression of women and sexual minorities) – Gelderloos points out (with examples) that both the mainstream and alternative media refuse to acknowledge the extreme sexism and homophobia of Martin Luther King. He also describes how the nonviolent movement only permits women to use violence to defend themselves in individual cases of attempted rape, and not in situations of ongoing domestic violence. Or against the gradual systemic violence – for example the harmful corporate-produced chemicals in their breast milk – that is irreparably damaging their children’s health.

Chapter 5 Nonviolence is tactically and strategically inferior – Gelderloos demonstrates that the nonviolent movement is totally focused on short term tactics and unable to show how any of these tactics will achieve their long term goals. When confronted with their inability to achieve goals, nonviolent advocates typically come back with the pat response: “Political change takes a long time and may not come in our lifetime.”

Gelderloo bemoans the millions of dollars wasted on grassroots lobbying, which is almost never effective. Even when Congress meets your demands on paper, they always backtrack. Gelderloos gives the example of the School of the Americas campaign, which sucked up years of organizing and nonviolent protests When enough pressure built up, the Pentagon simply closed the SOA and reopened it under a new name. He asks how many social centers, free clinics, prison reform groups, etc. – with the potential to produce real change – could have been built with this wasted money.

He also compares specific tactics that have a goal of disrupting “business as usual.” Does it make more sense to blockade a bridge for a few hours by forming a human chain – or putting it out of commission for six months by blowing it up?

Chapter 6 Nonviolence is deluded – Gelderloos uses this chapter to outline the extreme contradictions in the views embraced by nonviolent advocates. He points out that they support state violence all the time, simply by paying taxes (at present many support the NATO attacks on Libya). Privileged activists need to understand what the rest of the world has known all along: neutrality isn’t possible. The question is which violence scares us the most and which side we will stand on.

Chapter 7 The alternative: possibilities for revolutionary activism – Gelderloos finishes with his vision of strategies that are most likely to succeed in dismantling centralized state and corporate structures. In doing so, he stresses that localized groups will need to self-organize and decide on strategy, based on peoples’ strengths. He envisions a loose confederation of local autonomous groups that will form non-corporate structures (free clinics, cooperatives, farmers markets, etc) to meet local needs. While he sees no need to convert everyone to anarchism, he emphasizes the need to be continually on guard against cooptation by the Institutional Left – by ensuring decisions are made based on circumstances, not arbitrary ideology.

He also stresses the absolute necessity for these groups to learn self defense – to ensure if they occupy a building to create a free clinic the police can’t take it away from them.

A PDF of Gelderloos’ book can be downloaded free at http://zinelibrary.info/files/How%20Nonviolence%20Protects%20The%20State.pdf – but without the extensive endnotes. If you want the endnotes, you have to buy it. Even so, Gelderloos, a true anarchist, gives suggestions at his PDF site on how to pirate the endnotes if you can’t afford the book.

Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America

(Book Review)

By Ward Churchill (2007 AK Press)

AIM activist Ward Churchill

Pacifism as Pathology is a collection of essays centered around Ward Churchill’s original 1985 essay “Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American Pseudopraxis.” The premise of the essay is that the militant nonviolent stance assumed by the US progressive movement is based on irrational psychological reasons rather than strategic reasons or moral principle.

Viewpoints from a Range of Activists

The 2007 edition contains a preface by Derrick Jensen, who lays out compelling reasons for the necessity of “violence” in bringing about genuine political change in his 2006 book Endgame. Jensen’s argument, as in Endgame, is primarily ecological. Humankind is being systematically killed off by the capitalist class, via their poisoning of the air, water and food chain, as well as their heedless imposition of catastrophic climate change. Jensen poses the very reasonable question: are we willing to retaliate violently to save our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren?

The next essay is Ed Mead’s preface to the 1998 edition of Pacifism as Pathology, immediately following an 18 year prison term as a result of armed actions (bombings of state and federal buildings in Washington State) conducted by the George Jackson Brigade. Based on his experiences, he arrives at the following conclusions: 1)  pacifism as a strategy of achieving social, political and economic change can only lead to dead end liberalism – the most vicious and violent ruling class in history won’t give up privilege without a physical fight; 2) because 99.9% of practitioners of political violence will eventually confront death or imprisonment, it’s imperative that political violence be carried out in a manner calculated to win; and 3) although the George Jackson Brigade applied the tool of revolutionary violence when its use wasn’t appropriate, he feels pride that they erred on the side of making revolution instead of the alternative.

The book also contains an afterwards by Canadian Activist Mike Ryan describing his frustration after 20 years of nonviolent resistance as part of the Canadian peace movement – and his conclusion that violent resistance must be allowed as a tactic for genuine political change to occur.

Churchill’s Infamous Assault Rifle Workshop

Churchill explains, in his 1998 introduction, that Pacificism as Pathology was originally written in 1985 as part of a four year debate over a workshop “Demystification of the Assault Rifle” that he gave at a 1981 Radical Therapy conference. He was invited to give the workshop owing to an admission by many activists that their fear of weapons was chiefly responsible for their rejection of violence as a political strategy. The reaction of some conference participants was to pass a resolution banning similar workshops in the future, as well as the presence of firearms (except those of the police or military) at any Radical Therapy conference. Churchill was invited to write an article on his views for the magazine Issues in Radical Therapy, which was subsequently Xeroxed and distributed widely throughout North America. While Churchill acknowledges the right of all activists to personally reject violent strategies and tactics, he challenges the right of nonviolent proponents to condemn activists willing to embrace property destruction and/or armed self-defense among a diversity of strategies. As he points out, activists willing to engage in violent resistance wouldn’t dream of trying to force their views on nonviolent activists.

Armed Jewish Uprisings Under Nazi Occupation

For me, the most valuable part of the book is the first section about Bruno Bettelheim and Jewish armed uprisings, in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos and in numerous concentration camps during the second world war. This is an aspect of World War II history I was totally unaware if, as the work of Bettelheim and other scholars documenting armed Jewish resistance are carefully sanitized from the history textbooks served up to US high school and college students.

Bettelheim, who contrasts the Jews who resisted violently with the majority of Jews, who followed the Nazis passively to the camps and even to the gas chambers, makes a strong case for his belief that the persecution of the Jews was aggravated by the pervasive lack of fight back. He blames their failure to resist on strong psychological denial – a pathological need to cling to an illusion of “business as normal” – that ultimately overwhelmed their basic survival needs. The logical position would have been to accept the cold reality that their own lives were doomed and to use their deaths to save the life of other Jews by making the extermination more difficult. He points out that Jews had easy access to guns in 1930s and 1940s Germany, and there was no reason why every Jew that was arrested couldn’t take one or two SS officers with them.

Churchill describes how all the revolts inflicted significant damage on the Nazi machine. The revolt at Auschwitz killed 70 SS officers and destroyed the crematorium. Armed rebellions at Sorbibor and Reblinka were even more effective, and Sorbibor had to be closed following the uprising. There were also lesser insurrections at Kruszyna, Krychaw and Kopernik.

Militant Nonviolence: Racist, Deluded and Irrational

Churchill devotes the rest of the book to correcting historical distortions regarding Gandhi’s and Martin Luther Kings nonviolent resistance movements (which have been totally whitewashed by the ruling elite); a brief historical overview of the ineffectiveness of nonviolence in contrast to campaigns incorporating violent resistance; an analysis of the inherent racism implicit in the dogmatic nonviolence promoted by white upper middle class activists; and an outline of the irrational psychological motivations underlying militant nonviolence.

Although Churchill couches his psychological analysis in much more polite terms than I would, he believes that some white upper middle class activists are deeply conflicted about whether they really want to dismantle capitalism and give up their position of privilege. Thus they adamantly reject any approach incorporating violent resistance, owing to its historical record of effectiveness.

Pacifism as Pathology can be downloaded free at http://www.cambridgeaction.net/images/c/c7/Pacifism_As_Pathology.pdf

How Nonviolence Protects the State is the title of a 2007 book by Peter Gelderloos. It can be downloaded free at http://zinelibrary.info/files/How%20Nonviolence%20Protects%20The%20State.pdf

As a long time activist, I have always been troubled by the militant nonviolent perspective that dominates the progressive movement in the US. In some circles, the taboo is so absolute that activists are systematically demonized for raising the subject. I tend to get suspicious whenever I see the politically correct thought police swing into action – especially when they embrace views that are clearly counterproductive to successful organizing (the US left, in contrast to other countries, is a shambles). An arbitrary taboo against specific topics is often a sign that your movement has been infiltrated, either by Cointelpro or left gatekeeper agents.

The systematic misrepresentation of Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s views on violence also puzzles me. Neither were militant pacifists. Gandhi clearly articulated situations in which he would advocate violence as a strategy. Whereas as Mark Kurlansky describes in 1968, King employed violence strategically in some of his marches (in which female protestors slapped cops to provoke a violent overreaction) to maximize media attention.

Likewise I have never understood the failure to distinguish between property destruction and interpersonal violence. If anything progressive organizers come down harder on activists who break shop windows (because of its greater harm to corporate interests?) than those who get into scuffles with cops or counter protestors.

Alienating the Working Class

As an organizer, however, what bothers me most is that militant nonviolence is totally alien to working class culture and creates a major stumbling block in drawing blue collar workers into the movement for change. We try to recruit working class activists by appealing to their deep resentment over the unfairness of wage exploitation and privilege. Then we outlaw their natural reaction – to level that privilege by destroying property and looting (to reclaim what they believe is rightfully theirs) or bashing a cop or security guard who is manhandling them or standing between them and food for their kids. I have repeatedly seen blue collar activists marginalized and demonized in these debates. And yet people wonder why they are drawn to the Tea Party movement (which isn’t bound by politically correct niceties) rather than the left.

Reviving the Debate

Obviously I’m extremely pleased to see Gelderloos, American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill, environmental activist Derrick Jensen and even the culture jamming group Adbusters revive the debate. In 2008 Churchill released the second edition of Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. This can also be downloaded free at http://www.cambridgeaction.net/images/c/c7/Pacifism_As_Pathology.pdf

Moreover I am unsurprised to learn that the taboo against violent protest isn’t a spontaneous development in the American progressive movement. As in the case of alternate media outlets that refuse to report on 911 or the JFK assassination, there is increasing evidence that government-backed left gatekeeping foundations have carefully inserted themselves into roles where they dominate the dialogue around the issue of violence.

The Government Role in Promoting Nonviolence

Australian journalist and researcher Michael Barker is one of the most prolific writers about the role of CIA, Pentagon and State Department linked foundations in the nonviolent movement. The ones he has followed most closely are the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Institute for Peace, the Albert Einstein Institute, the Arlington Institute, Freedom House, the NED-funded Human Rights Watch, the International Republican Institute, and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/38214).

Most of the research into these foundations focuses on their work overseas, particularly their active role in creating “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. However as Barker points out, the ICNC also has major influence, via its workshops, literature and documentaries, on progressive organizing in the US.

To be continued

Click to Play: iframe>

Lyrics:

Won’t you Please Come to Chicago by Graham Nash

Though your brother’s bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that’s known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … to get better

Politicians sit yourselves down
There’s nothing for you here
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For a ride

Don’t ask Jack to help you
‘Cause he’ll turn the other ear
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Or else join the other side

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

Somehow people must be free
I hope the day comes soon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Show your face

From the bottom of the ocean
To the mountains on the moon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
No one else can take your place

Yes, we can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

***

The most eye-opening section of Kurlansky’s 1968 (see previous blog) is chapter 3, in which he discusses the importance of violence and the rhetoric of violence in attracting media attention. As a veteran of the 1999 Battle of Seattle (the Seattle anti-WTO protest), I can’t help but agree. If it hadn’t been for a group of Black Bloc anarchists who smashed store front windows at MacDonald’s and Nike, our 75,000 strong protest would never have made the major dailies, much less the six o’clock news. Of course, to give the Seattle police their due, the police riot also attracted significant media attention.

Violence? Or Property damage?

Police violence in Seattle

Violence=Publicity

According to Kurlansky, no one understand the importance of the media in movement building better than Mohandas K. Gandhi, who inspired the current non-violent movement. Gandhi went to great lengths to obtain Indian, British, and American coverage of every protest he organized. In fact it was Gandhi himself who first spoke of the value of British violence in enticing the media to cover the Quit India movement.

Kurlansky goes on to describe a police chief who thwarted Martin Luther King’s organizing efforts in Albany, Georgia by studying his non-violent tactics and countering them with non-violent law enforcement tactics. As a result, King’s Albany campaign was a total failure. Because there was no police violence, it received no national media attention. And without media attention, King was unable to pressure Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to enforce federal civil rights laws there.

After Albany, King and other civil rights leaders deliberately targeted towns with hothead police chiefs and angry volatile mayors. Korlansky relates an incident in 1965 in which a King protester named Annie Lee Cooper punched the sheriff and then dared him to hit her. The photo of Sheriff Clark clubbing a defenseless woman made the front page of newspapers throughout the country.

Later in the book, Kurlansky describes the most highly publicized student antiwar protests of 1968. Here again, he stresses that they only took on national importance because of the repressive (sometimes violent) measures government and university administrators (particularly at Columbia University and University of California-Berkeley) took to stop them. Had the authorities merely ignored the student protests and sit-ins, they never would have received the national media attention that made them historic events.

The 1968 Democratic Convention

At Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, yet again it was police violence by Mayor Daley’s goons that drew national media attention to what was essentially a harmless prank by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs and other Yippies (Youth International Party). Featured events at the Yippies’ Festival of Light in Lincoln Park (where the police riot occurred), included snaking dancing, poetry, mantras, the Yippie Olympics, a Miss Yippie Contest and Pin the Rubber on the Pope.

In addition to attacking non-violent protesters engaged in civil disobedience (remaining in the park after the 11 p.m. closing time), police also viciously attacked reporters, cameramen, as well as going on a clubbing rampage in the neighborhood (Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was one of the local residents who was attacked).

All this magically transformed the Yippies non-violent prank into front page news. Though ironically they had to share the limelight with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Violent Soviet repression of Dubcek’s freedom movement also made this event international front page news.

Police riot at 1968 Democratic convention

To be continued, with a discussion of the Czechoslovakian student/intellectual movement that resulted in Prague Spring and its implications for a repressive American regime in 2010.

The above title is an example of a novel international counterculture offensive called “culture jamming” or “meme warfare,” popularized by the Vancouver-based Adbusters Magazine and Adbusters Media Foundation (https://www.adbusters.org/). A “meme,” as defined in Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn’s 2000 book Culture Jam, is defined as a unit of information (a catchphrase, tune, fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. According to Lasn, memes compete with one another and can alter behaviour, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. In Lasn’s view, meme warfare is about challenging the mental stranglehold of the advertising culture, reversing America’s suicidal consumer binge and launching a revolution that ultimately frees us from the corporate stranglehold over society, government and our lives.

Culture Jamming: the Movie

Culture Jamming, which I first saw in 2004 and is one of my favourite all time films, gives real life examples of culture jammers in action. As they take a common media messages or images (on billboards, for example) and tweak them a little to call attention – in a humorous and mind blowing way – to the bullshit the media bombards us with on a daily basis. And simultaneously remind us of some unspoken truth the media is trying to conceal from us.

For example Adbusters has redesigned the American flag with corporate logos (I got one free with my subscription) instead of stars:

The Adbusters Flag

***

Here are some other familiar Adbusters images:

***

The film Cultural Jamming also taught me that you don’t have to belong to a group to participate. A lot of individuals use stencil art – on trash cans, construction site fences, vacant buildings, etc. – to deliver culture jamming messages. When I get depressed, I sometimes indulge in a little culture jamming myself (like a woman in the movie), by writing culture jamming messages on address labels (for example, “Sorry I destroyed your planet”) and sticking them on trash cans and telephone poles and in phone booths and other prominent locations in New Plymouth’s central business district.

I also culture jam by incorporating the following footer in all my emails, lest people forget the US government monitors all their communications:

NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice, and certainly without probable cause. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse other than petitioning your elected officials and exercising your constitutional rights. See: https://ssd.eff.org/ for solutions.

***

Adbusters‘  Call for Revolution

When Lasne talks about revolution, he means it. In fact the last two Adbusters – which call for an international Carnivalesque Rebellion Nov 22-28 (a “tsunami of global dissent”) – are quite literally about revolution. Both describe in a graphic and detailed way the strategies and tactics of revolution.  The most recent issue, for example, contains some very thoughtful discussions about Black Bloc tactics, about creatively reinventing civil disobedience to increase its mass appeal, about the role of vandalism as “an intentional mode of aesthetic expression,” and finally about the controversy regarding the role of violence in civil protest – including commentary from Hannah Arrendt, Ken O’Keefe and Gandhi himself about instances in which a violent response to authority is absolutely indicated (I have recently read a fascinating book, 1968, by British author Mark Kurlunsky describing instances in which Martin Luther King allowed the use of violence in protest marches to increase media coverage).

However most striking in the current issue are numerous full page images of demonstrators from around the world confronting armed, violent authority.

The Adbusters blog is also well worth a visit: https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters It talks about the potential of building on the growing unrest in Europe (funny how poorly the Sept 29th general strike in Spain and large anti-austerity protests in Belgium, Greece, Iceland and elsewhere in Europe have been covered in the US media). Adbusters find it particularly significant that Portugal’s largest union has called for a general strike for Nov 24^th – right in the middle of the Nov 22-28 Carnivalesque Rebellion.

Affirmative Action: Nixon’s Brainchild

More from Webster Tarpley Barrack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography

There are a lot of misconceptions about the origin of affirmative action policies that require employers to hire and schools and universities to enroll a minimum percentage of women and minorities. Fox News would have you believe these policies came out of a vast left liberal conspiracy. The truth is that affirmative action and racial quotas and set asides were first rolled out by a Republican president – Richard M. Nixon – and his Secretary of Labor George Shultz – in collaboration with McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation. This is another fascinating aspect of the hidden history of foundations that Webster Tarpley explores in his unauthorized biography of Obama.

It’s obvious from their own public commentary that the motives of these three men were anything but altruistic. Their intent in launching these programs was not to promote the interests of women and minorities – but to splinter and suppress a progressive voice in the Democratic Party that was becoming a threat to business interests. In meetings with Republican Congressional leaders, Nixon himself stressed the importance of exploiting the controversial Philadelphia Plan (a hiring mandate incorporating quotas in the largely white construction industry) to “drive a wedge between civil rights groups and organized labor.”

Who Was McGeorge Bundy?

Tarpley’s review of Bundy’s public life reveals his role in all this was pivotal. An army intelligence officer during World War II, he became National Security Advisor to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and was largely responsible for the cynical “strategic hamlets” policy in Vietnam. Bundy left government in 1966 to head of the Ford Foundation (until 1979), where he totally revamped the foundation’s agenda to focus on the oppression of African Americans and other minorities. This was accompanied by a simultaneous shift away from funding broad economic needs, such as housing, education, mass transit and health care – to more divisive political and cultural programs that specifically targeted white blue collar racism as the cause of minority disadvantage.

The Old Divide and Conquer Strategy

At the time Bundy, as a member of both Skull and Bones and the Foreign Relations Council, clearly identified with the Wall Street elite. It was his view that the efforts of Martin Luther King (who opposed racial quotas because of their inherent divisiveness) and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee to merge the struggle of the black community with the labor and antiwar movement posed a serious threat to the business interests he represented. His strategic response was to target white blue collar workers as the main barrier to black self determination – and to pour millions of dollars of Ford Foundation funding into the work of race baiting black separatists and nationalists, affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality. Tarpley specifically links the 1968 inner city riots (from which many African American communities have never fully recovered) to the propaganda activities of Ford funded community programs. Bundy was clearly guilty of incitement to riot, and Tarpley laments he was never prosecuted for it.

Another of Bundy’s strategic moves was to break up the traditional black-Jewish coalition in New York City. He did so by funding minority community coalitions to churn out rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda directed at leftist Jewish teachers and administrators, many of whom had radical New Deal backgrounds. The demand posed by these community groups (backed by $1.4 million from the Ford Foundation) for the right to arbitrarily hire and fire teachers was a blatant violation of their union contract and an important precipitant of the disastrous 1968 teacher’s strike.

Following Nixon’s election in 1968, he, Nixon and Shultz collaborated in pushing affirmative action legislation through Congress, which included a revival of the Philadelphia Plan (first trialed and abandoned under Lyndon Johnson) and the creation of the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission.

To be continued (with a fast forward to the foundations Obama worked for in Chicago)