Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Feb 21, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Some minor changes have been made.
Editor’s note: Originally posted on CounterCurrents on February 18 but I did not find it until yesterday. The aspects in the article were compiled on February 17, I believe, so some of the stories cited are dated, but the ideas of the post are still valid. There actually were mentions of the orange menace’s use of the term “legendary warriors” in the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Washington Examiner, but only the latter actually interpreted his remarks, saying that he was talking about “U.S. special operation commandos.” The names of the current president have been changed to the following term: “the orange menace” or a close variation in this printed version.
With the orange menace’s claims of the “dishonest media” and “fake news” at his recent press conference, and liberals defending the corporate media as a “watchdog,” the reality of the situation is hard to determine. Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines adversarial as “of or characterized by opposition, disagreement, hostility” and watchdog as “a person or group that keeps watch to prevent waste, unethical practices.” Using those definitions, I looked at the U$ corporate media garnering the most praise by liberals currently, apart from any Fox affiliate which is pro-orange menace.
I look at CNN’s website, and there are stories about the orange menace’s recent press conference, ousted National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, the orange menace issuing a new immigration order, the border wall, a “Russian spy ship” off Connecticut, and the liberal sketch comedy show, SNL. As I look at MSNBC’s website, it isn’t much different. Other than obviously promoting their TV shows, the stories range from the orange menace’s admission to a wrong claim about the Electoral College, why Kellyanne Conway isn’t booked on Morning Joe, an interview with Rep. Elijah Cummings, and Netanyahu on the two-state solution. Other stories include Chuck Todd declaring that the orange menace has an “anti-media” stance, an interview with Rep. Seth Moulton saying that the orange menace is a “serial liar,” a GOP senator defending the orange menace Congress removing a Obama gun law, resistance against the orange menace’s deportations, and Susan Sarandon on the orange menace. NBC News has a similar feel. There are stories about Mike Flynn, the orange menace’s Muslim immigration ban, the orange menace’s EPA pick Scott Pruitt, ICE startling lawmakers, the Congressional Black Caucus, anti-Muslim groups, “the Russians” according to U$ officials, immigrants in the U$, and the orange menace’s new labor pick, Alexander Acosta. Additionally, a number of MSNBC stories are reprinted on NBC News’s website.
CBS News and ABC News aren’t any better. CBS News has a story on the orange menace’s “achievements,” the orange menace’s lie about Electoral College numbers, Mattis speaking with Russian counterparts, Flynn’s replacement turning down the job, the orange menace asking a black reporter about the Congressional Black Caucus, and the orange menace blaming the media for the Flynn firing. Stories also focus on the pro-immigrant protest across the country, “Day Without Immigrants,” Elijah Cummings wanting to meet the orange menace, the orange menace overturning a coal mining debris law, Nikki Haley on the two state solution, and the Russian “spy ship.” As for Disney-owned ABC News, the stories are about the same. They focus on the orange menace’s recent press conference, a new immigration order to be issued by the orange menace, the “Russian spy ship,” Acosta’s nomination by the orange menace, rise of hate groups across the country, undocumented immigrants, the “Day Without Immigrants,” Russian spies and the White House, and the orange menace’s “battle with the press,” Other stories include the vital role of immigrants in the U$ economy and the House GOP considering an investigation into leaks which discredited Flynn.
The Washington Post and New York Times might be seen as reputable by some but looking at their stories, this is thrown into question. The Post has stories about Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, Flynn’s replacement turning down the offer, the orange menace’s family lifestyle, the orange menace’s recent news conference, federal immigration raids, EPA nominee Scott Pruitt, House GOP plan to eliminate Obamacare, and possible review of US intelligence agencies discarded. Other stories focus on depleted uranium used by the Pentagon, ICE detention, and many more. The New York Times, often called “The Grey Lady,” now days, is not any better. Its top stories include the orange menace’s recent press conference, the 2 state solution, the orange menace’s new pick for labor secretary, Flynn’s replacement turns down the job, EPA nominee Scott Pruitt, and GOP plan to replace Obamacare. Other articles focus on powers of border agents, claims of a “deep state” in the US, the “Day Without Immigrants,” bookstores resisting the orange menace and a number of other subjects.
All in all, none of these stories fulfill the “adversarial” or “watchdog” role the corporate media is claimed to have. The orange menace thinks that the media is “too tough” on him, which a third of Americans agree with, however, the media’s realm of criticism covers very small area. For one, the corporate media has not challenged the orange menace on his obfuscation over Afghanistan. The orange menace recently, in a call with Afghani President Ashraf Ghani, seemed to advocate a continuation of the war, by pledging to continue to implement the US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed in 2012. The agreement declares that Afghanistan is a “NATO ally” and that US forces will be in the country until 2024 in order to fight “al-Qaeda and its affiliates,” among other aspects. By advocating for the continuation of this agreement, the orange menace is also supporting, by extension, the Bilateral Security Agreement, signed in 2013. This agreement, in force until 2024, declares that U$ military operations “to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate in the common fight against terrorism,” allows U$ forces to control certain facilities and areas within the country, frees U$ vehicles, vessels, and airplanes from “inspection, regulation, or registration requirements,” exempts U$ military contractors from certain requirements, and exempts U$ forces from paying taxes or other charges, to name a few aspects.
There were no stories challenging the orange menace’s views of Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, largely because the media agrees with them, as those countries are seen as “enemies” of the empire. Of course there were no stories on the orange menace’s endorsement of Special Forces across the world. Earlier this month he called them “legendary warriors” engaged in the “most secret, sensitive and daring missions,” showing that the golden age of the “gray zone,” started under Obama, will continue. There were also no stories, except in progressive media, about the implications of the orange menace’s pro-cop and anti-Black Lives Matter executive orders.
While it is right to call out the orange menace’s lies, deceptions, and deceit, the corporate media is largely ignoring many of his policy maneuvers. Instead, it is better to engage in solidarity with countries under attack by U$ imperialism and resist the orange menace’s fascist moves, especially when it comes to anti-immigrant and pro-cop measures, but not get caught up in the supposed the orange menace-Russia “connection.”
This quote is an excerpt of a documentary titled “The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975.” The bombing referred to here is the infamous act of white supremacist terrorism in 1963.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Feb 20, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
With the beginning of the current era, the calls for gun control have been partially (but not fully) muted. This article will go beyond the critical history of gun control and armed resistance by discussing my justification for rejecting gun control and, instead, an embrace of armed self-defense and armed resistance, terms which I will explore later in this post.
The battle between gun control, gun rights, and armed resistance
Gun control and armed resistance, with the latter used to defend against acts of oppression, have been often at odds. When the White European settlers came to the Western Hemisphere, indigenous peoples “offered heroic resistance” but they were ultimately suppressed because “Europeans possessed a huge superiority in weapons.” [1] At the same time, armed resistance has been an effective form of self-defense. During the Reconstruction period, Black militias were formed to defend the Black population against racist Whites, sometimes even unifying with poor whites to achieve this goal. Examples of such self-defense later on includes Robert F. Williams and his gun club, called the Black Armed Guard, meaning that “becoming a threat to the capitalist order and defending the gains of the workers movement and democratic rights through force if necessary” is important. The long history of racial domination in the United States (1510-2017), with “systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World” beginning on January 22, 1510, shows that the right and ability to own guns is an essential tool to “stand up to white terrorists and overt racist ideologues.” This has been flaunted by the fact that, as also noted in the previous post of this series, some of the first gun control laws were aimed at Blacks, which is why many view the debate over such control with caution, and the fact that the KKK was first a “gun-control organization,” and that policies like “stop and frisk” were driven by gun control desires, feeding an “exploding prison population.” Such history allows gun rights supporters on the “Right” to claim that gun control has racist roots, even though some liberals say that this does not negate the possibility of adopting any gun regulations in the present.
The history of guns and gun rights have become politicized. Some claim that the assertion that gun control is racist and that the civil rights movement succeeded because blacks “were willing to take up arms against their oppressors” came from libertarian and “obscure right-wing” websites. [2] Some of these people have also used the example of gun control laws enacted after the Civil War and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was “blocked by segregationists when he tried to get his concealed carry permit” to argue against current gun control efforts, criticizing “Obama or his gun-grabbing cohorts,” saying that gun control is racially motivated. This claim reportedly was tied with the claim that “slavery might not have lasted so long in America if black people had been granted the right to bear arms at the outset of their arrival in the new world.” To digress a bit here, not only is the claim that armed enslaved Blacks could have resisted their bondage with guns ahistorical (because why would the white overlords give enslaved Blacks guns at all? wouldn’t that undermine their whole system of control?) but it implies that enslaved Blacks did not resist their chains of human bondage. Any analysis of history shows this to be completely and utterly false. Yet again, gun rights supporters will do anything they can to promote the use of guns. Saying that, the liberal arguments for gun control are at times so deluded as to be a joke.
Ladd Everitt, the former communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), a gun reform organization, is one of theses people. In his article on Waging Nonviolence, one of those progressive publications, he scoffs at the idea of gun control being racist, asking “if gun control laws had targeted blacks for disarmament, how would they have been able to successfully engage in armed resistance against White terrorists during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement?” [3] This ignorant argument doesn’t even make sense, because it disregards the fact that enslaved Blacks gained guns during the Civil War and due to evasion of gun control laws, allowing them to engage in armed resistance. Apart from Everitt’s silly argument, he then claims that calling gun control racist doesn’t make sense because “for most of our 234 years, the entire U.S. legal system has been arrayed against blacks” and that history is “replete with examples of African-American communities being severely punished and repressed after they did take up arms against white terrorists.” Now, he is correct that the entire U$ legal system has been arrayed against Blacks and that some Black communities did suffer backlash from armed resistance, but he dismisses the obvious reality that such resistance allowed Blacks to survive through years upon years of bondage, discrimination, and bigotry.
As the years have gone by, the “political forms of the left-right axis” have begun to change. In 1976, cities like DC led the way in gun control, with the majority black city council banning “residents from owning or carrying handguns (excluding guards, police, and those with already registered handguns).” [4] By 1989, the NAACP voted to support gun control measures, and four years later, during “the peak of gun homicides among African-Americans,” 74% supported gun control.” Still, a number of groups have historically engaged in armed self-defense, including the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets (which has a modern version formed in 1993) the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and the still-existing American Indian Movement. Currently there is the Fruit of Islam, Muslim Girls Training, the Red Guard Party (Maoists in Texas), Brothas Against Racist Cops, Redneck Revolt, Black Guns Matter, the John Brown Gun Club/John Brown Militia, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and the Indigenous People’s Liberation Front, among many others, showing that “marginalized communities and their supporters [can use]…firearms for self-defense and the defense of others against hate crimes, protection against the police, and as a means of challenging oppression from across the political spectrum.”
There have been a number of current developments when it comes to gun rights. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, held that the Second Amendment “guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun” rejecting the existing D.C. law that someone could own a shotgun but could not use in self-defense apparently, but Antonin Scalia had a whole set of exceptions to this declaration of gun rights including allowing “laws banning guns in sensitive places…laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, [and] laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed.” [5] This decision was also one of the first fortes into “gay rights activism for the Second Amendment rights of sexual minorities and of all other Americans.”
In 2010, the Supreme Court hit another nail in the coffin of gun control in the United States. In a 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago, the longstanding ban in Chicago of handguns was overturned, with the declaration that the Second Amendment applies to states. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, noted Black Americans who used guns throughout US history, noting that “Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights.” [6] The amicus brief for the Pink Pistols group declared “Recognition Of An Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms Is Literally A Matter Of Life Or Death For Members Of The LGBT Community,” which was cited by Justice Scalia, contending that gun rights are “especially important for women and members of other groups that may be especially vulnerable to violent crime.”Scalia further argued that even the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because it was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which is not likely referring to the law itself, since it NEVER mentions the words “gun” or “arms,” but rather to the fact that “advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cited the disarmament of freed blacks as a reason the law was necessary” as the arch-conservative National Review claims. While these claims may seem erroneous, a number of books seem to back up this assessment as a correct one. There is no doubt that gun rights were on the minds of Radical Republicans in Congress since the State of Mississippi had enacted a law in November 1865, part of the “Black Code” in the state, saying
“…it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed for trial in default of bail…That if any white person shall sell, lend, or give to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto any fire-arms, dirk or bowie-knife, or ammunition, or any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, such person or persons so offending, upon conviction thereof in the county court of his or her county, shall be fined not exceeding fifty dollars, and may be imprisoned.”
“…whenever in any State or district in which the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, and wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms, are refused or denied to negroes, mulattoes, freedmen, refugees, or any other persons, on account of race, color, or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, or wherein they or any of them are subjected to any other or different punishment, pains, or penalties, for the commission of any act or offence, than are prescribed for white persons committing like acts or offences, it shall be the duty of the President of the United States, through the Commissioner, to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases affecting such persons so discriminated against.”
White racist attacks on Southern Blacks and efforts to take guns away from them by the KKK and other terrorist groups likely influenced the provision in the 1868 Mississippi Constitution saying “All persons shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their defense.”
Back to the McDonald case, Clarence Thomas had a concurring opinion which was evidently different from Alito’s. He noted how “blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs” and after this, and the decision itself, articles appeared in numerous conservative publications saying that gun control was racist. [7]
Fast forward to 2013. That year, the Washington Post came out with an article about Black gun clubs in Maryland such as the Metro Gun Club, Big Foot Hunt Club, and elsewhere. The members of the club who were interviewed said that they loved “their guns and recalled growing up in black farming communities where every family had guns for hunting — and protection” noting that such love for guns “spanned generations in their families.” [8] Members had a variety of opinions, with some believing that “guns should be in the hands of decent, honest people” but that assault rifles should be “restricted to military and law-enforcement personnel,” some saying that guns could protect women from rapists, others saying there are new challenges being in favor of guns “in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December and talk of tighter gun control laws,” and one long-time gun owner saying “I’m torn. I don’t want guns to shoot people, but I don’t want you to take away my guns either.”
As the years past, more began to question peaceful protest and thought that violence could be the answer. One writer put it in 2014 that “weeks of peaceful protests and outright riots in Missouri have accomplished nothing” and said that people should act to “preserve their own life” from an out-of-control police state, and then posing the question “is it time to start resisting police with violence?” [9] This question is nothing new, as resistance to police has taken a more combative tone in the past, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, during the main thrust of the Black Power movement.
In 2015, the tension between gun control and gun rights continued. That year, 60 percent of Black Americans believed firmly in gun control, while White Americans believed the opposite. However, the racist history of gun control is present for some in the Black community, with the right to bear arms seen as civil rights issue, support for gun control in this community decreasing in the last 20 years, and support for gun ownership by black Americans has grown, especially since the massacre at the Charleston Emanuel AME Church when gun control was pushed as a solution by President Obama. [10] Taking this into account, it worth remembering that “gun control and race…are inextricably linked.” The idea of gun ownership as a form of civil rights may result in some balking from liberal gun control supporters. One point they can dispute is the idea that guns are used in self-defense. From first glance, it may seem that firearms are not used in self-defense, with gun rights supporters countering that “in most cases shots are never fired, because simply displaying a weapon can deter a criminal.” The idea of guns being used for self-defense is supported by many Americans, even if evidence may not be as clear, especially when it comes to armed civilians ending acts of mass killing, with date from places such as the Violence Policy Center. However, it is worth noting that even the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, cited by gun control advocates, says that “firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense.” While they say that this isn’t a use of self-defense, this is actually the idea entirely. It is worth quoting this Center in full:
“We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense…We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns…We found that these young people were far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use a gun in self-defense, and most of the reported self-defense gun uses were hostile interactions between armed adolescents…Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss.” [11]
You could say that this disproves the idea of armed self-defense, but actually I would say that in a sense, it actually proves the idea by saying that guns can frighten and intimidate. And isn’t that part of self-defense?
In 2015, the Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale. They argues against a ban on standard magazines for common defensive arms, such as popular handguns from Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Springfield or Glocks, making clear the idea of a “relationship between gay rights and gun rights.” [12] That same year, there was a powerful argument against gun control. The writer said that the idea to do something after a tragedy is nothing new, but new gun laws have consequences for Black people. He argued that any new criminal laws should be “carefully considered” saying that gun laws, like many criminal laws have “contributed to sky-high rates of incarceration for minorities,” citing the story of Marissa Alexander, and saying that “strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can also ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes.” He goes on to say that gun control, historically has “been directly or indirectly tied to race,” citing bills such as the Gun Control Act in 1968 and the Mulford Act in 1967, noting that these laws, among others in the years to come, “opened the floodgate to further federalization of criminal laws and the “tough on crime” mindset that dominated late 20th century American politics.” He ends by saying that while “every gun death is a tragedy,” with loss of life being horrendous, gun laws, even if well-intentioned, disproportionately burden the black community, arguing that “as calls grow for more gun laws, let’s not compound a tragedy by continuing the same mistakes of the past.”
From 2015 to the present, Black Lives Matter fits into this equation. They didn’t focus on gun control as a priority possibly because of the “racist history of gun control” and the fact that such gun laws are more likely to be used against Blacks than Whites. [13]
There have been a number of developments in the fight between gun rights and gun control. The NRA, which declared that women with guns can stop abusers and rapists, called for armed guards in schools after Sandy Hook), was mum when unarmed Blacks (incl. Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, and Tamir Rice) were killed, even when a black man with a concealed permit, Philando Castile, was killed. [14] They weren’t the only game in town. In Dallas, Texas, a Black man named Mark Hughes was marching with an AR-15 rifle across his chest in a solidarity rally to protest the deaths of Castile and Sterling, shooting began and he was referred as the “suspect” in the shooting on Dallas police officers by Micah Xavier Johnson, leading Black gun owners to feel, rightly, that “they’re discriminated against for exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.” Clearly, the NRA is “a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don’t think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues” as Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, put it, even as he said that they were “afraid to make the wrong statement,” which just seems like a convenient excuse.
In the Black community in the United States, there have been strong calls for Black gun ownership and establishment of a Black nation within the US. [15] As General Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the New Black Panther Party (a weird organization which has no connection to the original Black Panthers is likely opportunist) and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club argued, “we [Black Americans] are a defenseless people and surrounded by a hostile society here in America…Blacks and African people need to be armed, We look at our history in this country…Being surrounded by white supremacy like we are, we are in the most volatile position of any race in the world.” Such feelings means that as Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, a book on Newton Knight, a white Mississippi farmer, soldier and Union sympathizer who united with Confederate deserters and escaped slaves to secede from the Confederacy, puts it, “we’re at a critical juncture of history in terms of race relations, reminiscent of the post-Civil War era” with independence and separatism viewed as the only recourse. Christian Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa, adds that “it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States” including organizations like the Nation of Islam occupying “decent size areas in American cities.” Apart from this, other groups have been formed. In February 2015, Philip Smith started a group, the National African American Gun Association (NAAG), for “law-abiding, license-carrying gun owners who happen to be African-American” which had grown to over 11,000 members in all 50 states, a sign of more interest by Black Americans in gun ownership, especially from Black women. This has also manifested itself on protests by armed members of the New Black Panther Party (with questionable beliefs) and the Huey P. Newton gun club against the anti-Muslim hate group named the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), with the horrid group declaring that, in typical fashion, “we cannot stand by while all these different anti-American, Arab radical Islamists team up with Nation of Islam/Black Panthers and White anti-American anarchist groups, joining together in the goal of destroying our country and killing innocent people to gain dominance through fear! We will be going in full gear for self defense only. This is a full gear situation.”
Since the election of the orange menace, there have been a rise in memberships in gun clubs and gun ownership because they are worried about their safety, especially threatened by white racists, bigots, and neo-Nazis emboldened by the orange menace. This includes more members in the Liberal Gun Club, which will be described later, Black Guns Matter, and the NAAG among “non-traditional” people such as self-described liberals, non-binary folks, Black Amerikans, and Latino Amerikans. [16] This included people, like Yolanda Scott, who said “I’m not the type of person who is afraid of my own shadow. I’m going to protect myself, whatever that means.”
In 2016, there were a number of other developments. After the shooting at the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub, Democrats in the US Senate pushed forward a “gun control” measure to demonize Muslims by pushing to exclude those in on “watchlist” that the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center maintains. Bursting to the forefront was the Pink Pistols, a decentralized “LGBT self-defense” group founded in 2000, headed by a disabled woman in Philadelphia named Gwendolyn Patton, with 45 chapters nationwide and 1,500 to 25,000 members, declaring “armed queers don’t get bashed.” [17] The group also files court cases on their behalf. They describe themselves as people dedicated “to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community…We change the public perception of the sexual minorities, such that those who have in the past perceived them as safe targets” and sometimes work with the NRA on certain cases, but not always. This all means that they may be a opportunist group and are not along radical lines, which the Socialist Rifle Association tried to do, in theory, although there are schisms in that organization which makes it unworkable.
At the present, there is another gun group, called the Liberal Gun Club, which is probably even more opportunist. This group aims to “provide a voice for gun-owning liberals and moderates in the national conversation on gun rights, gun legislation, firearms safety, and shooting sports.” They also describe themselves as an “education and outreach non-profit” Beyond this, they declare they provide a place for gun owners who do not agree with “right-wing rhetoric surrounding firearm ownership” a voice. With a range of opinions, the long-time contributors and annual meeting attendees (not all members), who they call “elders,” believe in stronger mental healthcare, addressing homeless and unemployment, along with poverty, enforcement of existing laws instead of new laws such as the Assault Weapons Ban, uniformity in permits for guns if they are the law of the land, licenses for carrying a concealed weapon.
There are a number of aspects worth keeping in mind. For one, at the present, as Democrats push forward gun control measures, including a number of Black politicians, White politicians oppose the measures, along with the NRA, which wants gun use to be deregulated without a doubt, and “conservative entertainment complex.” [18] Perhaps those who call for Communist Gun Clubs to “learn basic skills of using weapons and armed self-defense, could become a basis for future workers militias that will fight all forms of reactionaries,” recognizing that the principle of self-defense is universal, that views of guns are racialized, and that “opposition movements [to bigots] cannot function without simultaneously building communities.” Once we realize that, we should not reject those in the heartland of the U$ who may oppose fracking but also strongly believe in their right to have firearms, with “liberals” possibly a section of the citizenry which is “less well informed than it believes it is, more driven by emotion and prejudice than it realizes,” leading it to harboring “dangerous biases,” as shown in the recent presidential election.
Where we stand now
With the beginning of the orange menace’s presidency, a grueling four years (or horrifyingly eight) is ahead. While there are some who say that gun control laws are classist, some say that gun control efforts are not racist, others who demand the removal of all gun laws, there is no need to delve in such areas [19] There is no doubt that there are people in the U$ who feel that guns make them safe, whether they are part of the largely White NRA or not. As it stands now in the US, gun laws will contribute to the white supremacist order. More specifically, such laws are related to the fact that class rule in all states and in the US at large, reply on “bodies of armed men,” such as police, prisons, a standing army, and other “instruments of coercion” to maintain order, manifesting itself in the Klan disarming Blacks, the “stop and frisk” laws in New York City, and creating “more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes,” bringing with it more justifications for a militarized police force. Already, over 7 million Americans are subject to a form of correctional control, with gun control efforts as a major factor, coupled with Supreme Court decisions that authorized exceptions to the Fourth Amendment since policing guns, with unequal and unfair enforcement, can said to be like policing drugs.
While practical measures, such as increasing funding for mental health programs should occur, we have to turn to “mutual help and self-defense” to strengthen the solidarity between all of those never meant to survive under the unjust system of capitalism. [20] Additionally, a “reasonable gun control regime” is not possible in the U$ currently, with the need for racial justice ignored, even as some claim that “permissive gun laws [in the U$] are a manifestation of racism,” and claiming that gun control are anti-racist measures, which doesn’t even make sense. Some who are in favor of gun control have proposed all sorts of “technological fixes.” This includes support of (1) “smart guns” that can only be fired by “authorized users” and connected to cell phones perhaps; (2)”gunfire detectors” or make a school a “fortress” with lockable doors and a computer terminal at a local police department allowing police to control the school; (3) using robots to detect those who “don’t belong” in an effort and ultimately having “lethal robots” to kill suspected shooters. In all, each of these ideas is horrible and should not even be considered as a “solution” as they would increase police power and reinforce the problems with the (in)justice system. Others are vehemently opposed to guns, like one person who was incensed with “gun ads” on TV, the rhetoric of the NRA, and romanticizing gun efforts. One piece specifically, mocking those on the “Left” who “active oppose gun control,” says that it doesn’t make sense that people need “guns to wage an eventual revolution and liberate themselves from the shackles of the state and corporate America,” saying that such “leftist dreams” would not occur because of a “toxic gun culture….with a lethal cocktail of supercharged masculinity, racism, and provincialism” and that “disarming the Right” would do more, even saying that “guns hardly keep away the police or help communities fight back against the cops” and implying that such laws are “against patriarchy and other forms of oppression.” While the piece may have some good points, it misses the bigger picture. Gun control laws are not the “only ways to reduce gun violence and save lives” and such laws don’t help protect marginalized communities, arguably disarming them at most, or weakening their protection at minimum.
As the orange menace continues to sit in office with his cronies and state violence increases across the country by police, immigration enforcers, and bigots, we should listen to Lorenzo Raymond. He said that in this “historical moment,” hate crimes and racist terror is growing and the “Left” needs to recognize the right of “necessary self-defense against oppressive force.” Raymond goes on to say that there is a growing “black gun movement” in the U$ based on past history, remembers that there has been a “vigorous Black gun culture” in the South when the Black freedom movement was working to overturn segregation, and that gun control for most of the establishment isn’t about peace but has to do with “an orderly and centralized capitalist empire.” He adds that while guns kill 33,000 a year, alcohol (80,000 a year) and prescription drugs (120,000 a year) kill more, with more lobbying by these interests than the NRA since as the New York Times put it once, guns are a small business in the U$ at large. He goes on to say that gun control won’t bring us to a humane society, noting that Australia has such control and their society isn’t humane, while saying that the “open-carry state of Vermont” has elected imperialist “progressive” Bernie Sanders, and citing the “autonomist Kurds of Northern Syria,” who are not as radical as he portrays them but are actually serving the interests of imperialism in helping to split up the Syrian Arab Republic, as examples. Raymond has more. He says that “unilateral disarmament of the American Left” is new, with Eugene Debs calling for guns after the Ludlow Massacre to protect from Rockefeller’s assassins (and goons), armed miners in Harlan Country in the 193os, and armed protection by urban labor unions. He ends by saying that armed resistance by the right-wing is likely in the coming year, such as by right-wing militias and white terrorists, that there is a need to recognize the right to bear arms like conservatives, joining groups like the Liberal Gun Club (clearly opportunist) and Phoenix John Brown Gun Club, since it is the only hope of making the country safer, defending from bigots and others by any means necessary, even as the “right-wing’s fetishization of brute force” should be refuted most definitely.
While Raymond is right, he is only putting forward part of the puzzle. A month ago, in an article where I attempted to predict the likely agenda of the orange menace’s administration, I declared at the following:
“…Considering that U$ society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted, it is criminal and irresponsible to fight for gun control. Anyone who is a person of color, whether female, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, intersex, or is otherwise considered a “minority” in current society, should have the right to defend themselves with arms as necessary. That right is already claimed by white, straight men, so why can’t others in society arm themselves to fight off bigots? You can’t fight a revolution with flowers and sayings, but political power, as Mao Zedong put it, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Gun control, if decided as necessary, should happen after a socialist revolution, not before it.”
Now, in saying this, I am simply saying that any “minority” should have the right to self-defense by arms as necessary. Also, in saying that revolution can’t be fought with “flowers and sayings” but that political power grows out of a gun barrel, I was trying to say that there should be a diversity of tactics. When I pointed out that gun control should happen after a socialist revolution, not before, I was arguing out that such self-defense cannot occur as effectively with gun control measures in place. Also, I was trying to say that the focus on gun control should be removed from the equation, with other approaches instead, which are more effective.
Guns have been seen as necessary by those advocating for socialist revolution. [21] Karl Marx, in his 1850 Address to the Communist League, declared that
“…it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition must be carried out at once; we must prevent the revival of the old bourgeois militia, which has always been directed against the workers. Where the latter measure cannot be carried out, the workers must try to organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff…under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted.”
Marx was not the only one to make such a declaration. Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the Great October Socialist Revolution, supported “special bodies of armed men” as part of a socialist revolution and believed that armed people can make communism a possibility.
He even went as far as saying, in earlier years that workers should be immediately armed and said something that should make liberals tremble:
“…only an armed people can be a real stronghold of national freedom. And the sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming itself, and the longer it maintain its position of striker and revolutionary, the sooner the soldiers will at last begun to understand what they are doing, they will go over to the side of the people against the monsters, against the tyrants, against the murderers of defenceless workers and of their wives and children”
There is no doubt that guns can be a tool to allow socialist revolution to succeed. Why should the “Left” focus on limiting such a tool? Sure, guns can be used for malevolent ends and have often been used in such a way as gun violence on the streets of cities across the US, in the slums and ghettos of the oppressed, demonstrates. However, they can also be used to allow socialist revolution to succeed in countries such as China (1949), Russia (1917), Cuba (1959), and the DPRK (1948-1950), among many more.
Finding the way forward requires looking at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. I am aware that the document in its entirety is bourgeois in character. However, I think it is worth reprinting herein its full entirety: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Apart from the fact that this Amendment reads like an unfinished sentence, one can still have an interpretation. I think it is fair to say that the amendment says that militia units in states should be well-regulated for the purposes of securing the State from “undesirables” (whoever the elites and society think they are) but also declares that “the people” which means the whole population of the US, over 324 million people, have the right to “keep and bear Arms,” a right which shouldn’t be infringed.
Now, while the Second Amendment is mainly said to be about gun rights, I would argue that is too narrow. The word “arm,” which has been associated with weapons since its origin in Indo-European languages is defined by “any instrument used in fighting” or a “weapon,” with a weapon defined as either an organ used for defense or an “instrument of any kind used to injure or kill, as in fighting or hunting” as noted by Webster’s New World College Dictionary and numerous thesauruses. This means that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” applies to ALL weapons, not just guns. Hence, people, as noted by Akinyele Omowale Umoja in We Will Shoot Back, on pages 7 and 8, have the right to defend themselves with “fists, feet, stones, bricks, blades, and gasoline firebombs,” along with guns of course.
Keeping this in mind, it worth defining a number of terms. Umoja, in We Will Shoot Back, on page 7, defines armed resistance was the “individual and collective use of force for protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights,” while also including armed struggle, armed vigilance, guerilla warfare, spontaneous rebellion, retaliatory violence, and armed self-defense. He also defines armed defense, on the same page, as the “protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack.” Adding to this, Black’s Law Dictionary (Third Pocket Edition), defines force (which they break down into eight types), on page 294, as “power, violence, or pressure directed against a person or thing,” meaning that one does not have to kill or maim someone to apply force. These definitions are suitable for describing tactics used in the current political climate of the U$.
As we watch the orange menace’s administration from our TVs, computer screens, phones, or read it in the papers, we must recognize the need for resistance and act on such feelings. Still, we cannot be roped into the bourgeois milquetoast resistance by the Democratic Party and their lackeys and instead engage in solidarity, at minimum, with those under attack by the capitalist system within the U$ and across the world as a whole. It is not worth “waiting” for revolution. Rather, it is best to act in the present against the threats that face this planet and its people, even when one should do so without illusion, whatever form that takes offline or online.
Notes
[1] LeftistCritic, “Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” Soviet History, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 6; Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016, accessed January 17, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015, accessed January 16, 2017; David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; David B. Kopel, “The Klan’s Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South,” Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017.
[2] Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010, accessed January 16, 2017; Newsmax, “Top Firearms Group: Gun Control Has Roots in Racism,” February 25, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.
[3] Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.
[4] Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Logan Marie Glitterbomb, “Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control,” Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017, accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only “Part 1.” They also note the Sylvia Rivera Gun Club for Self-Defense as an example but this group could not be found despite internet searchings. It is possible the group exists but may be a small group with little publicity or its name has changed from the past.
[5] Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, “The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017.
[6] Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010, accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, “The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law, Vol. 1 (ed. Gregg Lee Carter, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 9; John Massaro, No Guarantee of a Gun: How and Why the Second Amendment Means Exactly What It Says (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009), 652; Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 93; Deborah Homsher, Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America: Politics of Firearms in America (Expanded Edition, New York: Routledge, 2015), 292; Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 19, 197; Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 45; Philip Wolny, Gun Rights: Interpreting the Constitution (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2015), 26.
[7] Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.
[8] Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, “Black gun clubs and the right to bear arms,” Washington Post, February 19, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.
[10] Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Alex Gourevitch,”Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power,” Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; The Week Staff, “The truth about guns and self-defense,” November 1, 2015, accessed January 16, 2017; Michael McLaughlin, “Using Guns In Self-Defense Is Rare, Study Finds,” Huffington Post, June 17, 2015, accessed January 16, 2017.
[12] David Kopel, “The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Jonathan Banks, “Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism,” Vice, June 22, 2015, accessed January 16, 2017. I know its horrid Vice, but so what.
[13] Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.
[14] Claire Landsbaum, “NRA Ad Claims ‘Real Women’s Empowerment’ Is Owning a Gun,” New York Magazine, July 13, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Max Plenke, “When Black Men Are Shot and Killed, the NRA Is Silent,” Mic, July 7, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Tessa Stuart, “Black Gun Owners Speak Out About Facing a Racist Double Standard,” Rolling Stone, July 14, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, “Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias,” Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Hannah Allam, “For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue,” McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, “Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias,” Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017.
[15] David Love, “Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?,” Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Hannah Allam, “For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue,” McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; RT (Russia Today), “New Black Panthers in armed showdown with anti-Muslim militia in Texas,” April 6, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.
[16] Charmaine Lomabao, “Liberal Gun Club Experiences Increasing Membership Since Trump Victory,” Newsline, December 27, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Shantella Y. Sherman, “Black Gun Purchases Reportedly Skyrocket Since Trump Election,” Afro, January 4, 2017, accessed January 16, 2017; The Grio, “Gun sales to blacks, minorities surge after Trump win,” Aol News, November 28, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; WSPA Staff, “Firearm sales rise among minorities,” WBCD (NBC Affiliate), December 28, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Ben Popken, “Trump’s Victory Has Fearful Minorities Buying Up Guns,” NBC News, November 27, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Teryn Payne, “Gun Sales Among Blacks See Increase,” Ebony magazine, November 29, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017. Reprinted from Jet magazine; Brian Wheeler, “Why US liberals are now buying guns too,” BBC News, December 20, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Joe Schoenmann, “Fearing Trump Supporters, Now Liberals Are Buying Guns,” KNPR, January 10, 2017, accessed January 16, 2017; Teresa Walsh, “Now it’s the liberals who are arming up,” McClatchy DC, December 23, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Brandon Ellington Patterson, “African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness,” Mother Jones, July 12, 2016; Brandon Ellington Patterson, “African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness,” Mother Jones, July 12, 2016.
[17] John Burnett, “LGBT Self-Defense Site ‘Pink Pistols’ Gains Followers After Orlando Massacre,” NPR, June 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Julia Ioffe, “The Group that Wants to Arm Gay America,” Politico, June 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, “The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Pink Pistols, “About the Pink Pistols,” accessed January 16, 2017; The Liberal Gun Club, “Who We Are,” accessed January 16, 2017; The Liberal Gun Club, “What We Do,” accessed January 16, 2017; The Liberal Gun Club, “Talking Points Regarding Regulation,” accessed January 16, 2017.
[18] Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, “The Long, Racist History of Gun Control,” The Blaze, May 2, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017; Edward Wyckoff Williams, “Fear of a Black Gun Owner,” The Root, January 23, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017; Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Nicholas Johnson, “Negroes and the Gun: The early NAACP championed armed self-defense,” Washington Post, January 30, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Alexander Reid Ross, ““Death to the Klan” and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US,” It’s Going Down, July 26, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Barbara Nimiri Aziz, “Profile of a Progressive Gun Enthusiast,” CounterPunch, accessed January 16, 2017.
[19] David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Ehab Zahriyeh, “For some blacks, gun control raises echoes of segregated past,” Al Jazeera America, September 1, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, “Gun control is people control, with racist implications,” NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017; Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2017; Alex Gourevitch,”Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power,” Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017;
[20] Alex Gourevitch,”Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power,” Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Gary Gutting, “Guns and Racism,” The New York Times, December 28, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; William Brennan, “Bulletproofing,” The Atlantic, January/February 2017; Bruce Mastron, “My Latest Reason to Boycott the NFL: Guns,” CounterPunch, January 16, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Ken Levy, “If You Don’t Support Gun Control, Then You Don’t Support the Police,” CounterPunch, July 16, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Andrew Culp and Darwin BondGraham, “Left Gun Nuts,” CounterPunch, May 29, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Logan Marie Glitterbomb, “Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control,” Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only “Part 1.”
[21] Karl Marx, “Address to the Communist League,” The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 67; V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution” (1918), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 572, 591; V.I. Lenin, “The revolution in 1905: The beginning of the revolution in 1905” (January 25, 1905), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 508-509.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Feb 16, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Some changes have been made, such as in word choice, but generally it is the same. I removed a line at the end being “if there is a pro-Russian direction by the orange menace’s government, this would be positive for the world and possibly reduce conflict, even if it is hard to maintain that posture with attacks from Russophobes” as I no longer agree with it due to deeper criticism of Russia itself.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Oriental Review under the title “Trump and the “Ruskies”” and has been reprinted here for the subscribers to this blog’s email list. It also includes the original first link instead of to Vox, in the official article on Oriental Review, a link to which I did not originally intend even though I understand the reason for including it rather than a link to Wikipedia. There have been some developments (including this and this) since I wrote this yesterday but many of its conclusions still ring true. All mentions of the current president’s name have been changed to the orange menace in this printed version.
Recent days in U$ politics almost seem like a plot out of a Hollyweird movie, except that they are happening and have real consequences. After Gen. Mike Flynn was ousted from his post as National Security Advisor, for daring to speak to the Russians, possibly about sanctions, but also possibly not, tensions by Russophobic politicians and compliant corporate media have heightened.
The question worth answering is: how “pro-Russia” is the orange menace’s administration?
Throughout the recent presidential campaign in the United States, Hillary Clinton and her lackeys accused the orange menace of being “Putin’s puppet.” It is worth remembering that Clinton was making such accusations back in 2014, claiming that there were “phony environmental groups…funded by the Russians” that opposed fracking, a claim often made by those in the oil & gas industry. There’s no doubt that during the campaign the orange menace had a more moderate tone toward Russia than establishment Democrats or Republicans by far, with cries of “impeachment” in the present, as some Democrats clap at the “scandal” the orange menace’s administration is facing.
While Tillerson and Dunford are meeting with their Russian counterparts, relatively little has changed from the Obama Administration. For one, the orange menace’s administration has declared, through Nikki Haley, and Sean Spicer, that Russia has to “return” Crimea to Ukraine and reduce violence in the country for sanctions to be removed. The Russians have rightly rejected this ridiculousness. If the orange menace was really “pro-Russia” he would have removed the U$ military troops near Russia’s borders and engaged in more efforts to remove the sanctions. Clearly, the same policies of the Obama Administration on Russia are being continued under the orange menace’s watch.
The national security establishment, often called the “intelligence community,” has been directly supported by Russophobic Democrats who declare their allegiance, claiming what these spooks are saying is 100% true. Clearly, they don’t remember their history and are making the orange menace-Russia connection the new “conspiracy theory” of liberals, almost discrediting the Democratic Party wholesale. These same people, along with Russophobic Republicans, have a bill in Congress proposing a review of possible efforts by the orange menace’s administration to ease sanctions on Russia, are declaring that the administration engaged in a “cover-up,” and are uniting around an investigative probe to “discover” any Russian connections in the new Administration, which might not even happen anyway.
The corporate complaint media has also played up the “Russia threat,” peddling the claims of a magical “Russian spy ship” off Connecticut, while they twiddle their thumbs about “what happened” during the phone call between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador to the United States. Other outlets have been more perceptive. The Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic had columns saying his ouster by the orange menace has been a victory for the “deep state,” which is more accurately called the national security establishment. Even the arch-conservative National Reviewcalled for Flynn’s conversation, captured by the FBI and NSA, to be released in full.
Taking this all into account, with every day, there is less and less of a possibility that the orange menace will lessen tension with Russia. For one, the “establishment coup” to oust Flynn was pushed by same spying machine he helped create, making it valid for he orange menace to directly blame them for the result. Apart from the arguments that “the Left” needs meaningful critiques of the orange menace and that Flynn had a mind for “conspiracy thinking,” Flynn’s resignation will likely have a negative effect on the possibility of “Russian detente” by the orange menace’s administration.
Some may counter these determinations by noting that the orange menace has taken a “positive” tone toward Putin since he has been in office. They might exclaim that when, in his recent interview with Bill O’Reilly, the orange menace said that Putin was reasonable and “glossed” over the idea that he was a “killer” by saying that the empire has made mistakes, shows his “loyalty” to the Russians. This is completely bunk. For one, the orange menace’s administration is taking a strong anti-Iran and pro-Zionist position, which fundamentally hurts Russian interests. This position could even result in the war with Iran, despite the fact that Flynn’s ouster is good news for Iran, since he was outspoken in condemning the “terrorist” acts of that country’s government. The real acts of terror were by tens of thousands of U$ bombs dropped on Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan last year, along with Special Forces in areas across 70% of the world, people whom the orange menace has called “legendary warriors” fighting in far off places against “radical Islamists.” To Iran’s credit, it is resisting the aggressive moves of the orange menace’s administration, deriding them as uncalled for.
Regardless of what Flynn was fired for, whether it was lack of trust or something else, there is no doubt that the efforts of the Russophobes within the national security establishment and within the Democratic and Republican political parties will intensify their efforts in the coming days. It’s almost like they think the Soviet Union has “returned” like in Simpsons Tide, a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, when the Russians had deceived the U$ to think that the Soviet Union had disappeared.
Perhaps more accurately, the present political conundrum, resembles the 1964 British political satire Dr. Strangelove. The Russophobes are like General Gen. “Buck” Tergidson, only differing in degree from out-of-his-mind jingoist Gen. Jack D. Ripper who wants a nuclear war with Russia no matter the cost, who claims that the Communists are tricking the President, saying that they “will clobber us!” The orange menace’s administration is like President Merkin Muffley, who tries to take a more balanced, cool-headed approach to Russia until it is evident, that war cannot be avoided.
As we stand now, we are at the crossroads, with the future of the world in the balance. As long as the orange menace’s administration takes a strong stand against Iran, Venezuela, and the DPRK, a multipolar world is threatened. What happens next is up to us, the people of the world.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Feb 8, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
While the bourgeois media is focused on the orange menace’s racist immigration ban, something has been missed by these complaint media outlets. I’m not talking about the five-year lobbying ban (which may not be fully enforced) or the negotiating with Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical bourgeoisie, to “bring down” drug prices (which just seems like an elaborate nothingness) but rather the long-awaited strategy of the orange menace to fight Daesh which has “arrived” on our doorstep.
A memorandum, published on January 28, declares a “Plan to Defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” Apart from the preamble which paints Daesh as a horrid, brutalist, and barbarian organization, the short memo says that “it is the policy of the United States that ISIS be defeated” (section 1) with the policy coordination, review, guidance, and other aspects of this memo described elsewhere (section 2). The document referenced in section 2 is one issued the same day, a document that reshuffles the organization of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council. It declares that the National Security Advisor and Homeland Security Advisor will determine the agenda of each of these committees, headed by the orange menace (or Pence in his place), with regular attendees including the Secretaries of Defense, Energy, State, and Treasury, the Attorney General, and U$ Ambassador to the United Nations, along with allowing, depending on the issue at hand, the Secretary of Commerce, U$ Trade Representative, and National Intelligence Director Without getting into any more detail, this memo could be said to engage in a major overhaul of the upper echelons of the National Security apparatus in the U$.
The document outlining the anti-Daesh “Plan” goes on, saying that a “new plan to defeat ISIS (the Plan)” will be developed “immediately” with the Secretary of Defense writing a draft. This draft will be, within a month, submitted to the orange menace, comprising “a comprehensive strategy and plans for the defeat of ISIS…recommended changes to any United States rules of engagement and other United States policy restrictions…public diplomacy, information operations, and cyber strategies to isolate and delegitimize ISIS…identification of new coalition partners in the fight against ISIS…mechanisms to cut off or seize ISIS’s financial support…[and] a detailed strategy to robustly fund the Plan.” The memo ends by saying that the Secretaries of Defense, State, Treasury, and Homeland Security, along with the Director of National Intelligence (DIA), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor, and Homeland Security Advisor, will develop the plan, compiling all the relevant information, and seeking any further information from “any appropriate source,” likely even right-wing and bigoted ones.
The two memos issued on January 28 don’t exactly outline the actions that the orange menace’s administration to “fight ISIS,” only proposing possible avenues. One way to tell how the policy will unfold in the coming months is to look at who will be developing the plan: Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, DIA Dan Coats, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford. If Mnuchin, Bosser, and Coats are confirmed, working with Tillerson and others, then the policy will involve working with NATO, working with regional U$ imperial proxy states like Jordan, and continued support for the Saudi bombing in Yemen. Beyond this, the formulated policy would likely include a push for more markets, “ground troops” in countries like Syria, striking at “Islamist terrorism” with Islamophobic policy, and a continued war in Afghanistan. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story.
Recent actions shine a light on how the possible strategy will unfold. Raids by U$ special forces will continue as part of national policy, along with drone strikes, to fight Daesh and any group deemed as “radical Islamic terrorists,” the new code words for the “enemy” in this era. While some thought that the recent raid in Yemen, which the orange menace’s administration justified even though dozens of civilians were killed, including young children, would result in the government there stopping such strikes, this does not seem to be the case at all. Such raids may even bolster Al-Qaeda, though in saying this one should not be caught in the idea of “blowback” which many bourgeois progressives use as a reason for why the bombing is “bad.” Simply, the orange menace has revealed himself to be a war criminal, there’s no other way to put it.
As Nick Turse wrote on January 5, on the eve of the orange menace’s administration, we live in, as a result of the Obama presidency, a “gray zone,” a time when there is a “murky twilight between war and peace,” a time when elite troops were deployed in 138 countries across the world last year, with deployments across the African continent and ringing revisionist China, capitalist Russia, and Iran. For what we know so far, especially from his recent speech in which he called SOCOM’s troops “legendary warriors” who engage in “the most secret, sensitive and daring missions in defense of the United States of America” with no enemy standing “a chance against our Special Forces — not even a chance.” Additionally, it seems evident that this horrid reality, coupled with private mercenaries for hire, will continue full force under the orange menace’s watch.
In terms of seeking “new coalition partners” to fight Daesh, there is a possibility these new partners would include Russia or maybe even Syria, the army of which is advancing in their fight against Western-backed terrorists. However, cooperation with Syria may be too optimistic since “safe zones” still seem to be on the mind of the orange menace. A Reuters report, on January 29, said that the orange menace and King Salaman of Saudi Arabia agreed to mutually “agreed to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen,” purportedly for refugees. As anyone with sense knows, this is just a dressed up version of no-fly-zones and expanded U$ imperialism in the Syrian Arab Republic. In terms of safe zones in Yemen, this implies continued U$ support for the Saudi aggression in Yemen, which has, already, killed over 11,000 people, and destroyed much of the country, including its vital infrastructure. There is no doubt that the orange menace’s administration will ally with Gulf autocracies such as the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar, along with Yemen of course.
In the same Reuters report, it says that the White House agreed to work with Saudi Arabia to counter “Iran’s destabilizing regional activities” and debating if the Muslim Brotherhood should be deemed a terrorist organization by the U$, then subject to sanctions. Clearly, on the issue of Iran, fundamentally little will change from Obama under the orange menace’s administration. Sure, the agreement on Iran’s non-existent nuclear program will go away and Western mega-corporations will lose out on the “new” market in Iran, but the aggressive feelings of the United States toward the Islamic Republic will not go away. This much was indicated when National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, in a “muscular” response, declared that recent Iranian actions “underscore…Iran’s destabilizing behavior,” saying that the missile launch violates UN Security Council Resolution 2231, claimed that the Iranians backed the Houthi forces in Yemen, and said that the Obama Administration was “weak and ineffective” in responding to “Tehran’s malign actions” but that the orange menace’s administration will condemn “such actions by Iran that undermine security, prosperity, and stability throughout and beyond the Middle East and place American lives at risk,” with this stance meaning that they are “officially putting Iran on notice.”
After the recent immigration ban, under which the orange menace gave the Saudis a free pass, which will likely harm the U$, there have been calls to ban Americans from Iran, which will lead to continued aggression of an imperial nature. This also means that Saudi funding of terrorists in Syria (and across the region) may also get a pass, which would show the continuation of policy from Obama to the orange menace. Additionally, it seems very evident that war may be in the cards, with the orange menace directly threatening Iran, and possible war with Iran in the cards.
Other articles recent add to this, noting that more threats and sanctions (also see here) are being used against Iran by the United States (which could inflame the region), with the orange menace’s administration wanting to contain Iran, with capitalist Russia (and revisionist China for that matter) standing on the side of Iran in this war of words and actions. Iran is also preparing itself for self-defense if need be with new military equipment and other measures (also see here) while the orange menace’s cabinet pick paid by MKO terrorists, Iran stands against partition of Iraq, and Iranian army commanders seeing the threats as nonsense, as they defy the U$ to the best of their ability.
It is worth quoting what Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution said in a recent speech:
“The new U.S. president says Iran should thank Obama! Why?! Should we thank him for creating ISIS, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria, or the blatant support for the 2009 sedition in Iran? He was the president who imposed paralyzing sanctions on the Iranian nation; of course, he did not achieve what he desired. No enemy can ever paralyze the Iranian nation…Trump says fear me! No. The Iranian nation…will show others what kind of stance the nation of Iran takes when threatened. We actually thank this new president [Trump]! We thank him, because he made it easier for us to reveal the real face of the United States. What we have been saying, for over thirty years, about political, economic, moral, and social corruption within the U.S. ruling establishment, he came out and exposed during the election campaigns and after the elections. Now, with everything he is doing—handcuffing a child as young as 5 at an airport—he is showing the reality of American human rights. The incident of the February 8, 1979 [referring to the day that the Army Air Force began its allegiance with Imam Khomeini (Homafaran Allegiance) and about the final days of the Iranian revolution] was unexpected for the regime and a blessing from God we were not counting upon. An unexpected provision should be hoped for in anything that the believing front does: it is true that logical and material calculations are necessary, but sometimes we should open up to counting on the supernatural too…if we use wisdom and prudence along with trusting the Satan, the result will be a mirage. In any matter, including diplomacy and the country’s problems it is true that trusting demons and the materialistic power, which oppose your essence, leads to a mirage.”
James Petras, a Marxist who seems to take the side of the orange menace (which is an oxymoron in and of itself), even said, in a recent piece, that the orange menac will continue the murderous reign of the empire. While he praised the orange menace for his seeming “protectionism” and certain “critiques,” Petras admitted that the orange menace ignores “the enormous regional economic and military power of Iran” and has proposed to “re-negotiate the recent six-nation agreement with Iran in order to improve the US side of the bargain” possibly to placate the Zionist state, and then said that “Trump will most probably maintain, but not expand, Obama’s military encirclement of China’s maritime boundaries which threaten its vital shipping routes.” Petras, who describes the orange menace as a “market realist who recognizes that military conquest is costly and…losing economic proposition for the US” who views “Russia as a potential economic partner and military ally” and sees revisionist China as a “powerful economic competitor,” said that the orange menace is a “capitalist-nationalist, a market-imperialist and political realist.” Still, he seems unsure about what will happen next in his administration.
Of course, Petras is not seeing through the smoke of “economic nationalism” of the orange menace, which is tied with his anti-worker nature and racist imperialism. While there is no doubt that the orange menace is different from Obama in his actions or behavior, on US imperial foreign policy, to say the least, it is clear that the orange will support the Zionist project and US imperialism worldwide in his own patented way, even if that includes playing both sides of the “anti-ISIS war.” Hence, all of the orange menace’s “critiques” of elites are worthless junk not worth paying attention to since he will benefit the capitalist elites, already infusing his advisors with Goldman Sachs, engaging in a “globalism of the 1%” which supports empire and buttressing Islamophobia, making it national policy. Of course, he will also not oppose continued militarization of the country (and world) and expansion of the security apparatus, coupled with mass surveillance. Hence, it is accurate to describe the orange menace as a president who has “openly exhibited racist, nativist, sexist, arch-authoritarian, police-statist, Islamophobic, pro-torture, and even neo-fascist sentiments and values.”
Where the murderous empire goes next is clear. While countries like the Philippines are plying the double game by claiming to resist the U$ but also crack down on communist forces and allow U$ troops in the country, revisionist China is rising more so on the world stage. The latter will hopefully pose as a possible counter to the horrid (and racist) imperialism that will spew out of the orange menace’s administration like left over trash falling out of a garbage truck, policies that leave destruction in their wake.Perhaps Chinese media has a point in saying that “the court,” “the media,” “the public,” “domestic and international politics,” and the “economy” could keep the orange menace in check, but they might be believing too much in those elements.
Those who think that the orange menace will change U$ policy, be anti-interventionist, or end the slew of wars, are dead wrong. As he declared in a speech just a couple of days ago, he said, following typical dogma, said that the U$ military is “fighting for our security and freedom,” while also saying that “defense of our nation” is important to him, at least in his mind, that the military will never be “forgotten” by the orange menace’s administration (i.e. it will get more money), and that the U$ strongly supports NATO. In his speech, he declared that SOCOM and Central Command will be the “very center of out fight against radical Islamic terrorism,” saying that more focus will be placed not only on Central Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt, but across the world. He also declared to the “forces of destruction” by which he means Daesh, Al Qaeda, and “associated forces,” that “America and its allies will defeat you. We will defeat them,” while saying, as typical militaristic boilerplate, but also showing his loyalty to the war machine, that the “men and women of the United States military provide the strength to bring peace to our troubled, troubled times.”
It seems obvious that the military will expand, with the orange menace acting as a bully for Western capitalists to gain new markets, using his “twitter diplomacy” and imperial might, along with other “tools” at his disposal. Cuba and the DPRK will remain under imperialist assault as will Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In the end, one must cast off any illusions about the orange menace, recognizing his racist and imperialist nature, while rejecting the arguments of bourgeois liberals and progressives who do not challenge the fundamental nature of the murderous empire.
In a recent statement against torture, Sanders accepted imperial precepts, basically saying that the US is “great” and “respected” along with worrying about helping our “adversaries” while declaring his commitment to defending “American values” and citing the opposition of US military leaders against torture as part of his argument. Hence, his argument against torture is not progressive but is actually an imperialist, militarist, and uber-nationalist one.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 31, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
Editor’s note: After this piece was ignored by CounterPunch and rejected by Dissident Voice, which told me “Thank you for your submission to Dissident Voice. I am sorry but DV will not be publishing this time,” it is being published here.
Recently, Graham Vyse, a staff writer at The New Republic, bellowed with pain, like a deer wounded with an arrow, declaring that U$ Senator Bernie Sanders was courting White voters, said something positive about the orange menace, refused to vote against Jeff Sessions, and had “blind spots” on identity politics, which was all summed up in the title of “Bernie Sanders Is a Big Letdown.” To put it mildly, Senator Sanders is more than a “letdown” but is a downright imperialist. Maybe the Sandersnistas should have realized that before they looked to their new savior to “fight” the big banks and Wall Street, constituting the financial bourgeoisie, like Elizabeth Warren, or to stand up to the orange menace, with Sanders calling him “delusional” even as he voted in favor of the orange menace’s appointees John Kelly (Secretary of Homeland “Security”) and James “fun to shoot some people” Mattis (Secretary of “Defense”) on January 20th. Not surprisingly, the same people who supported Sanders were also “shocked” and “surprised” that he would endorse war criminal and corporate slave Killary Clinton, while not recognizing his deep connection with the Democratic Party’s machinery and establishment.
Sanders’s imperial foreign policy is nothing new. In May 1993, Sanders voted for the use of US troops in Somalia. Years before the intervention, Mohamed Said Barre, who had taken power in a military coup in 1969, originally allied with the revisionist Soviet Union as a socialist, even if he was not really socialist. By 1977 he was charting his own horrid course, with expansionist desires by declaring war on Ethiopia, then helped by the Soviets, and at that time, the U$ assisted his country. By 1991, after his methods became more ruthless, a group of rebels drove Barre from Mogadishu, leading to a vacuum in the country and civil discord of monumental proportions. By 1993, when the U$ intervened, there had been a UN operation (Operation Restore Hope or UNITAF) to provide humanitarian assistance the previous year, under President Bush’s direction, with U$ troops comprising the major part of the effort, but this faltered, leading to another operation. This ensuing operation, continuing until 1995, was challenged by “rebel” Somali military commander Muhammad Farah Aideed, an individual that the U$-led UN force was trying to kill, leading to two Black Hawk helicopters in a fiery battle being shot down. As a result, this incident led President Clinton to pull U$. troops out of combat not long after and “all U.S. troops left the country in March 1994,” resulting in supposed “curtailed” U$ interventions in the future, with the UN mission ending on March 1995 even as fighting continued.
This intervention, which was “memorialized” in numerous books and a film, Black Hawk Down, a Hollywood flick which predictably portrayed the Somali people as “wild savages” who don’t know what they are doing, even though Somalis has good reason to be angry about the U$ military presence. The movie’s pro-military narrative showed that it aligned with the position of Brigadier General John S. Brown who declared that the intervention was about rescuing “a people and a state from anarchy and chaos” and called those who fought in the a supposedly “humanitarian” conflict “heroes.” Such deception was also repeated by the compliant corpoate media, which hyped up the pictures of starving Somalis, of course. As Brendan Sexton III put it, “one of the true tragedies of the war in Somalia [which some rightly call a debacle] was the support that it received from liberals and even radicals,” by which he means people like Sanders. Apart from having the blood of thousands of Bosnians on his hands, Sanders also, by voting for U$ troops in Somalia, was expressing his consent for the killing of almost 10,000 people in the ground war for Mogadishu before the one-day battle in early October 1993. He was also consenting to the continued destruction of Somalia in a civil war which has raged since 1986, which begun with the Somali rebellion. It continues today with the U$ military, federal Somali government, and African Union troops fighting against Islamic reactionary groups, continuing the trend of U$ military intervention on the African continent.
In 1999, he justified the brutal U$ bombing in Bosnia, voting to use U$ ground troops in 1995, and quoted a member of the German Green Party, Joschka Fischer, in favor of the campaign. He argued that“if anyone thinks there is a simple solution to this problem [in Bosnia], then you know very little about this problem…[this bombing] means standing up against genocide. It’s a contradiction, but we have to live with it. If we accept Milosevic as a winner, it would be the end of the Europe I believe in.” He went on to, after an audience member told him that he had “sold out,” justify the bombing by declaring that “I ask you to think about what happens to the eight hundred thousand men, women, and children who have been pushed out of their homes!…What do you do to a butcher who has lined up people and shot them?” and then, after saying he opposed a massive ground force in Bosnia, weirdly said, “I don’t know what to do, but I’ll tell you what I am doing, what I am trying to do.” He later said he was “on the phone…with the White House” to help negotiate a settlement, aligning with his defense of Clinton the year before from Congressional Republicans who called for his impeachment.
The bombing in Bosnia was more than a “simple” military operation. It was one of the many military operations the Clinton administration conducted in the 1990s, this one to degrade the infrastructure of Serbia because the leader, Slobodan Milosevic, had not gained the “green light” from the U$ before attacking the Albanian minority in the country. These problems were nothing new, as they grew out of the break up of the Yugoslavian republic ten years earlier which led to ensuing conflicts. In the later 1990s, international leaders proposed two terms: NATO control of Kosovo and NATO military occupation of the remaining parts of Yugoslavia. Both were rejected by the national assembly of Serbia, which called for negotiations toward an agreement on Kosovo’s autonomy. But, this was ignored, and U$-led bombing began, lasting for 78 days, leading to displacement of 800,000 people after the first three months, and an untold number of killed civilians. Likely as a surprise to some of Sanders’s supporters, he did not mention the Serbian legislature’s proposal, supporting humanitarian imperialism instead, which is part of the reason that Michael Parenti parted ways with Sanders. [1]
In more recent years, Sanders declared that he supports arming the Kurds (in Syria) or “those people who we can trust” with air support, benefiting arms manufacturers. The imperialist positions don’t end there. He has also supported helping “so-called Syrian moderates” and said that “President Obama is absolutely right in his efforts to judiciously use air strikes, which at this point have shown some success” which sounds like apology for the killing of civilians on Obama’s watch. If these positions don’t cry imperialism, I don’t know what does. Of course, Sanders does not want the drone program to end, saying that “there are times and places where drone attacks have been effective…we have to use drones very, very selectively and effectively,” only wanting to “limit” it to his own parameters. This in and of itself is not a surprise, as Sanders voted to confirm Harold Koh as Legal Advisor for the U$ State Department, a Reagan lawyer who infamously declared that drone killing was legal, a position that Koh took after confirmation but Sanders never expressed an objection to.
Some readers may be saying that Sanders is a “social democrat” and harshly criticizes the banks (and their crimes), but that, even if it is not an act and is thoroughly genuine, pales in comparison to his imperialist positioning. Sanders has, on record, supported sanctions against Iran, declared that Iran is on the stage to “obtaining a nuclear weapon” despite evidence from US and Israeli intelligence agencies to the contrary, voted against closing the Guantanamo Bay Prison in 2009, saying it is “complicated” and should be decided by a presidential commission even as he says rhetorically that the prison should be shut down “as soon as possible,” and said that the F-35 program in Vermont is “very controversial” and “incredibly wasteful” but is still supporting it regardless. If that isn’t enough, Sanders, beyond his declarations against ground troops, didn’t oppose Obama’s “anti-ISIS” bombing campaign, saying to bourgeois progressive commentator Thom Hartmann that the US should be involved. He told Hartmann that his “solution” was a multilateral international effort where “these guys in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, these multi-multi-billionaire authoritarian countries who have made huge amounts of money from oil” should help fight ISIS. This ahistorical and ignorant position ignores that U$ imperial proxies across the Arab World, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar, along with other Gulf autocracies, have made the Syrian civil war more bloody with their support of reactionary terrorist groups, and such a policy would reinforce these authoritarian states while further destabilizing the Middle East.
Such positions make his declaration that he is “kind of conservative on getting involved in all kinds of wars abroad” have a different meaning than one would first perceive, showing that his “admission” that he is “not a pacifist but…always understood war is the last recourse” and that he he “understand[s] the cost of war” to be deceptive at best. He seems to be contradicting himself in supporting the “anti-ISIS” war, admitting in 2014 that “while we focus all of our attention on ISIS, the middle class in this country continues to collapse.” Despite saying that, he has taken a pro-military, and purportedly antiwar, position, declaring that “our guys are doing a tremendous job under very difficult circumstances” even as he called for the Afghanistan war to end while declaring that the U$ should have “the strongest military in the world” and should act militarily if “people threaten the United States…threaten our allies or commit genocide,” supposedly using military force only as the “last resort.” That sounds like blatant imperialism regardless of what “good” you can say about Sanders.
To add to this, Sanders said that we should support “those elements in [revisionist] China fighting for a democratic society” or the elements backed by the US government, argued that it is his “strong opinion that Bashar al-Assad has to go” since he is “a terrible dictator at war with his own people” meaning that the U$ should still support “opposition groups,” and told Bill O’Reilly that “the entire world has got to stand up to Putin. We’ve got to deal with sanctions, we’ve got to deal with freezing assets,” calling for isolating Putin and Russia politically and economically, and calling for “international corporations [that] have huge investments in Russia” to pull them out, to punish Russia. That means he would be right at home with the Russophobic rhetoric supporting U$ imperialism in the media, by the intelligence agencies, and by politicians who are Democratic and Republican.
At this point, it should be clear to any reasoned person that Sanders doesn’t oppose the imperialist agenda of the murderous empire. He is much more than a “big letdown,” but is a pimp for empire. There is much more to say about Sanders, with this article only scratching the surface. Anyone with sense should remember this as Sanders continues his milquetoast opposition to the orange menace’s administration just like the rest of the Democratic Party, which is, as a result, showing its uselessness with each passing day.
Notes
[1] You can read the description by Stephen Gowans on the reasons for the bombing, who says that military campaign was meant to turn Milosevic’s own people against him, that an sanctions campaign was engineered to target areas where Milosevic had strong support, and that Washington spent “$10 million in 1999 and $31 million in 2000 to train, equip and advise an overthrow movement to destabilize the former Yugoslavia and oust Milosevic,” with him being thrown out of power in a “US-UK engineered uprising.” He also said that this was under the guise of bombing Serbia and parts of Montenegro in 1999 because “US officials said they were convinced the Milosevic government was carrying out a genocide in Kosovo,” that Western capitalists were mad because Milosevic was a “communist” who “told the Americans to go fuck themselves” meaning that he refused “to turn Yugoslavia into a western puppet state.” He also adds that Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was sanctioned and bombed because, as Gowans put it, it was a “social democracy that resisted a free-market take-over,” not due to the ill-treatment of ethnic Albanians.These viewpoints are distorted by the fact that Gowans is an utter revisionist, so his characterization of the Yugoslavian government is distorted beyond belief.
Based off a Mr. Robot quote by Angela Moss, but also applying to horrid orange menace of course.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 29, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
In November 2015, in a campaign ad, the orange menace declared that “our country is in deep trouble because let’s face it: politics are all talk and no action…I don’t disappoint people, I produce.” These same words can easily (and reflexively) apply to his presidency at the present, only nine days old at the writing of this article. I could have added more analysis here, but I think this is a good stab at what has happened so far. This is basically almost like a stream of consciousness, so pardon me if I missed something along the way.
Before January 20
In order to recognize the reality, it is best to provide some context, which goes beyond the likely policies of his administration or Obama’s legacy. Frank Newport, the CEO of Gallup, one of the firms that publishes polls for the interest of PR peoples across the United States, not the general populace of course, declared on December 20 that
“the U.S. president is the CEO of the government…the government will soon become President-elect Donald Trump’s biggest responsibility. This is no minor challenge…Trump has appointed high-level business and military executives to his Cabinet posts, individuals who presumably have experience in making large organizations work well. Only time will tell how effective they can be in using this expertise to affect the operations of massive federal bureaucracies…Trump’s most important governmental challenge, in my view, will be dealing with the public’s basic lack of confidence in the men and women they elect and send to Washington to represent them…Trump’s best course of action may be to move in a positive direction — attempting to work with Congress, cooperating in a rational way, getting things done and in general helping convince Americans that the legislative branch can actually work.”
Not surprisingly, Newport does not expand on this analogy whatsoever. If the President of the United States is the CEO of the government, then the board of directors is the capitalist class, not just Wall Street, and the “people” of the United States are the shareholders, who really don’t have a vote or voice unless they hold a large amount of shares (i.e. big campaign contributors). Hence, the orange menace, or any president, is managing the affairs of the country for the capitalist elite, not engaging in his own policy. While the capitalist class would have preferred Killary of course, they can adapt and work with the orange menace easily.
The orange menace’s management of the country won’t be easy in the sense that he could incur popular resentment. As another Gallup poll earlier this year noted, while most of those in the U$ think that “the country is on the wrong track,” there are also divisions between views of former Clinton and the orange menace’s backers, but there is also agreement on high healthcare costs, the “threat” of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, worries of loss of U$ world leadership, that the US should be the “world’s top military power,” opposition to “building a wall along the border with Mexico,” favoring legalization of marijuana, “favoring the death penalty,” critical of more gun control measures, and even agreement on gay marriage. Still, public opinion can be manipulated no doubt, even if he doesn’t “like tweeting” or the differing sources of election news for the orange menace and Clinton voters, so he may have no trouble after all.
In the days before the orange menace’s inauguration, an event which is a spectacle for every President, Obama made some “last minute” actions, some of which were symbolic. Due to public pressure and likely to give himself a “good” legacy (despite the fact that his legacy is actually atrocious), he pardoned transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning and Puerto Rican independence fighter Oscar Lopez Rivera, along with a number of nonviolent drug offenders. [1] Of course, many political prisoners are still locked behind bars and his action was symbolic as it did not challenge or undermine the reality of mass incarceration in the United States as a whole but instead contributed to an image of Obama as a “hero” or “savior.” It worth saying however that if Manning’s sentence had not been reduced, the orange menace likely would have extended the sentence and left her in prison for life, with the head of the military, Ash Carter opposing this move from what I’ve read.
As the days toward inauguration neared, the signs of “change” became clear. Fewer people said they would watch the orange menace’s inauguration, with lower numbers likely coming from distraught bourgeois liberals and progressives along with those angry at the U$ capitalist system, and more than before, people said they were satisfied with immigration levels into the US which actually may not be a bad thing. And finally, a report was released saying that the orange menace and his team were aiming for dramatic cuts in the Departments of State, Justice, and Education, along with other social programs while growing the budget of the Pentagon. Not only does this show that those who thought that the orange menace was non-interventionist, like the libertarian goofs at Antiwar.com, are wrong, but it shows that he is playing a key role in the coming years of capitalism in the United States. Such a report indicates that cuts on social spending will increase, aggressive imperial posturing (and wars) will spike, and the proletariat will suffer.
In order to indicate the events of the orange menace’s administration so far, it is best to break down the events day by day since the orange menace is acting very quickly indeed.
Day One: January 20
On the day of his inauguration, the orange menace made a speech written by two of his closest advisors: white supremacist (and bigot) Steve Bannon and anti-immigrant political operative Stephen Miller, which set a tone for dark days ahead. On the streets, some were rightfully restless, with smashing of windows “of a Starbucks and Bank of America in Washington, DC.” [2] While some may criticize these actions as counter-productive or that we should be “peaceful,” it is clear that they are a justified form of resistance in a society that values capitalist property so highly.
With the media focusing on that, they clearly passed over the orange menace’s first executive order, which targeted Obamacare, in preparation for legislation to ultimately repeal it. While the law is absolutely horrid, leading to a growth of underinsurance in the United States which had not been there before and benefits pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, the GOP replacement for this law will make conditions worse. Of course, Democrats are not pushing for universal healthcare at this stage but instead are clinging to their sacred cow of Obamacare.
Also, the same day, the U$ Senate pushed through three of the orange menace’s appointees. One of them was only approved to go forward, while John Kelly for Secretary of Homeland Security and James Mattis for “Defense” Secretary were passed with overwhelming supermajorities, indicating yet again that the Democrats are not an opposition party, but are easily falling in line.
There is one more aspect to note about the events of January 20. On that day, Rex Tillerson, the orange menace’s nominee for Secretary of State, was interviewed by a site which declares that “the tendency to view Latin America and the Caribbean in isolation of world policy and under the shadow of U.S. hegemony is anachronistic,” as noted by Libya 360 a few days later. In the interview, with the imperialist news outlet almost handing him the answers, Tillerson declared that the U$ would continue cooperating with Mexico on “important issues of common interest,” endorsed the imperialistic Plan Colombia, thought that a “calamity that has befallen Venezuela” as a product of “its incompetent and dysfunctional government-first under Hugo Chavez, and…Nicolas Maduro,” arguing that there should be a “negotiated transition to democratic rule in Venezuela.” This not only gives an indication of continuation of U$-backed coups in the region but a continuation of U$ policy. Beyond this, Tillerson said that he would “denounce the Maduro government’s undemocratic practices,” engage with Cuba but “reform of its oppressive regime” by supporting supposed “human rights defenders and democracy activists,” promote TV and Radio Marti, work to extradite Assata Shakur to the U$, try to “mobilize international support to share the burden of U.S. assistance for Haiti,” and enforce “all congressionally-mandated sanctions including the measures in the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Extension Act of 2016,” along with much more.
Five days before, one article in the bourgeois liberal Huffington Post, written by those who want to privatize state organs in Venezuela, argued that Tillerson had a troubled relationship with the country. [3] They wrote that “ExxonMobil’s history in Venezuela starts in 1921,” that Venezuela’s ties to the company were “severed in 1976, when president Carlos Andres Pérez sought to nationalise the oil industry” and were “reestablished in the 1990s” but then ended in 2007 when Hugo Chavez re-nationalized “the oil business” under the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA. The article went on to say that ExxonMobil, then under Tillerson’s leadership (since the year before), won an arbitration decision by the World Bank to “compensate ExxonMobil $US1.6 billion” and that when “ExxonMobil launched oil operations off the coast of neighbouring Guyana,” the Venezuelan government not surprisingly, and rightly so, accused the horrid oil company of “trying to destabilise the region by siding with Guyana.” The article ends by saying that while “Tillerson and ExxonMobil have been against economic sanctions as international policy,” the current relationship with Venezuela could lead to increased sanctions, maybe even including “severing diplomatic relations or suspending or significantly reducing Venezuelan oil purchases” but that another possibility is that Tillerson would “compel Venezuela to honour its international financial commitments” and privatize its oil (and other) “unproductive industries” (in the minds of the writers).
Day Two: January 21
On this day, the second day of the orange menace’s administration, the opposition began to come to more fruition, giving hope for the future, maybe (unlikely though). There were clearly mixed ideologies among the millions joining women’s marches that day, but of course, anti-imperialism from the marchers was absent. Some may be right that such marches were “a watershed mark in American activist history” and that “the list of speakers was impressive and widely divergent” but that “tone and militancy of marches in other areas were mixed.” However, I think, it had more problems that and was almost a “Farce on Washington” like the famed 1963 March on Washington, as Malcolm X put it, with saying that everyone should be “nonviolent” not defending themselves with force. I think there could be some change and the movement could separate from the Democrats, I also think it will dissipate and not go on an independent path. But we’ll see.
The same day, apart from an article showing how connected the Obama Foundation was to the capitalist class, the orange menace gave a speech to the spooks at the CIA. In a speech which was first reprinted by the UK tabloid, The Daily Mirror, was boastful but also telling on what the orange menace won’t change. In the speech, which of course was praised by the orange menace himself and by CIA apologist David Ignatius, calling the CIA “very, very special people,” saying that “we have to get rid of ISIS. Have to get rid of ISIS. We have no choice,” praising his team, while saying that the Senate will get through all the intelligence and military appointments “through, but some will take a little bit longer than others.” There’s need to even quote anything else in the speech other than noting that the orange menace being arrogant while praising the military and CIA as “important” and “special,” not changing their current role in the imperial structure of the United States, saying that he is behind the CIA “1,000 percent” and that he respects them. The fact that his first real speech, was to the CIA, apart from the inaugural speech which is usually worthless listening to or reading in any way, shape or form, is significant and should be noted.
Day Three: January 22
On the same day that hundreds protested in Northern Italy against an U$ military base, media in East Asia decried the “isolationist” nature of the orange menace, fearing possible diplomatic turmoil. Such concerns, of course, are not unfounded due to the increasing aggression the orange menace’s administration has shown to revisionist China as I noted in my post about his “diplomacy” late last year. On this day, the libertarian Antiwar.com folks declared that there had been the first U$ drone strikes under the orange menace. This was also confirmed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which has noted four confirmed drone strikes, some engaged in even without Presidential approval. Further strikes were noted on January 25 and numerous days before. So the global assassination program is not ending, clearly. Yet another set of powers that Obama literally handed to the orange menace.
The same day, the orange menace had a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing extremist who rules the murderous (and Zionist) state. They spoke on “ways to advance and strengthen the U.S.-Israel special relationship, and security and stability in the Middle East,” including consulting “on a range of regional issues, including addressing the threats posed by Iran” and promising Netanyahu that the US will have an “unprecedented commitment to Israel’s security.” Of course, Netanyahu would praise the orange menace’s push for a border wall, as both him and the orange menace are engaging in racist policy as right-wing reactionaries. [4] It is worth considering the horrid settlements the orange menace is supporting in the “West Bank,” a region given that name because is is west of the Jordan River, claimed previously by the state of Jordan.
Day Four: January 23
On this day of the orange menace’s administration, he fulfilled one of his key promises during the presidential campaign. He issued a memorandum which withdrew the US from TPP. While some complained that “foes of war should rejoice and congratulate Trump” but didn’t do so, this seems silly because to “give credit where credit is due,” it is better to thank the grassroots movement and numerous individuals across the spectrum against the deal which the orange menace was responding to, rather than thanking the orange menace for killing the agreement. There is no doubt there was “imperial aspects of the TPP” but this aspect has been replaced by aggressiveness toward revisionist China. While Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary has been more cautious and less hawkish than Tillerson who outwardly pushed for imperialism, he did say that “The U.S. is going to make sure that we protect our interests there [in the South China Sea]. It’s a question of if those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yeah, we’re going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.” [5] Some have noting that Tillerson and Spicer’s comments imply U$ military action or a naval blockade against “China’s growing naval fleets would risk dangerous escalation.” [6]
Beyond this imperial aggressiveness, the orange menace enforced his ideological supporters. He restricted abortions, with more official sanction to “pro-life,” more accurately anti-abortion sentiment, than before. The same day, the orange menace ended the mortgage rate cuts, which the National Realtors Association was not happy about whatsoever, saying it will hurt homeowners. If that wasn’t enough, the U$ Senate approved another one of the orange menace’s nominees 66-32-1, Mike Pompeo, to be the head of the CIA. As a reminder, Pompeo supports NSA surveillance, opposes the current “Iran deal,” wants the CIA’s “black site” prisons to come back, and wants the Guantanamo Prison to stay open.
The only other news that day was about the orange menace’s approval rating, mainly. Some sources said that he had a low approval rating coming into office, while others noting that the orange menace’s positions broadly do not “resonate with majority public opinion on a number of his most visible policy and issue positions” except in his “direct attack on the federal government itself.” Another worthwhile poll is a Pew Research Center survey finding that “65% of Americans give priority to developing alternative energy sources” while only 27% “would emphasize expanded production of fossil fuel sources.” Other than this, some wondered, considering the orange menace’s focus on Cuba and Mexico, how much of Obama’s “soft” coups that the orange menace’s admin will continue. It is also worth mentioning the orange menace’s other memorandums that day and staying the course with military appointments.
Day Five: January 24
On this day, the orange menace’s administration took a hard stand against environmentalism. Apart from a memorandum “streamlining regulations,” the orange menace passed memos that approved the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) for now, declaring that TransCanada can resubmit its application to the Keystone XL pipeline, and declaring that all new pipelines have to use materials from within the United States. The memo on DAPL received the most attention, with some saying that it clearly benefits capitalists who funded him and others saying that it violates indigenous law. As for the Keystone XL pipeline which is barreling ahead more than under Obama’s deceptive “rejection” of it, seemingly under pressure from the environmental movement and bourgeois environmentalists, resubmitted its application for the pipeline which is likely to be approved.
Beyond orange menace’s pro-business and anti-environmental moves, he reinforced imperial inter-relationships. In a readout of a call with Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, the orange menace declared that “the United States considers India a true friend and partner in addressing challenges around the world” and continued this imperialistic relationship, obviously as a way to ensure “security in the region of South and Central Asia” which means countering the influence of revisionist China in the region, while maintaining the sphere of influence of the murderous U$ empire. Also on the foreign policy front, Nikki Haley was confirmed by the US Senate in a 96-4 vote in which only four senators voted against, showing once again the milquetoast nature of the Democratic Party in relation to the orange menace.
On another topic entirely, the orange menace reinforced his ideological supporters and economic nationalism (some of which is likely a put on). He met with big automakers, from General Motors, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler, telling them to create factories in the U$ and saying he would change environmental regulations to make them more business-friendly. [7] Interestingly, “foreign automakers such as Toyota and Honda were not invited” which may indicate where his interests lie and which companies will be benefited by corporate subsidies and which will not in the years to come. In terms of ideological supporters, the orange menace’s administration declared support for a bill to end federal funding to abortion completely. It is worth noting that Obama supported abstinence-only education in Africa up to at least 2013, if not later. [8]
Day Six: January 25
The repression of the orange menace’s administration began to show even quicker than it did under Obama, of course. In one executive order, it was declared that it would be administration policy to crack down on sanctuary cities (called “sanctuary jurisdictions” in the order) for undocumented immigrants, that such immigrants would have to be removed, and that 10,000 new immigration officers would need to be hired. The order also put sanctions on individuals from numerous countries and, to continue the racist, anti-immigrant measures, an office on immigrant crimes was established, tasked with producing quarterly reports on “the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens present in the United States,” along with engaging in surveillance and data gathering on immigrants.
To give even more specifics of the order, in section 12, the Secretaries of Homeland Security and State work together to implement sanctions, with the Secretary of State specifically ensuring that “diplomatic efforts and negotiations with foreign states include as a condition precedent the acceptance by those foreign states of their nationals who are subject to removal from the United States.” Like his other executive orders, the specifics are shrouded in legalistic language. The specific provision of law, available here and here says that the Attorney General is the person who determines that if an “alien who is a citizen, subject, national, or resident” of a certain country is banned, with the Secretary of State ordering “consular officers in that foreign country to discontinue granting immigrant visas or nonimmigrant visas, or both, to citizens, subjects, nationals, and residents of that country” until the Attorney General let the Secretary know if “the country has accepted the alien.” Basically, this implies that such refugees or immigrants would be detention until they can be fully deported.
This executive order was only the beginning. The same day the orange menace declared that the US-Mexico border wall will be built, he declared that sanctuary cities would be stripped of funding. The same day, the New York Times claimed that “Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen” were listed in draft executive order, but the exact law cited, which was Division O, Title II, Section 203 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, only lists the Iraq and Syria, along with “any other country or area of concern.” [9] Clearly, this means that this draft would only apply to Iraq and Syria, meaning that mentioning Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, or Yemen is just guesswork.
It is worth also mentioning that the draft of the order, apart from obvious “Muslim Ban,” as it is accurately called, creates “safe zones” in Syria. However, considering this was not on the final order, which will be noted later in this article, but it is in consideration. This means that “safe zones” which are obviously just code for a no-fly-zone and increased U$ imperialist intervention in Syria are under consideration by those in the highest parts of the orange menace’s administration. This is not a good sign and it would not be a surprise if something like the “safe zones” surfaces again at some point.
Even more disturbing is the draft executive order of the orange menace to review the use of CIA “black prisons” overseas. [10] The order declares that the U$ needs “critical intelligence” on “developing threats” and that it was wrong for Obama to push for civilian trials for those at Gitmo. Even more than that, it says that the push to “close” it should end, military commissions should return, and Gitmo should remain open. If that isn’t enough, the order complains that the CIA is limited in maintaining an “effective and lawful interrogation program” by NDAA in 2016 and revokes executive orders 13491 and 13492 while reinstating executive order 13440. This means that E.O. 13491 which pushed for “lawful interrogations” and E.O. order which ordered the closure of Gitmo are taken away while E.O. 13440, a Bush order in 2007, allowing only limited compliance with the Geneva Convention among those captives captured by the CIA and held in extrajudicial detention. If this isn’t enough, this draft order declares that keeping Gitmo open is critical to fight “radical Islamists” across the world, says that the U$ remains in global conflict with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and “associated forces” across the world (a continuation of language of the Obama era) and says that any existing transfer efforts out of Gitmo will be stopped. The order ends by saying that the DIA director, Attorney General, CIA director, and other senior members will recommend if interrogation of “high-value” terrorists should be reopened, if “black sites” of the CIA should reopen, if executive order 13440 should be revised, and recommend how “enemy combatants detained in the armed conflict with violent Islamic extremists” should be tried swiftly and justly. It then claims that no one will suffer cruel or unusual punishment, which seems silly with such torture chambers revived.
The weirdest part about this order is that is was basically denounced by the orange menace’s administration. First of all, it was blasted by Rand Paul and John McCain, while other Republicans took a “wait and see” approach. [11] However, reportedly, the order “shocked” Mattis & Pompeo, with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, saying he didn’t know where it came from. [12] Now, this could be denial just for the case of denial. At the same time, they could also be covering their tracks and bring back the order at an “opportune” time. If the order is not a statement of administrative policy, then who would draft this and why? I don’t know.
As for immigrants, they took even more of the brunt on January 25, just like on other days. One article said that the orange menace basically called for concentration camps for immigrants while the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a bourgeois group as I have previously described, declared that the orange menace’s Muslim ban is “real and even more draconian than many anticipated,” saying that it is “written in such a broad manner that it may also prohibit dual nationals of those countries who are citizens of non-targeted countries from entering the U.S. on a visa.”
More directly, the orange menace issued another immigration-related executive order, which was as racist as his previous pronouncements. In order to understand it, it is best to look at specific sections. One section, section 7, declares that the Secretary of Homeland Security will “take appropriate action, consistent with the requirements of section 1232 of title 8, United States Code, to ensure that aliens described in section 235(b)(2)(C) of the INA (8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(2)(C)) are returned to the territory from which they came pending a formal removal proceeding.” Once again, this is legalistic language, and needs to be broken down. The section of US code referenced talks about “treatment of aliens arriving from contiguous territory,” saying that immigrants arriving on land from a foreign country “contiguous to the United States,” like Canada or Mexico, can be returned by the Attorney General to the country “pending a proceeding.” Going further from there, in the case of an immigrant (called “alien” throughout the code) who is applying for admission to the US, if an “examining immigration officer” determines that an immigrant seeking to enter the US is “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted,” then they are detained. If this happens, then an immigration judge conducts proceedings, with determination whether the immigrant is deported, with such a judge having the power to “administer oaths, receive evidence, and interrogate, examine, and cross-examine the alien and any witnesses,” even to issue “subpoenas for the attendance of witnesses and presentation of evidence” if need be. Such powers of a judge may seem fundamentally undemocratic, but apparently it is allowed. The judge also has the ability to “sanction by civil money penalty any action (or inaction) in contempt of the judge’s proper exercise of authority under this Act,” meaning that an immigrant can be sanctioned for not following “proper procedures” or accused of not following them, then fined. The proceeding for the immigrant can take place either in person, through a video or telephone conference, and the immigrant can be represented by a lawyer of their choosing, who can “examine the evidence” against the immigrant, present evidence on their behalf, and cross-examine witnesses. However, immigrants do not have the right to “examine such national security information” used to justify their deportation, which almost dooms the immigrant to losing their case. After this is all done, then the immigration judge decides whether the immigrant is to be deported, with their decision based “only on the evidence produced at the hearing” and the immigrant will have access to their visa or entry document, or otherwise which is “not considered by the Attorney General to be confidential.”
The U$ code goes on. Other sections of related code say that any immigrant claimed to have a “communicable disease of public health significance,” who has a “physical or mental disorder” which “threatens” others, a “drug abuser or addict,” who wants to enter the U$, will be denied on the spot! Now, if that doesn’t sound racist, I don’t know what is. The last section of code I’ll reference here is one about “classes of Deportable Aliens.” saying that immigrants can be deported if they: (1) overstay their VISA, (2) fail to maintain their “nonimmigrant status,” (3) are convicted “of a crime involving moral turpitude” committed within five or ten years depending on their status, (4) if they are convicted of a crime with a sentence of more than one year, (5) if they are convicted of “two or more crimes involving moral turpitude,” (6) if they violate supposedly (or in reality) any drug laws, (7) if they are a “drug abuser or addict,” (8) if they sell, purchase, or exchange “any weapon, part, or accessory which is a firearm or destructive device,” (9) if they are convicted of “domestic violence…stalking…child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment,” (10) if they lie to immigration authorities, (11) if they engage in any “activity to violate any law of the United States relating to espionage or sabotage,” (12) if they engage in “any other criminal activity which endangers public safety or national security,” (13) if they engage in an activity opposing the control or advocating “overthrow of, the Government of the United States by force, violence, or other unlawful means,” among many other aspects. Apart from some of these measures, like #13 being anti-communist, others of these measures, even if you agreed with them, are part of a racist immigration system aimed at Latin American immigrants clearly, especially with crimes like “moral turpitude” which can be so broadly defined as it can mean something that isn’t “socially acceptable.” It is also worth noting here that an immigrant owning a gun, which is justified under the Second Amendment as the “right to bear arms” is a deportable offense, saying that immigrants, under law do not have the legal right to defend themselves with force and showing that gun control is again used as a form of social control like I noted in my previous post.
On January 25, there were many other developments. A National Security Advisor was announced by the orange menace’s administration, the orange menace promoted a positive image of himself, personal propaganda on the official White House website (a shocker, not really), and guidance on the orange menace’s federal hiring freeze was released publicly. If that wasn’t enough, news media reported that Steve Bannon was registered in two places which says that maybe the “major investigation” into voter fraud that the orange menace wants should begin in his own administration, and the orange menace seemingly backing away from efforts to scrub climate change information from EPA websites even as “political appointees are exerting more oversight over the agency’s scientific communications.” [13] Other news worth noting is that Ben Carson, a person who believes that the housing market should be deregulation, was approved by a Senate committee, even by bourgeois progressives like Elizabeth Warren who apparently believed in his lies and that the millions of dollars John Kerry handed to the Palestinian Authority (was it just a PR stunt?) was canceled by the orange menace, with Kerry’s action seeming very last-minute.
Day Seven: January 26
On this day, the war of the orange menace’s administration with the media took another step forward. Steve Bannon, the White House Chief Strategist, declared that because of the election result, “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.” [14] He went on to say that “the elite media got it [the presidential election] dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong…[the election was] a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there. The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign. Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign…That’s why you have no power. You were humiliated.” He was also quoted as saying that “you’re [the media are] the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party” with Bannon citing The New York Times and Washington Post, saying that “the paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated. They got it 100 percent wrong.”
While I am critical of the bourgeois media, I don’t think what Bannon is saying should be brushed off so easily. There is no doubt that much of this media favored Clinton over the orange menace, some predicting that the orange menace would lose. However, to say that the media is the “opposition party” and to be so opposed to the press in the manner he is acting is utterly repressive, there is no doubt. While restricting newspapers in socialist countries and those under U$ imperialist attack is justified, in this case, it is dangerous since it could mean that all we will get is orange menace’s propaganda, allowing no sort of room for opposition to his reactionary, right-wing nature.
Again there was more about the orange menace’s anti-immigrant policy. Reuters claimed that they had seen a “draft executive order” which would “block the entry of refugees from war-torn Syria and suspend the entry of any immigrants from Muslim-majority Middle Eastern and African countries Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Yemen while permanent rules are studied.” [15] Coming days would prove if this was true or not. What was clearly true was the payment of the expanded border wall with a 20% tariff on Mexico. One article noted that Republicans support the 20% tariff on Mexico, called a “border adjustment,” but major retailers oppose it. [16] The same article said that such retailers argued that it would drive up consumer prices and violate WTO rules, the former which is more of a valid concern than the latter. Steve Horn of DeSmogBlog argued that the wall would grease the way for a “handful of gas pipelines proposed to cross the U.S. border into Mexico, several of them owned by Keystone XL builder TransCanada and another one owned by Dakota Access pipeline owner Energy Transfer Partners,” sending fracking gas south of the border, but that if the 20% tariff passes, then the volume of oil from Mexico to the US could rise. Horn also argued that this proposal has “split the oil refining and oil-producing sectors, with producers supportive and refiners critical of the tax scheme” with companies like American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Koch Industries against it, and Rex Tillerson for the measure, with Goldman Sachs mildly for it.
The other news of that day was not any better. The orange menace’s declared national school choice week showing that he endorses school privatization (continuing the anti-public education policy of Obama), the impact of the anti-Obamacare order was explicated. Shockingly, one poll, released the same day said that almost half of Americans think that there are “some circumstances under which the use of torture is acceptable in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.” Luckily there was also resistance to the orange menace brewing. Raul Castro, like many in Latin America, is wary and not trusting of the orange menace which is part of the reason he told the orange menace to respect Cuban sovereignty (and also to protect the island from imperialist assault. One article in Consortium News, argued that the orange menace was continuing to lie and disdain the truth, so that people think it is true, with the consequence of this action leading to “an ill-informed constituency, incapable of engaging in the kind of well-informed debate that serves as a check against ill-advised foreign policies and can muster solid support for well-advised ones.” Of course, such a development should be criticized. Finally there was a new poll saying that the orange menace fared poorly with the public, claimed that few supported the border wall, many wanted the orange menace to “fully divest from his business interests” and few with a “favorable opinion of Russia” or of Putin reportedly.
Day Eight: January 27
Statements of imperial policy became even clearer on January 27. Mattis, the new head of the Pentagon, declared that the US would continue to be committed to the NATO alliance, citing that importance of Germany as an U$ base, and that NATO is important to fight against terrorism. [17] The same day Mattis also told the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that he had “unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” Such statements are not a surprise since the orange menace declared the same day to the Pentagon’s top brass that the military should be bulked-up, even as he “pointed to expensive programs,” calling for an increased “military campaign against the Islamic State,” likely expanding the “about 6,000 military personnel in Iraq and Syria, including trainers, advisers and special operators.” [18]
In terms of foreign policy, more imperial inter-relationships were reinforced. In the first press conference of the orange menace’s presidency, it was clear that May, the first foreign leader to meet the orange menace in the Oval Office, wanted to discuss “post-Brexit trade opportunities” with him, while the British government made it clear that Britain was still a “fully engaged member of the European Union.” What more comes of this will only be known in the days ahead.
Beyond this, it as clear that other relationships were supported. This included support for the existing one with Australia and possibly an improved relationship with Mexico though these is unlikely. Before moving onto the horrendous executive order, it is worth noting that since 2012, net flow of migration from Mexico decreased, with people who were “fleeing gang-related violence spiraling out of control in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,” with stricter enforcement of “immigration laws and greatly expanded its use of deportations” by Obama. [19] Along with more Asian immigrants recently who are “well educated and as such compete with a different set of Americans for jobs, but also contribute to faster-growing sectors of the American economy.”
With this background it is worth discussing the horrid executive order. The Guardian described the order as a “draconian shift in US policy,”says that the action would close “US borders to refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in war-torn Syria,” with a de facto ban of those across North Africa and Middle East, with “a 90-day block on entry to the US from citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia” and runs counter to the principle in the U$ Constitution of discrimination on basis of religion, with the orange menace saying that he would elevate “persecuted Christians in the Middle East and North Africa” above Muslims. [20] The article also noted that Republicans were embraced the order, while “Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi…invoked dramatic images of a sorrowful Statue of Liberty” and the pro-Syrian war Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said they would challenge the order with a lawsuit.
Beyond The Guardian’s quibs is the text of the executive order itself. The order says, in section 2, that U$ policy is to protect U$ citizens “from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States; and to prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes.” The following section said that the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, along with the Director of National Intelligence, conducting a review to determine information needed from any country to determine “that the individual seeking the benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or public-safety threat.” The section adds that all of those individuals will then submit to the President “report on the results of the review” within 30 days of the order, with reducing investigative burdens during the review “to ensure the proper review and maximum utilization of available resources for the screening of foreign nationals.” The orange menace declared that “the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from [certain] countries…would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order.” After that, the Secretary of State requests that all foreign governments “start providing such information regarding their nationals within 60 days of notification,” and after this expires, then the Secretaries of Homeland Security and State would submit to the President a list of different countries that were “recommended for inclusion on a Presidential proclamation,” with such secretaries submitting “the names of any additional countries recommended for similar treatment.”
The specific law referenced in section 3 of the executive order notes two specific countries: Iraq and Syria, but also says that it can include those from
“a country that is designated by the Secretary of State…a country, the government of which has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism; or any other country or area of concern designated by the Secretary of Homeland Security.”
The law adds that by Feb. 16, 2017, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence determines whether other countries will be part of the ban, with the Secretary considering
“whether the presence of an alien in the country or area increases the likelihood that the alien is a credible threat to the national security of the United States…whether a foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence in the country or area; and…whether the country or area is a safe haven for terrorists.”
If this is taken to its fullest extent, then it would imply that people could ultimately be banned, if the executive order was expanded, from Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania, Tunisia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Senegal, India, Somalia, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines. [21]
Getting back to the executive order, the DIA director, Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, FBI director, in section 4, would be told to implement a program which will identify those individuals “seeking to enter the United States on a fraudulent basis with the intent to cause harm, or who are at risk of causing harm subsequent to their admission,” which they would report on within 60 days, then again within 100 days, and another report within 200 days. Section 5 of the order than declares that the Secretary of State would “suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days,” with the “entry of nationals of Syria as refugees” suspended until the program is improved so that Syrian refugees can be admitted in a way “consistent with the national interest,” that there can only be 50,000 refugees entering “in fiscal year 2017,” that Secretaries of State and Homeland Security can jointly “determine to admit individuals to the United States as refugees on a case-by-case basis.” Then section 6 says that Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, along with Attorney General, might rescind certain authority, and section 7 says that the Secretary of Homeland Security would “expedite the completion and implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking system for all travelers to the United States,” another racist measure, with reports every 180 days until the horrid system is “fully deployed and operational.” Also, the Secretary of State, is told in section 8, to suspend the Visa Interview Waiver Program, while requiring “that all individuals seeking a nonimmigrant visa undergo an in-person interview, subject to specific statutory exceptions,” while expanding the Consular Fellows Program in part by “substantially increasing the number of Fellows, lengthening or making permanent the period of service.”
To end the discussion of the order, section 9 and 10 need a some attention. Section 9 says that the Secretary of State will “review all nonimmigrant visa reciprocity agreements to ensure that they are, with respect to each visa classification” and section 10 says that the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General, will collect and publicly display “information regarding the number of foreign nationals in the United States who have been charged with terrorism-related offenses while in the United States; convicted of terrorism-related offenses while in the United States; or removed from the United States based on terrorism-related activity, affiliation, or material support to a terrorism-related organization, or any other national security reasons.” Yet again, this is meant to attack immigrants in a racist and bigoted way which fuels those anti-immigrant organizations on the right-wing that already exist. Other than this, in the order, sections 11 and 12 are basically boilerplate, as is section 1.
There are a number of other aspects of January 27 worth noting. For one, the orange menace reinforced his “economic nationalism” by meeting with business leaders from across the U$ to improve manufacturing which make the capitalist class smile with glee. Also, it is worth noting that the orange menace signed his bigoted executive order on the SAME DAY as Holocaust remembrance day, which shows how insensitive and disgusting he is. Additionally, the “pro-life”/“right to life,” actually anti-abortion, received official sanction as Pence addressed their rally in DC on the behest of the orange menace. Pence then declared that
“we will not grow weary. We will not rest, until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity…next week President Donald Trump will announce a Supreme Court nominee who will uphold the God-given liberty enshrined in our Constitution in the tradition of the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia…Life is winning again in America. That is evident in…the historic election of a president…who I proudly say stands for the right to life.” [22]
Of course, the orange menace’s advisor Kellyanne Conway, addressed the crowd too, saying that “yes, I am pro-life…This is a new day, a new dawn, for life…[the right to life] is not a choice. It is God-given…This is a time of incredible promise for the pro-life, pro-adoption movement. We hear you. We see you. We respect you. And we look forward to working with you.” It seems that with anti-abortion to gain such official sanction is dangerous as it hurts any effort to advance reproductive rights, and hurts impoverished women, whether cisgender, transgender, or otherwise.
The same day there were a number of news releases. One was a poll showing that many of those in the US still support Obamacare, many are concerned about health insurance convergence, many oppose cutting federal funding to Planned Parenthood by a large martin, even among Republicans, only 31% think that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, with everyone else thinking it should be legal in all or most cases, and 70% support Roe v. Wade. In the realm of foreign policy, Hollande, the horrid (neoliberal and disgraced) leader of France declared that “there are challenges, there are the challenges the US administration poses to our trade rules, as well as to our ability to resolve conflicts around the world.” [23] Others commentators noted that the orange menace is making up facts, ignoring realities, which mirrors the lies during the Obama administration about chemical weapons by the Syrian government (proven false) and concealing evidence about “who was behind the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014,” but that the orange menace is not helping himself by “making easily debunked claims about crowd sizes and voter fraud” meaning that for now he “has gotten off to a very rocky start by telling some very petty lies.” Other commentators went beyond the orange menace. One specifically noted that Rex Tillerson “confirmed before the US Congress that hostilities and agitation toward both Moscow and Beijing will only expand over the next 4-8 years,” saying that U$ foreign policy won’t change, as the U$ will “continue meddling across Asia and provoking conflict with China,” just like under Obama, tensions with Russia will continue, and that “nothing, short of war, will backup Tillerson’s statements about a sea literally an ocean away from US shores.” The final commentary was on Global Research Center. This commentator noted the orange menace’s horrible policies, ranging from the DAPL construction resuming, a border wall between the US and Mexico, an immigration ban, some of the orange menace’s tweets, the orange menace’s lies, and declared that there is hopefulness of resistance to the orange menace, despite Wall Street seeming to warm up to him but saying such resistance should change:
“…The ascendancy of Trump provides an important opportunity for the building of a broad-based united front of democratic forces including African Americans, Latin Americans, Native peoples, immigrants, women, LGBTQ communities, environmentalists and other working class constituencies. However, this alliance which represents the majority of the population within the U.S. must be based on sound political principles and not opportunism…This coalition of genuine popular forces should be organized outside the framework of the Democratic Party which represents the same ruling class elements as the Trumpist Republicans and their Wall Street and Pentagon supporters…A revolutionary mass party of the working class and the oppressed is the only solution to the current political and economic crises.”
Day Nine: January 28
Note: I published this right at midnight on Jan. 29, meant to cover everything Jan. 28 and before, so when it says “today” it is referring to Jan. 28, not today
The racist and bigoted immigration order of the orange menace played out today. For one, many “refugees and migrants holding valid visas” who were en route to the US were stopped, specifically “detained at U.S. airports and restricted from the country as a result of President Trump’s executive order,” with such people detained or not allowed in including Iraqis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Iranians, to say the least, with groups like the International Refugee Assistance Project on their side. [24] Even those who have green card holders from target countries, all of which are Muslim majority but do not include Saudi Arabia or any of the Gulf autocracies of course, are banned.
Rightly so, many reacted with anger. Arabs and Iranians who planned trips to the US were angry, saying that the ban was “insulting and discriminatory,” and some said it made them feel humiliated. [25] Even the director of an Oscar-nominated film, Asghar Farhadi, was apparently not allowed to attend the Academy Awards next month as a result of the ban. [26] His film is a French-Iranian drama, titled The Salesman, which tells the story of a couple who play lead roles in Death of a Salesman, have a fraught relationship. Not surprisingly, Silicon Valley, also called Sexist Valley or Surveillance Valley more accurately, was at least partially mad. Google and Facebook CEOs slammed the orders as “loss of talent,” detracting from those who are “real threats,” and making people live in “fear of deportation.” [27] This of course was driven more by the fear of loss of profit by these mega-corporations than caring about actual people, no doubt.
The reality of the order has been playing out all day. One Iraqi man was released even as another is detained (or was before he was released also) as a result of the order. Additionally, as a result of the ban, enforced by Customs and Border Protection officials on the ground, led to warnings from Qatar Airways to travelers, Iran criticizing the ban, The International Rescue Committee, The International Organization for Migration, UNHCR, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and weepy Democrats slamming the order, while House Speaker Paul Ryan defended it, saying that “our number one responsibility is to protect the homeland.” [28] The same article even claimed that “the list of seven countries [Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia] whose citizens are now banned from the US was likely just a starting point” with the administration weighing it if could add even more countries to the list! The racism clearly continues.
Many other organizations and individuals condemned the ban today. These included Jewish organizations ranging from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and J Street to the Anti-Defamation League,” the latter of which are horribly pro-Israel, without a doubt. [29] The revolutionary Iranian government struck back as well. The Iranian Foreign Ministry declared that while respecting people of the US is important, with it being vital to distinguish between them and hostile U$ actions, “Iran will implement the principle of reciprocity until the offensive U.S. limitations against Iranian nationals are lifted,” as they argued that “restrictions against travel by Muslims to America…are an open affront against the Muslim world and the Iranian nation in particular and will be known as a great gift to extremists.” [30] Additionally, President Hassan Rouhani said earlier today that there is no reason to build walls between nations, implying the orange menace, saying
“Today is not the time to erect walls between nations. They have forgotten that the Berlin wall fell years ago. To annul world trade accords does not help their economy and does not serve the development and blooming of the world economy. This is the day for the world to get closer through trade.”
While he makes a valid point against walls, he is also endorsing corporate globalization which has devastated indigenous peoples across the world and allows capitalism to gain new markets wherever it nests, leading to exploitation and destruction, including in Iran. So, his statement is wrongheaded (in part because he doesn’t note the anti-fascist nature of the Berlin Wall) but also aligned with Western business elites without a doubt.
Sudan echoed the statement of Iran. Their foreign ministry declared that the ban was unfortunate after progress on sanctions, saying that “It is particularly unfortunate that this decision coincides with the two countries’ historic move to lift economic and trade sanctions…and just as economic and financial institutions as well as businessmen in the country were set to continue developing their investment projects.” [31] Then there’s education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who seems she has been taken in by the glamor and acceptance of Western bourgeois institutions, saying that she is “heartbroken that today President Trump is closing the door on children, mothers and fathers fleeing violence and war. I am heartbroken that America is turning its back on a proud history of welcoming refugees and immigrants – the people who helped build your country, ready to work hard in exchange for a fair chance at a new life…I ask President Trump not to turn his back on the world’s most defenseless children and families.” [32]
I’ve also heard recently that the bigoted immigration order has been stayed by several federal judges which turns it to be correct. It was after a case filed by the ACLU which has a horrible history, along with other cases across the country. It is also clear that the orange menace will stay in defending it, saying it isn’t a “Muslim ban,” working out as he planned, with the former an utter lie. [33]
Beyond his bigotry, the orange menace made outreaches on the foreign policy front. He called Russian President Vladimir Putin today in hopes of having “a great relationship” between the US and Russia (and stabilizing US-Russia ties), along with calls to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on “security and trade issues between the two countries and the mutual threat posed by North Korea,” speaking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with likely calls with French President François Hollande and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. [34] It has also been reported that there has been a “sudden resignation” in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by Norman Bay, resulting in leaving the commission with only two commissioners, “not enough for the required quorum to make decisions,” meaning that “even if the president chooses someone quickly, the process will likely take several months,” with an appointment process that “requires Senate confirmation.” [35]
Beyond January 28
There is much still to come in the later days of the orange menace’s presidency. For one, seemingly on January 30, the orange menace will announce that the US embassy in Israel will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He also will continue to advocate on path, making it worth looking at those financial disclosures of his nominees who include as I previously noted:
“…former Goldman Sachs partner Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, arch-conservative Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, ex-Navy Seal Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior, conservative (and wife of Mitch McConnell) Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation, former governor of Texas Rick Perry for Energy Secretary, long-time investment banker Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce, restaurant CEO Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor, Georgia politician Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, conservative commentator Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, billionaire education “reformer” Elisabeth “Betsy” DeVos as Secretary of Education, investment banker Gary Cohn as Director of the National Economic Council, and Director of Ameritrade Todd M. Ricketts as Deputy Secretary of Commerce…Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as administrator of the EPA, California politician Mick Mulvaney as director of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), pro-wrestling tycoon Linda McMahon as administrator of the SBA (Small Business Administration), and Wall Street lawyer Walter “Jay” Clayton as director of the SEC (Securities and Exchanges Commission).”
At the same time, it is worth noting that the orange menace has only signed, so far, a small number of executive orders” but is in a “long line of incoming commanders-in-chief flexing their executive muscles the first week on the job” and likely many of those before him, “the President is using his new executive powers to make his campaign promises a reality.” [36]
That’s not all. The Japanese government is apparently fearful, trying to “please the new foul-speaking lord,” with “10 billion dollars will be spent…in the United States by Toyota car giant, in order to appease the new Emperor” but notes at the orange menace is “preaching protectionism and an extreme form of nationalism” while he also “decides to exceed all previous rulers by his brutality and aggressiveness, and re-hire the old and well-tested samurai, Japan, for his deadly onslaught against humanity.” It is also worth noting that Russia is still quite muted about the orange menace, likely even after the call today, as they are “carefully reading the signals from Trump” and that Moscow is “literally gun-shy of America, the distance between micro-events, like my treatment a couple of days ago on Russian television, and macro-developments, like improving bilateral relations, is very small indeed.”
I don’t have much else to add here, other than saying that for one the capitalists must be made extinct, and that two, the orange menace should be resisted at all costs but bourgeois liberals and bourgeois progressives cannot be trusted, instead independent and radical structures (and movements) should be built and expanded, because otherwise fascism of the orange menace will roll right over the U$ without a real fight, something that none of us really should want if we care about the world around us.
Notes
[1] Roberta Rampton and Ayesha Rascoe, “Obama shortens sentence of Manning, who gave secrets to WikiLeaks,” Reuters, Jan. 18, 2017.
[2] Daniella Diaz, Sophie Tatum, Amanda Wills and Alysha Love, “Inauguration live coverage,” CNN, January 20, 2017.
[3] Sary Levy-Carciente and María Teresa Romero, “Rex Tillerson Has A Long, Troubled History With Venezuela,” HuffPost, Jan. 15, 2017.
[4] Rory Jones, “Israel PM Netanyahu Praises Trump’s Plan for Mexico Border Wall,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 28, 2017.
[5] Alex Lockie, “White House: The US will stop China from taking over territory in international waters,” Business Insider, Jan. 23, 2017; Reuters, “Trump White House Pledges to Block China from Taking South China Sea Islands,” Jan. 23, 2017, reprinted in Newsweek.
[6] Reuters, “Trump White House Pledges to Block China from Taking South China Sea Islands,” Jan. 23, 2017, reprinted in Newsweek.
[7] Bill Vlasic, “Trump, in Meeting, Urges Automakers to Build in United States,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 2017.
[8] Michaeleen Doucleff, “U.S. Spent $1.4 Billion To Stop HIV By Promoting Abstinence. Did It Work?,” May 3, 2016, NPR News; Andy Kopsa, “Obama still funding failed ‘faith-based’ programmes,” Al Jazeera, March 27, 2013.
[9] Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Orders Mexican Border Wall to Be Built and Is Expected to Block Syrian Refugees,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 2017.
[10] Greg Miller, “White House draft order calls for review on use of CIA ‘black site’ prisons overseas,” Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2017.
[11] Katie Bo Williams, “Trump review exposes GOP divide on torture,” The Hill, January 25, 2017.
[12] Austin Wright, “Mattis, Pompeo stunned by CIA ‘black sites’ report,” Politico, January 25, 2017.
[13] Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin, “Trump administration backs off plan to scrub climate pages from EPA website,” Washington Post, January 25, 2017; Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker, “After His Claim of Voter Fraud, Trump Vows ‘Major Investigation’,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 2017.
[14] Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
[15] Julia Edwards Ainsley, “Trump moves ahead with wall, puts stamp on U.S. immigration, security policy,” Reuters, Jan. 26, 2017.
[16] Neil Irwin, “How to Interpret the Trump Administration’s Latest Signals on Mexico,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
[17] The article also says correctly that “the US accounts for nearly 70 percent of the NATO budget and has long urged its European allies to step up their contributions, particularly in the face of what Washington calls the “Russian aggression” in Ukraine.”
[18] Greg Myre, “At Pentagon, Trump Declares His Aim Of ‘Rebuilding’ The Military,” NPR News, Jan. 27, 2017.
[19] Max Bearak, “Even before Trump, more Mexicans were leaving the U.S. than arriving,” Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2017.
[20] Sabrina Siddiqui, “Trump signs ‘extreme vetting’ executive order for people entering the US,” The Guardian, Jan. 27, 2017.
[22] Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Mike Pence tells March for Life in Washington: ‘We will not rest, until we restore a culture of life’,” Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2017, reprinted in National Post.
[23] This article also says and I quote, “the US president is also expected to scrap the agreement’s European equivalent, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Area (Nafta),” but this is ultimately questionable.
[24] Emma Brown and David Nakamura, “Refugees, migrants detained at U.S. airports challenge Trump’s executive order,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2017; Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Kulish, “Trump’s Immigration Ban Blocks Travelers at Airports Around Globe,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 2017; Amy R. Connolly,”Syrian refugees detained at N.Y. airport file legal challenge,” UPI, Jan. 28, 2017.
[25] Eric Knecht and Maher Chmaytelli, “In Middle East, US travel curbs decried as unjust, insulting,” Reuters, January 28, 2017.
[27] Laura Mandaro, “Google CEO troubled by Trump refugee ban that ‘creates barriers’ to talent,” USA TODAY, Jan. 28, 2017.
[28] Jeremy Diamond, “Trump’s immigration ban sends shockwaves,” CNN, Jan. 28, 2017
[29] Laura Koran, “Jewish groups pan Trump for signing refugee ban on Holocaust Remembrance Day,” CNN, Jan. 28, 2017.
[30] Parisa Hafezi, “’An open affront against the Muslim world’: Iran says it will ban Americans in response to Trump’s refugee order,” Reuters, Jan. 28, 2017, reprinted in Business Insider
[31] Reuters, “Sudan calls Trump ban unfortunate in light of sanctions progress,” Jan. 28, 2017
[32] The same article notes that in December 2015, those who denounced the orange menace’s proposed ban included “Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Republican House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who said the ban was “not what this party stands for.” “More importantly,” Ryan added at the time, “it’s not what this country stands for.”” Ryan, of course, has switched his position in favor of bigotry now.
[33] Doug Stanglin and Alan Gomez, “Trump says immigration ban working ‘nicely’ as protests, detainments hit airports,” USA Today, Jan. 28, 2017.
[34] Philip Rucker and David Filipov, “Trump holds calls with Putin, leaders from Europe and Asia,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2017; Laura Smith-Spark and Ivan Watson, “Trump and Putin talked about stabilizing ties, Kremlin says,” CNN, Jan. 28, 2017.
[35] Marie Cusick, “As Trump Reboots Pipeline Expansion, An Unexpected Delay Emerges,” NPR News, Jan. 28, 2017.
[36] Lauren Said-Moorhouse, “What’s Trump done so far? His productive first week and how it stacks up to previous presidents,” CNN, Jan. 26, 2017.
Courtesy of Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s 2013 Black resistance history, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (p. 197)
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 20, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
The days in the U$ may seem dark with the orange menace in power while repression increases from its murderous norm. This means that any pretense for nonviolent respectfulness as a “solution” on its own should be abandoned. Last month, I promised to write about this subject and now I am delivering on that promise, with views which are different from those I expressed in the past. [1] To be clear, I’m no “gun nut” or “gun enthusiast,” a label that liberals and progressives throw around, and do not subscribe to the views of the NRA (National Rifle Association) or any of its supporters. This article is the beginning of a two-part series, with this article recounting the history of gun control laws, which is interconnected with the story of armed self-defense and armed resistance. In order to construct this history, those of liberal, conservative, and radical viewpoints are used together.
A critical history of gun control, armed self-defense and armed resistance
For much of U$ history, gun laws have been interlinked with racism and racial politics, at minimum. The first targets of gun control measures were enslaved Blacks, with the fear of “Black rebellion and…fear of weapons in Black hands,” aiming to prevent the possession of weapons by Black people in America. [2] Specifically, the first gun control measure was in colonial Virginia in 1664, with similar measures passing in 1712 and in 1831 after Nat Turner’s rebellion. From here, it is worth jumping forward to the traditional founders, often called the “Founding Fathers” in our hero-centric culture. When the Second Amendment was proposed as part of the bourgeois freedoms (“The Bill of Rights”), demanded by weirdly named “Anti-Federalists”, later the first Republicans, which mainly included dispossessed farmers and slaveowners, it was not racially equal. Those who wrote and ratified it, had numerous laws on the books which were racially exclusive, banning enslaved Blacks (and even “free” Blacks) from having guns, in fear of revolt across the thirteen states of the new country. Some have even argued that the amendment itself was not meant to protect individual’s right to bear arms but to prevent the federal government “from usurping control of state militias and undermining their slave patrol duties” and was used by the author of the amendment, James Madison, as part of his “1789 campaign to win election to the House of Representatives” and gain support for the “Bill of Rights” on the whole.
After the new rights were put in place, there were some gun laws were so intrusive that they would be emphatically rejected by the NRA and others if laws of a similar character were proposed today. One such law, in 1792, on the federal level, mandated that “every eligible man…purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia” with guns inspected and put on public rolls. [3] Some may take this to mean that such laws were not racist after all. However, such a law was likely to prevent rebellions by farmers and dispossessed revolutionary war veterans, like those in Western Pennsylvania, in 1786 and from 1791-1794, over economic inequality, taxes (of numerous types), foreclosure, debt enforced by the courts, and other forms of resentment. Hence, such gun laws were a form of social control aimed at Whites. Laws that were racist continued into the 19th century, with Blacks allowed to possess arms in Virginia in the early 1800s but “had to obtain permission from local officials” which was unlikely. Another form of social control aimed at White gun owners were concealed carry laws in the 1820s where purportedly “violence-prone men” were limited in using their weapons, an example cited by gun control advocates as “the first modern gun control laws” with the aim of “reducing criminal violence among whites.” Such an explanation is historically inaccurate because the first gun laws were in the 17th century, as noted in the previous paragraph. Additionally, the first bans on concealed weapons were in the Southern states of Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, then seen as limiting a practice of criminals. By the mid-1900s, most US states had concealed carry laws rather than banning guns completely within their state borders, implying that they these laws were a form of social control.
For enslaved Blacks, guns were an important and vital tool (one of many tools) of resistance against their chains of human bondage. They were used to protect against violent White supremacists, police, and terrorist vigilantes. Without guns, they were defenseless and could not win their freedom or initiate an armed rebellion, rejected by most as a “losing strategy” since enslaved Blacks were a “minority in a predominantly white country.” [4] Still, they were at least “313 slave actions, or alleged revolts by groups of ten or more slave[s]” from 1526, 16 years after the first 50 enslaved Blacks are transported to the North America (on January 22, 1510) and start of the African slave trade in the Americas, until 1860, compared to thousands in other parts of the Americas (not within the U$). After one such rebellion, in 1831, by Nat Turner, which was Hollywoodified in Birth of a Nation, planters repressed abolitionists and actions of rebellious Blacks as guns were controlled even more tightly. Such restrictions were not a surprise. Brutal slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, one of the “Founders,” worried to John Adams, in an 1821 letter, that enslaved Blacks, once free, would have the right to bear arms and that they might “seek and gain political influence and power,” leading to possible revolt.
Some advocates of gun control have said that it is “sad” to admit that “our gun rights history…is stained with racism,” which commenced when Blacks, free and enslaved, were banned from owning firearms, with the means of enforcing this being “slave patrols” where armed White men went around to “ensure that blacks were not wandering or gathering where they were not permitted, engaging in suspicious activity or acquiring forbidden weapons” with such functions in some areas “taken over by state militias.” [5] I’m not sure why it is “sad” to admit this. It is better to recognize it as a part of U$ history which is glossed so easily that heart-throbbing gun rights advocates have taken up the cause of spreading this information instead of progressives, which is a damn shame. Anyway, Blacks being prohibited from owning guns was even ruled as legal by North Carolina and Georgia Supreme Courts in the 1840s! The Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) case, which denied Blacks, like Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man whose story is not fully known, whether enslaved or free, standing (or humanity) in court, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and said that enslaved Blacks in U.S. territories cannot be freed by an act of Congress. Part of the rational cited by racist and bigoted Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of the Supreme Court for this decision was the possibility of Blacks owning guns, obviously seen as a threat to White bourgeoisie, especially in the South.
Gun control was clearly aimed at Blacks (enslaved and free) and Whites (to an extent) as a form of social control before the Civil War. Some resisted this imposition, including Harriet Tubman, who was a “conductor” of the underground railroad, carrying a firearm (debate it if was a pistol or rifle) to fend off “possible attacks from slavecatchers” and rescuing more than 300 people from slavery with her gun by her side. [6] Frederick Douglass, one of the major leaders of the abolitionist movement, declared that a good revolver was critical for Blacks to stay free, specifically commenting that gaining freedom in the South would require “the ballot-box, the jury-box and the cartridge-box.” Before the Civil War, some Black female fugitive slaves fired back at slavecatchers, while others engaged in armed self-defense or armed resistance, even as Blacks in the South were not allowed to possess guns, with such guns used in these struggles taken from those in the hands of White folks. With the onset of the Civil War, Blacks gained guns, legally, for the first time, with Black soldiers as a decisive force during the war.
The victory for the Union, and ultimately for Black peoples in the American South mainly, would not last. Many southern Blacks predicted that they would need their weapons to “defend themselves against racist whites unhappy with the Confederacy’s defeat,” a prediction proven true when “recalcitrant white racists committed to the reestablishment of white supremacy determined to take those guns away from blacks” and reassert control. [7] Soon, “Black Codes” were passed to reestablish White power across the South, with measures banning Blacks from owning liquor and guns, with some laws cloaked in “neutral, non-racial terms,” which was enforced by groups of White men who “began terrorizing black communities.” These vigilante enforcers (White terrorists) took different names in every locale, but mainly came to be known by the name of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), along with many others, with intimidation campaigns which disarmed Blacks and served as gun control organs. Newly freed Blacks were not passive or fell into their “assigned” state of subservience, but actively resisted such intimidation and White terrorism, forming Union Leagues with Black militia attachments and Black rifle clubs, even as there was no attempt to disarm such White racist vigilantes, leading to some communities unable to resist racist assaults as they were left “vulnerable and disarmed.”
Such gun control efforts in the Reconstruction period have been used by guns rights supporters on the right-wing, at the present, to advance the argument that “gun control is racist.” [8] This argument seemingly assumes that gun control began during the Reconstruction period. While gun control supporters are right that this argument is faulty in that gun control began before then, some argue laughably that laws before the Civil War were “enacted to provide for the public’s safety, not to discriminate against any particular minority, and were enforced uniformly against all state residents” which whitewashes the actual history to make it sound nice, happy, and glad, denying that laws were racist and a form of social control. Such people cannot deny that there were “discriminatory gun control laws at this time—and other times—in our history that specifically targeted blacks.” It is more accurate to say, like Detroit Black man Rick Ector, that “gun control has racist roots” even if you disagree with his assertion that denying people “the opportunity to own a gun and to protect themselves…is the epitome of racism.”
In the following years of the Reconstruction, the ability of Black Amerikans to own guns was under attack. The Supreme Court eviscerated the true meaning of the 14th Amendment, in United States v. Cruikshank and The Slaughter-House Cases, among others, which allowed segregation to be further greenlighted in the South, with groups, like the KKK, engaging in forcible disarmament of free Blacks and imposing White supremacy through “rape and murder of countless ordinary blacks” as they gained (and held) power throughout the American South. [9] This did not happen without resistance. In 1892, in pamphlet entitled “Southern Horrors,” Ida B. Wells, a Black female crusader against lynching, declared that mob violence was only ameliorated when “blacks exercised manly self-defense” because “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” Specifically, the resistance to White terror after the rise of the KKK and legal violence of Southern government led to what became the modern civil rights movement starting in the early 20th century.
The NAACP and W.E.B. DuBois were at the forefront of such a movement. In 1906, after the Atlanta “race riot,” DuBois patrolled his home with a shotgun. His aggressive statements following this event and his purchase of a gun were not just a one-time event. [10] In fact, as the editor of the NAACP’s magazine, still printed today, called The Crisis, DuBois championed “armed self-defense,” casting it as a duty, a viewpoint also held by NAACP leaders Walter White and Louis Wright, among others. During the 1919 “race riot” in Chicago, DuBois urged robust self-defense through the use of “bricks and clubs and guns” even as he cautioned against “blind and lawless offense against all white folk” and in 1921 he invoked self-defense as he urged Blacks to migrate into the North. Organizationally, the NAACP cut its teeth defending those Black Amerikans who engaged in armed self-defense, with major litigation. This included defense of a Black sharecropper, named Pink Franklin, who shot the planter “who laid claim to him under a peonage contract” in 1910, and was freed by 1919. Another case was that of Ossian Sweet, a man who feared White “mobbers” and being called a coward when going into his home in 1925. So he carried “a sack full of guns and ammunition” and a mob gathered. By the end of the encounter, one white man was killed by “Negro gunfire” and the NAACP hired “Clarence Darrow to defend the Sweets” while they used the “case to fuel a fundraising juggernaut.” Some instances didn’t go as well, such as Sgt. Edgar Caldwell, a WWI veteran, who shot (and killed) a trolley driver who stomped on him “after throwing him from the whites-only section.” Caldwell only survived two years on death row “before he was executed” despite the NAACP raising money for his defense. Finally, it is worth noting that DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, and Marcus Garvey came together in thought at least, as they found “basic agreement” on the idea of armed self-defense by Black Amerikans.
Dr. Ossian Sweet & his East Side Garland home
Beyond the NAACP, Black Amerikans were fending for themselves. Up until the 1950s (and beyond), Black women defended themselves from harassment and physical assault by White men with pistols or “handy” rifles. [11] As Jim Crow and Jane Crow intensified in the wake of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision which legalized “separate but equal” racial segregation in the American South, states enacted “gun registration and handgun permit laws” with such laws passed in Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917), along with others following in Missouri (1919) and Arkansas (1923).
At this point, gun control laws expanded beyond social control of White folks and anti-Black racism to other marginalized social groups. Such laws included the infamous Sullivan Act, which was put in place to “keep the immigrant populations from carrying pistols” and served as what some call the “forefather of today’s modern “may issue” gun permit laws” for concealed carry. [12] Some guns rights advocates claim that California’s roots of its gun control legislation is “tied to white anxiety over Mexican-Americans and Chinese-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century.” While more research would be needed to see if this claim is accurate, there is one reality that is clear: discriminatory gun laws in the Northern United States were passed from the 1910s until the 1930s. These laws, which came about as a result of immigration of “unsavory types”, were thoroughly embedded with racism and directly promoted and crafted by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Specifically as a response to urban gun violence and crime often pegged on immigrants, especially those from Italy and Eastern Europe, the president of the NRA, Harvard-educated lawyer Karl Frederick, helped draft “model legislation to restrict concealed carry of firearms in public.” These laws, such as the Uniform Firearms Act in Pennsylvania in the 1920s, allowed police to determine who was “suitable” to carry a gun, with “racial minorities and disfavored immigrants…usually deemed unsuitable.” Later on, in 1934, when Congress was considering restrictions on “”gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns,” the NRA endorsed the law, the National Firearms Act, showing that it was not, then, the “aggressive lobbying arm for gun manufacturers.”
During the 1930s, some of those in the working class directly engaged in armed self-defense. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) mobilized mass support with “the Scottsboro defense campaign, the miners’ strike of 1931, the unemployed movement, and the underground and armed self-defense organization of thousands of sharecroppers under conditions of the most vicious repression,” helping to prepare the working class for “the enormous battles of the late 1930s.” [13] Such sharecroppers came together in the Sharecropper’s Union, starting in Alabama in 1932, which expanded its membership to “about 12,000 poor farmers and farm laborers,” who were mostly Black, with some White workers, “in five Black Belt states of the Deep South.” With the CPUSA’s members among the leadership, this union organized rural poor to resist plantation owners and ally with urban working class folks. Since the conditions in the South made “elementary demands” have “revolutionary significance,” the sharecroppers organized their struggle as one with arms, engaging in “revolutionary armed self-defense” to meet what they saw, accurately, as “counterrevolutionary terror” with pitched armed battles in Tallapoosa County, Alabama (Camp Hill in 1931 and Reeltown in 1932) and Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1935.
As the years went by, armed self-defense was undoubtedly still used but no new gun control legislation was passed, with new laws not reappearing until the 1960s. One person who threatened armed self-defense was Paul L. Robeson. In 1946, he challenged the refusal by President Harry S. Truman to sponsor anti-lynching legislation by telling him that if the federal government would not protect Blacks, they would “exercise their right of armed self-defense.” This threat was not based in thin air but in the reality and likely actions of Black Americans. Robeson later attended a world peace conference in Paris in 1949, saying that Black Americans should not fight “against the Soviet Union on behalf of their own oppressors” and as a result, the bourgeois media and US government “launched an attack of unprecedented ferocity against Robeson that lasted for nine years.”
By the 1950s, the tradition of armed self-defense continued. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the up and coming leaders in the civil rights movement, took measures to protect himself, making his home an “arsenal.” [14] He applied for a concealed carry permit, under a law that the NRA had promoted thirty years earlier, in 1956, after his home was bombed, but the application was rejected. Still, his house was protected by armed guards for sometime before he fully endorsed the methods and practice of nonviolence. Even saying this, he was not the first one to continue this tradition.
In 1954, members of a NAACP chapter, mostly “upper-class Blacks,” in Monroe, North Carolina, fled due to attacks by the Klan, leaving Robert F. Williams and Dr. Albert E. Perry as the only remaining members. [15] With Williams (henceforth referred to as Robert) and Perry at the helm, the Monroe NAACP branch gained a new life and character. Soon enough the organization consisted of veterans in the leadership, housewives and “fed up” working-class people from the local area. The latter is clear from examination of the members and history of the Black Armed Guard in Monroe, North Carolina. In 1958 and 1959, Robert, a WWII veteran, led the chapter, apart from civil rights activism, to defend two “black children below the age of ten were sentenced for sexual molestation because a white girl kissed them,” in what was called the “Kissing Case.” They were pardoned due to popular pressure, resulting in the Klan engaging in vigilante action by burning crosses in front of their houses.
However, the equation changed in May 1959. A Monroe court acquitted a “white man for the attempted rape of a black woman,” leading Robert to declare on the steps of the courthouse that “this demonstration today shows that the Negro in the South cannot expect justice in the courts. He must convict his attackers on the spot. He must meet violence with violence, lynching with lynching.” [16] He later clarified his statement by saying that he was only saying that if the US Constitution could not be “enforced in this social jungle called Dixie,” then Blacks need to “defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence,” explaining that
“that there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.”
Of course, this resulted in his suspension as president of the NAACP branch, leading his wife, Mabel, to be elected president in his place. This was due to the fact that Mabel and Robert were involved in the struggle for black freedom.
Other than the civil rights activism, the NAACP chapter had another role. In 1957, Robert, along with his wife Mabel, and others in the community, organized a rifle club to defend themselves from attacks by the KKK, with the base of the club coming from the NAACP branch that Robert led. While Black men dominated the new club, some Black women were members, and the club’s actions were broadly a success. [17] The latter was clear from the fact that attacks in the region were reduced. Robert, and the actions of the club, became a “classic example” of armed self-defense and “militant community action,” meaning that he and his chapter were controversial, with disputes with Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, just like Malcolm X years later. The club, which was associated with the NRA likely because they thought those in the club were White, hilariously enough, the club used guns to defend Freedom Riders and the local community. Anger from moderate bourgeois civil rights organizations like the mainstay of the NAACP and continuing horrid conditions in the South led Robert and others to question the usefulness of nonviolence, showing that the “meaning of civil rights activism was not set in stone but constantly contested and reconstructed.” Robert later formed a unique ideology “from elements of black nationalism, Marxism, and radical republicanism.” This does raise a question of whether his viewpoints were a bit opportunist, but on the whole he was doing the right thing.
Robert and Mabel Williams with pistols, training in Cuba.
Throughout the late 1950s, armed self-defense was advocated by numerous peoples of the Black community, organized in “small and scattered groups” until the early 1960s. [18] Most of those who took up arms were Black men, who dominated the “organized and formal” armed self-defense in the South. However, some women took up arms to defend their families and later nonviolent civil rights activists.Ultimately, Blacks in the South saw their struggle as one to stay alive, and then to fight for the right to vote, among other political rights, meaning that they were not about revenge as White slaveowners like Jefferson had guessed.
While it is valid to say that nonviolent direct action defeated racial segregation, Amerikan apartheid more accurately, in the South, it is also worth acknowledging that field organizers, nonviolent in their stance, in the Deep South, were “often protected by armed farmers and workers.” [19] It is also worth remembering that a “civil rights victory” was not inevitable, but that the role of armed Blacks helped this occur. In 1964, Robert P. ‘Bob’ Moses, director of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)’s Mississippi project, declared that “it’s not contradictory for a farmer to say he’s nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder’s head off.” Like Moses, many advocates for Black civil rights and for desegregation appreciated the importance of guns in the South, especially by Black veterans and informally organized community groups. Such groups and individuals helped protect racial justice advocates, seeing the protection as a necessity, with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SNCC, and Martin Luther King (MLK) refusing to publicly criticize the use of armed self-defense. This made it clear that, the saying that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” was true in the south, for the “southern freedom movement.”
The tradition of armed self-defense in the US South was connected with the civil rights movement, with many believing in nonviolent resistance, with gunfire and the threat of gunfire helping nonviolence, which some veterans of the movement describe as “aggressive confrontations,” serving as an effective tactic for change. [20] While this was the reality, and this resistance did end “mental paralysis” which made Blacks unable to break free of “white supremacy” fully, nonviolence was not a way of life for many in the southern Black community with households having guns and armed supporters protecting field organizers. Conflict between fears of bigoted (and racist) Whites and needs of Blacks to defend themselves arose again later in the 1960s, leading to more radical Black activists who believed in varying forms of Black liberation and Black nationalism, and splitting from the arguably bourgeois civil rights movement. Many Blacks, not just Black activists, apart from Malcolm X, were undertaking the slogan of armed self-defense as a way to protect themselves from violent repression of Blacks by racist Whites.
Robert, Mabel, and the other members of the Williams family suffered from his strong stance against nonviolent respectfulness and in favor of armed self-defense. In August 1961, Mabel held off police who were coming to arrest Robert for a “so-called kidnapping of a white couple,” when he was actually trying to free the white couple from an angry mob. [21] Eventually, each one of them fled to Cuba after he was pegged with “kidnapping” changes. In the process, Robert rejected the idea of Black nationalism, along with Marxism, thinking that it “putting class before race,” at least as he saw it. These beliefs, while readers may disagree with them, are not a surprise for him since the CPUSA was engaging in destalinization and embracing Khrushchev’s revisionism. As a result, Robert made a lasting friendship with the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group, but also produced a newspaper named The Crusader and broadcast a radio show for Southern Blacks called Radio Free Dixie. Perhaps the Trotskyists saw this as a way to have a dig against the CPUSA, while also seeing how Robert was opportunist with a rejection of Marxism and Black nationalism. While he said that the Cuban government was limiting his work, it is more likely this was the work of the CPUSA, which had, at the time, removed themselves from actively supporting the struggle of suffering Blacks. As a result, in 1965, after arguing in favor of radical internationalism, he moved to the People’s Republic of China, where he stayed in exile. He later returned to the United States in 1969, and was pardoned of his “crimes” in 1975. Still, to many, his actions (which were not his own of course) still represented “the tactical power of armed self-defense as a tool against reactionaries of all stripes” and the power of Black nationalism.
Through the 1960s, while Williams was in political exile (1961-1969), Blacks in the U$ were not giving up the use of the gun to protect themselves and/or assert their rights as human beings. In 1964, while SNCC respected the desire of the Black masses to engage in armed self-defense, James Foreman admitted that “I dare say that 85 per cent of all Negroes do not adhere to non-violence. They are allowing the non-violent movement to go ahead because it is working.” [22] The same year, the Progressive Labor Movement, a radical communist group formed two years earlier which had been expelled from the CPUSA for pro-China sentiments, declared that
Black people, if they are to be free, must develop political power outside of the present power apparatus through armed self-defense, political councils, the creation of an economic base, seizing land and factories and finally, uniting with all workers struggling for revolution.”
At the same time, a former preacher for the socially conservative, but Black nationalist, Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm X, who has been mentioned earlier, became even more spoken out. In 1964, Malcolm argued for Black rifle clubs, which the White commercial press were “hysterical” over, and for armed self-defense against White reactionaries, even telling Lew Rockwell, the head of the Nazis, that if MLK or anyone in his demonstration were harmed, then the Nazis would face “maximum physical retaliation.” [23] This belief was centered around the idea that nonviolence in and of itself was a lie that would hurt more Blacks, meaning that people should be armed and able to defend themselves rather than giving up their rights. Malcolm directly embodied this in an iconic image in Ebony magazine, in 1964, with unknown origins, showing him with a M-L carbine, standing at the window, watching for those who were out to kill him.
Ebony picture of Malcolm X with a gun
Sadly, Malcolm was gunned down by NOI members, on February 21, 1965, with twenty-one bullets riddling his body, likely with the help of the NYPD, CIA, and FBI, all whom had an interest in seeing him dead and “neutralized.”
Apart from Malcolm, there was one group that engaged in armed self-defense to protect civil rights activists. It was called the Deacons for Defense and Justice. This group defended civil rights workers against attacks from the KKK and other White supremacists, with a masculinist appeal and awareness of their place in history. [24] The group expanded across the Deep South, including into Louisiana’s Natchez area, with Black women not being actively involved (since they were actively excluded) but they did participate on an “individual and informal basis,” with women defending their homes “with armed force,” and others participating with men in target practice in auxiliaries called Deaconesses. Specifically, there were at least six women associated with the Deacons, showing that armed self-defense wasn’t only a male phenomena.
Some gun control advocates claim that the Deacons do not support the idea that the “armed resistance won the civil rights movement,” which no one is arguing, saying that the Deacons were a “little-known group that had no discernible impact on the national civil rights movement.” [25] The argument, which rests on the fact that the group didn’t form until the summer of 1964, ends up citing certain “respectable” historians and uses huge MLK quotes. Ultimately, the Deacons, who were roughly active from 1964 to 1968, helped the national civil rights movement by allowing it to have victories in the Deep South, showing that fighting against segregation and racial injustice was a worthy cause. While one can argue that the results of the movement did not challenge the White power struggle on a national level, laws such as the Civil Rights Act in 1965 or Voting Rights Act in 1964 would have not been possible without the work of the Deacons. Without the Deacons protecting civil rights workers, it would have been harder to push for such laws since there would have been fewer victories against Southern racial apartheid, regardless of how much they accomplished in retrospect.
By 1965, Blacks were becoming more impatient than ever at the pace of the civil rights movement, and nonviolent respectfulness, which did not fundamentally challenge the White power structure nationwide. That year, in Watts, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, these emotions came out. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP), called the Progressive Labor Movement in earlier years, declared that this action was unorganized and faced tremendous odds, but that for a brief time of two days the people “liberated their own community and kept out the police.” [26] Still, they lamented that such resistance is too weak to meet the enemy at hand, meaning that there needed to be self-defense organizations to help them organize to defend themselves, along with independent political organizations to fight for their demands and lead them forward. Not everyone held this opinion of course. MLK argued that the Watts uprising was no model to be praised, but did recognize that such “riots” were the “language of the unheard.” The same year as Watts, there was a battle waged in “Bloody Lowndes” County, Alabama, which ended in 1966 with defeat, even as the efforts of a southern grassroots Black Power movement was gaining more strength, with visions of such Black freedom not yet realized. It is worth mentioning here that there was armed self-defense in the North as well, during the 1960s and before, but this writer has not read about this in detail, meaning that such instances have not been included in this article.
In October 1966, a new group came into the political scene: the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. This organization began in Oakland, California around the “basic need for armed self-defense” and creating an “all-round program of self-defense” with demands for basic, human needs, a minimum program “designed to unfold into the maximum program of socialist revolution,” although its ideology was ultimately all over the place (not in a good way). [27] The Panthers, influenced by Robert and Malcolm’s efforts, used guns as self-protection by openly carrying them in public and displaying them for everyone, especially the local police to see. The regular practice of “policing the police” in patrols happened after an incident in February 1967 when Newton, Seale, and several others, armed with guns, were stopped by police, with Newton refusing to let the police see a gun, with the police, after a huge crowd gathered, not challenging him and backing off. Newton and Seale were frustrated with civil rights movement’s failed promise, leading to more violence and oppression by the police, pushing the belief that the gun could be a way to gain liberation. As for recruits who were within the BPP, they were taught about socialism and Black nationalism, in classes organized by other Panthers, and learned how to “clean, handle, and shoot guns” in keeping with the previously mentioned belief.
Black Panthers inside of the California state house on May 2, 1967
One event of the Panthers electrified the nation and brought gun control back into the picture. In 1967, in an effort to stop the Panthers from brandishing guns in “an effort to police the police” and prevent police brutality, a measure was proposed to reduce their self-defense efforts. [28] In May of that year, a number of Panthers, with loaded weapons, went to the state legislature in Sacramento (in a “gun-in”) to oppose this form of racial repression, in an act which some say was the “birth” of the modern debate over gun rights, but this is inaccurate as such armed self-defense efforts had surfaced for years and years before. On May 2, a day when eighth grade students were gathering to lunch with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, thirty young Black Panthers, with the 24 men holding guns and six women only accompanying them, took to the steps of the state capitol building carrying “revolvers, shotguns, and pistols.” On those steps, Seale, reading a statement written by Newton (part of which is here), declared the following, connecting domestic and international struggles:
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the Black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people. At the same time that the American government is waging a racist war of genocide in Vietnam, the concentration camps in which Japanese Americans were interned during World War II are being renovated and expanded. Since America has historically reserved the most barbaric treatment for nonwhite people, we are forced to conclude that these concentration camps are being prepared for Black people, who are determined to gain their freedom by any means necessary. The enslavement of Black people from the very beginning of this country, the genocide practiced on the American Indians and the confining of the survivors to reservations, the savage lynching of thousands of Black men and women, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the cowardly massacre in Vietnam, all testify to the fact that towards people of color the racist power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror and the big stick. Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated and everything else to get the racist power structure in America to right the wrongs which have historically been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalates the repression of Black people throughout the ghettoes of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods and increased patrols have become familiar sights in Black communities. City Hall turns a deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from this increasing terror. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. The pending Mulford Act brings the hour of doom one step nearer. A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society, must draw the line somewhere. We believe that the Black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.”
While this act, and the subsequent marching inside the assembly chambers, gave the Panthers a nationwide reputation (perhaps foreshadowing efforts at branding today?), a fear of Black people with guns led to new gun restrictions. [29] Specifically in response to this incident, Republican assemblymember Don Mulford, pushed forward the Mulford Act stronger than before, pledging to make the bill tougher. Then-Governor Reagan declared that there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons” and said that guns were a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will,” imposing no “hardship on the honest citizen” (referring to good-natured White people) signing the bill into law only a few months later. The NRA supported this law and other gun control.
The following year, in 1968, the U$ Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and Gun Control Act of 1968, with both laying the foundations for the existing carceral state. The latter law, which banned felons from buying guns, expanded gun dealer licensing, and prohibited import of cheap “poorly made guns that were frequently used for crime by urban youth,” making it clear that the law wasn’t about controlling guns but “was about controlling blacks.” [30] Yet again, the NRA supported the law, praising it in their American Rifleman publication, along with a federal report in 1968 following suit blaming urban unrest, to an extent, on “easy availability of guns,” and arguing for firearm controls. Some claim that the passing of these laws meant that “attitudes toward gun rights shifted” for a temporary time “in favor of more racially neutral gun control policies” but this denies, yet again, the idea that gun control laws are a form of social control.
In the meantime, the Black liberation movement was gaining strength. In 1968, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was formed, lasting until 1971, embodying the ideas of economic independence, Black empowerment, and self-determination, likely having a stronger ideological basis than the Black Panthers, by “creating a Black nation within a nation,” calling for a homeland in “the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — subjugated land in which people of African descent were enslaved,” states that are part of what is commonly called the “Black Belt.” [31] As part of RNA practices, they had a “cadre of young black men armed with rifles,” willing to engage in armed self-defense, with armed women serving as security for the RNA’s Land Celebration Day in 1971, with a picture from that day opening this article.
A handbill for the RNA
As for the BPP, there was also a change. As the male bravado of the Panthers was tamped down, Black female writers changed the game, along with illustrations by Emory Douglas, especially, in The Black Panther newspaper, showing “poor black women resisting authority in everyday life.” [32] Such women carried guns and were framed as equals with men, not those who were subservient. In later years however, the FBI engaged in infiltration and psychological warfare against the Panthers (among many other radical left groups) as part of COINTELPRO, even as they started the free breakfast program in January 1969 and were hated by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover with a passion. Organizational disputes between SNCC, the BPP, and other organizations led to divisiveness, even as newspaper circulation of The Black Panther reached 250,000 in 1970, with Eldridge Cleaver kicked out of the party in March 1970, leading to the creation of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). After this point, the remaining parts of the party leadership were torn apart, with Cleaver, Seale, and Newton going their separate ways, with the party’s ideology being distorted even more, and the party collapsing in 1982.
Back in the late 1960s, support for gun control was across the board among the liberal bourgeoeisie. In the 1968 presidential election, Bobby Kennedy, before his assassination, supported gun control of “private citizens” but not cops of course, and George McGovern also supported gun control, which some said would be “a major step in disarming the people.” [33] The following year, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence or National Violence Commission for short, declared in the introduction to their final report that “violence in United States has risen to alarmingly high levels…[which is] dangerous to our society…it is jeopardizing some of our most precious institutions, among them schools and universities…it is corroding the central political processes of our democratic society.” Specific measures they recommend, to bring violence “under control” and “better control,” are is creation of “central offices of criminal justice” and private citizen organizations “as counterparts” (possibly the idea of police unions) and most importantly, “the adoption of a national firearms policy that will limit the general availability of handguns.” In later pages, the commission said that there needs to be a push for “responsible participation” by young people in America “in decision-making” as a possible “substitute for the violence that born in frustration,” along with admitting that “without the deterrent capability essential for security against external attack, internal freedom and security would not be possible,” implying that a huge military with a Soviet boogeyman is needed to keep US citizens “in line.” They also argue that all Americans have to recognize “the basic causes of violence in our society and what must be done to achieve liberty and justice for all” and that strong measures must be taken to end the “rising tide of individual and group violence.”
The commission was not alone in these remarks. General Ramsey Clark, who has the imperialistic idea of “progress” across the continent, by saying it created conditions making crime “common,” declared that “revolutionary crime and illegal conduct intended to alter institutions impose rioting, mob violence, unlawful confrontation, arson and trespass on a weary society.” [34] He also said that one of the elements of a “violent environment” which “violent crime” springs from is the “prevalence of guns,” implying that he supports gun control. Others said however, in 1970, that violence was an “ambiguous term” and that “order,” like violence, is “politically defined” and argued that national commissions in 1919, 1943, and 1968 do not mention (or consider) the connection of war (in this case in Vietnam) and domestic violence, an important fact to consider.
On the far right, there was a new development. The gun control efforts in the 1960s, which aimed to disarm “urban and black radicals” led to backlash. Hardline NRA supporters took over the leadership of the NRA, changing it from fighting for sport shooting into a group engaging in “aggressive political lobbying to defeat gun control” and leading to the modern gun-rights movement today. [35] People like Maxwell Rich, of the old NRA, were pushed out-of-the-way, with a man named Harlon Carter, leading his allied rank-and-file members to engage in a coup to take over the leadership in May 1977. He and his loyal followers transformed the NRA, for the worse, into a pro-gun powerhouse and juggernaut where mistrust of law enforcement was one of the main beliefs. At the same time, as the GOP and NRA rejected gun control, Blacks, faced by increased violence in U$ cities and the crack cocaine epidemic, driven in part by the CIA’s activities, embraced it.
As for the Left, support for armed self-defense and armed resistance was continued by certain sections and groups. Some argued that the “question of armed struggle” was a matter of expediency determined by political crisis in the country, potential of support from the masses at-large, and need of the people to engage in armed self-defense. [36] A few years later in April 1972, the “Revolutionary Union” group declared that “…even in an organized mass way, armed self-defense is incapable of completing the revolutionary task, and in time will even become less useful for defense,” saying that ultimately the only “real defense” of the populace is to “destroy the enemy…[through] offensive action and an organized military force.” One such ideology that included armed self-defense were the ideas of Maoism, which also defended extra-legal tactics and preparation for military struggle, contrasting from the cautious perspectives of “Old Left”groups, the former which was somewhat embraced by the BPP. In the Chican@ community, called the Mexican-American community today, armed resistance was used. The Chican@ nationalist organization, the Brown Berets, composed of “lumpen” and working-class elements, proposed the Chicano Moratorium (1969-1971 at least) to raise awareness about the Vietnam War as a “civil rights issue,” also advocated for armed self-defense and armed struggle, as part of their anti-capitalist viewpoint, as necessary tools for liberation.
Picture of eleven members of Brown Berets, the date of which is not known
While some argued against armed resistance, saying it was illegal and coercive, numerous groups still supported it. [37] In 1974, Ethel Shepton of the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), in Boston, argued against racial segregation, fighting for community control of schools in Black neighborhoods, along with armed self-defense against racist reactionaries, the right of “Black children to go to any school,” and the demand that the government “break up the fascist gangs.” As years passed, gun control was cited as part of a “fascist offensive” to win allies of the proletariat to the “side of capitalism” while Robert, in 1977, declared that Mao Zedong was a “invigorator of rebellion and revolutionary thought,” saluting the victories of China, showing his ideological flexibleness, perhaps not always for the best reasons. The same year, one group argued that they actively supported the right of White and Black working-class peoples, specifically those who were Black, to “defend themselves with arms against attack and lynching” with organization of armed self-defense in Black communities as “an important aspect of our leadership in the oppressed Nation.”
During the later 1970s, one slogan began to be used more than ever: “Death to the Klan” as the KKK expanded throughout the US in groups like the “Invisible Empire.” In 1979, the left-wing Communist Workers’ Party (CWP), an offshoot of the PLP, pushed forward “militant, anti-racist opposition to the Klan” by organizing within existing textile unions and against racism in the community as a whole, with positive results. [38] Of course, the Klan would not stand for this, doing what they could to stop the activism. As the CWP became more militant and organized a march on November 3, 1979, to counter the racist KKK, the Klan responded in force, with local Neo-Nazis, accompanied by FBI and police informants, arriving at the protest, taking “sidearms and rifles out of the trunk,” opening fire on participants, killing five in all, and likely wounding of many others, in what some called the “Greensboro Massacre.” In the aftermath of this, the community was confused but also horrified, with the police nowhere to be on the scene and the leadership of the CWP being heavily criticized by established politicians and other radicals even as the lesson from the experience led to “better methods of anti-Klan organizing.”
The CWP was not the only group organizing against the Klan. In Northern Mississippi, the United League organized the masses, engaging in armed self-defense and taking precautions against Klan threats, along with similar anti-Klan and anti-Neo Nazi protests across the country. [39] As for the CWP, the more restrictions were put on them but this didn’t stop them. In January 1980, charges against nine people who transported weapons to the funeral march for the five killed during the Greensboro Massacre was dismissed, which some called a “victory for the Communist Workers Party and the masses in the struggle for right to armed self-defense” even as all confiscated weapons were ordered destroyed. This victory allowed the CWP to continue to rally the people for nonviolent demonstrations even as they fought for the right of the masses to engage in armed self-defense, going against politicians like Ted Kennedy who supported gun control laws. In 1981, one publication noted that the Klan was dedicated to engaging in “armed suppression of the workers’ movement and all progressive political movements” meaning that such reactionary terror cannot be stopped by being unarmed, but that “common sense tells us that armed self-defense is the only protection that the masses have against the reactionaries’ terror,” which liberals reject, claiming that “the masses are not prepared to accept the necessity of armed self-defense.” In the same year, other measures were afoot. After the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan in March, the news media pushed for gun control, as part of “”anti-crime” hysteria” which some say was a way to justify more a bigger police apparatus, and turning the U$ “into one big convict camp for forced labor, a chain gang working for the profits of the monopolies.”
Handbill for Nov. 3 march by the CWP in Greensboro, NC
Despite criticisms of groups like the CWP, the chant of “Death to the Klan” became a national rallying cry. This was especially the case when the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC), originally emerging out of struggle by Puerto Rican and Black prisoners in New York, published a newsletter titled called Death to the Klan. [40] The organization was deeply rooted in the Black liberation struggle and Arab liberation struggles in Asia. One lesson that was clear, it seemed, from the rhetoric of the CWP and its predecessors, along with grassroots organizing in Dallas, Texas, was a clear need for “synthesis between community defense and mass organizing” with self-defense as an imperative for people of color. By the mid-1980s, JBAKC had trouble articulating a “mass self-defense strategy” as they tried to get rid of racist graffiti, but were beat back by a racist skinhead gang in 1985 who were armed with shields and weapons. As a result, some anti-racist skinheads organized armed self-defense and openly organized against those spreading hate and violence, including creation of a self-defense strategy with confrontations with racist often ending peacefully, without bullets being fired except in a few occasions.
Undoubtedly armed self-defense continued as a practice by some individuals. One example of this was during the “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles, in 1992, Korean shopkeepers had armed themselves, with Black “rioters” and Koreans portrayed negatively by the media, which diverted attention away from “a long tradition of racial violence,” with tensions among people of color “woven into U.S. history for the past 500 years.” [41] There is more on the history of armed self-defense, gun control, and armed resistance after 1992 but this was often a tactic by White individuals and not people of color.
Conclusion
In the original version of this article I wanted to write about the history of armed resistance and gun control as the first section, followed by my views on the subject as the second section, reinforced by what I had said above. However, with many footnotes and thousands upon thousands of words, and with such a rich history, it seemed best to split this article into a two-part series. Even so, there is no doubt that I did not cover all the history on this subject. It is worth saying that anyone, on either side of the debate over guns in U$ society should recognize the clear history in this article to inform their viewpoint so they don’t laugh off the other side as ignorant fools while ignoring the reality which is right in front of their noses.
Notes
[1] Other tweets of mine on the subject include: criticizing CodePink for implicitly rejecting armed self-defense, saying that calling for nonviolence at the upcoming women’s march doesn’t make sense, that liberals don’t care about safety of people of color because if they did they would call for armed self-defense, that armed self-defense shouldn’t be led by men, that these anti-fascists have the right idea, Korryn Gaines in Baltimore County has a right to armed self-defense, talking about armed self-defense in the Black community, challenging Hands Up United to endorse armed self-defense, asking if Muslims should arm themselves for self-defense, and so on.
[2] David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140, accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015, accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017.
[3] Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; LeftistCritic, “Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encylcopedia,” Soviet History, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 11, 13; Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. Ends up advocating for gun control.
[5] Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, “The Long, Racist History of Gun Control,” The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.
[6] Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017, Charles E. Cobb, Jr., “This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed,” Washington Post, July 28, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; LeftistCritic, “Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” p. 21.
[7] Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Candice Lanier, “MLK’s Arsenal & The Racist Roots of Gun Control in the U.S.,” RedState, January 17, 2013; January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, “The Long, Racist History of Gun Control,” The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; David B. Kopel, “The Klan’s Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South,” Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, “Gun control is people control, with racist implications,” NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017; LeftistCritic, “Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” p. 22-24. The rhetoric in favor of such armed self-defense was often masculinist in nature.
[8] Ehab Zahriyeh, “For some blacks, gun control raises echoes of segregated past,” Al Jazeera America, September 1, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). He goes on to talk about Nat Turner’s rebellion, the Colfax Massacre, and numerous other instances to disprove the gun control is racist idea.
[9] David B. Kopel, “The Klan’s Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South,” Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.
[10] Nicholas Johnson, “Negroes and the Gun: The early NAACP championed armed self-defense,” Washington Post, January 30, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017. This whole paragraph comes from a summary of this source.
[11] Noted in old issues of the NAACP’s The Crisis. Also see David B. Kopel, “The Klan’s Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South,” Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017.
[12] Niger Innis, “The Long, Racist History of Gun Control,” The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, “Gun control is people control, with racist implications,” NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017; David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011; Edward Wyckoff Williams, “Fear of a Black Gun Owner,” The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. Also see the Federal Firearms Act of 1938 which was also reportedly drafted by the NRA.
[13] Paul Elitzik, “The CPUSA and Black Workers in the 1950s,” Class Struggle, No. 9, Spring 1978, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017; Carl Davidson, Chapter 7: Revolutionary Upsurge, part of the book, “In Defense of the Right to Self-Determination,” 1976, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed January 17, 2017.
[14] Adam Winkler, “MLK and His Guns,” Huffington Post, January 17, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. Ends up advocating for gun control; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017. There are a number of articles also worth reading on the subject: “Nonviolent Philosophy and Self Defense” (Library of Congress), “The Important Role of Armed Resistance in the Black Civil Rights Movement” (AlterNet), and “Gun Control and the Disarming of the Black Community,” (The Root).
[15] Carl Davidson, Chapter 10: The Civil Rights Movement, part of the book, “In Defense of the Right to Self-Determination,” 1976, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed January 17, 2017.
[17] Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Davarian L. Baldwin, “The Civil Rights Movement,” The New York Public Library, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.
[18] “On the Black Panther Party,” Speech at the Second National Conference
of the Marxist-Leninist Party, USA — Fall 1984, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017. The conclusion that women were arming themselves is not in and of itself out of the question
[19] Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.; Jim Dann and Hari Dillion, CHAPTER 3: RETREAT FROM THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT, part of “The Five Retreats: A History of the Failure of the Progressive Labor Party,” 1977, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017; Charles E. Cobb, Jr., “This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed,” Washington Post, July 28, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017. Bob Moses also said that“I don’t know if anyone in Mississippi preached to local Negroes that they shouldn’t defend themselves.”
[20] Charles E. Cobb, Jr., “This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed,” Washington Post, July 28, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; “Hail the Formation of the Black Revolutionary Party,” The Black Revolutionary, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1971, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed January 17, 2017.
[21] Donald Parkinson, “Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right,” Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Malik Miah, “African-American Self-Defense,” Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Jake Rosen, “War on SNCC: Turning Point for Freedom Fighters,” Progressive Labor, Vol. III. No. 2 February 1964, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017. Also see a publication of the Freedom Archives, Robert and Mabel Williams Resource Guide which is cited in another article of this series.
[22] Progressive Labor Movement, “Statement of Principles and Strategic Concepts,” Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 2, no date [1964], Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017; Pili Michael L. Humphrey, Chairman of the Afro-American Commission Central Committee of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), “Commentary: Revolution and Black Liberation in the 1980’s,” Unity, Vol. 3, No. 9, April 25-May 8, 1980, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017;
[23] “Progressive Labor Editorial Comment: Malcolm X and Black Nationalism,” Progressive Labor Vol. III, No. 5, May 1964, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 17, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.
[24] David Love, “Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?,” Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017. This masculinist appeal is also noted in Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back and Estes’s I Am A Man. Noted most prominently by Lance Hill in his 2006 book about the Deacons for Defense but is also noted elsewhere.
[25] Ladd Everitt, “Debunking the ‘gun control is racist’ smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.
[28] Edward Wyckoff Williams, “Fear of a Black Gun Owner,” The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “MLK and His Guns,” Huffington Post, January 17, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Revolutionary Communist League (Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung Thought), “History of the Congress of Afrikan People,” Unity and Struggle, Vol. V, No. 6, June 1976, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed January 17, 2017; “On the Black Panther Party,” Speech at the Second National Conference
of the Marxist-Leninist Party, USA — Fall 1984, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Huey Newton, “In Defense of Self-Defense: Executive Mandate Number One,” The Black Panther, 2 June 1967.
[29] Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Edward Wyckoff Williams, “Fear of a Black Gun Owner,” The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.
[30] Adam Winkler, “Gun Control is “racist”?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017. Ends up advocating for gun control; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “MLK and His Guns,” Huffington Post, January 17, 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; David Babat, “The discriminatory history of gun control,” Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140, accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed January 16, 2017.
[31] David Love, “Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?,” Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.
[32] There have been numerous articles about Emory Douglas in publications across the web, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
[33] Cleveland Draft Resistance Union, “Johnson Quits,” 1968, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 16, 2017; “National Elections and the Revolutionary Movement: George McGovern – Friend or Foe?,” Pamoja Venceremos, Volume 2, Issue 14, July 21-August 4, 1972, Marxist Internet Archive; accessed January 16, 2017; National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, “Introduction to the Final Report of the Commission,” Civil Disorder and Violence: Essays on Causes and Cures (ed. Henry M. Clar, Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1972), p. 2-5, 8, 11-12. Other documents submitted to the commission of note “crimes of violence” and “mass media and violence.” McGovern is also criticized for his continued support of the Zionist state and U$ imperialism
[34] Jerome H. Skolnick, “Selections from the Politics of Protest,” Civil Disorder and Violence: Essays on Causes and Cures (ed. Henry M. Clar, Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1972), p. 47-48, 63-64; Ramsey Clark, “Selections from Crime In America,” Civil Disorder and Violence: Essays on Causes and Cures (ed. Henry M. Clar, Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1972), p. 13-14, 18, 21; Edward C. Banfield, “How Many, and Who Should Be At Liberty?,” Civil Disorder and Violence: Essays on Causes and Cures (ed. Henry M. Clar, Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1972), p. 31. Clark also said that “mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, widespread property crime…police brutality and criminal syndicates” are also factors. He also argued that there is “a political element in every large scale riot.”
[35] Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “Is Gun Control Racist?,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Gun Control,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, “There’s Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore,” Truthdig, January 29, 2013, accessed January 16, 2017; Jane Costen, “The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control,” MTV News, June 30, 2016, accessed January 16, 2017.
[40] Alexander Reid Ross, ““Death to the Klan” and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US,” It’s Going Down, July 26, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017. Organized anti-racist gangs included the Red and Anarchist SkinHeads (RASH) and the SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPs), along with the non-skinhead CHD (Coalition for Human Dignity) group.
[41] Newsweek Staff, “They Armed in Self-Defense,” May 17, 1992; accessed January 16, 2017.
Obama’s statement not surprisingly was basically endorsed by Huffington Post.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 12, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism.
Recently, the Chinese “Communist” Party publication, Global Times, rated Obama positively in a “fair review” of his legacy. They mentioned Obama’s farewell speech, saying that Obama’s accomplishments included “economic performance…better than other major Western nations” with an increased GDP per capita, lower unemployment rate, and a long bull run for the U$ stock market. The piece then declared that one of Obama’s legacies is Obamacare, devoting himself to “Affordable Care Act and gun control” which they almost implied was worth the effort. They even said that Obama was not as “bold” as Bush, relatively “cautious in military actions,” saying that he was the most “peaceful US president compared with several of his immediate predecessors,” not leading the US into any new wars, and not taking a leading role in the war in Libya. Even on the East Asia/Pacific pivot, which was “unsuccessful” in their view, they said that Obama was “not radical in the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy,” which prevented ruptures in Sino-U$ relations, adding that there are “mechanisms for bilateral exchanges” between the U$ and revisionist China, with ties between the two complicated but “mature” at the same time. They ended by saying that “Obama is a nice person, calm and not too extreme” but that he failed “show his special leadership,” and criticized the orange menace without naming him, calling the orange menace a person who “wants to be different in every category…and is obsessed with seeking the limelight.” In terms of criticisms of Obama’s presidency, the piece only mentioned that the U$ had “made the Syrian civil war last for five years, which led to the emergence of the Islamic State and the refugee crisis” leading to a weakening of “Washington’s control over the Middle East” and that “the gap in income distribution is growing larger,” with U$ citizens “feeling little sense of accomplishment.” Since such revisionist thought does not accurately describe the Obama legacy, it is important to set the record straight.
There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Obama was an imperialist of the highest order. Clearly the Global Times was writing a hit piece on the orange menace, who I wrote about two days ago, which should surprise no one since the orange menace is spewing BS on the issues of pharmaceuticals, the F-35 program, hacking, and others. For these, he may be partially right in one aspect but wants to push his image as a “tough” president, including supporting Taiwan to the hilt. As for Obama, the idea that he was a “nice person, calm and not too extreme” (or a “Woodrow Wilson”) is invalidated by his imperialist declaration last month that Russia was a “smaller” and “weaker” country that didn’t “produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” but still said it could pose a serious threat, somehow (that doesn’t even make sense!). I guess this is no surprise for a president who loves Reagan and has an administration that promotes the Russian hacking conspiracy, not a “kinder” imperialist by any stretch. With the orange menace administration coming in it is clearly time for armed self-defense.
Let’s go through the “accomplishments” and “legacy” of Obama and his administration one by one:
Voting AGAINST UN resolutions condemning glorification of Nazi and denial of Nazi war crimes in 2014 and 2016, supported by 115 member states in 2014 and 131 in 2016, a resolution proposed by the Russian Federation since 2006 reportedly. Last year, the U$ claimed that the resolution had an “overly narrow scope and politicized nature” and said it called for “unacceptable limits on the fundamental freedom of expression,” showing that the murderous empire values speech of Nazis (and white supremacists) above all others.
As Nick Turse wrote in an investigative piece earlier this month, U$ special forces can be found in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, partnering with “unsavory types” (you know who they are). Specifically, he noted that 70,000 special forces under Special Operations Command (SOCOM). across the world, are engaged in “shadow wars against terror groups…[along with] activities…outside acknowledged conflict zones…every single day” with the most elite forces of the US, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets “deployed to 138 countries in 2016” which is the highest Obama’s presidency, typifying “what has become the…murky twilight between war and peace.”
Continuing the imperialist war in Afghanistan, with 8,400 troops STILL stationed there, with no end in sight under the orange menace
Increase in the use of private mercenaries under Obama’s watch, who may be threatened by the orange menace. However, Erik Prince of Blackwater backed the orange menace, with the latter with an even more direct connection manifested in the fact that the brother of his Secretary of Education pick, Betsy DeVos, is Erik Prince! As of August 2016, the “number of U.S. service members in Afghanistan is dwarfed by the nearly 29,000 Department of Defense private contractors [private mercenaries in actuality] in the country, outnumbering American troops three to one” which is a decrease from the past, but the use of them is a still major part of imperial operations. Even The Atlantic bellowed that “America is waging a war largely via contractors, and U.S. combat forces would be impotent without them. If this trend continues, we might see 80 or 90 percent of the force contracted in future wars” with such contracts as big business for those cashing in.
As Cornel West recently argued, “today we are on the edge of an abyss…[in] the most powerful empire in the history of the world” leading to a “postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world” where Obama’s reign contributed to the “nightmare of Donald Trump.” West also argued that Obama followed the advice of his “neoliberal advisers to bail out Wall Street,” that no Wall Street executives went to jail (doing too little too late), he continued drone strikes killing civilians, he replied to Black Lives Matter “with words about the difficult plight of police officers” and in response to Israeli aggression he funded the Israeli army with many more millions of dollars, along with calling black youth in Baltimore “criminals and thugs” (so did Jay Carney). West also reminds us that “Obama’s education policy unleashed more market forces that closed hundreds of public schools for charter ones,” “labor insurgencies” in the Northwest overlooked, demonizing “truth-tellers” (mainly whistleblowers), creating a market-based healthcare policy which “provide[d] healthcare for over 25 million citizens, even as another 20 million are still uncovered.” West finally added that Obama was a “deporter-in-chief – nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch” which prefigures “Trump’s barbaric plans.”
As Glen Ford wrote last month, “looking at the number from a different angle, Obama released only one out of every two thousand of the nation’s 2.3 million prison inmates, the largest incarcerated population in the world, both in raw numbers and in the proportion of U.S. society living behind bars. In other words, Obama’s clemencies, like all other presidents’, are statistically meaningless and morally and politically distractive. But, of course, that’s what Obama’s good at – distracting people.”
As Jon Reynolds argued, “…when President Obama oversaw the brutal force-feeding of untried prisoners at a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they [pro-Obama liberals and progressives] said nothing. When President Obama’s mass-deportations of undocumented immigrants in the US outpaced deportations under his predecessor, they stayed silent…when President Obama spent his first term in office outspending his predecessor on raids against legal marijuana dispensaries , his supporters had little to say…When President Obama extended the US military occupation of Afghanistan until 2024, anti-war Democrats under George W. Bush were nowhere to be found. When President Obama fabricated a reason to bomb oil-rich Libya in 2011, and then just a year later, reauthorized the US invasion of Iraq, they were voiceless…when it came to light that President Obama had a “kill list” and US citizens were on it, and were being killed, all without due process — again, barely a peep. When Obama granted legal immunity to telecom companies that had conducted invasive spying during the George W. Bush years, when he extended the Patriot Act, when he prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act…when he expanded the NSA’s surveillance programs, and…green-lit indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, Democrats remained complacent. From January 2009 to the end of 2016, there has been a near-virtual silence from those identifying as Democrats against a variety of violations committed under President Obama, violations which were widely protested during the George W. Bush years…under a Democratic president, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was continued, US boots hit the ground in Syria and Iraq, US bombs fell in Libya, US drones terrorized the skies over Pakistan and Yemen, America’s nuclear arsenal was upgraded, and highly provocative military drills were conducted along the borders of [capitalist] Russia and [revisionist] China. Eight years of warmongering…Obama, like Bush before him…offered support to regimes like Saudi Arabia , which are notorious for oppressing homosexuals and women…from 2008 to 2014, one-quarter of a million people were deported for nonviolent drug offenses, often due to low-level marijuana possession. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way, shape, or form entitled to the moral high ground over the equally horrific opposing party is a beyond ridiculous assertion without any basis in reality…Kill lists, defense of torture, mass surveillance, US citizens being picked off by drone missiles, the continued buildup of a vast empire [all under Obama].”
Expanded Bush’s drone program to create a “kill list” where he would select people to be killed in the world every Tuesday, what is called “terror Tuesday” by some, killed by the secretive JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), engaging in what are arguably war crimes.
Hopes that race relations between whites and blacks would improve were quickly dashed, the bourgeois “middle class” continued to be “hollowed” out, income inequality reached its highest level since 1928, more Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico than those who enter the U$, partisan divides are harsher than ever, ordinary Americans were skeptical of the government’s economic policies toward the populace (and toward national policies in general), serious concerns about privacy rose, anger at the established media remained, and pessimism in the US is rising as noted in a recent Pew Research report.
“Normalizing” relations with Cuba and Iran, which allowed U$ capitalists to salivate even as restrictions remained on these “new” markets ready for Western capitalist exploitation of the highest order.
The auto bailout in 2008 and 2009, begun by Bush and continued by Obama, which “saved” the auto industry but didn’t change ANYTHING about it, even though the industry was temporarily nationalized and new jobs could have been created, maybe even in renewable energy, who knows.
The refusal to prosecute ANY Bush administration officials for torture.
The failure to close the hellish Guantanamo Prison Camp, which still has 55 detainees, where people are routinely tortured and numerous people have died from hunger strikes, or the huge naval base there. The base at Guantanamo which occupies over 5,880,483 square feet, with 1,362 buildings, according to the US military’s count. Furthermore, the base, which occupies 45 square miles, according to the official site, ensures, “regional security” in the Caribbean, supports U.S. Navy, and Coast Guard ships, while helping the wicked Department of Homeland (In)Security “care” for migrants, and helping “control the flow” of undocumented immigrants into the United States. The “official history” of the base which boasts about their “self-sufficiency” doesn’t mention, context for seizure of Gitmo or the US military’s three imperialist occupations of Cuba (1898-1902, 1906-1909, 1917-1922), with the land taken during the imperialist Spanish-American war of 1898, then codified as part of the Cuban-American treaty of 1903 which was signed during a time when the sovereignty of Cuba was limited.
The New York Post says Obama’s legacy is a “devastated Democratic Party,” an assessment which is actually pretty accurate to be honest.
The presence of 5,000 troops in Iraq, one of the wars that Global Times forgets for some reason.
As noted by NBC News, “the president’s policy moves…firmly aligned Latinos with the Democrats…[while] white, economically-insecure American increasingly drifted from his party [to the orange menace], despite Obama policies aimed at them.”
Even a pro-Obama tepid liberal in Truthout argued that under Obama, “as with the torturers, none of the Wall Street thieves who eviscerated the economy to their great profit were ever prosecuted for any of their crimes…[he] all but ignor[ed]…Standing Rock as he champions fracking and tar sands oil pipelines…[he] champions the middle class while peddling the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership [along with other “free trade” treaties and he] sold more weapons to the world than any administration since World War II.”
Beyond an increase in national debt, he escalated U$ presence in Syria with special forces rushing to the country, backing “moderate” Syrian rebels who are actually terrorists and “rebels” in Ukraine to fight “Russian aggression.”
As James Bovard argued, Obama “became judge, jury, and executioner” when it came to drone bombing, the US is bombing, as of now, “seven foreign nations” (Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan). This resulted, in Syria where rebels backed by the Pentagon and those backed by the CIA have battled each other. Beyond this, the opinion notes that during the U$ bombing in Libya in 2011, the U$ joined “the French and British assault on the Libyan government” and toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, while “federal agencies slammed the door on routine requests – especially from the media” with numerous FOIA denials, and the TSA “became far more intrusive and abusive” to say the least.
As Ajamu Baraka argued, on Dec. 23, 2016, Obama signed into law a new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which “further strengthened the repressive capacities of the state” including increasing its propaganda abilities, to “curtail speech and control information” [which I talked about here] connecting to its legacy of “increased surveillance of the public to the use of the espionage act to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers.” Baraka said that the “latte left” and liberal allies have fully collaborated with this, with efforts to “weaken the incoming administration by attempting to split it from its Republican legislative arm,” with the orange menace’s beliefs becoming “a useful tool for enforcing neoliberal ideological consensus,” leading to the reappearance of the phenomenon of neo-fascism, nothing new to Black America who which has “suffered from the racist, arrogant assaults of this criminal state to maintain the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project.”
Said “no” to the Zionist state recently, but has consistently supported the Zionist state through its numerous bombing campaigns over the years. The orange menace aims to be even more Zionist than Obama, which is apparently possible.
Leading on the “environmental movement” and bourgeois environmental groups so they would “await” his rejection of Keystone XL which happened, but also didn’t since he approved the southern half in 2012 (when he boasted about more pipelines) and “disapproved” of the northern half but actually didn’t since oil-by-rail continues onward as noted on Wrong Kind of Green and elsewhere.
Continuing the imperialist assault on states like Zimbabwe, Russia, Eritrea, the DPRK, and others full force, without stop. The orange menace will likely increase this with his “diplomacy” with intervention in the African continent on the rise.
Using states ranging from Saudi Arabia (including voting against that 9/11 bill) to Qatar as imperial proxies to carry about U$ policies of mass murder over the years.
As I noted in my post in July, President Obama “extended the imperial war and occupation in Afghanistan beyond his time in office, leaving more troops “than planned” with the empire as “strong as ever” despite “growing U$ debt from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” I also pointed out the lack of domestic opposition to imperial adventures, with most peace groups as bourgeois, noted that there have been “US-backed coups in Ukraine (2014), Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Maldives (2012), and Brazil (2016), coupled with drone strikes across the Muslim world from secretive drone bases, shadowy attack teams (JSOC, CIA, and so on), private mercenaries-for-hire, and authoritarian imperial proxy states such as Saudi Arabia.” Additionally I noted that “the United States certainly has colonies like the “empires of old” manifested in its inhabited territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa (supposedly “self-governing” since 1967), Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands” along with the “mainstay of the murderous empire comes in the hundreds of military bases, numbering 500 at minimum (most of which the military calls “installations” [11]), scattered across the world.” This shows that quotes like these are true.
There’s no doubt that even if Obama was “better” than Bush in some regards (which I seriously doubt), he was a bloody imperialist. There are numerous aspects I didn’t touch on here, especially in the realm of social policy, but I wanted to avoid praise here as I’m trying to be critical in this area rather than having the idea of “balance” whatever that entails. I could go on and give other aspects of Obama’s legacy. However, rather than continuing the list I’d like to show some charts:
As noted from a revised map I put on twitter.Countries the U$ is currently bombing as I noted on twitterThis map displays, as noted by Nick Turse, “the locations of 132 of those countries” with 129 (blue) supplied by U$ Special Operations Command and 3 (red) — Syria, Yemen and Somalia — “were derived from open-source information.”As Nick Turse notes in the original caption for this image, “Locations in blue were supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command. Those in red were derived from open-source information. Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia are not among those nations named or identified, but all are at least partially surrounded by nations visited by America’s most elite troops last year.”Original caption by Nick Turse: “a closer look at the areas of the “undeclared campaigns in the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine” mentioned by retired Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland. Locations in blue were supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command. The one in red was derived from open-source information.”U$ bases near Iran, as of 2015, an image usually used to demonstrate US imperial power in the regionU$ bases near revisionist China as of Feb. 2016U$ bombs dropped in 2016 in the Middle East (and part of central Asia), most of which were in Syria, Iraq & Afghanistan. Data here comes from the CFR, but also uses this map and bombs from this anti-U$ poster in Iran. A U$ flag was put on each bomb, with some countries, like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, representing the exact number of bombs, while others (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria) are just representationalA graphic I made, putting into place each bomb individually (taking about an hour at least) showing ALL the bombs dropped on Libya in 2016, using this map as a basis, with data from CFR.After making all those maps, I’m a bit tired, so here is a chart of U$ bombings in 2015 also from the CFR. Part of the reason I didn’t make a map also is that Iraq & Syria are put into one category.
I don’t really have anything else right now since I’m tired and this post is going out later today. But, comments are welcome.
Perhaps the orange menace won’t be a fan of Wikileaks as some media had been claiming. This quote here is no endorsement of the orange menace but is just a quote from his wild twitter.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 10, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. A new graphic was also added!
Every day since November 8, the media blares about a new “decision” by the orange menace and his advisers, something that we should be concerned about, apparently. The bourgeois media, a large chunk of which threw their support behind war criminal Killary Clinton in the presidential election, has been thrown into a tizzy over picks by the orange menace. Some say it is hard to “glean a political agenda” from the orange menace due to his changing positions, others say that he is assembling a pro-business “conservative dream team,” the “most conservative” cabinet since Reagan, an “unorthodox cabinet” that will lead to deregulation, the “richest administration in American history” which is worth more than $250 million, or a racially homogeneous cabinet, mostly consisting of white, straight men. [1] Hence, there is no consensus in the bourgeois media, or among those opposing him, on what the orange menace will do, or where he will go. However, it is simple to see his agenda, removed from a focus on the his “twitter diplomacy.” Instead, it is best to look the orange menace’s picks for cabinet and high governmental positions to assess how he will be “somebody with strong views…that are maybe a little bit unpopular,” as he told an interviewer Rona Barrett in 1980, assisting the capitalist class with his “old fascist strain” unlike the fascism of the Obama administration.
The individuals who the orange menace has chosen so far show a conservative, right-wing agenda in the works, which includes his informal advisers like Jared Kushner as well. He’s chosen, so far: Reagan conservative Mike Pence as Vice-President, former Goldman Sachs partner Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, arch-conservative Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, ex-Navy Seal Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior, conservative (and wife of Mitch McConnell) Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation, former governor of Texas Rick Perry for Energy Secretary, long-time investment banker Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce, restaurant CEO Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor, Georgia politician Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, conservative commentator Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, billionaire education “reformer” Elisabeth “Betsy” DeVos as Secretary of Education, investment banker Gary Cohn as Director of the National Economic Council, and Director of Ameritrade Todd M. Ricketts as Deputy Secretary of Commerce. He also picked RNC Chairman, Reince Preibus, as White House Chief of Staff, and Steve Bannon, head of the bigoted outlet called “Breitbart News,” as a strategist, to spread his deceptive message. Apart from the patronage to the elements of the Republican Party who supported him, by choosing Chao, Bannon, and Preibus, he chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as administrator of the EPA, California politician Mick Mulvaney as director of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), pro-wrestling tycoon Linda McMahon as administrator of the SBA (Small Business Administration), and Wall Street lawyer Walter “Jay” Clayton as director of the SEC (Securities and Exchanges Commission).
As of January 2019, Reince Preibus has been replaced (first by John Kelly, then by Mick Mulvaney who still heads OMB), Jeff Sessions has been succeeded by Matthew Whitaker (and possibly William Barr if confirmed), Ryan Zinke has been succeeded by David Bernhardt, Andrew Pudzer was withdrawn (first replaced temporarily by Ed Hugler, then by Alexander Acosta since), Tom Price has been replaced by Alex Azar, Gary Cohen has been replaced by Larry Kudlow, Todd M. Ricketts was withdrawn (and replaced by Karen Dunn Kelley), Steve Bannon was succeeded by Kellyanne Conway as Senior Counselor (serving with Johnny DeStefano), and Scott Pruitt was succeeded by Andrew Wheeler. However, Steve Mnuchin is still the Treasury Secretary, Mike Pence is still Vice-President, Elaine Chao is still the Secretary of Transportation, Rick Perry is still the Energy Secretary, Wilbur Ross is still the Commerce Secretary, Ben Carson is still the Housing Secretary, Elisabeth “Betsy” DeVos is still the Education Secretary, Linda McMahon still heads the Small Business Administration, and Walter “Jay” Clayton still heads the SEC. The interests of those who sit in the cabinet of the orange menace or have cabinet-level positions is shown in a graphic I created on January 11, 2019:
It is clear from this graphic, which took me hours to put together, that the “fossilized” bourgeoisie (i.e. those in fossil fuels), the financial bourgeoisie, and varieties of “free market” think tanks are strong in the cabinet of the orange menace. Runner-ups in terms of influence are the manufacturing bourgeoisie, pharmaceutical bourgeoisie, food industry bourgeoisie, and the military-intelligence establishment. Of less influence in the cabinet is Evangelical Christianity (maybe more so if Betsy BeVos is Evangelical), the warmaking bourgeoisie, Tea Party Caucus, and media bourgeoisie. While Robert Lighthizer is an important part of his group of advisors (wikipedia calls him “one of the most influential Trump Administration officials and the lead figure in formulating the administration’s trade policy”), but his interests, including as a lawyer and in politics do not fit with the groups shown here, so he is not displayed. Here is the link (noted in the *) on the chart that shows the Chinese state owning 25% of Prince’s company. These interests may change in the future, so visualization may need to be done again. This does not include the informal advisors to the president like Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon, Anne Coulter (possibly), and Sean Hannity, along with his two presidential counselors (Kelly Anne Conway and Johnny DeStefano), and those in the White House Office, headed by Mike Mulvaney (Zachary Fuentes, Daniel P. Walsh, Chris Liddell, Bill Shine, Jared Kushner, Hope Renee Hudson, Ira A. Greenstein, Stephen Miller, Ivanka Trump, Avrahm J. Berkowitz, Andrew Brumberg, Larry Kudlow, Everett H. Eissenstat, Andrew J. Olmem, Cletus R. Willems III, Bill McGinley, John Mashburn, Jessica Ditto, Dan Scavino, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Raj Shah, Lindsay Walters, Hogan Gidley, Ory S. Rinat, Lindsay Reynolds, Anna Cristina Niceta Lloyd, Chris Herndon, Stephanie Grisham, Douglas Lynn Hoelscher, William F. Crozer, Shahira Knight, Joyce Meyer, Amy Swonger, Marcia Lee Kelly, Monica J. Block, John R. Bolton, Doug Fears, John A. Eisenberg, Joan Virginia O’Hara, Brian Jack, Bill Stepien, Sean E. Doocey, John M. Roscoe, Jana C. Toner, Justin R. Clark, Steve Munisteri, Jennifer S. Korn, Brooke Rollins, Derek Lyons, Alexander B. Gray, Peter Navarro, Pat Cipollone, Stefan C. Passantino, Ann M. Donaldson, Jordan Karem, Madeleine Westerhout, and RDML Keith B. Davids)
What will happen next is clear: the new imperial administration will undoubtedly help big capitalists by scaling back those regulations seen as “harmful” to economic growth, such as the pathetic Dodd-Frank reform law, there will be less enforcement, and an increase in privatization. This means that offending companies will get off scot-free for committing capital crimes, a continuation of the relatively hands-off approach of officials of the Obama administration. In the area of public education, existing policy of school privatization will be continued, but will even more aggressive with a push for school vouchers, charter schools, and opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (Common Core), supported by some capitalists and “reformers.” Such policies would be coupled with a “lower taxes” on the capitalist class, “balancing” the deficit by cutting Food Stamps and other programs, while privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Additionally, the federal workforce would be slashed, unions would be under even more attack, and “Obamacare” would be repealed (with arguments about how long it will take to repeal or “fix” the law), the latter angering insurance and pharmaceutical companies who have benefited from the law. At the same time, the surveillance apparatus will continue (and likely expand), a higher minimum wage will be opposed, anti-discrimination and hate crime laws will be stopped dead in their tracks, increased restrictions on abortion will blossom, the “drug war” will be intensified resulting in opposition to medical (or non-medical) marijuana legalization, and oil and gas drilling on federal lands will increase. These changes build off the status quo of surveillance continuing under Obama’s rule and a hostile environment against abortion since right-wing reactionary backlash to Roe v. Wade, and existing large-scale fossil fuel drilling which Obama has boasted about on occasion. This included the time that he approved the southern half of the Keystone XL in 2012, with not much of a peep from bourgeois environmental groups, sometimes called “Gang Green,” like the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, to name a few.
Other aspects of the orange menace’s picks are worth noting. In the realm of immigration, future policy is very evident. For Secretary of Homeland (In)Security, he chose John Kelly, a former commander of U$ Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) and long-time Marine Corps veteran who fought in the first (1991) and second (2003) phases of the twenty-five year war with Iraq (1991-2016), and helped quell the 1992 urban uprising by thousands of Black folks in Los Angeles. There is no doubt that his experience with SOUTHCOM, the southern department of U$ imperialism in the Americas, will help him implement strong border control, which would be harsher than existing measures. However, immigration policy would expand Obama’s hardline policy of deporting over two million immigrants during his time in office, along with immigration raids and a militarized border, with drones and other equipment, along with acceptance of reactionary anti-immigrant “militias.” [2]
Imperialism will continue to run rampant with the orange menace’s jingoistic idea of “America First,” declaring last month that “there is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag, and that flag is the American flag. From now on, it’s going to be America first. OK? America first. We’re going to put ourselves first.” In area of foreign policy, the orange menace has chosen South Carolina governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley as UN Ambassador, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, retired Marine Corps General James “fun to shoot people” Mattis as Secretary of Defense, lawyer Robert Lighthizer for United States Trade Representative, Kansas politician Mike Pompeo for CIA director, and Indiana politician Dan Coats. Some may say that the imperial policies of bombing seven countries (Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria), using killer drones to “eliminate” supposed terrorists (who are more often than not civilians), use of special forces and small strike forces across the world, and use of private mercenaries (“private contractors”) to do the bidding of empire, will be ameliorated by the orange menace. Such people may say that likely increased investment in Russia (and good relations), with orange menace standing up to the U$ intelligence community, on their conclusion Russia is behind the election hacking (it definitely isn’t even even as he has ACCEPTED U$ intelligence on this matter), along with some supposing he will engage in “non-interventionism.” While the anti-Russian campaign pushed by the Democratic Party, certain Republicans, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with internal (FBI) and external (CIA) police of the empire, and “left” journalists of The Intercept like Glenn Greenwald, and other “respected” publications like Mother Jones [dead link], the orange menace may (seems more unlikely now than ever) pare back the budget of the CIA, if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed in this regard, this analysis misses the bigger picture at hand. Undoubtedly a possible conflict within the administration is brewing about the threat of Russia as some want to take more of a defiant stance and others want to be more cordial. [3]
For one, Tillerson will likely push for expanded energy markets while Lighthizer would push for protectionist policies. It is possible that these two views, along with the orange menace’s economic nationalism, may be balanced in some way or another. Regardless, the capitalist class will pleased if the orange menace can help them gain new markets and create a better “business-friendly” environment, even in the United States. Based on the fact that ExxonMobil (and its subsidies) has locations in 58 countries, along with a number of U$ colonies (Northern Marinas Islands and Guam for example) more than half of which are in Europe and the Asia Pacific region, this might be an area of future U$ policy under the new imperial administration, along with a push for more markets in the Middle East, the South American and African continents, where ExxonMobil does not have as many “operations.”
While the U% has strongly supported the murderous Zionist state since the 1960s, with billions upon billions of dollars in weaponry to “defend” itself from a basically imaginary threat, the orange menace’s administration will amp up the support. This will include, with extremist David Friedman as the US ambassador to the Zionist state, a strong position against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, moving the U$ embassy to Jerusalem, continuing to support Israel to the hilt, continuing the never-ending negotiations for the “two-state solution,” and supporting illegal settlements on stolen (and occupied) Palestinian land. It will also include a possible war with Iran (or threat of such a war) since the orange menace and some of his advisers want to re-negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. Such a move is ridiculous since the existing deal is already beneficial to U$ imperial aims by punishing the Islamic Republic for even having “peaceful” (yet environmentally destructive) nuclear power. If the deal is changed, it is possible that the pro-Western moderates in Iran, like Hassan Rouhani, will loose favor and a more “hardline” Iranian politician will take charge, leading the country to oppose U$ imperialism more effectively and chart its own course more independently.
The military and security establishment will undoubtedly be pleased by the coming policies of new imperial administration. For one, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (and naval base) will be kept open, continuing Obama’s non-closure policy, CIA black sites across the world will be re-established, and a strong effort to fight terrorism will commence, whatever that entails. Even if the U$ intelligence community stops giving arms and equipment to terrorists disguised as “Syrian rebels,” imperial policy will continue. With Pence declaring that his model for a Vice-President would be Dick Cheney, who concentrated power in that political office, it means we are in for dark times, with a return to waterboarding as accepted policy and harsh “anti-terror” policies.
The orange menace is targeting the revisionist China, possibly with tariffs. The country, since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, abandoned anti-revisionist beliefs. While they clash, as part of conflict between “great” powers, they work with such imperialists on issues such as terrorism and help restrict the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Due to the orange menace’s hardline position on Taiwan, his likely continuation of Obama’s “Pacific pivot,” which encircles China with personnel (and bases), his criticism of the country for seizing a U$ spy drone, and likely demanding that China be labeled as a “currency manipulator,” they have begun preparing for the worst. [4]
The next target of the new administration is the DPRK. On multiple occasions, as part of his “twitter diplomacy,” the orange menace declared that the country’s plan to build a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the U$ “won’t happen” and criticized revisionist China for not doing enough, the former which may come back to “haunt him” as preventing a test will be hard to do. [5] The Koreans take such provocations seriously. An editorial after the U$ presidential election, in the Rodong Sinmun, a newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), declared that the Obama administration “put the security of the US mainland in the greatest danger” by attacking the DPRK and that the new administration now has the “difficulty of facing the Juche nuclear state.” [6] In months the followed, the DPRK’s state media made similar arguments, brashly attacking the imperialist behemoth, saying that the strategic position of the socialist state has “reached its highest level,” declaring that “no force on earth can block the DPRK’s advance. Neither sanctions nor blockade nor military pressure can ever frighten it,” saying that the Korean people cannot be overpowered by the U$, and arguing that the U$ is not qualified to be the “human rights judge” of the world. [7]
Such viewpoints are a justified form of resistance to the empire. The DPRK believes that “national peace, prosperity and dignity” in the world, by an anti-imperialist (and socialist) state like themselves, hinges on a “powerful nuclear force” and that they should have the ability to build their “powerful socialist country” (even if they are not actually a socialist country in reality) with self-development and self-reliance while fending off U$ attacks. [8] As they are under siege, they have fought back with counter-propaganda to: point out that the U$ electoral system favors capitalists (which is correct), criticize dismal human rights record of the U$, say that the downfall of the U$ empire is inevitable, and otherwise condemn U$ imperial foreign policy. [9]
As a civilized socialist nation, where, in the past year, numerous technical senior middle schools (and a new middle school for orphans) opened, the public health service (part of their socialist healthcare system) was improved, the art and literature sector was invigorated, thousands of new homes were opened, and a Natural History Museum opened its doors, the Korean people will undoubtedly do what they can to resist US imperialism, assisted by the WPK. [10] In his New Year’s address, Kim Jong Un, chairman of the WPK, chairman of the DPRK’s State Affairs Commission, and supreme commander of Korea’s armed forces, offered warm greetings to the Korean people and “progressive peoples across the world,” saying that in 2016 the DPRK consolidated its self-defense by achieving the status “of a nuclear power, a military giant, in the East which no enemy, however formidable, would dare to provoke” which is aimed at people like the orange menace. [11] Kim Jong Un, after reviewing the accomplishments of the previous year and challenging the country to more, then said, referring to the DPRK and the Korean people, “we should turn out again in the new year’s march towards a greater victory…we should concentrate our efforts on implementing the five-year strategy for national economic development.” He later declared, after outlining economic industries to improve, that the country’s defense forces should “politically and militarily and maintain full combat readiness to firmly defend the socialist system and the people’s lives and property” and said that the DPRK will “continue to build up our self-defence capability…and the capability for preemptive strike as long as the United States and its vassal forces [the South Koreans and Japanese] keep on nuclear threat and blackmail.” In sum, whatever the orange menace does to attack them, the DPRK will be ready in force while they continue to push for reunification of the Korean peninsula even if the murderous U$ empire opposes it.
The other country the orange menace has under his radar is less talked out: Syria. While U$ aid to terrorists in the country may end, along with U$ aid to certain Kurds, Bashar Al-Assad saying that the orange menace could be a “natural ally” to help fight terrorism, a military attack on the country is more possible than ever. [12] Other than his claim to relentless bomb ISIS and cut off its oil during the campaign, he also promised safe zones for refugees within the country. [13] After the election, in December, the orange menace reiterated this promise, saying that “when I look at what’s going on in Syria, it’s so sad…we’re going to help people. We’ll build and help build safe zones in Syria, so people will have a chance,” building such zones with money from Gulf monarchies, imperial proxies. [14] Thus humanitarian effort of building these zones sounds like veiled reference to no-fly-zones, which will be difficult to establish and lead to U$ troops on the ground. [15] So, in sum, the orange menace is calling for war in the socially democratic and secular state of Syria, something that all thinking people should oppose.
Some readers may think something is missing in this article. They may balk at conservative Christianity taking more of a role in government and anger by the incoming administration at pushes for diversity and “political correctness,” the latter which be should described as political respectfulness since it is about respecting other people, regardless of their cultures or beliefs. They might also mention possible attacks to come on “public” media like NPR and PBS, and stronger gun rights. While some of these concerns are justified, others are not. For one, it is worth being concerned about the encroachment of religious beliefs on governments, as they are often tied to socially conservative ideals which distort governments in a way that disturbs efforts of human betterment. However, there is no need to defend “public” media like NPR (National Pentagon Radio) or PBS (Petroleum Broadcasting Service) because they have already corrupted themselves by promoting military contractors, agribusiness, and other capitalistic propaganda. The same goes for gun rights. Considering that U$ society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted, it is criminal and irresponsible to fight for gun control. Anyone who is a person of color, whether female, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, intersex, or is otherwise considered a “minority” in current society, should have the right to defend themselves with arms as necessary. That right is already claimed by white, straight men, so why can’t others in society arm themselves to fight off bigots? You can’t fight a revolution with flowers and sayings, but political power, as Mao Zedong put it, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Gun control, if decided as necessary, should happen after a socialist revolution, not before it.
With this article, there must be a plan of action, even as the Chairman of Council of Economic Advisers, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Secretary of Agriculture have not been nominated yet. While there have been some protests of nominees of the orange menace, specifically Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, there has not been a widespread effort to oppose his nominees. [16] Even, the Democrats, led by New Yorker Chuck Schumer in the Senate, and Marylander Steny Hoyer and Californian Nancy Pelosi in the House, not even Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the like cannot be trusted to stand against the orange menace. They are clearly milquetoast liberals and progressives, with the possibility of the orange menace and Schumer working together in the future, and the Clinton team (Bill & Hillary) attending the inauguration of the orange menace. [17]
There is much that can be done to resist the horrid nature of the coming neo-imperial administration. One can say that there doesn’t need to be a protest against rapprochement with Russia, but instead against a reactionary Russophobic position by Obama, Clinton, McCain, and the like, along with opposing “his overall reactionary program of vile xenophobia, racism and sexism” with a mass movement. Since this is needed, there should be a push to reject every nominee he has put forward, to reject David Friedman, Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions, Ryan Zinke, Elaine Chao, Rick Perry, Wilbur Ross, Andrew Puzder, Tom Price, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Gary Cohn, Todd M. Ricketts, Steve Bannon, Scott Pruitt, Mick Mulvaney, Linda McMahon, Jay Clayton, John Kelley, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Robert Lighthizer, Dan Coats, and Mike Pompeo. Only a united approach of opposing all these individuals can reject the agenda wholesale. If nothing is done, it is possible that the Republicans will move quickly to enact their reactionary social and economic policies, to say the least, leaving little time for resistance. Such opposition cannot be bourgeois in character, meaning that it cannot be funded by foundation-money or wealthy donors who need not be named, hence involving solidarity to defend states like the DPRK, Cuba, Iran and Syria from imperialist assault. The bourgeoisie cannot be allowed to gain more victories and all efforts to expand their influence and power should be resisted at all costs. What happens next is up to you, the reader, to organize to stop the “orange menace” not because of his supposed “friendly” nature with Russia, but for the fascism he will bring to the homefront, imperialist destruction that will rein down on the peoples of Korea, Syria, and Iran, and unwavering support for the murderous Zionist state.
UPDATE:
Currently, the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions is going on in the Senate, with activists engaging in political theater by calling him out as a racist and allied with the KKK, a position the NAACP has also taken at this time. This in and of itself is not bad, as Sessions has praised law enforcement, representing the “old South,” and claims he wouldn’t participate in unlawful behavior. Confirmation hearings for Sessions and Rex Tillerson will be happening in the coming days.
Notes
[1] Jane C. Timm, “The 141 Stances Donald Trump Took During His White House Bid,” NBC News, Nov. 28, 2016; Andrew Restuccia, Nancy Cook, and Lorraine Woellert, “Trump’s conservative dream team,” Politico, Nov. 30, 2016; Matthew Cooper, “Donald Trump Is Building the Most Conservative Cabinet In U.S. History,” Newsweek, Dec. 9, 2016; Noah Bierman and Evan Halper, “Trump’s Cabinet picks are among the most conservative in history. What that means for his campaign promises,” LA Times, Dec. 15, 2016; Niall Stange, “Trump’s unorthodox Cabinet,” The Hill, Dec. 15, 2016; Stephen Collinson, “Donald Trump’s Cabinet a boon for conservatives,” CNN, Dec. 20, 2016; Nick Timiraos and Andrew Tangel, “Donald Trump’s Cabinet Selections Signal Deregulation Moves Are Coming,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2016; Jim Tankersley and Ana Swanson, “Donald Trump is assembling the richest administration in modern American history,” Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2016; Danielle Kurtzleben, “How The Donald Trump Cabinet Stacks Up, In 3 Charts,” NPR, Dec. 28, 2016.
[2] Its possible that the idea of birthright citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment may be under attack as well, but it is hard to know, but it is clear that harsher immigration laws, possibly emulating the one in Arizona, will be pushed on a national level along with a ban on immigration from certain countries.
[3] Bryan Bender, “Trump’s team tries to stifle rift on Russia,” Politico, Jan. 5, 2017; Reuters, “Trump accepts U.S. intelligence on Russia hacking: chief of staff,” Jan. 8, 2017; Kyle Bullack, “Graham: Trump worried blaming Russia will undermine his legitimacy,” The Hill, Jan. 8, 2017.
[4] Chinese state media reports aircraft carriers conducting drills in the South China Sea and arguing if the country should alone “shoulder responsibility to fight global warming” if climate change denial becomes official policy in the orange menace’s administration.
[5] AFP, “Trump dismisses N.Korea nuclear threat, baits China in tweets,” Jan. 3, 2017; Rebecca Morin, “Trump: North Korea will be stopped,” Politico, Jan. 2, 2017; Choe Sang-Hun, “North Korea will test intercontinental ballistic missile, Kim says,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 2017; Reuters, “North Korea cannot ‘tip’ missile with nuclear warhead: U.S. State Department,” Jan. 3, 2017; David Brunnstrom and Arshad Mohammed, “Trump’s North Korea red line could come back to haunt him,” Reuters, Jan. 3, 2017.
[6] AFP, “North Korea urges policy shift from Trump administration,” Nov. 10, 2016.
[7] Ri Hak Nam, “No Force on Earth Can Overpower Strength of DPRK,” Rodong Sinmun, Dec. 29, 2016; KCNA, “U.S. Has No Force to Block DPRK’s Advance,” Jan. 4, 2017; Miniu Joson, “Press Review,” KCNA, Nov. 8, 2016;
[12] Reuters, “Syria’s Assad: Trump can be our natural ally,” Dec. 14, 2016.
[13] Ali Vitali, “Trump on refugees: Create ‘safe zone’ in Syria, don’t ‘destroy all of Europe’,” NBC News, Nov. 16, 2015; Netasha Bertand, “Trump says he wants to set up safe zones in Syria ‘so people can have a chance’,” Business Insider, Dec. 16, 2016.
[14] Mark Landler, “‘It’s So Sad,’ Donald Trump Says of Syria, Promising ‘Safe Zones’,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 2016; Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton, “Trump promises Syria ‘safe zones’, Obama says no easy fix,” Reuters, Dec. 16, 2016.
[15] Paul D. Stinkman, “Donald Trump Says U.S. Should Establish Safe Zones in Syria,” U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 16, 2016.
[16] Sari Horowitz, “More than 1,100 law school professors nationwide oppose Sessions’s nomination as attorney general,” Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2017; Jay Croft, “Arrests end NAACP sit-in at Jeff Sessions’ office,” CNN, Jan. 4, 2017.
[17] Dan Merica and Theodore Schleifer, “Bill, Hillary Clinton to attend Trump Inauguration,” CNN, Jan. 3, 2017; Eugene Scott, “Schumer confirms Trump told him he likes him better than Republicans,” CNN, Jan. 3, 2017. Such “resistance” that exists now is pathetic and toothless, seeming to go little beyond jingoism in the name of empire. Bourgeois liberal commentators or Democrats won’t save us from the orange menace’s fascism. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, they can easily pass the orange menace’s agenda, and a good number of Democrats will likely fall in line. Existing “resistance” includes a site to resist the “fascist America” of the orange menace organized by activists, artists, indigenous peoples, and writers, but is sadly, although rightfully anti-fascist, is devoid of radical analysis, especially concerning class and capitalism itself, making it an easy appeal to middle-class, bourgeois audiences.
A screenshot from a 1949 animated Soviet propaganda film by Victor Gromov, titled “Mr. Wolf,” focusing on a pacifist capitalist, like Andrew Carnegie perhaps, who, fed up with the horrible nature of war, moves to an “island of peace.” But when he finds oil, he gets greedy, dropping his belief in pacifism, demands control of it, reveals his secret stash of arms, and seizes control of the oil with the help of (presumably) the US Navy. The message of greedy capitalists and duplicitous pacifists is very clear while some are flummoxed.
Originally published on the Leftist Critic blog on Jan 6, 2017.
This post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Like the other post on Soviet history, this is a good first attempt at the subject, although it could be improved, of course.
As the orange menace promises to increase military spending, including 350 more ships for the Navy (likely costing over $126 billion dollars), strengthening the murderous U$ empire, which builds off the brashly imperialist foreign policy of the Obama administration, it is important to recall our history. This article will first outline the narrative by David Swanson, a former press secretary for bourgeois Democratic “peace” politician, Dennis Kucinich, during his presidential candidacy, and peace activist, on the history of how the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 came into fruition, summarizing his book to the best of my ability, there will be a counterpoint to his history, and finally it will end with my conclusion on where to go from here.
David Swanson’s narrative of what happened
David Swanson’s book is a good place to start. While he is not radical, and is a bourgeois pacifist, he does help tell this story. As he tells it, the peace movement in the 1920s, depending on new female voters, united around the idea of war outlawry, previously split by the League of Nations, seen as a glorious and noble cause. [1] This movement was strengthened by outrage at the horrible effects of WWI, despite the manipulation of emotions, by Woodrow Wilson’s “propaganda machinery,” in the form of the Committee of Public Information, to influence Amerikans to support war. Such manipulation was preceded by Wilson winning election in 1916, with slogans like “he kept us out of the war,” but turning around and involving the U$ in WWI in April 1917. Many in the U$, disillusioned with promises of war, distrusted European peace efforts, as the U$ membership in the League of Nations and World Court did not materialize, along with other failed negotiations in the 1920s, the peace movement grew. Leading intellectuals, robber-barons, like Andrew Carnegie who founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and politicians, like Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, promoted peace. At the same time, “peace societies” were created in the U$, along with a litany of other pro-peace organizations, such as the American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, some of which spread “a barrage of peace propaganda.”
There are number of individuals who specifically pushed for “war outlawry” or the abolishment of war. Swanson cites 22 individuals. [2] One of these individuals was Salmon Oliver Levinson, a Yale graduate and Chicago lawyer who led the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, which tried to make war illegal and recognized as an institution. [3] Others, such as Kirby Page and temperance activist Carrie Chapman Catt, also pushed for war outlawry, allied with other forces, like the Progressive Party which represented interests of farmers, petty urban bourgeoisie, and trade unions, collapsing after the 1924 election, along with public opinion in favor of prohibiting war. Pro-peace clubs and organizations sprung up by the hundreds, with thousands of members, eliminating the divides in the past between more wealthy organizations, like the Carnegie Endowment and the American Foundation for Peace, and more radical ones pushing for disarmament and opposing militarism. The former profited from war with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonds from the U.S. Steel Corporation. However, it is worth pointing out that Outlawrists, tapping into widespread skepticism of collective defense agreements, “favored the rule of the written word” to prevent war, creating a world court which had international jurisdiction, but were muddled when they didn’t always consider the distinction between “aggressive” and “defensive war.” Beyond this, such a push for outlawing war was an effort to change people’s conceptions of what they consider “morally acceptable,” hoping that society could be organized for peace, but not always taking into account that some engage in statements of desire about ending war and peaceful resolution rather than the reality.
From then on, there was a push for Western diplomats to negotiate what became the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Illegal diplomacy by pro-peace U$ citizens, led to debate among French, German, and British diplomats about being involved in the treaty, boosted by supportive writings in The New Republic, New York Times, and Foreign Affairs, along with sympathetic congressmembers like socially conservative William Borah and Republican Robert LaFollette, among others. [4] Aristide Briand, a long-time prime minister, advocate of “personal diplomacy,” and breaker of a railroaders strike, made the first move, with a Minnesota Republican, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, no active advocate of peace, forced into action even as he cursed pacifists privately. Obviously in an effort to reinforce U$ imperialism, Kellogg was willing to threaten war to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas, derided by the new Soviet government, but was pushed into action by a strong peace movement, negotiating a treaty with the French secretly, making it multilateral even though Briand did not want this to happen originally. Some of the French showed their true colors, like Paul Claudel, who said that outlawing war was sentimental and would please “cranks,” Bolsheviks and socialists, proposing a joint declaration of principles but Kellogg stuck by his demand for a treaty, later coming over to public negotiations of the treaty as the U$ and British allowed their respective imperialisms to fall under the idea of “self-defense” and not be covered by the treaty. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, also called the Pact of Paris, was signed in Paris in 1928, picketed by feminists saying that an equal rights treaty should be proposed and anti-imperialists who said that U$ imperialism would continue, and survived the U$ Senate (votes in favor 85-1), despite broad questioning of its effectiveness, then entering the canons of international law in July 1929.
Swanson continues by saying that the pact’s ideas were influential. He says that it inspired the UN’s principles in 1945 and International Criminal Court, claiming the pact was the “first U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union’s existence.” [5] He also says that Henry Stimson tried to stop the USSR and nationalist China from supposedly going to the “brink of war.” He doesn’t note that this was part of a “Sino-Soviet conflict over the Manchurian railway line,” which was settled with a protocol that “affirmed the original status of the railroad as a joint enterprise” and Soviet victory. At the time, Persia (Iran) defended the USSR rhetorically when it took defensive measures against nationalist China in the 1929 spat. Swanson also points out Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and Germany invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 and the Soviets on Sept. 17, 1939 as violations of the pact. Not surprisingly, Swanson does not say that this intervention was in accordance with the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact since the Soviets felt that the Polish could no longer defend themselves because of the collapse of their state after a Nazi attack, and the Soviets were welcomed by the Polish people as “true liberators.” Swanson goes on to say that the treaty was not ordinary, but meant to outlaw war, with the reality that the U$ quickly violated the pact, with peace structures not stopping the coming war. Some supported Outlawry at the time (Stimson) but opposed it later, and others, such as, a Wall Street lawyer named William Chanler, a friend of Stimson, used it as a basis for criminal trials of the Germans and Japanese for war crimes at Nuremberg and the UN Charter as a whole. Eventually, Kellogg was given a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the treaty even as he didn’t stop advocating for U$ imperial aggression.
Before ending the section on Swanson’s narrative, it worth noting how taken in he is about this story. He thinks war outlawry be revived and that we should have a “Kellogg-Briand Day” on August 27 every year, celebrating a “step toward peace” but war’s abolishment or end. [6] He goes on to say that his book, dispelling the well-kept secret that war is illegal, continues the campaign for outlawry, which includes pushing countries to comply with the pact, and says that a public referendum on war is an intriguing idea. At the end of his book, he outlines numerous proposals for reducing the U$ war machine, and says that his self-published book, where he had complete editorial control, is meant to help people learn about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and study peace activism that got us to Outlawry.
What Swanson missed
Another screenshot from the Soviet animated film “Mr. Wolf.”
In his happy good lucky story of the road to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Swanson glosses over a number of details, almost portraying the U$ imperialists as “peacemakers” in the process. As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia argued, the U$ tried to use the Paris Peace Conference, from 1919-1920, to marginalize the USSR, Harding’s administration, favoring monopolies, used the Washington Conference of 1921-1922 to force the UK to agree to equality between U$ and UK battle fleets, Coolidge’s administration was unfriendly to the USSR, and U$ warships helped bomb Nanking in 1927. [7] Additionally, Swanson’s book barely ever mentions the Soviets, usually only referring to them in passing except for one time when he notes that a delegate from the USSR, Maxim Maimovich Litvinov, proposed to the League of Nations’s commission on disarmament in Nov. 1927 that there be the “immediate and total abolition of all armies, navies, and air forces; the sinking of all warships; the scrapping of all war material; and the demolition of all arms factories” but Western governments rejected this, and the French even voted to expand their navy. He never expands on other Soviet policies in favor of peace but has a very Western-centered approach, likely written with his audience of liberals and progressives in mind who scowl at the Soviet Union.
There is another aspect of the process that Swanson barely talks about, if he even alludes to it: the interests of Western capitalist states who engaged in the pact. Kellogg himself wanted to desperately avoid the treaty, which was, as some writers put it, “the product of Realpolitik and cynical political calculations,” with the French seeing the pact as a possibility for a “defensive alliance aimed at Germany” while in the US, many believed that “the solution to the scourge of war lay in the universal renunciation of its practice.” [8] More specifically, while Briand’s offer for negotiations on a treaty to end war “thrilled pacifist-minded Americans,” it also served “France’s strategic needs,” a way to sideline the US “should France go to war” but Kellogg understood “what Briand was trying to accomplish and wanted nothing to do with the offer” and did not like Briand’s “bid to energize U.S. peace groups and thereby box in the Coolidge administration.” Beyond this, Kellogg agreed to talk with the French, engaging in a multilateral treaty outlawing war rather than a bilateral treaty, which supposedly “rendered it largely ineffective, more a toy handcuff than an iron manacle” and Briand was hardly in a position to argue against it. Paris served as “the site for the historic meeting to renounce war” and U$ Senators had few illusions about the treaty, knowing “it was the international equivalent of an air kiss,” voting the same day “to fund the construction of fifteen new warships.”
The U$ State Department admits this much in their write-up about the pact. They argue that the pact had “little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II” but also note the movement that pushed for the peace pact. France was facing, they note, “continuing insecurity from its German neighbor and sought alliances to shore up its defenses,” but the US was less eager to enter into a bilateral peace pact, worrying that it “could be interpreted as a bilateral alliance and require the United States to intervene if France was ever threatened” so they suggested that it be multilateral, which aligned with war outlawry being “immensely popular in international public opinion.” The State Department history also says that the pact’s language “established the important point that only wars of aggression – not military acts of self-defense – would be covered under the pact,” resulting in many nations signing it, and the U.S. Senate ratifying the agreement after making “reservations to note that U.S. participation did not limit its right to self-defense or require it to act against signatories breaking the agreement.” The pact was first tested, argues this history, during the Mukden Incident which led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, but the fact of a “worldwide depression and a limited desire to go to war to preserve China” led to no action from the League of Nations or the U$. Later threats to the agreement “from fellow signatories Germany, Austria and Italy” made it clear there “was no way to enforce the pact or sanction those who broke it” with many ways around the terms, the pact not helping prevent WWII but very idealistic in the view of the State Department history.
In missing this aspect of the pact, Swanson, of course, did not mention the imperial nature of the pact itself. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia argued that the pact was originally used by the US and other imperialist powers as a “means of isolating the USSR” but that under “the pressure of public opinion they were forced to invite the USSR to subscribe to the pact.” [9] The Soviets adhered to the pact on August 29, 1928, details of which will be discussed later in this article. Such an action led to anger from Trotskyists who saw themselves as righteous in their “revolutionary” feelings, even though Leon Trotsky supported a continuation of the NEP, opposed measures to ensure the security of the Soviet state from opportunists and foreign enemies, and pushed the idea of “permanent revolution” while rejecting the more practical idea of “socialism in one country” proposed by Joseph Stalin, as noted in a previous post on this blog. The Trotskyists claimed that the signing of this pact marked a departure from a “revolutionary path,” strengthened “bourgeois illusions,” struck at Lenin’s work, and that Western powers are not interested in peace but wanted to check the “successful robber activities of the Nipponese competitor,” Japan. While most of these statements take an unrealistic counter-revolutionary viewpoint, the last statement about Western powers is one the Soviets would actually agree with.
The Soviet government had a good reason for signing the pact regardless of what the counter-revolutionary Trotskyists said. While they would have, a few years before, possibly sneered at the effort as “bourgeois sentimentalism,” the USSR wanted to join the world community even as the initial invitations for the pact excluded the Soviets, leaving them to believe there was the tacit formation of an anti-Soviet bloc, but the French invited the Soviets to be signatories and they did so, with their affirmation of the pact showing a “Soviet desire for peace.” [10] Signing the pact was also a continuation of previous Soviet policy. Beyond what Swanson briefly mentioned, in the 1927 and 1928 disarmament conferences, Litvinov offered wide-sweeping proposals for disarmament, which was popular among the public, even when the USSR adhered to the pact, one newspaper, the Inprecor, argued that Britain, France, and capitalist satellites like Poland, were continuing preparation for war on the USSR.
However, not everyone in the Soviet government wanted to ratify the pact. The People’s Commissar of the Soviet Union (1924-1930) Georgy Chicherin, opposed ratification, while Nikolai Bukharin (who supported NEP’s continuation and wanted socialism at a “snail’s pace”) and Litvinov supported it, arguing that it would allow Western powers to interfere in Soviet foreign affairs, the same reason he opposed the Soviets joining League of Nations. [11] His supporters pointed to British & French reservations about the pact, arguing that it would have no effect.
Despite this argument, the Soviets signed the pact, but mad they were not invited to signing ceremony, taking the position that “all international wars must be prohibited, in particular, wars with the aim of suppressing movements of national liberation,” along with prohibition of “intervention, blockade, military occupation of foreign territory, foreign ports” along with “severance of diplomatic relations” since this “contributes to…an atmosphere that favors the occurrence of war.” [12] The Soviet government as a whole took the position that signing the pact showed they were consistent advocates of peace, and believed that only a “universal and complete disarmament plan” could prevent armed conflicts, while admitting the pact would be a dead letter unless growth of arms was limited. Some, such as Evgeny A. Korovin, argued that the pact was a “serious blow to the system of the Anglo-French capitalist bloc” and that it weakened the League of Nations. The Soviets also declared that the pact did not go far enough renouncing war by “failing to cover all methods of aggression,” saying that the fact that the pact didn’t have provisions for disarmament showed the “insincerity of bourgeois pacifism.” Looking at articles 1 and 2 of the pact itself shows their criticism to be valid, as it is very loosely worded, only condemning recourse to war internationally and renouncing it as form of national policy:
ARTICLE I: “The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”
ARTICLE II: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
Additionally, the pact, unlike Soviet treaties of nonaggression which renounced war “completely, totally, and without qualification,” seemed to exclude warlike action and the right of self-defense from the pact’s operation, meaning that it, arguably, watered down and truncated the “concept of nonaggression.” [13] Later on, the Soviets would argue that a declared war or any “de facto military actions initiated by any state” should be considered a breach of the pact.
More importantly, the pact inadvertently gave Soviet foreign policy a boost. As a result of the pact, the Soviets proposed their own security policy, inviting neighbors to bring the pact into force by themselves, with what was called the “Litvinov Protocol,” named after the Soviet diplomat, signed by the USSR, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia, later joined by Lithuania, Turkey, Persia, and Free City of Danzig, with Finland not as a signatory. This showed that the USSR was a champion of the principles in the pact and an “active proponent of the idea of curbing the freedom of states to indulge in waging war in order to promote their interests.” This pact, signed in February 1929, represented the “spirit of the Pact of Paris,” while it renounced the use of force and recourse to warlike measures, and while it provided little security for the neighbors of the USSR, its intention was more important than its application. Part of the text of the agreement is reprinted below:
“…[the following governments] being desirous of promoting the maintenance of peace between their respective countries and for this purpose of putting into force without delay, between the peoples of those countries, the Treaty for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, signed at Paris on August 27, 1928, have decided to achieve this purpose by means of the present Protocol…
Article I. The Treaty for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, signed at Paris on August 27, 1928…shall come into force between the Contracting Parties after the ratification of the said Treaty of Paris of 1928 by the competent legislative bodies of the respective Contracting Parties.
Article II. The entry into force in virtue of the present Protocol, of the Treaty of Paris of 1928 in reciprocal relations between the Parties to the present Protocol shall be valid independently of the entry into force of the Treaty of Paris of 1928…
Article IV. In order to give effect to Article I of the present Protocol, each of the High Contracting Parties, after ratification by its legislative bodies of the Treaty of Paris of 1928, shall immediately notify the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and all the other Parties to the present Protocol, through the diplomatic channel.”
This agreement, also called the Moscow Protocol or more formally the “Protocol for the Immediate Entry into Force of the Treaty of Paris of August 27, 1928, Regarding Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy,” was immediately effective unlike the prolonged Kellogg-Briand Pact, with the Soviet negotiated agreement entering into force many months before the latter pact, and helping to improve Soviet relations with Poland. [14] The Soviet pact also disapproved the views of Western capitalists that “Red Russia would [not] keep a pledge to disarm.”
Later on, in 1933, the USSR concluded a convention on the definition of aggression with Afghanistan, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Persia, Poland, Romania, and Turkey, and the next day a similar convention with Czechoslovakia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. [15] This agreement defined aggression as a “declaration of war, invasion, assault, naval blockade and support of armed bands” along with outlining false excuses and justifications for such aggression by capitalist states. Over the years to come, as even noted by this anti-communist but partially fair account of Soviet foreign policy, the Soviets recognized the danger posed by the Nazis, trying to “restrain German militarism by building coalitions hostile to fascism,” adopting a policy of “cooperation with socialists and liberals against fascism, thus reversing its line of the early 1930s,” with the county joining the League of Nations in 1934, and Litvinov advocating “disarmament and collective security against fascist aggression.” Beyond this, the Soviets also, in 1935, made alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, and “from 1936 to 1939 it gave assistance to antifascists in the Spanish Civil War,” leading to Germany and Japan signing the “Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936” but the West did not want to “counter German provocative behavior,” and after France and Britain appeased “Hitler’s demands for Czechoslovak territory at Munich in 1938,” Stalin then abandoned his “efforts to forge a collective security agreement with the West” apparently.
After this, Stalin came to an “understanding with Germany,”replacing Litvinov with his confidante, Viacheslav Molotov as commissar of foreign affairs, with the Nazis and Soviets engaging in “intensive negotiations,” leading to the Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939, which “pledged absolute neutrality in the event one of the parties should become involved in war, while a secret protocol [that] partitioned Poland,” and soon thereafter the WWII began. Despite this, one cannot blame the Soviets for war, since felt they could not trust the Western powers to fight the Nazis by allying with them, and they did not want destruction of their country like happened during WWI. In later years, the Soviets pushed the UN for a new definition on aggression which encompassed viewpoints from across the Third World in 1953 and 1956. [16] After that point, when Khrushchev unfairly and traitorously denounced Stalin in his “secret speech” and cozied up more to the Western capitalists, revisionism took hold in the country, only to be uprooted by 1964, seemingly, when Leonid Brezhnev took power. All of these aspects will be covered in later articles about Soviet history.
The fact that Swanson did not address the Soviet perspective on the pact at all is not much of a surprise. While he is good-intentioned in writing about this subject and his book is a worthy history, he also is a bourgeois pacifist who does not talk about the role of capitalism, class relations, or imperialist struggle in bringing this agreement to fruition. I don’t wish to talk about that history in regards to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as that would require a good amount of additional research on the subject. As a result, this article is just meant to criticize Swanson and bring a new perspective to light on this subject, leading to future discussion.
Concluding thoughts
Final screenshot from the Soviet animated film “Mr. Wolf” I’m using in this article.
Some may say that it isn’t even worth reading the works of a bourgeois pacifist like David Swanson and that I’m giving him free press. While I can see where such a viewpoint is coming from, I also think it is unfair. It is worth reading other points of view in order to improve your own. There is no doubt that Swanson spent time and resources on writing his history, but his ideological viewpoint distorted his history so he did not, as a result, recognize the full reality. What I mean by this is that he is writing from a white, privileged, and Western perspective geared toward audiences in the U$. You could even add in that his perspective does not mention perspectives by women, not even white women, since only a smattering of the war outlawrists he cites are women. Additionally, where is a mention of race in this book? Doesn’t the Kellogg-Briand Pact effect people of color across the world? Also, a more robust analysis of European imperialisms and U$ imperialism would have improved the narrative to be more critical of established power structures. This agreement led to a sort of “capitalist peace” you could say.
The current Kellogg-Briand Pact, coupled with Articles 1 and 51 of the UN Charter, is a good tool to restrain the murderous empire. However, one must be wary of the demands of bourgeois pacifism in this regard, as such pacifism does not recognize the possibility of revolutionary wars for liberation and often says that people should not have the right to armed self-defense, instead just engaging in peaceful measures. This should be rejected wholesale. If Palestinians have the right to fire back rockets in response to never-ending Zionist bombing then blacks in the U$ have the right to defend themselves with arms against bigots trying to harm them. To be realistic, there will only be peace once socialist revolutions sweep the world and remove the virus of capitalism because militarism is deeply tied to such a horrid economic system. Sure, we can support the idea of outlawing war. However, we should not think that it, even if connected with an international court and other instruments of international law, will bring justice in a way that prevents capitalist exploitation. This is especially the fact if such a push does not include a demand for strong enforcement mechanisms, something that the Kellogg-Briand Pact lacks, not even allowing for sanctions, as much as they can be destructive and an instrument of imperialist aggression, of countries that violate its provisions. [17]
Notes
[1] David Swanson, When the World Outlawed War (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), p. 6, 11-18, 19-20. Such propaganda stayed in people’s minds before Wilson saw public opinion as “something to use, rather than avoid,” Swanson argues. The organization that paid for this was one group called the National Council for Prevention of War.
[2] War Outlawrists that Swanson cites: John Dewey, Robert Farrell, Thomas Hall Shastid, Sherwood Eddy, Robert Farrell, Murray Butler, James Thomson Shotwell, Andrew Carnegie, Salmon Oliver Levinson, John Chalmers Vinson, John E. Stoner, Kirby Page, Charles Clayton Morrison, Arthur Capper of Kansas, William Borah, Warren G. Harding, John Haynes Holmes, Raymond Robins, Frances Keller, Calvin Coolidge, James Brown Scott, and Carrie Chapman Catt.
[3] Swanson, 20-28, 30-33, 34-47, 60-69, 73-74, 111-114; LeftistCritic, “Annotating A Section of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” Soviet History, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 38. The idea of such enforcement was a court of law, with enforcement of rulings relying on good faith of nations, not military action, an economic blockade or sanctions, with the court as a form of “dispute resolution.”
[5] Ibid, 6, 144-155. Kellogg said that the pact did not mean the US recognized the USSR, but the Soviets hoped the pact would be a way to gain rapprochement (American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature, Vol. 1 (ed. Robert L. Beisner and Kurt W. Hanson, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 851. Also see “The Sino-Soviet Border Conflict, 1969: U.S. Reactions and Diplomatic Maneuvers” published on the National Security Archive’s website in 2001.As Chen Tiqiang argues, “Article 1 of the Anti-War Pact of Paris concluded on August 27, 1928, stipulates that the signatory countries to the pact “renounce…recourse to war as an instrument of national policy.” The Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East; pronounced on November 12, 1948, pointed out that a war in violation of the Paris pact is illegal by international law and that “those who plan and wage such a war with its inevitable and terrible consequences are committing a crime in doing so.” Thus, it is clear that wars of aggression had already been prohibited by international law before Japan launched its war of aggression. The Japanese Government, therefore, had launched its war of aggression against China wittingly and deliberately with full knowledge of its legal significance” (Chen Tiqiang, “Conclusions Confirmed by History,” Beijing Review, Aug. 30, 1982, vol. 25, no. 35, p. 27). Another writer notes that “in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (or Pact of Paris), the States Parties solemnly declared “that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” The Pact did not, however, specify criminal liability either for States or for individuals in the event of a violation of the Pact; whether the norm set forth in the Pact reflected a general rule of international law or one binding solely upon those States that had ratified the Pact was uncertain. As such, after the outbreak of World War II, many believed that no “international agreement criminalising wars of aggression was in force in 1939, and therefore, on the basis of the nullum crimen sine lege principle, the Allies were not legally entitled to prosecute the top Nazi leaders for aggression” but at the San Francisco conference in April 1945 they asserted that the original intent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact requires trying Nazis and Japanese fascists as war criminals (Sean D. Murphy, “The Crime of Aggression at the ICC,” Public Law and Legal Theory Paper No. 2012-50, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2012-50, 2012, p. 3-4). It is worth noting that WWII commenced even with the pact in place, but that the pact influenced Japan’s pacifist constitution.
[6] Swanson, 5, 6-8, 9-10, 49, 157-162, 163-165, 170-171. Other proposals include simple disarmament, disentangling ourselves from alliances that cause us to go to war like NATO, pressure those in power, enacting numerous strategies and create a holiday for the pact on August 27, that war is good for nothing (p. 165-167, 169). His ideas, outlined in p. 166 to 167 include: (1) cutting half of a trillion dollars out of the national security budget, half into tax cuts for everyone, half into useful social spending; (2) bring the National Guard back home and de-federalize it; (3) ban redeployment of personnel suffering from PTSD; (4) ban no-bid military contracts; (5) restore constitutional war powers to Congress; (6) have a public referendum before any war; (7) close foreign bases; (8) ban weapons from space; (9) ban extralegal prisons; (10) ban “kangaroo courts” outside the US justice system; (11) restore habeas corpus; (12) ban use of mercenaries; (13) limit military spending; (14) ban secret operations, agencies, and budgets; (15) ban drone strikes; (16) forbid transfer of student info. to military recruiters without permission; (17) comply with Kellogg-Briand Pact; (18) reform or replace the UN; (19) join the ICC and make it independent of the UN; (20) disarm.
[8] James M. Lindsay, “TWE Remembers: The Kellogg-Briand Pact,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 27, 2011.
[9] LeftistCritic, “Annotating A Section of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” Soviet History, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 39; Max Shachtman, “War, Kellogg Pact and the Soviet Union,” March 1929, The Militant, Vol. II No. 5, 1 March 1929, pp. 1 & 4; Jack Weber, “March of Events,” July 13 1935, New Militant, Vol. I No. 29, 13 July 1935, p. 3; Sam Gordon, New Developments in Far East: Western Imperialists Register Protests as Japs Hold on to Booty, February 1932, The Militant, Vol. V No. 6 (Whole No. 102), 6 February 1932, p. 1.
[10] Alastair Kocho-Williams, Russia’s International Relations in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52; Akira Iriye, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945, Vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 84-85, 106; J.L. Black, Canada in the Soviet Mirror: Ideology and Perception in Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1917-1991 (Canada: Carleton University Press, 1998), 66. The Comintern didn’t take Litvinov’s moves them seriously and got ready in case of invasion. Some say that the USSR remained “somewhat isolated diplomatically” by the West at least, but this is only one opinion on the matter. It is also worth noting that the provisions of the Kellogg-Briand Pact also applied to Soviet relations with Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania (Jan F. Triska and Robert M. Slusser, The Theory, Law, and Policy of Soviet Treaties (Sanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 1962), 250-251).
[11] Jan F. Triska and Robert M. Slusser, The Theory, Law, and Policy of Soviet Treaties (Sanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 1962), 259.
[12] Triska and Slusser, 259, 260, 262. On August 5, 1928, Chicherin argued that “the exclusion of the Soviet government from these negotiations leads us…to the assumption that among the real objectives of the initiators of this pact there obviously was and is an endeavor to make of this pact a weapon for isolating and fighting the Soviet Union. The negotiations regarding the conclusion of the Kellogg Pact was obviously an integral part of the policy of encircling the Soviet Union, which at present occupies the central point of the international relations of the whole world” (Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Harold Henry Fisher, Soviet Russia and the West, 1920-1927: A Documentary Survey (Sanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 1957), 352).On the subject of the Litvinov Protocol also see Rudolf Bernhardt, Use of Force · War and Neutrality Peace Treaties (N-Z) (New York: North Holland Publishing Company, 1982), 36. Also see documents here on the Avalon Project’s website.
[13] Triska and Slusser, 258; International Law and International Security: Military and Political Dimensions (ed. Paul B. Stephan and Boris Mikhaĭlovich Klimenko, London: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991), 9, 296; George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial (London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), 4; Richard C. Hall, Consumed by War: European Conflict in the 20th Century (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 97; Miron Rezun, The Soviet Union and the Iran: Soviet Policy in Iran from the Beginnings of the Pahlavi Dynasty until the Soviet Invasion of 1941 (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1981), 148, 154, 247; Marcel Mitrasca, Moldova: A Romanian Province Under Russian Rule : Diplomatic History from the archives of the Great Powers (New York: Algora Publishing, 2002), 8, 124, 330, 372, 377.
[17] The lack of such provisions in the Kellogg-Briand Pact is not a surprise because Western capitalist states would have never stood for strong enforcement, rejecting it in an effort to defend their own empires.
Leftist Critic backup 
