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by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 12:32 pm
by American Dream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 12:35 pm
"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda?
Part Two: The Crisis of the Marxist Left and the Rise of the WWP
ukKevin Coogan- Although Ramsey Clark greatly contributed to the IAC's credibility with respect to the outside world, the emergence of the WWP inside the American radical movement essentially stems from resistance inside the U.S. Left to the radical changes in the Soviet Union begun by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet system sent a shock wave throughout the American Left not unlike that which had followed the partial revelations of Stalin's crimes in the famous 1956 20th Party Congress of the CPSU. Gorbachev's new policies bitterly split the American Communist Party (CPUSA), whose aging leadership clearly opposed the new turn. The CPUSA crack-up also had a profoundly disorienting effect on many of the "peace" fronts long associated with the party, as well as on its fellow travelers inside the "Rainbow Coalition"/Jessie Jackson wing of the Democratic Party.
Starting in the 1960s (when it played a major role in organizing anti-Vietnam peace demonstrations), the CPUSA managed to establish cooperative relationships with left/liberal groups like the National Commission for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service Committee, Women's Strike for Peace, sections of the labor movement and the peace, civil rights, "social justice" and social gospel groups associated with the National Council of Churches; all of whom helped form the base of the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party.
When dealing with Democrats and left-liberals along "Popular Front" lines, the CPUSA carefully avoided spouting radical dogma even as its sister parties in Moscow and Havana encouraged Marxist-led revolutions in the Third World. While the CP extended its influence into left-liberal circles, particularly during the Reagan years, party "hardliners" rested content in the knowledge that the more clout the CPUSA had inside the Democratic Party and its allied constituent groupings, the less likely the Reagan Administration would be able to generate the political will needed to use military force against revolutionary regimes and movements throughout the Third World. Needless to say, this "two tier" approach met with Moscow's full approval.
All that changed with the shift of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. Hardliners were infuriated with Gorbachev's decision to end Russian support to its client states in Eastern Europe. Many of these regimes were run by ideological hardliners willing to devote considerable resources to encouraging insurgent Marxist movements in the Third World. Not surprisingly, party bosses in regimes like East Germany (whose hold on power was ultimately based on Soviet military might) now became Gorbachev?s harshest critics.
Gorbachev's decision to distance the Soviet Union from Cuba also dealt a serious blow to Cuban-allied insurgency movements throughout both Central and Latin America. Since the romanticization of the Cuban Revolution, combined with Cuban military aid to the Sandinistas and the deployment of Cuban troops to help the government of Angola in its war against Jonas Savimbi's Union Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA, a brutal South African-, U.S.-, and Chinese-backed opposition movement) had led many American leftists into the Soviet camp in the first place, Gorbachev's actions against Cuba came as a particularly bitter blow.
The crisis inside the Soviet-allied Left became even more pronounced after Saddam Husayn's invasion of Kuwait, when Soviet foreign policy began to tilt more towards Washington than Moscow's longtime ally Baghdad.
In the midst of this larger crisis over Gorbachev and Iraq, the WWP became the first avowedly left sect more or less ideologically allied with Moscow to offer its unconditional support to Saddam Husayn as a victim of "U.S. imperialism," while it attacked Gorbachev as "a counterrevolutionary" (if not a CIA agent).
Until 1988 Sam Marcy, the WWP's three-decades long undisputed leader and theoretical guru, had taken a relatively benign view of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika.
By the fall of 1988, however, Marcy had decided that Gorbachev's decision to embrace both market reforms and political accommodation with the West was an unmitigated disaster. In a February 10th, 1989 forum on Soviet policy that included a spokesman from the Communist Party, the Soviet UN Mission, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the African National Congress, and the now-defunct Line of March grouping, WWP spokesman Larry Holmes confessed to being "worried by perestroika" and other ideas advanced "to justify policies that seem to be alien to socialism."
On September 29th, 1989, the WWP convened an "emergency conference" (entitled "In Defense of Socialism") to unify the party around the new anti-Gorbachev line. A few weeks later, in late October 1989, the WWP National Committee met to discuss Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's October 23rd speech to the Supreme Soviet, in which Shevardnadze announced that the Soviet Union had decided to disengage from Eastern Europe.
The meeting ended with the WWP sending out "messages of solidarity" to the Communist Parties of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, according to a report in the November 9th, 1989 WW. Nor did the WWP shy away from publicly defending Romania's Dracula-like dictator Nicholae Ceausescu, whom the WWP worked vigorously (but with little success) to turn from monster to mensch inside the pages of Workers World.
The WWP was equally consistent when it came to Asia. The sect even applauded the brutal Chinese repression of pro-democracy students and workers at Tiananmen Square. In the April 12th, 1990 WW, Sara Flounders (currently a leader of the "human rights" organization IAC), wrote: "Now the significance of the suppression of the right-wing movement in Tiananmen Square" could be seen from a "clearer perspective"; namely, that China had "smashed the plot of international anti-China forces to subvert the legal government and the socialist system of China."
How did Flounders know this to be true? Because Chinese Premier Li Peng said so in a March 20th speech to the National Peoples Congress in Beijing.
The WWP's public opposition to Gorbachev made it a potential vehicle for hard Left elements then trying to construct their own line independent of Moscow. Left stars like famed radical lawyer William Kunstler openly endorsed the WWP line on Gorbachev in blurbs for Sam Marcy's April 1990 book Perestroika: A Marxist Critique (essentially a compilation of his articles written for WW). Spurred on by the favorable response, the WWP intensified its attack. A September 8th, 1991 WW editorial even claimed that the introduction of capitalism into Eastern Europe "has been a tyranny as bad as any terror." On September 28-29th, 1991, the WWP held an "emergency conference" in New York "in response to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin takeover" in Russia.
According to an article in the October 10th, 1991 WW, "over 45 comrades" spoke on an open microphone at the conference about the "counterrevolutionary" events in Russia and -- surprise, surprise -- "not one of them found cause to oppose the party's analysis."
One WWP'er even expressed pleasure about the way that China had "stopped in Tiananmen Square" the "so-called democracy movement," while another praised the former East Germany as "a haven for gay liberation"!
by American Dream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:03 pm
"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda“
Part Three: Stealth Trotskyism and the Mystery of the WWP
uk Kevin Coogan - One of the many ironies of the IAC/WWP story is that a group now aligned with some of the most dogmatic elements in what’s left of the Left is itself most likely run by secret Trotskyists. Given the hermit-like quality of the WWP, it’s hard to know for sure. Even accurate estimates of the group's members are hard to come by.
In the 1980s most conventional estimates were that it had somewhere between three and four hundred followers. Thanks to the IAC in particular, the WWP's recruiting efforts over the past decade have met with some success, especially in New York and San Francisco. If both actual WWP members and fellow travelers are counted, the group may now deploy up to a thousand cadres, if not more.
Insofar as the WWP has had difficulty in recruiting, it may be due in part to the extremely closed and clannish nature of its leadership. Nowhere is this fact more evident then when it comes to discussing the group's origin. For some reason the WWP exercises great circumspection when it comes to acknowledging its origins as a faction inside the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The WWP’s leaders even obscure their background to their own members. In the May 6th, 1986 WW, for example, the paper began a lengthy four-part series ostensibly dedicated to explaining the WWP's history. Not once in the entire series was it ever mentioned that the WWP first emerged out of the Socialist Workers Party or that the group's founders had spent over a decade as a faction inside the SWP.
Yet the WWP's analysis of the Soviet Union strongly suggests that the sect never abandoned the worldview that its founding leaders first acquired while still inside the SWP. This issue, however, remains so sensitive that following the death of WWP founder Sam Marcy on February 1st, 1998, not one WWP memorial speech mentioned that Marcy had ever been in the SWP, much less a former member of the party's National Committee.
The bizarre nature of the WWP's attempt to conceal its origins is only heightened by the fact that virtually everything written about the group by outside commentators notes its beginnings inside the SWP. One of the rare academic discussions of the WWP's history comes in a survey book by Robert Alexander which is aptly titled International Trotskyism.
The mystery of the WWP begins with Sam Marcy, who dominated the organization from its official inception in 1959 until his death at age 86 in 1998. Born in 1911 in Russia into an extremely poor Jewish family, "Comrade Sam" grew up in Brooklyn. After spending time in the CPUSA's Young Communist League (YCL), Marcy joined the SWP in either the late 1930s or 1940s.
Trained as a lawyer, he served as a legal counsel and organizational secretary for a local United Paper Workers Union. During this time he met his wife Dorothy Ballan, who also came from an immigrant Russian-Jewish family. Although Ballan (who died in 1992) graduated from Hunter College with a degree in education, she joined the United Paper Workers to spread the Marxist gospel. Following traditional Left "industrial colonization" tactics, Marcy and Ballan next moved to Buffalo and began recruiting workers in industrial plants there into the SWP. By the late 1940s, however, the anti-communist backlash that would culminate in McCarthyism made their work inside the trade union movement virtually impossible.
Despite these political setbacks, Marcy and his fellow Buffalo SWP comrades (most notably Vince Copeland) became increasingly convinced that the world had entered a new period of revolutionary class struggle, particularly following the Chinese Revolution. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 hastened the emergence of what was known in the SWP as the Marcy/Copeland "Global Class War" tendency. The Buffalo-based "global class warriors" called on the SWP to downplay its differences with Stalinist regimes and forge a joint front against "U.S. Imperialism."
Global Class War's fundamental point was that the geopolitical defense of "really existing socialism" took priority over the Trotskyist argument that put a premium on promoting class struggles inside the Soviet bloc against the dominant Stalinist bureaucracy. Marcy and Copeland's position might be best described as "semi-entrist" because although they very much wanted to court the Stalinist states, they rejected any argument that called on Trotskyists to enter the CPUSA en masse.
What the Global Class War argument meant in practice became clear during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP majority supported the uprising as a student and worker-led revolt against Stalinist oppression. The Global Class War faction, however, completely disagreed. A Trotskyist named Fred Mazelis recalled Marcy telling him in 1959 that "the Hungarian workers were hopeless counterrevolutionaries and that we should support the Stalinists in their crushing of the Hungarian workers councils."
According to another former SWP'er named Tim Wohlforth, "Marcy had decided that the Hungarian Revolution was basically a Fascist uprising and that as defenders of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists had a duty to support Soviet intervention." The WWP's 1959 founding statement (reprinted in a 1959 issue of WW under the heading "Proletarian Left Wing of SWP Splits, Calls for Return to Road of Lenin and Trotsky") explained that while it was OK to support demands for "proletarian democracy," once the Hungarians began demanding "bourgeois political democracy," the correct Trotskyist policy was to support "the final intervention of the Red Army which saved Hungary from the capitalist counterrevolution."
In other words, if 99.9% of the Hungarian people wanted to overthrow Russian domination and prevent Hungary from being a satrapy of Moscow, introduce a democratic parliamentary system, and adopt an economic system that worked, they were morally wrong; in contrast, the Soviet troops who shot down unarmed Hungarian student and worker protesters were morally right.
In its founding statement, the WWP also denounced the SWP’s attempts to engage in coalition electoral campaigns with a group of former CP“ers (known as the „Gates faction“ after its leader, John Gates) who had broken from the CPUSA after the 20th Soviet Party Congress partial revelations about Stalin’s massive crimes.
According to WW, however, the real “rightwing” trend inside the Soviet Union actually began after Stalin’s death with the rise of Khrushchev! The WWP’s founding statement further noted that while Stalinism “may be theoretically as wrong as social democracy,” social democrats were “considered friendly to American imperialism and the Stalinists are considered hostile.” Ergo, Stalinism was better than social democracy.
After breaking with the SWP, the tiny WWP sought to ally itself with pro-Stalinist and anti-Khrushchev elements still inside the CPUSA who were angry about American CP leader William Foster’s refusal to openly criticize the Khrushchev “revisionists.” Around the time that the WWP was created, a splinter group called the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Party in the United States (POC) “better known as the “Vanguard” group” split from the CPUSA and embraced China’s anti-Khrushchev, “anti-revisionist” line. Although the WWP supported the Chinese position, the Vanguard group refused all of its political overtures because they viewed the WWP as treasonous “Trotskyites”! Not long thereafter, the WWP began removing Trotsky’s picture along with any references to him in party publications.
Now thoroughly isolated from the rest of the Left, Marcy led his little group with a strong hand. Tim Wohlforth met Marcy in 1959 at an SWP convention held at a New Jersey summer camp shortly before the Global Class War clique broke with the SWP. As Wohlforth later recalled in his memoir, The Prophet’s Children, while at the camp he had come upon a small mass of people “moving like a swarm of bees” and deeply engaged in conversation. In the middle of the mass “was a little animated man talking nonstop” who had a “high-pitched voice” and “spoke in a completely hysterical manner.” Yet Marcy’s devoted followers seemed “enthralled by his performance. . .It was my first experience with true political cult followers.”
From its inception, the WWP attacked any and all liberalization tendencies in Communist Bloc nations and scrambled to be first in line to applaud crackdowns on dissident movements. The April 1959 issue of WW even ran an editorial praising the brutal Chinese suppression of Tibet’s independence movement. As for the Soviet Union, the WWP regularly attacked the entire spectrum of dissident thinkers from Solzhenitsyn to Sakharov. The WWP line was that the dissidents really reflected broader „rightwing forces“ percolating inside the Soviet CP itself. In a February 22nd, 1974 essay, Marcy noted that Khrushchev’s ‘so called democratization“ had „opened up a Pandora’s box of bourgeois reaction, not only in the Soviet Union but even more virulently in Eastern Europe.“
The WWP fully supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Russian tanks crushed the Dubcek Regime and with it „Prague Spring.“ Needless to say, it also fiercely opposed the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s. The WWP’s true love throughout the 1960s was Maoist China, with North Korea a close second. The WWP even opposed the signing of the 1963 U.S.-Soviet Test Ban Treaty because it would bar China from acquiring nuclear weapons!
When the Chinese exploded their first H-bomb in 1967, WW declared it to be „a major victory for socialism.“ The party was particularly enthusiastic about China’s disastrous „Cultural Revolution,“ so much so that as late as the WWP’s 1986 party conference, Mao’s wife Chang Ching (a Cultural Revolution enthusiast and „Gang of Four“ leader) was singled out for special praise.
As much as the WWP admired China, it despised Israel. WWP cadre proudly carried signs in support of al-Fath that read “Israel = Tool of Wall Street Rule” and “Hitler-Dayan, Both the Same.” A June 24th, 1967 WW editorial following the Six Day War stated that Israel “is not the state of the Jewish nation,” but a state “that oppresses Jewish workers as well as Arabs.”
The fact that Israel was largely created by Socialist Zionists and in 1967 was led by Labor Party Premier Golda Meir (a woman something unthinkable in the Arab world), whose political base was the Social Democratic Israeli trade union movement, did not matter. Nor did it matter that every Arab state that opposed Israel had systematically crushed all independent labor unions or that “progressive” Arab governments like Jamal `Abd al-Nasr’s Egypt had a long record of employing Nazis both to train its military and security forces and to spread anti-Semitic hate propaganda throughout the Middle East.
As the WW editorial explained, “The fact that many of the Arab states are still ruled by conservative or even reactionary regimes does not materially affect this position” of support, because the Arabs “are struggling against imperialism, which is the main enemy of human progress,” whereas Israel “is on the side of the oppressors.”
This same editorial went on to assert that “When the bosses on a world scale” i.e., the imperialists “ go to war with the oppressed colonial and semi-colonial nations, it makes little difference who fires the first shot, as far as the rights and wrongs of the matter are concerned. . .Naturally, the imperialists were the original aggressors in every case.” Some two decades later, the WWP would use virtually identical arguments to justify supporting Saddam Husayn.
The WWP’s remarkable capacity for Orwellian “double think” was by no means limited to the issue of the Soviet Union or Israel. Take gay liberation, for example. Starting in the early 1970s the WWP actively recruited many gay and lesbian followers, since paradoxically enough the group had a fairly advanced position on this issue.
The sect’s recruitment successes in this area came about in part because most of the other ultra-left groups competing with the WWP were orthodox Maoists who endorsed the Stalinist/Maoist line that homosexuality was a sexual perversion caused by decadent capitalism that would be swiftly cured come the revolution. Yet even though WWP cadres frequently promoted themselves as gay or lesbian, the WWP refused to criticize the notoriously repressive practices directed against homosexuals in China, North Korea, and Cuba, much less in Serbia or Iraq.
Perhaps the ultimate absurdity of the WWP, however, is that the stealth Trotskyism of its leadership actually saved the sect from collapse in the late 1970s. In the 1960s the WWP, primarily through two key front groups, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF) and the American Servicemen’s Union (ASU), managed to recruit a fair amount of new members who were drawn to the group less by its theories than by the extreme militancy of its street actions. Indeed, YAWF’s one notable contribution to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was that it was the only group which supported the Weatherman at the disastrous SDS convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969.
YAWF also participated in the Weatherman-organized “Days of Rage” protest that same autumn. With the end of the Vietnam War, however, the entire American Left began to suffer an enormous downturn, and the WWP was no exception to the rule. The cadre-based Left was further weakened by the rise of new social movements like women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the anti-nuclear and ecology movements, all of which operated organizationally and ideologically outside the traditional framework of orthodox Marxism, much less that of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist sects.
Faced with the challenge of widespread de-radicalization, as well as the growth of new social movements, the WWP (like many other Marxist sects) took an „industrial turn“ and ordered its followers back into the labor movement. The WWP even created the Centers for United Labor Action (CULA) to help coordinate these efforts.
Yet ironically, what ultimately gave the WWP a second lease on life was the death of Mao and the subsequent ideological crisis inside post-Mao China that finally resulted in the defeat of the „Gang of Four.“ The WWP’s competitors in orthodox Maoist grouplets like the October League rapidly ran out of ideological steam as the new post-Mao Chinese leadership moved even closer to the United States. After China began aiding American and South African-backed movements like UNITA, and Chinese troops tried to invade Vietnam, orthodox Maoism became even harder to rationalize.
Thanks to the WWP’s stealth Trotskyism, however, the group managed to escape political oblivion by reorienting itself away from China and toward the Soviet Bloc with relative ease.
The WWP’s great advantage in the post-1977 period was that throughout its entire history it only concealed „ but never abandoned „ its basic Trotskyist ideology. Orthodox Maoism, it should be recalled, maintained that with the death of Stalin the Soviet Union had ceased to be socialist state. Maoists even went so far as to claim that, thanks to „Khrushchevite revisionism,“ the USSR had been transformed into „a social-imperialist state“ not unlike Tsarist Russia.
The WWP, however, completely rejected this view even while it was busily glorifying ultra-Maoist groups like China’s „Gang of Four“ for their revolutionary zeal. In a May 1976 WW article, for example, Marcy reasserted the Trotskyist position (naturally without identifying it as such) against the standard Maoist argument. More specifically, he rejected the idea „that there is a new exploiting class in the Soviet Union,“ and that there had been a „return to the bourgeoisie to power there.“
The reality was that the USSR still remained „a workers“ state“ whose „underlying social system. . .is infinitely superior to that of the most developed, the most „glorious“ and the most „democratic“ of the imperialist states.“ At the same time (again following Trotsky) he admitted that Russia had undergone „a severe strain, deterioration, and erosion of revolutionary principles, and [was] moreover headed by a privileged and absolutist bureaucracy.
Marcy' later rejection of Gorbachev as a “capitalist restorationist” in the late 1980s was not all that dissimilar to Trotsky’s attack on Bukharin not Stalin in books like The Revolution Betrayed as the main threat to socialism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
The WWP’s brand of covert Trotskyism would prove crucial to its future growth. In the late 1970s, its ideology allowed the sect to attach itself like a pilot fish to Soviet and Cuban-allied organizations and avoid political annihilation either from the atrophy of its membership or from a devastating political schism.
The WWP’s switch from Mao’s China to Brezhnev’s Russia was so remarkable that in 1984 the sect, which not long before was singing the praises of the Gang of Four, now publicly endorsed Jesse Jackson for President! Finally, when the CPUSA itself split into pieces in the late 1980s, the WWP was in a position to exploit the new situation for maximum political profit.
Conclusion
Given the WWP’s worldview, the notion that a group as closely linked to the WWP as the International Action Center could ever be taken seriously, either as a „human rights“ or „peace“ organization, seems comical as well as grotesque. The all too „resistible rise“ of the IAC/ WWP, however, only makes sense when it is viewed in the context of the broader collapse of Soviet-style Marxism and all of its ideological variants. Left to its own devices, the WWP would have remained on the political margin as a quirky Left sect whose weirdly messianic ideology combined the worst aspects of Trotskyism, Maoism, and Stalinism into a unique and utterly foul brew.
by American Dream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 5:29 pm
The Origins of Putinophilia
May 19, 2014
There is a growing divide in the U.S. Left, between those who simply oppose U.S. intervention in Ukraine, and those who defend, or even praise, Russia’s strongman, Vladimir Putin. Things haven’t always been like this. If I remember correctly, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, only the Workers World Party and its front groups defended Saddam Hussein. The rest of the left had no illusions about the dictator. I think a change began in the Left after the anti-war movement failed to prevent the invasion. There began to be talk about a “red-brown” strategy, that is, forming alliances with right-wing, or even fascist, groups that claim to be opposed to U.S. imperialism. The thinking was that the Left by itself was not strong enough, or maybe not committed enough, to successfully struggle against imperialism. And if it is permissible to work with groups with terrible politics, then it is permissible to support governments with terrible politics. Thus, it became possible to see any dictator who ran afoul of the US as an ally against imperialism. Gadaffi and Assad were now on our side, according to this view.
Putin has acquired a special place in these people’s eyes. During Russia’s 2008 border war with Georgia, Bush was unable to do anything. Many on the Left saw this as a humiliation for the hated Bush. (Although I suspect that Bush really didn’t care.) So now Putin can do no wrong in their eyes. He can imprison his critics and persecute gays and ethnic minorities, and they will simply explain it away or ignore it. And as Putin has grown a halo, Obama has become the embodiment of pure evil in these people’s eyes. John Pilger, for example, has claimed, on the basis of no evidence, that Obama was plotting to seize Russia’s naval base in Crimea and start a war. How can anyone take this seriously?
If the Left is to avoid becoming completely irrelevant, it needs to return to the principled anti-imperialism of the past.
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 15, 2015 5:45 pm
What a stupid fucking article. It personifies that idiotic way of "thinking" that is so prevalent in America these days. To wit, you're either with us or you're against us. If you're agàinst what asshole A is doing you therefore worship asshole B.
If you think it's wrong and dangerous that Obama and the neocon gang are trying to provoke Russia into war, possibly risking WW3, and is supporting an evil neonazi cabal that is slaughtering thousands of innocent people then ... Automatically .... You think that Putin is a Saint.
If you hate white then you must be one of those people who worships black.
Idiotic. Insulting. Not worthy of this board.
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 15, 2015 5:46 pm
) is not “threatening to take the world to war”.
by American Dream » Wed Mar 04, 2015 3:35 pm
A more aggressive group of white supremacists showed up in front of the conference center the following morning. Members of the League of the South (LOS) protested outside in the cold particularly against a CPAC breakout session supporting stronger measures against Russia in the conflict against the Ukraine which is currently fighting to become an independent state. The session included on their panel a member of the Log Cabin Republicans a conservatives pro-gay rights organization that has been the center of controversy since CPAC has disinvited them from participating in the conference two years in a row with the exception of this last minute addition to the panel. The handful Matt Heimbach outside CPACof protestors were led by Matthew Heimbach who in addition to the LOS is also an associate of the Traditional Youth Network, which he co-founded, and the American Freedom Party. He and the other protestors, which included longtime neo-Nazi activist Ron Doggett and Marshall Rawson, who last summer worked as an intern for then-Rep. Paul Broun on Capitol Hill, spent much of the afternoon talking with the CPAC attendees as well as reporters that came to their area to question or confront them. Despite the entire Gaylord Hotel Resort Area being private property they were allowed to stay and continue their protest during the afternoon.
In 2013, Heimbach and his associate Scott Terry participated in a CPAC session on racial tolerance by Black conservative K. Carl Smith titled "Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You're Not One?" and voiced their objection to it as “disenfranchised whites”.
According to reports, over 10,000 persons attended CPAC 2015.
by American Dream » Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:40 am
Groups and individuals involved in the wider movements of the Christian Right and contemporary libertarianism, on which PRA has reported over the past two years, have advocated varying degrees of nullification and secession; and have envisioned vary degrees of political tension, violence and civil war. Peroutka and Moore may lack the votes in their respective governmental institutions for nullification over marriage and other issues, but they can be voices for building a movement which could one day be capable of carrying it out.
It is not clear yet how organized or capable the movement is currently, but it is worth noting that former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) spoke at a gathering in January at the Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, called “Breaking Away: The Case for Secession”.
“I would like to start off,” Paul declared, “by talking about the subject and the subject is secession and, uh, nullification, the breaking up of government, and the good news is it’s gonna happen. It’s happening,”
RELATED: Nullification, Neoconfederates, and the Revenge of the Old Right
Meanwhile, judge Moore and Peroutka seem to be taking the long view—but others are not. Among these is another longtime Peroutka friend and ally, Michael Hill, head of the theocratic and White supremacist Alabama-based League of the South. Peroutka, as PRA reported last year, was a member of the board of directors of the League for several months in 2014, before quietly leaving, apparently in preparation for his run for office. His membership in the League was a major issue in the campaign. Peroutka said he resigned his membership but did not renounce the League itself. After Peroutka won the election, Hill celebrated his friend’s victory.
Hill has called for the formation of death squads to kill American government officials and journalists, and for White men of all ages to become “citizen soldiers” in a great modern defense of archaic notions of Christendom. He has as gone so far as to organize a paramilitary group.
Hill sees himself and his comrades as part of a long line of such “citizen soldiers,” invoking historic battles with Islamic armies going back to the Battle of Tours in the 8th century. His role models for warriors for Christendom, however, are the White Westerners who fought against Black liberation movements in Southern Africa in the 1970s.
“So if Western men in past times were willing to fight for their civilization in remote areas of the world,” he asked, “shouldn’t we expect them to be just as willing to fight for that civilization here at its very heart – the South? … The traditions and truths of Western Christendom are anathema to the [Obama] regime,” he concluded. “The tyrants’ regime and Western Christendom cannot coexist—that is not possible. One must win and the other must disappear. It is indeed the ultimate Zero Sum game.”
Michael Hill is treating the federal judge’s overturning of the “Sanctity of Marriage” amendment to the Alabama state constitution as the last straw. While the League says it supports judge Moore’s effort to defend the state constitution against the alleged federal tyranny, Hill declared that he no longer considers himself an American and called for violent secession of the South from “the American monstrosity.”
Hill also joined theologian Peter Leithart of Birmingham and prominent Christian Right political organizer David Lane, in explicitly declaring his opposition to “Americanism.”
RELATED: Neo-Confederate Group Forms Paramilitary Unit—While Claiming it Isn’t.
“Yes, many of our citizens have, wittingly or unwittingly, embraced Americanism for either survival or profit,” Hill declared. “I have not, and I intend to convince my fellow Southerners to join my side. I do not intend to leave Alabama or the South… I intend to fight, and if necessary kill and die, for their survival, well-being, and independence.”
A MOSCOW – MONTGOMERY AXIS?
As it happens, the League has been receiving encouragement from elements in Russia, particularly some who support Ukrainian separatists. He addressed, via Skype, a red/brown conference of anti-globalism activists, in Moscow in December 2014. Hill told the conference that he sees American southern nationalism as an “historic ‘blood and soil’ movement” – an overt reference to 20th century ultra-German nationalism and Naziism.
Hill reports that he also emphasized the League’s “direct Southern nationalist challenge to the political, economic, and financial engine of globalism – the Washington, DC/European Union alliance.”
While the League has been networking with separatist movements around the world for a long time, the relationship with and support for pro-Russian, Ukrainian separatists has been growing. On his Facebook page last year, Hill cast the situation as a battle between the “decadent West,” meaning the U.S. and the European Union (EU), and supposedly traditionalist Russia—which he described as “conservative, Orthodox, anti-Muslim and anti-PC.”
“We Southerners, as Christian traditionalists,” he concluded, “ought to sympathize with those in Ukraine who would object to closer ties with the USA-EU regimes simply because of what they now stand for: multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity; anti-Christian policies from abortion to homosexuality; open borders and the demographic displacement of native Whites; an aggressive foreign policy, including war, in the name of spreading liberal democracy. On the other hand, Russia today stands against such things.
by American Dream » Tue Mar 17, 2015 9:20 pm
GOING TO CPAC...AND MEETING UP WITH MATTHEW HEIMBACH
The 2015 edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has come and gone, but it did leave us with a lot of good memories, many of them committed to video. It's curious how the activities of the white supremacists from ProEnglish once again co-sponsoring the shindig, to Dick Spencer's conference at the National Press Club (yes, we will update his Rogues' Gallery entry soon), to the League of the South (LOS) protesting a CPAC workshop on Russia outside got only scant mention in more mainstream media fare, but that's okay. We expected that, which is why we keep going out to these things. We could not deprive you of this little exchange that was had with Matthew Heimbach, now could we?
by American Dream » Tue Mar 24, 2015 6:14 pm
Lee-Jackson day parade, Lexington, Virginia.
1-17-15
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated in Lexington, Virginia, on the 18th and 19th of January. Before that, Lexington plays host to a “Confederate heritage” celebration— organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans— that consists of wreath laying, rifle salutes, costumery… and stuff like this. If you’ll notice the black and white flags in the background of the second picture, those are the flags of the white supremacist “League of the South” who weren’t allowed to march because they make the Sons of Confederate Veterans look bad— but look what was allowed to march.
by Searcher08 » Wed Mar 25, 2015 10:58 am
by American Dream » Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:32 pm
Why Is Vladimir Putin Referring to Eastern Ukraine as ‘New Russia’?
August 30th, 2014
Western elites stole Ukraine from a deranged dictator with a bogus populist uprising. Now, kleptocrat Putin is stealing it back with irregulars, mercenaries, and tanks.
Don’t come to the conclusion that Putin is some sort of good guy. Putin is just like Western elites, but with a more direct approach, and what amounts to a personal arsenal of nuclear weapons. There are no good guys here. Murders? Yes. Thieves? Yes. And on both sides.
by Searcher08 » Wed Mar 25, 2015 1:07 pm
American Dream » Wed Mar 25, 2015 4:32 pm wrote:Why Is Vladimir Putin Referring to Eastern Ukraine as ‘New Russia’?
August 30th, 2014
Western elites stole Ukraine from a deranged dictator with a bogus populist uprising. Now, kleptocrat Putin is stealing it back with irregulars, mercenaries, and tanks.
Don’t come to the conclusion that Putin is some sort of good guy. Putin is just like Western elites, but with a more direct approach, and what amounts to a personal arsenal of nuclear weapons. There are no good guys here. Murders? Yes. Thieves? Yes. And on both sides.
http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=44836
by American Dream » Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:27 am
Neo-Nazis gather to support Russian imperialism in Ukraine
March 26, 2015
Putin’s useful idiots on the so-called “left” seem to be wilfully blind to the company they’re keeping:
By Dale Street
“The fascists are not in Ukraine, they’re meeting here!”, “Nazis licking Putin’s ass, OMG!” and “We don’t need foreign fascists here, we’ve nowhere to put our own!” read protestors’ placards outside the St. Petersburg Holiday Inn on 22 March.
The hotel was hosting the “International Russian Conservative Forum”, organised by the “Russian National Cultural Centre, The People’s Home”, a flag of convenience for members of the Russian “Motherland” party (Russian-nationalist, far-right and pro-Putin).
Organisations which sent official delegations to the conference included Golden Dawn (Greece), Ataka (Bulgaria), the National-Democratic Party of Germany, Forza Nuova (Italy), the Danish People’s Party, the National-Democratic Party(Spain), Millenium (Italy), and the Party of the Swedes.
All of these organisations are either on the far right or overtly fascist.
The French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Serbian Radical Party were invited to attend but decided not to do so for tactical reasons: participating in a conference with openly neo-Nazi organisations would undermine their attempts to appear “respectable”.
Other attendees included Nick Griffin (ex-BNP, now British Unity Party), Jim Dowson (ex-BNP, then Britain First and Protestant Coalition), Nate Smith(Texas National Movement), and Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson (American white supremacists).
Russian politicians and political activists who attended the event included members of “Motherland”, Putin’s “United Russia”party, the Russian Imperial Movement, the National Liberation Movement (slogans: “Motherland! Freedom!Putin!”), Battle for Donbas, Novorossiya, and the “social and patriotic club” Stalingrad.
Alexander Kofman (“Foreign Minister” of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic) pulled out of attending the conference at the last minute. But the Russian fascist Aleksei Milchakov, leader of the neo-Nazi Rusich brigade which has fought in the Donbas, made a point of turning up: “I’ve come direct from the front line, to make contact with European colleagues, to ensure that in Europe they know the truth about the Donbas, so that Europeans flood into Novorossiya (to fight), not into Ukraine.”
Summing up speakers’ contributions, one journalist wrote: “Overall, three things united the nationalists of the different countries: hatred of the US government, hatred of homosexuals, and hatred of the ‘Kiev junta’.”
All three themes were encapsulated in the contribution from Chris Roman, a Belgian active in the recently founded far-right “Alliance for Peace and Freedom” international federation: “In the West you’ll soon be able to marry a dog or a penguin. From the age of five children are taught how to play with themselves, and that it is normal to be gay.
“I support the Russian army, the Russian rebels. I don’t recognise the Kiev junta, a puppet of Wall Street. I don’t recognise the liberal Russian opposition, a fifth column. Politkovskaya, Nemtsov and Berezovsky are now all in hell.
“Crimea is Russian. Alaska is Russian. Kosovo is Serbian. Russia is our friend, and America our enemy. Glory to Russia! Glory to Novorossiya!”
The Russian government was not directly represented at the conference. But the composition, location and themes of the conference underline a growing alliance between Putin and the European far right.
The conference also exposed, yet again, the spurious nature of the Kremlin’s “anti-fascism” and the “anti-fascist struggle” of its puppet governments in Donetsk and Lugansk.
by Searcher08 » Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:41 am
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