On False Internationalism

The following is a short excerpt from E. Tani & Kae Sera’s False Nationalism, False Internationalism: Class Contradictions in the Armed Struggle, a sequel of sorts to J. Sakais’ Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, and which just arrived in my mail yesterday from AK Press. In this quote they are talking about the relationship between white activists and African revolutionaries in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, but if you were to change but only a few words you would get a perfect description of the relationship between a certain sector of the Canadian white Left - in particular the south west Ontario manifestation of it – and Native revolutionaries. That is why I am posting it – some food for thought for my Canadian comrades.

In the late 1960s Euro-Amerikan radicals and liberals raised tens of thousands of dollars, walked picket lines in front of courthouses, and helped make a big public issue of the defense trials of Black Panther Party leaders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Newton and Seale were projected by the media and the white Left as the most revolutionary leadership for the New Afrikan movement. Was that campaign an example of genuine internationalism? No. Many Euro-Amerikan students may hae been subjectively sincere in a desire for internationalism, but objectively what took place was the reverse. Because at the same time that the Euro-Amerikan Left was promoting Huey and Bobby, they were also ignoring – and thus implicitly condoning – imperialist counter-insurgency against real revolutionary nationalists, such as Fred Ahmed Evans in Cleveland or the Republic of New Afrika 11 in Mississippi. In other words, no solidarity with those explicitly fighting for New Afrikan independence. What passed for “solidarity” was really a settler Left attempt to once again pick Black leaders more suitable to them. Not internationalism, but false internationalism. [emphasis mine]

The Shock of Recognition: Looking at Hamerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism

By J. Sakai. The following is an excerpt from Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. Thanks to Kersplebedeb for this.

The Superman is a symbol, the exponent of this anguishing and tragic period of crisis that is traversing European consciousness while searching for new sources of pleasure, beauty, ideal. He testifies to our weakness, but at the same time represents the hope of our redemption. He is dusk and dawn. He is above all a hymn to life, to life lived with all the energies in a continuous tension towards something higher. (1)

Benito Mussolini

We weren’t thinking about fascism while we watched two 757s full of people fly into the ex-World trade Center. And maybe we still weren’t thinking of fascism when we heard about the first-ever successful attack on the Pentagon. But fascism was thinking about us.

Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it’s in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth – but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven’t actually understood it.

1950s Repression & The Decline of the Communist Party USA

The following is an excerpt (Chapter 10) from J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. This chapter analyses and discusses the McCarthyite “repression” of the settler Communist Party USA during the period of the 1950s. I am posting it, both because I recently finished reading Settlers and this chapter (like the rest of the book) struck me, but also because some comrades south of artificial settler border are drawing on the memories and imagery of the 1950s experience of the CPUSA to describe the current U.S. government crackdown on anti-war and international solidarity activists.

Because this period is being invoked in such a manner now, I find Sakai’s analysis to be timely, and as such I am reproducing that chapter here. I am not saying that the Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Marxist-Leninist] and other targeted organizations are analogous to the CPUSA that Sakai skewers (that is a discussion for another time), but I think we should critically re-examine this period and the way that many of us have, to be frank, come to romanticize it.

1. The End of the Euro-Amerikan “Left”

The post-World War II collapse of the Communist Party U.S.A., the main organization of the Euro-Amerikan “left,” was an important indicator of disappearing working class consciousness in the oppressor nation. It is not true that the Euro-Amerikan “left” was destroyed by the McCarthyite repression of the 1950s. What was true that the anti-Communist repression effortlessly shattered the decaying, hollow shell of the ’30s ”old left” – hollow because the white workers who once gave it at least a limited vitality had left. The class struggle within the oppressor nation had once again effectively ended. Mass settler unity in service of the U.S. Empire was heightened.