06/25/16

Leftists Find a Socialist They Don’t Like

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Fresh from their attendance at the Left Forum gathering of socialists and communists in New York, officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have finally found a socialist they can hate: Brexit murder suspect Thomas Mair, the alleged killer of British MP Jo Cox. The SPLC says Mair has been linked to the “once-prominent American neo-Nazi group” known as the National Alliance.

But strangely enough, the SPLC neglected to mention that William Pierce, the head of the National Alliance, was also the editor of a publication called National Socialist World.

The SPLC seems to believe there is a significant moral difference between socialism based on race—the Nazi version—and socialism based on class, the Marxist version. Otherwise, why would they find one form objectionable and the other worthy of a conference featuring Evelyn Schlatter, deputy director of research of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project?

In fact, however, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism was based on Marxism. “In public,” notes George Watson, author of The Lost Literature of Socialism, “Hitler was always anti-Marxist…” However, Watson notes that Hitler privately “acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition” and stated explicitly that “I have learned a great deal from Marxism…” Watson cites the book, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, by Otto Wagener, who was Hitler’s economic advisor.

In the case of the British Brexit attacker, who allegedly killed Cox because she favored keeping Britain in the European Union, the SPLC cites the British press in saying that Nazi regalia and literature, including a manual with instructions on building a pistol, were found after searching Mair’s home.

All of this is very disturbing. The neo-Nazi movement here and abroad is full of dangerous characters. But years before the SPLC advertised itself as an authority on such groups as the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI was monitoring and even infiltrating these groups. Leftist objections to government “surveillance” forced the FBI to curtail the monitoring of extremists.

The FBI used to infiltrate the far-right and the far-left, including such groups as the Weather Underground of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. A Weather Underground bomb factory discovered by the FBI in San Francisco in 1971 turned up bombs, killing instruments, and communist literature, including books by Lenin and Mao.

And yet, the SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” project ran an article praising Bill Ayers, who never repented for his crimes, as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author.” It also claimed he had become “a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education.”

President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has refused to prosecute Ayers and/or Dohrn for their alleged involvement in the bombing murder of San Francisco police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970. Dohrn has adamantly denied involvement in the bombing.

The softball treatment of Ayers and Dohrn demonstrates that the media’s designated “experts” on right-wing extremism have a big blind spot. In fact, the SPLC helped inspire an actual terrorist attack on the Washington, D.C. offices of the conservative Christian Family Research Council (FRC). This occurred after a homosexual militant discovered the location of the FRC on an SPLC “hate map.” A security guard was wounded before he took down the attacker.

Using Thomas Mair and his link to the National Alliance in their latest successful attempt to drum up some favorable media attention, the SPLC says Pierce turned the group into the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America. But it is not considered very significant these days. By contrast, as demonstrated by the thousands in attendance at the recent Left Forum in New York, the organized pro-communist movement, which is based on Marxism, is very much alive. Yet the SPLC mixes among and with them.

What’s more, some groups in the U.S. today considered to be pro-white are aligned with the Russian government of Vladimir Putin and his one-time influential adviser, Alexander Dugin. In fact, former KKK leader David Duke once traveled to Russia and met with Dugin.

Interestingly, the Charleston church shooter, Dylann Roof, had declared in his alleged manifesto, that “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the Internet,” when it came to racist support groups for his planned massacre of black people. The drug-abusing 21-year-old was complaining about a lack of organized support for his views. But the SPLC tried to transform Roof into a global right-wing terrorist by linking him, without any substantial evidence, to a “worldwide white supremacist movement.”

An Internet search by Carrie Devorah determined that Roof’s website was hosted by a Russian server. This was the only evidence of an international connection to the massacre.

Nevertheless, Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was invited to address “the scope of radicalization, and assess what steps can be taken to mitigate the rise of terror via lone wolf attacks and organized terrorist plots” in a June 23 hearing conducted by the Subcommittees on National Security and Government Operations of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In his testimony, Cohen mentioned how he had previously testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security and had served on the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

He said, “We must ensure that the government’s attention to the threat of Islamic extremism does not cause it to fail to devote the resources necessary to combat homegrown violent extremism based on other ideologies.” He added that “All forms of extremist violence are dangerous to our nation and must be vigorously confronted.”

But there was no mention of whether these “other ideologies” included Marxist groups like the ones the SPLC associated with at the Left Forum, or whether “extremist violence” from Marxist-oriented groups is a potential problem.

One of the participants in the Left Forum was pro-terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, freed from prison by the Obama administration.

As we noted previously, the SPLC employs the tactic of “partisan tolerance,” meaning that the conservatives who want to protect America and its allies from Islamic terrorists, or even from Russian aggression, have become, in their eyes, the problem.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

06/10/16

Trump Seen as Vehicle to Destroy GOP

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

While showing an image of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, veteran leftist operative Webster Tarpley told the recent Left Forum in New York City, “If we play this right, he can destroy the Republican Party.” The comments, delivered at the major left-wing gathering of the year, reflect the belief among “progressive” activists that the Donald J. Trump candidacy can be used to destroy the Republican Party and usher in a major period of Democratic Party rule, under the increasing influence of an openly socialist faction.

“This party must be destroyed,” Tarpley said, referring to the Republicans.

Tarpley’s analysis of the political scene takes on additional significance as we see evidence of communists and Mexican nationals protesting outside Trump rallies and assaulting Trump supporters. Tarpley’s audience was the Left Forum, which is described as “the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public.” The theme for this year’s event was “Rage, Rebellion, Revolution: Organizing Our Power.”

Those participating included the Democratic Socialists of America (which supported Barack Obama and now Bernie Sanders), the Southern Poverty Law Center, representatives of the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, the “Exonerate Ethel Rosenberg” campaign, CodePink, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Workers World Party, the Trans Queer Liberation Movement, and the Greek Communist Party.

A former operative in the movement led by Lyndon H. LaRouche, an aging Marxist ideologue who served time in prison on fraud charges, Tarpley is viewed by the left as an expert on the class struggle that defines the evolution of the American political system. He has been a prominent figure in the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, which blames unnamed U.S. officials for carrying out the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He is today associated with the Tax Wall Street Party, a group backing the Sanders proposal to raise taxes on financial transactions in order to finance a socialist super state.

Drawing on historical sources and stories about turmoil in the Trump campaign and the GOP, Tarpley predicted that Trump’s candidacy will divide the Republicans and result in one of its factions merely surviving as a regional party based in the Deep South, rural areas, and the intermountain West. However, he said the party itself has become so dependent on “aging white men,” a shrinking percentage of the electorate, that it may be “demographically doomed” in the long term.

Tarpley, who thinks Sanders has not gone far enough to the left, believes opposing Trump and calling him a fascist is a smart organizing tactic by the left. In his talk, “Destroy the GOP—Split the Dems,” Tarpley describes the Sanders campaign and associated groups as “New Deal Democrats,” as opposed to the “Wall Street Democrats” backing Hillary Clinton. Eventually, if everything goes according to plan, the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party will take control in a “progressive realignment,” and a “new progressive coalition” could emerge and dominate American politics for decades.

“Trump is the trigger” for this dramatic series of developments, he told the leftist conference, and it means the Republican Party could go “extinct,” since it is perceived as being hostile to the new immigrants who have flooded into the country. He is predicting a complete political realignment for the period 2016 to 2046.

However, left unsaid in his presentation is whether after Mrs. Clinton is presumably done with her first term as president, she could be challenged for another term by the Sanders wing of the party, possibly represented at that time by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

But the idea that Warren is somehow against the interests of Wall Street and finance capital is, of course, complete nonsense. She ran for the Senate with the support of hedge fund billionaire George Soros and other big money liberals.

While Tarpley is not a supporter of Mrs. Clinton or President Obama, he gives Obama, a skilled Marxist-trained operative, enormous credit for assembling a winning coalition in the presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. He explained, “2008 was a watershed election, and in retrospect that will become more obvious than it is now.” He said Obama had ushered in “a new phase” of politics that has put tremendous pressure on the Republican Party to generate support from enough of the electorate to survive as a national political entity.

“That future is what you have to keep your eyes on,” he emphasized. “That’s where you have to get. It means a crushing defeat for Trump, if we can do it.”

At the same time, Tarpley acknowledged that Trump supporters have “legitimate economic beefs,” based on the declining standard of living, and the fact that “deindustrialization” has harmed the middle class by destroying millions of factory jobs. But the Republican ideology is “in crisis,” as factions of the party disagree over the benefits of free trade and solutions to other economic problems. Other major Republican donors have libertarian tendencies that threaten the GOP coalition as well, he stated.

While the demise of the Republican Party may seem like wishful thinking, Tarpley outlined a political scenario that is plausible to outside experts and which could mean that the GOP would meet the fate of other political parties in American history—such as the Federalists, Whigs, and Know-Nothings — “by breaking apart” and losing the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court in the process.

Tarpley’s predictions about Trump’s negative impact on the Republican Party came just a few weeks before Trump unleashed a series of attacks on a “Mexican” judge, who was actually born in the United States, prompting more concern from current and former Republican officials that the Trump presidential campaign could jeopardize Republicans prospects in November.

The destruction of the GOP also means the defeat of what Tarpley called the “neocon warmongers,” defined as those who favor U.S. military intervention against radical regimes and terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Continuing the pro-Russian bent that has long characterized the LaRouche movement, Tarpley favors the destruction of NATO. He was a speaker at the “No to War, No to NATO,” conference in Rome, Italy, which also included a representative of the old Soviet front, the U.S. Peace Council. Tarpley then participated in a forum on “good relations with the Russian Federation” held in St. Petersburg, Russia.

While Trump has been critical of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and has questioned the need for NATO, a one-time anti-Soviet alliance, these positions were not of any interest or concern to Tarpley. Instead, Trump was viewed as an opportunity to divide and weaken the Republican Party.

With the Republican Party out of the way, the activists making up the Left Forum would be able to consolidate their power in the Democratic Party and move it even further to the left, in terms of more socialism at home and more accommodation of “anti-imperialist” and “anti-capitalist” forces abroad.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.