What’s in a Name?
During the run-up to the war in Iraq in early 2003, a coalition named United for Peace & Justice (UPJ) played a central role in organizing most of the major anti-war demonstrations across the United States. The coalition’s name was deliberately crafted to evoke positive associations in the hearts of the American people. After all, who could possibly oppose such lofty virtues as “peace” or “justice”?
But United for Peace & Justice’s actual purpose had very little to do with either of those virtues. At its core, it was a hate-America coalition that sought to save the regime of one of the monsters of the 20th century, Saddam Hussein, using slogans that relentlessly accused the U.S. of pursuing a “policy of permanent warfare and empire-building” around the world.
The co-chair and principal leader of UPJ was Leslie Cagan, a longtime Communist Party member and a national leader of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy & Socialism, a self-identified Marxist entity seeking to bring “a 21st Century socialism” to America. In the Sixties, Cagan was an enthusiastic supporter of the Black Panther Party, a gang that waged armed warfare against the police and engaged in criminality that included drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, assault, arson and murder.
Cagan was also a strong supporter of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose nation she described as “not an abstract idea of socialism or revolution,” but as a society whose principal hallmark was a type of “humane interaction among people” that she “had never witnessed” in the United States. And she supported the 2002-03 “Not In Our Name” initiative, a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party that seeks to achieve a Communist America by means of a “revolutionary war”—complete with “great bloodshed and destruction”—waged “right within the belly of this most powerful imperialist beast.”
Obviously, the promotion of “peace and justice” could scarcely be described as the true, animating objective of Ms. Cagan and her UPJ coalition.
More recently, another prominent, enormously influential movement—which just happens to be backed by this same Leslie Cagan—has similarly adopted a benign sounding name that resonates quite naturally with people of good will. But that name—Black Lives Matter—deceptively conceals a radical, racist, and horrifically destructive agenda.
An Openly and Proudly Marxist Movement
When BLM was established in 2013, its stated objective was to galvanize a protest movement in response to the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, a so-called “white Hispanic” man who was tried for murder and manslaughter after he had shot and killed a black Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin in a highly publicized 2012 altercation. Before long, “Black Lives Matter” became a rallying cry for writers, public speakers, celebrities, demonstrators, and even rioters, who took up the cause of demanding an end to what BLM terms the “virulent anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society.”
BLM gained additional prominence following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an 18-year-old black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Brown’s death, which occurred while he fought with the officer just minutes after having robbed a local convenience store, set off a massive wave of protests and riots that grew into a national movement denouncing an alleged epidemic of police brutality against African Americans.
But BLM’s larger objective went far beyond matters of interracial violence and police misconduct. Its overarching mission was to thoroughly discredit the United States as a detestable and irredeemable nation where black people are “collectively” subjected to “inhumane conditions” in a “white supremacist system” that was originally “built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.” Dedicated to advancing this theme were BLM’s founders, three hardcore Marxist black women. One of them was Alicia Garza, a self-described “queer” social-justice activist who reveres the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata Shakur for her contributions to the “Black Liberation Movement.” Garza is likewise a great admirer of such luminaries as Angela Davis (another revolutionary Marxist and former Black Panther) and the late Audre Lorde (a black socialist lesbian feminist).
Another of BLM’s three founders was Patrisse Cullors, who in 2015 openly acknowledged BLM’s subversive objectives, proclaiming on video: “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.” In the same video, Cullors revealed that for more than a decade she had been a protégé of Eric Mann, who in the 1960s and ’70s was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. Both organizations aspired to topple U.S. democratic institutions by means of violent revolution, remake the nation’s government in a Marxist image, and promote America’s military defeat in Vietnam.
BLM’s third founder was Opal Tometi, who asserts that “the racist structures that have long oppressed Black people” in the U.S. have perpetuated a “cycle of oppression” and a permanent climate of “anti-Black racism.” In 2015, Tometi attended a “People of African Descent Leadership Summit” in Harlem, New York, where she had a warm meeting and photo-op with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator, Nicolas Maduro. During a speech which she delivered at that Summit, Tometi thanked Maduro and his government for having given her an opportunity to speak there. She also used the occasion to condemn “Western economic policies, land grabs, and neocolonial financial instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” The following year, Tometi praised the Bolivarian Revolution by which Venezuela’s previous Marxist dictator, the late Hugo Chavez—whose policies transformed Venezuela from South America’s wealthiest nation into an economic basket case—had initially come to power.
BLM’s pro-Marxist orientation was articulated with great passion at a BLM protest in July 2016, when Cornell University professor Russell Rickford declared: “We’ve got to build a grassroots, antiracist movement to defeat capitalism altogether, and it’s not going to happen at the ballot box. There can be no human system under capitalism. Capitalism is an anti-human system.”
read more:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/blm-pamphlet-john-perazzo/
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