The History of BLM Matters
Look. Let’s get this clear. Black Lives Matter as a civil rights slogan is perfect. Who could disagree? The phrase simply states what ought to be obvious to anyone who isn’t a racist. Matters grow more complicated when someone states “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” Quickly, one is marginalized and even attacked as a racist.
Behind the slogan and the movement, however, is the organization of the same name: Black Lives Matter. BLM is under the leadership of committed Marxists advancing an anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-nuclear family, anti-heteronormativity, anti-prison, anti-Israel and anti-fossil fuels agenda. Antifa’s agenda is nearly identical except they throw in a “global, communist order.”
In the past months we have witnessed the wholesale evaporation of the “peaceful” component in big city protests with rioting, arson and looting in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and other “blue” cities. Even before this ominous turn, careful observers had noted that the “peaceful protestors” egged on, supported and covered the tracks of the violent aggressors, seeming to operate in a functional division of labor.
The insurrection then made a crucial tactical shift. The central target became the police. This includes other forces of law and order as well. It is not just a matter of having run out of statues to tear down or businesses to loot and burn. It is a tactical shift of these neo-Marxists to assault the fundamental institutions of the “state.”
The violence continues to be led by Black Lives Matter and autonomous white partners and auxiliary co-revolutionaries comprised primarily of the terrorist group Antifa. Certainly, not a syllable of opposition to the violence by any of these groups has been voiced let alone a commitment to end it.
Each of the three co-founders of BLM are admitted Marxists with ties to ‘60s black radical ideology. Patrisse Cullors’ mentor was a white Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who was on the Executive Committee of the Weather Underground. Eric Mann was a disciple of Mao and an admirer of Herbert Marcuse one of the leaders of the Frankfurt School prior to WW 2. He expected the intellectuals in Europe to replace the working class as a revolutionary force. Marcuse mused that “The ghetto population in the United States could be such a force.”
Aliza Garzar, another co-founder, admired and hailed Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army who was convicted for the murder of a police officer and escaped to Cuba. The third BLM co-founder is Opal Tometi. She actively supports the brutal dictator of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro.
Some argue that because BLM is decentralized you cannot paint everyone with the same brush. Hawk Newsome, leader of BLM of Greater New York recently declared “We pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe we need an arm to defend ourselves.”
The BLM head in Toronto, Yusra Khogali, another Marxist, stated that “white people are a genetic defect of blackness.” BLM’s Los Angeles head Melina Abdullah calls for dishing out “violence and pain” to whites. It goes on and on.
The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 abolished Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr sought an America where people would be judged by “the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.”
This did not sit well with the burgeoning Black Power Movement of the late ‘60s. Figures such as the Maoist Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party shaped black revolutionary and white revolutionary consciousness towards separatism and violence.
The anti-Vietnam War movement generated support for Third World revolutionaries and the “most oppressed” domestically. As Mao said “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The police have the guns. They must be “defunded” and defanged is the latest slogan. This is pure Marxism-Leninism.
Lenin made very clear in his book State & Revolution that power cannot be transferred to a new ruling class until the state and its monopoly of the means of violence is “smashed.” The Democratic Party’s local and national leadership has tacitly accepted this devil’s brew by defunding the police and stepping back from law and order.
The deeper danger and tragedy are that many in the Democratic Party’s leadership, as Obama once said, seek to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Obama declared at John Lewis’ funeral with great irony that the filibuster was a “Jim Crow” relic.
If the Democrats control both Houses of Congress and win the Presidency and the filibuster is ended for Senate passage of bills, simple majorities would be sufficient to pack the Supreme Court, give statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C., enshrine federal mail-in voting and a host of other measures truly commencing a fundamental transformation of the Republic.
We would enter a period of majoritarian tyranny that the Founders warned about. The Constitution would be well on the way to being shredded legally. And even this would not be the full end game of the likes of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Marvin A. Treiger, PhD was formerly the Youth Chairman of the Communist Party of Southern California, a member of the Maoist Revolutionary Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s. He converted to conservatism and Americanism in the aftermath of 9/11 while in a solitary three-month retreat. He resumed activism when Barack Obama became the Presidential nominee in 2008. Dr. Treiger is a retired Psychotherapist.
