I’ve written several times that the current political ructions in America are really a continuation of the left’s violent dummy-spit at losing the 1968 election. Many of the same violent Communist radicals are in fact pulling the strings of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. For instance, convicted Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg sits on the Board of Directors for Thousand Currents, the fundraising arm of Black Lives Matter. BLM activists also invoke the name of Assata Shakur, another terrorist murderer, from the radical black supremacist gangster group, the Black Panthers.
But, argues John Ruddick, Antifa/BLM are actually just the latest eructation of a century-old tradition of violent communist agitation. In fact, the latest wave of domestic terrorism is the Third Wave of communist violence in America.
America has faced this menace twice before. Many are familiar with the violent uprisings in the late 1960s and early 1970s[…]
Fewer, however, are familiar with what happened half a century earlier – the First Red Scare (1919-1920).
Terms like “Red Scare” are generally used as a pejorative. A nudge-and-wink at those silly, paranoid Bircher types, constantly fretting that “The Russians are coming!”
But treating the threat of communism as a groundless paranoia is to behave like the odious Lincoln Steffens, who happily refused to notice the tens of millions of bodies rotting in Ukraine and the Gulag Archipelago, or later useful idiots like François Mitterand, who likewise studiously ignored the tens of millions of victims of Mao and his henchmen.
Likewise, the fact that communists in the West – however fortunate it may be that they never got near the helm of the ship of state – were (and are) every bit as determined to have their show trials, purges, gulags and mass killings. The Weathermen, after much debate, concluded that there were no “civilians” in their self-declared war on America. All that was left to decide was how many white babies they had to kill.
Even in Australia, communists dreamed of having their very own show trials and struggle sessions, in order to purge the wicked “rightist subversives”.
The common thread in the sporadic eruptions of wannabe-revolutions from the far left is violence. Democratic processes are exploited only insofar as they are useful.
Eugene Debs was a quarrelsome trade unionist who[…]founded the Socialist Party of America and ran for president in 1900 receiving 0.6 per cent of the vote. He kept running for president and his vote kept growing. Debs didn’t believe in democratic elections but running for president was great PR.
At the 1912 presidential election Debs won 6 per cent which was alarming since he, unlike Bernie Sanders, was honest about his intentions: ‘The Socialist Party is not a reform party! It proposes to abolish the capitalist system’[…]
So with hopes high, the American commies struck. In February 1919, a hundred unions in Seattle went on strike announcing, ‘We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labour in this country!’ Seattle was paralysed. The national press saying it is ‘only a middling step from Petrograd to Seattle.’
That strike didn’t last a week but the overt Marxism of its leaders rattled America. Seattle’s horrified mayor toured the nation warning of ‘Americanism and Bolshevism.’ Congress appointed a sub-committee to investigate ‘any efforts being made to propagate the principles of any party exercising any authority in Russia’ and ‘any effort to incite the overthrow of the government.’
When, as they repeatedly have, ordinary Americans turn their back en masse on Marxism, the far left immediately drop the charade of democratic process. Petulantly deciding that the American public just don’t know what’s good for them, the left happily turn to violence.
A few months later, 36 sticks of dynamite were mailed to politicians, editors, businessmen and intelligence agents. Most were intercepted before they could detonate but several were injured. Weeks later, nine larger bombs exploded in eight cities destroying homes and killing two. Accompanying the bombs was a message: ‘War, class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order… there will have to be bloodshed because it is necessary; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.’
May Day, 1919 saw the first street violence between socialists and police across several cities. Coinciding with this leftist violence was the first episode of racial violence which saw African Americans organise and fight back – 38 died in Chicago and 15 in DC. The Marxists actively tried to co-opt African Americans. The New York Times on 28 July, 1919 reported: ‘Reds Try to Stir Negros to Revolt; Widespread Propaganda on Foot Urging Them to Join IWW and Left-Wing Socialists.’ But the African Americans of this era were disinterested in Marxism and its militant atheism.
The violence peaked in September 1920 when Wall Street was bombed injuring hundreds and killing 38.
If all that sounds familiar, it should. It was the same script the left followed from 1968, right through the 1970s. In 2020, they’re giving it another run.
The hard left attempting revolution is not new. Marxists exploiting African American poverty is not new. This ugly phenomenon does however peter out because the nuttiness eventually disillusions too many of their own people. The masses not only fail to man the barricades – they vote Republican.
The lesson from this same history that should hearten Americans despairing at the state of their country is that violence might appeal to college radicals, but it fails to sway the ordinary voter. In 1920, Americans voted in a landslide for Warren Harding, who campaigned explicitly on a “Return to Normality”. In 1972, voters returned Nixon in a landslide unmatched until Reagan’s near-clean sweep in 1984.
A century after Harding, Americans are once again facing a choice between a Republican or a Democrat party in thrall to the extreme left and their black-clad paramilitaries.
It can only be hoped that it won’t be third time lucky for the brutal Marxist mob.
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