Reform or revolution? While some seek to fulfill the promise of the United States, others seek its violent overthrow

We are in the midst of a dangerous and turbulent time not seen since the 1960s. This is a perfect storm: an international pandemic, a lockdown that has socially isolated millions and left them out of work, and an economic collapse all due to the COVID-19 scourge. In the midst of this, video of the killing of George Floyd while in police custody was shared around the world. Together with video of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery and renewed attention on the Breonna Taylor case it sparked outrage, protests, and riots.

Outside powers are engaged in active measures to stoke additional conflict and polarization in the United States and Europe. Neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups are being funded by outside powers along with communist militant groups with the aim of creating chaos in America.

“The revolutionary program today is an interaction of different forces, some ideologically in conflict, such as Antifa, communist militants, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Boogaloo movement.”

The video of George Floyd dying while in police custody on May 25 was widely condemned. A combination of video captured by surveillance cameras, body cameras and onlooker cell phones showed how he was detained, placed on the ground with three police officers pinning him down, and one officer standing by and looking around. One of the officers pinning him down placed and kept a knee on Floyd’s throat.  Floyd told the police who were pinning him down, "Please. I can't breathe. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. They're going to kill me." Eight minutes and 46 seconds passed, during which civilians observing what was transpiring screamed at the police to stop, but they ignored their warnings and continued to pin him down until well after George had died.

The death of George Floyd, for one rare moment, united a deeply divided and polarized America in condemnation for this unjust killing, and thanks to the video footage led to the firing of the four officers involved. Derek Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Three other officers were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder.

We are witnessing two tendencies that sometimes overlap, but that are distinct and have different end goals.

One tendency views the United States as a project that continues to evolve toward a more perfect union that fulfills the promises found in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It recognizes our troubled common history, seeks a national conversation on how to reduce racism in the country, and advocates for reforms to policing to reduce abuses and racism. This approach views non-violent protest, economic boycotts, and civil disobedience as instruments to exercise power and demand changes in society. This approach in the 1950s and 1960s was championed and led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement.

The second tendency views the United States as a hostile white racist regime that must be overthrown using violence and replaced. This tendency does not recognize the rule of law, and views street violence, looting, rioting, and the tearing down of statues and symbols of the United States as a legitimate uprising. The Nation of Islam in the late 1950s and early 1960s sought a separate racial territory for blacks, and Malcolm X held secret meetings with the Ku Klux Klan to divide the United States along racial lines. This approach changed in the mid-1960s following the death of Malcolm X. This new approach advocated by Stokely Carmichael and the black power movement — which birthed the Black Panther Party — sought the violent overthrow of the United States using revolutionary violence and establishing a communist revolution.

The revolutionary program today is an interaction of different forces, some ideologically in conflict, such as Antifa, communist militants, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Boogaloo movement. They may disagree on the ultimate ends but are in agreement in the means: an insurrection to overthrow the existing United States government.

The Black Lives Matter organization (BLM) has deep ideological connections to the black power movement pioneered by Stokely Carmichael. When Fidel Castro died in November 2016, Black Lives Matter published a eulogy on Medium titled “Lessons from Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of El Comandante.” The piece was published without a byline or attribution to any individual authors.

“We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante. And there are lessons that we must revisit and heed as we pick up the mantle in changing our world, as we aspire to build a world rooted in a vision of freedom and the peace that only comes with justice. It is the lessons that we take from Fidel.”

…

“A final lesson is that to be a revolutionary, you must strive to live in integrity. As a Black network committed to transformation, we are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us. We are thankful that he provided a home for Brother Michael Finney Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill, asylum to Brother Huey P. Newton, and sanctuary for so many other Black revolutionaries who were being persecuted by the American government during the Black Power era.”

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Black Lives Matter, like Stokely Carmichael, ironically views the Castro dictatorship, despite being a regime whose inner circle comprises white old men who repress black Cubans, as an inspiration. Opal Tometi, one of Black Lives Matter’s founders, was photographed at a gathering with Venezuelan strong man Nicolás Maduro. This is also ironic because Venezuela is the country with the highest per capita killings by the police of civilians in the world — several orders of magnitude higher than the United States.

Progress on racism and policing in the United States can be achieved, but not through a revolutionary program linked to political violence and communist regimes. If one looks at all of the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s two figures stand out: Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr.

The black power movement did not believe in working within the legal system as Marshall did or practicing nonviolent resistance as King did, and by their own statements would have “offed” Thurgood Marshall if he did not get with their revolutionary program. 

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) said at a rally for the release of Huey Newton on February 11, 1968, “They gave you Thurgood Marshall, and you said we were making progress. Thurgood Marshall is a Tom of the highest order.”

H. Rap Brown also claimed that there were no major differences between the two political parties, and claimed that “the only difference between George Wallace and Lyndon Johnson is one of them's wife's got cancer.” He continued with rallying calls for political violence and cited Che Guevara.

“That's the only difference. But you go for it! You go for it because you chumps! You go for it! The only thing that's going to free Huey is gun powder. Black powder. Huey Newton is the only living revolutionary in this country today. He has paid his dues! He paid his dues! How many white folks you kill today?”

“But you revolutionaries! You are revolutionaries! Che Guevara says they only two ways to leave the battlefield: victorious or dead,” Brown continued. “Huey's in jail! That's no victory, that's a concession. When black people become serious about the revolutionary struggle that they are caught up in, whether they recognize it or not… when they begin to go down and knock off people who are oppressing them, and begin to render these people impotent, that's when the revolutionary struggle unfolds… This is the animating spirit behind the violent elements in the protests. Those that are tearing down statues, looting shops and killing people. The revolutionaries believe that this is what is achieving change not the widespread revulsion of the video combined with nonviolent protests. They are wrong, and past history demonstrates this.”

Stokely Carmichael delivered the rally’s main address repeating similar themes, but twice also mentioned that the revolutionaries would reach out to Uncle Toms and the bourgeoisie and "bring them home" to the movement. If they failed to join they would be "offed." This was a totalitarian campaign for black Americans, join the revolutionary project or die.

This should not be a surprise. Carmichael had been spending time in Cuba.

Shortly after Che Guevara's capture and execution, Stokely Carmichael placed the Argentine's death in context and was quoted in Andrew Sinclair's Viva Che!: The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara."The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism,” Sinclair wrote. “That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us."

Both Ernesto Guevara and Stokely Carmichael were exposed to communists and their theories while teenagers and joined networks of communist agitation. Guevara's parents would host communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War at their home in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s. Stokely Carmichael while attending the select Bronx High School of Science in New York City became friends with the son of Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis and became active in socialist youth politics, joined a Marxist discussion group and participated in demonstrations against the House Committee on Un-American Activities that focused on communist subversion in the United States.

Stokely Carmichael, despite this background, joined the emerging civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who advocated nonviolent resistance as a method to achieve profound change. Carmicheal enrolled in Howard University and joined the school's Non-Violent Action Group, a civil-rights organization. In 1961 he participated in a number of anti-segregation initiatives in the Deep South, including "freedom rides" organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Carmichael graduated from Howard University in 1964, with a degree in philosophy. Two years later he replaced John Lewis as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Having taken over the organization he began to make impassioned speeches advocating for black power and steadily abandoned Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent stand. 

He told an audience in Havana, ''We are moving toward guerrilla warfare in the United States. We are going to develop urban guerrilla warfare and we are going to beat them in this field because there is one thing the imperialists do not have: their men don't want to fight, they don't want to fight what they call guerilla warfare, which is really hand-to-hand combat." 

The Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee on November 1, 1967 made public these statistics on riots since 1965.

The call for guerrilla warfare in the streets of American cities was generating an escalation in violence and costs in lives lost, injuries, and hundreds of millions in material losses in what Mr. Carmichael advocated as revolution. The CIA report "DISSIDENT ACTIVITY: January 1966 through January 1973" approved for release on June 19, 2003 described a dire situation in 1967 that "[a]lthough severe racial rioting had occurred in U.S. cities in previous summers, it never had been as widespread or as intense as it became in 1967. In the two cities hardest hit, Newark (26 dead) and Detroit (43 dead), conditions of near-insurrection developed in ghetto areas, and police and National Guardsmen responded with volleys of automatic weapons fire."

During his tenure as SNCC chairman, Carmichael urged African Americans to engage in urban guerrilla warfare against the United States. He stepped down from the position of chairman in May of 1967. In 1967 Carmichael was interviewed by Mario Menendez, editor of Sucesos, a Mexican magazine, while he was staying in Havana attending the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), a communist alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS) and made claims about the SNCC that others would reject:

"Now, we used the word nonviolent because at that time the central figure in the struggle to defend the black race was no one less than Martin Luther King and anyone who resorted to violence was considered a traitor. Consequently we resolved to use the word nonviolent. However we knew that our struggle would end up in violence, that it was only necessary to wait for the right time. So we accepted this name for the grouping and coordinated activities from city to city, wherever we could engage in nonviolent demonstrations."

Carmichael (wearing sunglasses) applauds while attending the first conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity in Havana (1967).

Diane Nash, a great pioneer of nonviolence from the sit-ins to the Selma march, rejected nonviolence and took up with the siren call of Black Power. Nash described her reasoning:

"If we've done all this through nonviolence, think what we could do if we were just willing to be urban guerrillas and knock over a few banks.” ... 

”Of course, ten years later I looked up and I hadn't knocked over any banks and I hadn't been a guerilla. I hadn't even been to the rifle range. But I had withdrawn from this painful, creative engagement with nonviolence and democracy behind a big smokescreen of noise."

In addition to deactivating serious activists the lure of violence and urban guerrilla warfare would exact a terrible cost. According to Virginia Postrel, from 1964 to 1971, there were more than 750 riots, killing 228 people and injuring 12,741 others. After more than 15,000 separate incidents of arson, many black urban neighborhoods were in ruins. The end results were ruined neighborhoods; an explosion in crime; and increased poverty.

In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow.  The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive. In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King, Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokeley Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States. Andrew Mitrokhin, in their book, outlined the KGB's active measures to achieve the goal of race war in America and mentioned Carmichael's visit to Cuba in 1967.

"Stokeley Carmichael, told a meeting of Third World revolutionaries in Cuba in the summer of 1967, “We have a common enemy. Our struggle is to overthrow this system ... We are moving into open guerilla warfare in the United States.” Traveling on to North Vietnam, Carmichael declared in Hanoi, “We are not reformists… We are revolutionaries. We want to change the American system.” King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots erupted in over a hundred cities, 46 people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested."

Stokely Carmichael would go on to become "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party in 1968 and left for Africa in 1969 as America's cities burned following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 and was heavily influenced by Robert F. Williams, a black militant nationalist living in Cuba from 1961 until 1966 then moving to Maoist China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and stayed there until 1969. Members of the Black Panther Party were reading Che Guevara's books on Guerrilla Warfare and applying it on the streets of America to deadly effect. The violence continued into the 1970s. The wreckage in places like Detroit can still be seen today.

At least 22 people have been killed during the George Floyd protests, 11,000 arrested and $400-500 million dollars in damage just in Minnesota. 

What we are witnessing today with this perfect storm of circumstances with a hard-left ideology known as Critical Race theory dominant in the academy is the possibility of many Detroits being created across the United States. This would cost billions of dollars, decimate black communities, and be a disaster for the future.

Critics of nonviolence like to point out that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, but fail to mention that he succeeded in transforming the United States into a better country by successfully and nonviolently addressing historic injustices.

What did Reverend King accomplish? He led the successful Montgomery bus boycott that ended segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956. He led the Birmingham campaign in 1963 that faced off with the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, who used high-pressure water jets and police attack dogs on children. The campaign ended with Connor losing his job and the city’s discriminatory laws were changed.

Reverend King played an instrumental role in the August 28, 1963 march on Washington, D.C. with over 250,000 participants. It was done to pressure for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 in Alabama demonstrated African Americans desire to vote.

The violence by local authorities, racists, and the Ku Klux Klan and the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights activists were key to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These laws gave African Americans political power that had been denied them.

When King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 it spurred on the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and then the rising violence from rioters and looters, following Carmichael’s approach shutdown reforms, and led to the election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 on a law and order ticket.

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