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Monday, September 27, 2010

Puppet Obama sicks the dogs of State on his own left-wing for its Palestinian-solidarity activism

From:
The Obama Boomerang

Pro-Obama lefties get slapped down – by the FBI
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

FBI raids on six houses in Minneapolis and Chicago, including the office of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, have the antiwar movement – and the left in general – in an uproar. Agents came barging into homes guns drawn, kicking down doors and smashing furniture, armed with search warrants. The warrants described, in suitably vague terms, allegations of “material support for terrorism.” No arrests were made, although a number of individual activists were served with subpoenas demanding their appearance before a grand jury. Computers, documents, phones, and other materials were carted away by burly FBI agents, who appeared at 7 a.m. sharp, locked and loaded.

Let the frame-ups begin!

This Palmer raids-style fishing expedition is apparently aimed at members and supporters of an obscure Marxist grouplet, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Maoist remnant founded in the 1960s which came out of the “new communist movement” documented in Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air. What drew the attention of the authorities to FRSO was apparently their “solidarity” work on behalf of the Palestinians and a Colombian leftist insurgency known as FARC...

The target of the raids, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, is interesting because its history gives us a capsule summary of what happened to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s – and a lesson in why the current antiwar movement is floundering.

FRSO came out of the generational radicalization that created Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and energized a mass left-wing student-based movement. When SDS splintered into a couple dozen fragments in a frenzy of factional warfare, FRSO emerged from one of the splinters known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement (II) – the Revolutionary Youth Movement (I) being something altogether different, you see. In any case, as more and more of these young radicals began to go into real estate, or take up Zen Buddhism, the dead-enders either joined the Weathermen and went underground, or else joined one of the plonky neo-Stalinist “parties” – i.e. sects – that sprang up like mushrooms on a fallen tree.

FRSO was one such grouplet, formed out of the merger of the Maoist Revolutionary Workers’ Headquarters (which had previously split from the Revolutionary Communist Party), and the Proletarian Unity League. Both of these groups had been highly critical of the “ultra-left” doctrine, tactics, and strategy of the Maoist movement, and sought to salvage those activists who survived the flight to bourgeois respectability...

The Left Refoundationists went into the Democratic party, and were active in “Progressives for Obama,” an outfit cooked up by Tom Hayden, FRSO-“Left Refoundationist” and AFL-CIO bureaucrat Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover, whose job it was to get these former militant commies to the polls on behalf of the Great Change. The orthodox FRSO-ers, on the other hand, continued along the “Marxist-Leninist” path, meeting with leftist insurgents in South America and occupied Palestine, but still feeling the pull of the Great Change. As their “Main Political Report” on the domestic situation for 2010 puts it:

“The election of Barack Obama as the first African American President of the United States is a contradictory event. In part the election of Obama was a referendum on race in the United States, a referendum that came out surprisingly positive … Obama’s election represents a rejection of the Bush administration policies and a desire amongst the people for a progressive agenda from the government. Immediately following his election there was a sense of optimism and a feeling that change is possible. This is a very good development after so many years of Bush. ”

I wonder if they’ll revise that last sentence in light of recent developments.

I think it’s safe to say the antiwar movement was unprepared for this kind of attack from an administration they hailed as “a very good development,” and I’m not just talking about FRSO. The idea that the election of a black man whose resume reads “community organizer” is going to change the face of US imperialism even slightly is an illusion brought on by the identity politics that have long since replaced Marxism (or any coherent ‘ism) in the canons of the left. If many have wondered who let the air out of the antiwar movement, it was precisely those “radical” leftists who, like the “orthodox” Marxists of FRSO, signed on as the “left” wing of the Obama cult. That’s why they didn’t see the mailed fist of the State coming even when it was a few inches from their faces.

The Minneapolis and Chicago raids are just the beginning. The logic of the “war on terrorism,” and its legal machinery here on the home front, is an ever-expanding campaign to associate political dissent – and, specifically, dissent from our interventionist foreign policy – with violence and treason. And it will be a lot easier to pull this off under a “progressive” veneer. Remember, Bush’s political police just spied covertly, as well as targeting Islamic charities and shutting several down: Obama’s KGB is conducting open raids on the offices of domestic antiwar organizations. Anybody who gave a dime, or an hour of their time, to the Minneapolis and Chicago antiwar groups in which FRSO involved itself is now apt to be on an FBI “terrorist watch list.” Under this “progressive” President, the FBI isn’t just taking photos of us at antiwar events and following us to the grocery store: it’s kicking down the front door and taking our stuff...

The ruling elite has never been more nervous, because their rule has never been more brittle: the economic collapse foreshadows a political collapse that can only be prevented by a crackdown and general tightening of the rules of the American “democratic” system. They’re making up these new rules as they go along, and the process is still ongoing, but of one thing we can be certain: the Constitution is a dead letter. It no longer exists except as a document kept under glass, venerated but never obeyed...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Zionism is a comprehensive ideology, not unlike Communism and Fascism. In fact, it has elements of both, in that it seeks to use a vast, monolithic, authoritarian State in pursuit of its particularistic agenda.

Americans of both Left and Right are having an incredibly hard time coming to terms with the fact that there is essentially a Zionist shadow government that straddles both parties that is for all intents and purposes running the country, but obviously Obama knows this, and Obviously Bush knew this, because in both cases it's been integral to their agenda and governance.

We need to quit thinking of Zionism as an Israeli issue or a Mideast issue or a Jewish issue; it is THE issue of our times. Those who dismiss this by now self-evident fact are likely in its thrall -- whether they even know it or not. Denying its centrality to our politics and even our culture is how it has heretofore been so successfully able to operate under the radar and penetrate our way of life so thoroughly. Additionally, both the post-Christian statist-globalist Left, and the post-Western globalist Right have their own reasons for denying Zionism's centrality, and none of them are noble or pretty, having to do with their complicity both materially and in spiritual outlook.

Flushing Zionism out into the open in order to force the compromised elite to make a public choice is half the battle; once they've made their choice, whichever way the go, the dye is cast.

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