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"Areas where the government is unwilling to defend our people, we will defend ourselves."-
Malcolm X"You say you'll change the constitution,
Well, you know,
We all want to change your head,
You tell me it's the institution,
Well, you know,
You better free you mind instead,
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao,
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."
- The Beatles "Revolution"
I stopped watching the Superbowl years ago, but I could hardly escape news of Beyonce's politically charged performance of "Formation", that every liberal and their cousin was hailing as an anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. The performance, along with the music video, came off the heels of high-profile police shootings against unarmed black men, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Black Panther Party's founding. It predictably garnered a mix of praise and criticism from all around.
What did
I think? Beyonce's music has never worked for me, but then, neither does a lot of modern pop. "Formation" sounded no different to me than the latest hit by Nicki Minaj or Rhianna. The music video, however, had neat highlights: black women dressed as Southern belles, a black boy dancing off police officers, and the ever adorable Blue Ivy. It's a shame that more of Beyonce's music doesn't reflect her debut, "Crazy In Love", which I
had nominated to the National Recording Registry. Beyonce's a talented artist and I'm sure she means well. By all means, if you want to analyze the song to no end, then indulge to your hearts desire. I have little room to criticize, given that I once wrote a
whole essay analyzing Aqua's "Barbie Girl."
During the aforementioned performance, Beyonce and her fellow dancers dressed as members of the Black Panther Party. The Panthers, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, were a self-defense militia, whose goals included the liberation of black people from white supremacy. They used their Second Amendment rights to the fullest extent, carrying around their rifles behind their badass shades. The fears of police brutality were real, as we saw with Bobby Hutton, the Panthers' first martyr, who was shot down in the process of surrendering. They had a laudable free breakfast program for poor blacks which fed an estimated 20,000 a week and a health program that provided free medical care. Indeed, the social services of the Panthers did well to expose the inequalities of American capitalism, particularly as it affected black people. The Panthers were subject to racist attacks from J. Edgar Hoover's fascistic FBI, among which included the murder of Fred Hampton, a peace activist who helped to cure local gang violence. Many Panthers still remain in prison, and I am skeptical that all of the trials were fair. Much of the Panthers' central philosophy was put into
a plan of ten points, which demanded, among other things, self-determination, full employment, decent housing, African-American history education, an end to police brutality, fair trails, and finished by quoting the Declaration of Independence (Newton).
There was
another revolutionary who quoted Jefferson's Declaration of Independence when seeking the liberation of his people. His name was Ho Chi Minh, and his people were the Vietnamese. Ho had long struggled to end French colonialism in Vietnam, a fight that dates back to his attempts to persuade Woodrow Wilson on the matter after World War I. When the French at last left Vietnam, the nation was soon divided between religious fascists in the South and secular communists in the North. As a result of its containment policy, the United States intervened in Vietnam's civil war on behalf of the South, largely due to misinterpreting a second attack at the Gulf of Tonkin (which probably never happened). America's involvement in the Vietnam War was one of the great foreign policy blunders of the twentieth century. North Vietnam was no threat to our national security, and South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem and others was hardly a beacon for democracy, or even a capable fighting force. By involving ourselves in a civil war best left for the Vietnamese to handle, our military became entrenched in a cultural conflict we barely understood. The line between civilian and combatant was often blurred, even ignored. While many American soldiers certainly conducted themselves responsibly in Vietnam, crimes of war against the Vietnamese peasants were hardly isolated incidents. The My Lai Massacre was not an aberration, but representative of widespread polices, as evidenced by The Russell Tribunal, the Winter Soldier Investigations, and newly declassified documents brought into the fore by Nick Turse in the
Los Angeles Times. This is to say nothing of Nixon's sabotage of the Peace Talks in 1968, Kissinger's illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia, and the usage of Agent Orange which Vietnamese and American veterans still suffer with to this day. The National Archives
estimate that 58,200 Americans died in Vietnam, many of them have their names engraved on an obsidian wall in D.C. The late Robert S. McNamara, one of the chief architects of the conflict,
has reflected,
"I deeply regret that I did not force a probing debate about whether it would ever be possible to forge a winning military effort on a foundation of political quicksand. It became clear then, and I believe it is clear today, that military force -- especially when wielded by an outside power -- cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself," (Apple Jr).
Whatever our evils in Vietnam, (and they were many) none of them justify the evils of Ho Chi Minh. RJ Rummel, an expert in "democide", or death by government,
estimates that Ho's disastrous land reforms killed between 242,000 to 922,000 people, while their war activities against South Vietnamese civilians killed around 216,000 people (
Statistics On Democide).
Radio Free Asia has called the land reforms in particular near "genocidal", as "hundreds of thousands of people accused of being landlords were summarily executed or tortured and starved in prison." They estimate that over 172,000 Vietnamese were killed, 71.66 percent of them, it appears, were wrongly classified ("50 Years On, Vietnamese Remember Land Reform Terror."). Ho's Vietcong also tortured the American soldiers they captured, most famously, soon-to-be-senator John McCain. An experience so horrific, in fact, that McCain vigorously opposed George W. Bush's "waterboarding" torture, even while supporting our aggression in Iraq. Martin Luther King, who lost his relationship with LBJ for opposing the Vietnam War, always made it clear that he didn't think of the Vietcong communists as "paragons of virtue."
The response of the Panthers to the Vietnam War was clear opposition, but they also went one step further and embraced Ho Chi Minh. For instance, they gave Ho a
birthday greeting that makes Jane Fonda's "Hanoi Jane" incident look like patty-cakes,
"The Black Panther Party and the revolutionary peoples of racist America wish Ho Chi Minh a very happy birthday and many returns of the day. Having faced the same enemy for four hundred years, we the Black Panther Party want him to know that we stand in complete solidarity with the revolutionary people of Vietnam. We will fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."Black Panthers co-founder, Huey Newton,
offered to send Panthers as volunteers to aid the communists in their struggle against the U.S. military,
"In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers to the National Front for Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could stand without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our problem is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of the necessity for international alliance to deal with the problem... Such alliance will advance the struggle toward the final act of dealing with American imperialism"Another Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver,
encouraged black servicemen in Vietnam to
turn against their fellow officers and find common cause with the Vietcong as a "Black Trojan Horse,"
"We appeal to you Brothers to come to the aid of your people. Either quit the army, now, or start destroying it from the inside. Anything else is a compromise and a form of treason against your own people. Stop killing the Vietnamese people. You need to start killing the racist pigs who are over there with you giving you orders. Kill General Abrahms [sic] and his staff, all his officers. Sabotage supplies and equipment, or turn them over to the Vietnamese people... If it is necessary to destroy the United States of America, then let us destroy it with a smile on our faces... The Black Panther Party calls for freedom and liberation in our life time..." This is a side to the Black Panthers you probably weren't aware of, and I'm not surprised. These and other controversial issues within the Panthers aren't commonly spoken of in liberal circles, where dialogue on complex political matters is getting more and more Manichean. The popular vestiges of liberal thought :
Mic,
Buzzfeed,
Huffington Post,
Salon,
Vox, and even
The New Republic, are devolving into festering cesspools of vapid listicles, know-nothing explainers, nauseating clickbait, and tabloid infotainment. I'm here to present the other side of the argument, one that liberals might not hear. I'm going to argue that in spite of the many people of goodwill who may have joined the Black Panthers, their attempted "revolution" was a regressive failure.
Panther Misogyny"The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman."-
Malcolm XBeyonce, as we know, is a feminist. Much like Emma Watson or Joss Whedon, Beyonce uses her platform as an artist to spread ideas on women's equality. Celebrity feminism is useful so long as it doesn't devolve into hypocrisy. I heard the great Gloria Steinem speak about going to a Beyonce concert, where most of those in attendance were women. Before the songs, Beyonce told the women they were safe, and Steinem reacted joyously, "You had me at hello." The Panthers, whom Beyonce paid homage to, however, were hardly heroes of the feminist struggle.
You wouldn't think it, given how progressive the Panthers could be on women's issues. Women were allowed to hold leading positions in the Panthers. Newton himself once
gave an excellent speech connecting the racial struggle with that of the feminist and queer struggles. He hits upon the masculine insecurities that may prevent black men from uniting with these causes, and how these insecurities must be overcome,
"Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say " whatever your insecurities are" because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with," (History Is A Weapon).
Kathleen Cleaver, a fellow party member,
acknowledged there was sexism in the Panthers, but it was no more worse than sexism anywhere else. In fact, women were better off in the group because they had the opportunity to challenge sexism when confronted,
"What I think is distinctive about gender relations within the Black Panther Party is not how those gender relations duplicated what was going on in the world around us. In fact, that world was extremely misogynist and authoritarian. That's part of what inspired us to fight against it. When women suffered hostility, abuse, neglect, and assault—this was not something arising from the policies or structure of the Black Panther Party, something absent from the world—that's what was going on in the world. The difference that being in the Black Panther Party made was that it put a woman in a position when such treatment occurred to contest it. I'll always remember a particular mini-trial that took place at one of our meetings. A member of the Party was accused of raping a young sister, who was visiting from the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party, and he got voted out of the Party on the spot. Right there in the meeting. In 1970 the Black Panther Party took a formal position on the liberation of women. Did the U.S. Congress make any statement on the liberation of women? Did the Congress enable the Equal Rights Amendment to become part of the Constitution? Did the Oakland police issue a position against gender discrimination? It is in this context that gender relations—a term that we didn't have back then—in the Black Panther Party should be examined." Birth control is considered by the United Nations to be a human right because it gives women complete ownership of the bodies in regards to sex. When women are able to control when they can and cannot have children, it grants them more economic mobility, which prevents widespread poverty. This is why in spite of the good efforts for the poor done by Mother Teresa, her opposition to recreational contraception and abortion (which she called the world's greatest evil) was counterproductive to her cause of fighting poverty. This was well understood by Martin Luther King,
who wrote upon accepting the Margaret Sanger Award that,
"For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in a stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command."We ridicule conservatives for opposing Planned Parenthood, which provides women this essential right. Particular mocking is reserved for black conservatives such as Ben Carson and Herman Cain, who have suggested that Sanger's real aim in providing birth control and abortion to black women was to cause a black genocide. Yet these conspiracies about "black genocide" come right out of The Panthers' playbook. The
Journal of Social History has stated,
"The Black Panther Party considered contraception only one part of a larger government scheme of genocide. Drugs, venereal disease, prostitution, coercive sterilization bills, restrictive welfare legislation, inhuman living conditions, "police murders", rat bites, malnutrition, lead poisoning, frequent fires and accidents in run-down houses, and black over-representation in Vietnam combat forces all contributed to the malicious plan to annihilate the black race. The Panthers also vehemently criticized the government for its failure to develop a comprehensive program of diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of sickle-cell anemia. The Panthers therefore concluded that contraception was only part of a wider design to decimate the black race," (Caron).
To be fair to the Panthers, such perspectives were
not all that uncommon on the Black Left, and not without some justification. Blacks had good reason to be suspicious of birth control, given the tragic history of domineering over black childbearing,
"In the South, black fertility had a long history of being controlled by whites. Under slavery, African American women were encouraged to have children to increase a plantation owner's wealth. After the Civil War, when African Americans were no longer valuable property, the view among white supremacists abruptly shifted. It became desirable to decrease the African American population in the South. Sterilization abuse of African American women by the white medical establishment reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s. Women who went into the hospital to deliver children often came out unable to have more," (PBS).
Dick Gregory, a black comedian well-known for spouting conspiracy theories, was reliably on board with the idea,
saying, "First, the white man tells me to sit at the back of the bus. Now it looks like the white man wants me to sleep under the bed. Back in the days of slavery, black folks couldn't grow kids fast enough for white folks to harvest. Now that we've got a little taste of power, white folks want to call a moratorium on having children," (
PBS). Rev Jesse Jackson, who marched with Dr. King,
told Jet magazine that "abortion is genocide", though he later changed views (Kumeh). Even Malcolm X
shared his doubts, "It's easy to see the fear in their mind that masses of dark people....will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun [other peoples] like a human sea, a human tide, a human flood," (Caron). So the Black Panther's views against birth control and abortion fit well into this context, having said things
like the following,"The abortion law, hides behind the guise of helping women, when in reality it will attempt to destroy our people. How long do you think it will take for voluntary abortion to turn into involuntary abortion into compulsory sterilization? Black people are aware that laws made supposedly to ensure our well being are often put into practice in such a way that they insure our deaths," (Hyson).
While this was not an
uncommon view among the Black Left, it certainly wasn't the only one, nor even the
dominant. I've already referred to Dr. King as being pro-birth control (and presumably pro-abortion). Though he was dead by the time the Panthers really came afoot, his impact on racial justice was indelible even
then. So it's fair to assume that his views on birth control represented those of many on the Black Left. Don't take
my word for it, though.
The Journal of Social History states that the opposition had a lot to do with black male "machismo." As having plenty of children was seen as a symbol of masculinity. Planned Parenthood noted at the time that more black men opposed abortion than black women. Black women, in particular, were critical of the Black Power ideologies that often cast them as child-bearers who had contributed to the black man's "emasculation". In fact, fears of black genocide were most common among young and uneducated black men, and not so among educated black men and women, according to a 1973 study. In fact, the genocide arguments never persuaded the vast majority of blacks. Birth control and family planning were endorsed by high-profile civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin, Ron Dellums, and Baraba Jordan, alongside respected organizations like the NAACP, CORE, and the National Medical Association (548-550). These words by Toni Cade Bambara, a feminist of the Black Arts movement, were probably
representative for many black women, "I've been made aware of the national call to Sisters to abandon birth control... to picket family planning centers... to raise revolutionaries.... What plans do you have for the care of me and my child?" (PBS). Look, abortion can be difficult and complex issue, but absolute opposition to the matter is unrealistic, as choice isn't between abortion or no abortion, but between legal and illegal abortion. In any case, one of the best means of reducing abortions is to promote birth control, so opposition to birth control inevitably leads to more abortions. In most cases, opposition to birth control and abortion has more to do with policing sexuality than with saving the unborn. So, despite the eloquence of Newton's speech about the vulnerability of masculinity, he himself failed to live up to those ideals.
Newton's behavior towards women could be lethal. Newton was accused for murdering a seventeen year-old prostitute, Kathleen Smith, for calling him "Baby." As a result, the Panthers attempted to assassinate a witness ready to testify against Newton for the crime,
The Daily Beast,
reports,
"And there is former Panther and current Columbia University administrator Flores Forbes, who mistakenly shot and killed a fellow Panther during an attempt to assassinate Crystal Gray, a witness willing to testify against Huey Newton in the murder of 17-year-old prostitute Kathleen Smith who made the mistake of calling Newton "baby." Around the same time, Newton's tailor Preston Callins also made the mistake of calling him "baby." As punishment, Callins was brutally pistol-whipped and tortured by Newton," (Moynihan).
Regardless, the tactic worked. Newton fled to Cuba and boldly claimed "political asylum" for the murder of a prostitute. Though when he
returned to stand trial, Crystal Grey "refused to testify, following an attempt to kill her, and Newton again walked free after two deadlocked jury trials," (Anthony). Murdering underage sex-workers and trying to assassinate the female witness hardly seems like group for feminism to celebrate, but there's more.
While Elaine Brown was made head of the Panthers during Newton's then-exile to Cuba, she later
left "when he authorised the beating of a woman who ran the Panther Liberation School," (Anthony). According to
The Guardian, Newton
even violently assaulted fellow Panther Ericka Huggins (Anthony refers to him as her "rapist"). She left as a result, but still thinks rather fondly of the man,
"I can't think of any human being that hasn't had to battle with their own internal struggle. The Huey I first met was my dearest friend and ally to everyone I knew. And I loved him. I know that every human in the world has brought about harm, so I don't have a judgment, so to speak."This may sound strange to outsiders, but
this ends to justify the means mentality is common among members of cultish groups like the Panthers. Huggins displays such rationalizations in other instances, as does much of the Left, who consider the FBI the greater villain in this drama. To them, focusing on some of the Panther's shortcomings is just a distraction from white racism. As Newton
once said, "Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it," (
History Is A Weapon).
Though we'd be remiss not to mention Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver, who often said things such as "revolutionary power comes from the lips of a pussy", and was rumored to have abused and cheated on his wife Kathleen (Wasserman). Before joining the militant group, Cleaver raped white, as well as
black women. Raping black women was just "practice", whereas raping white women was an "insurrectionary act",
"I started out practicing on black girls in the ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the evil of a day. When I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically…. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women."Cleaver stopped raping after joining the Panthers, but
exonerated himself by stating that the crimes of America in Vietnam were far worse than anything
he did, "
I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist. . . . My answer to all such things lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts", (Horowitz). This doesn't sound very remorseful to me.
For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command. - See more at: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-gulf-coast/mlk-acceptance-speech#sthash.wjNDKBoC.dpuf
For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command. - See more at: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-gulf-coast/mlk-acceptance-speech#sthash.wjNDKBoC.dpuf
Panther Totalitarianism"Communism is based on metaphysical materialism, and a kind of ethical relativism, and a crippling totalitarianism, and a denial of certain human freedoms that I consider basic. First Amendment freedoms that I consider so basic, that I could never be a communist or accept the communist way of life, but I do feel we have to recognize that communism is in the world and we're either gonna have to have peaceful coexistence or violent co-annihilation."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The anti-imperialist left isn't anti-imperialist, it's just selective about which emperors they support or hate."-
Iyad El-Baghdadi
"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."- Mao Zedong,
Quotations of Mao Zedong You'll hear in liberal circles revisionist claims that the Panthers were "socialists", something akin to Albert Einstein or Eugene Debs. This is a lie, the Panthers were "communists" of the flavor that led to the deaths of millions. They were Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, Castroists, Potists, and Minhists. Anyone who doubts this need only look at one of their newsletters where
they attacked the "white" Left for denouncing the crimes of Mao and Che,
"Initially, these "culturalists" quoted the works of Chairman Mao and claimed to be their disciples. Now these same cultural provocateurs are denouncing these great revolutionaries, purporting that they are just as repressive as Nixon and his ilk, and that Marxism-Leninism is no longer relevant. These cultural provocateurs admire such decadent countries as Denmark, Sweden, India, Canada, England, "Israel", and "Bangla Desh". These people cannot distinguish between right and wrong; between the liberal-reactionary "democracy" in the above mentioned countries, and the revolutionary democracy in the socialist camp." (Seier).
More explicitly, this same newsletter argued that anyone on the Left critiquing Communist regimes, were no different than the U.S. imperialist forces that invaded Vietnam. Indeed what is most fascinating about this following passage is how it implicitly acknowledges there may be evils in these nations, but that followers must practice cultural relativism in regards to what others do in their own houses,
"Many of these same cultural provocateurs also denounce People's Democracies such as China, Cuba, Albania, Democratic Korea, and Democratic Viet Nam because these countries stress a proletarian revolutionary culture and not a liberal bourgeois, "do-your-own-thing", counter-revolutionary culture such as certain "leftists" in America advocate. These people are guilty of the same imperialist aggression that the U.S. Government commits daily on a global scale. They (the cultural provocateurs) want to impose a certain kind of social order, culture, and set of values on these countries, irrespective of the traditions of a people which are not necessarily counter-revolutionary or oppressive simply because they're foreign and different from ours. Culture is the internal affair of a country, of a people, and can only be determined by the people themselves, not by foreigners. We must recognize that many ethnic peculiarities exist within a country and among different countries, and that this is not bad; rather, it is good. There is room on this planet for many cultures. This can be likened to a bouquet of flowers (to paraphrase Huey), provided poisonous weeds are removed." (Seier).
Revolutions are often driven by philosophies. America's Founding Fathers were driven by the Enlightenment ideals of Locke, Gandhi's Satyagraha was driven by the anarchist pacifism of Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King was driven by the Gospels and Gandhi in turn. That the Panthers were driven by the totalitarian communism of some of the twentieth century's worst dictators corrupted their revolution to the core. Steve Wasserman, an activist during this period,
referred to Huey Newton as "a sawdust Stalin," speaking of his crude enforcers like Flores Forbes, who took to heart Franz Fanon's "right to initiative", explaining,
"What Forbes took Fanon to mean was "that it is the oppressed people's right to believe that they should kill their oppressor in order to obtain their freedom. We just modified it somewhat to mean anyone who's in our way," like inconvenient witnesses who might testify against Newton, or Panthers who'd run afoul of Newton and needed to be "mud-holed"—battered and beaten to a bloody pulp. Newton no longer favored Mao's Little Red Book, preferring Mario Puzo's The Godfather, which he extolled for its protagonists' Machiavellian cunning and ruthlessness."Indeed, while Newton may have quoted the Declaration of Independence and made reasonable demands on the government, he preferred that this revolution take its cues from the communist totalitarians. The Panthers romanticized Joseph Stalin as a fellow founding father alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King. The evils of Soviet Russia were well known by the 1960's, and even into the 1970's, for those who really wanted to look, the aforementioned socialist, Eugene Debs, refused to join the American Communist Party for its totalitarian bent, devout anarchist Emma Goldman exposed the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1931, George Orwell's allegory for the Soviet rise
Animal Farm, was published in 1945, Robert Conquest's assessment of Soviet crimes,
The Great Terror, was published in 1968, and
The God Who Failed, which collected essays from disillusioned communists, including none other than Richard Wright, was published in 1949. Am I saying that I expected the Panthers to have read all of these books or have known all of these details? No, but my point is that information contrary to the Soviet propaganda was probably available to those willing to seek it out, especially by the 1960's and 70's. It's a disturbing cognitive dissonance that prevented the Panthers from seeing any of these atrocities in the name of the communist cause. Doctrine over person, indeed. In any case, the fact that these governments were dictatorships alone should've made the Panthers suspicious, but I suppose Stalin and his ilk were "philosopher kings" in their eyes.
The Daily Beast cataloged from their papers this adoration of Stalin, a man who Alexander Solzhenitsyn
said killed an estimated 60 million (
International Business Times),
"So I shouldn't have been surprised to find that The Black Panther was actually full of glowing references to Josef Stalin. Eldridge Cleaver ("And I'd also like to quote Stalin…"), Panther "chief of staff" David Hilliard ("We think that Stalin was very clear in this concept…"), and Bobby Seale ("Joseph Stalin said one time that our best weapon…") were all fond of citing him. And Seale was complimenting his comrades when he observed that "our party can see Lenin and Stalin when we want to understand Huey and Eldridge." Hilliard kept a photo of Stalin on display in his office, believing that tales of Stalinist mass murder were bourgeois propaganda. "The reason that they fear Joseph Stalin is because of the distorted facts that they have gained through the Western press," he told an interviewer. Chairman Elaine Brown clarified that the Black Panther Party was "not opposed to Stalin," (Moynihan).
A great divergence from the example of Dr. King, who harshly criticized injustice in the United States (even going so far as to call it "the greatest purveyor of violence today"), but never went so far as to endorse the depravity of Soviet Russia. In the same speech in which he correctly diagnosed the success of communism as a consequence of the failure of Western democracy "to live up to the noble ideas and principles inherent in its system",
he still made it clear that communism was unacceptable,
"Now certainly, we can never give our allegiance to the Russian way of life, to the communistic way of life, because communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. When we look at the methods of communism, a philosophy where somehow the end justifies the means, we cannot accept that because we believe as Christians that the end is pre-existent in the means."
Newton praised Chinese totalitarian and mass murderer Mao Zedong, man responsible for more death than either Hitler or Stalin. He took many of his ideas from the former Chairman. He was still singing Mao's
praises in 1989, boasting that Mao's communal living spaces were an inspiration for the shared living spaces of the Panthers,
"I was very impressed with the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution that was going on in China at the time. And Mao Tse-Tung who was the Chairman of the Communist Party in China, was experimenting with communal eating and communal living." Of course, the Chinese had
no choice in becoming a part of these "living spaces", where the lands of any peasants or farmers were forcibly seized and made into people's communes. I can imagine that in the Panthers, as well as in Mao's China, there existed no such thing as private ownership. Everything was appropriated for the cause. The communal reforms became collectively known as the Great Leap Forward, led to a Great Chinese Famine that killed thousands.
One reason for this was widespread bureaucratic malpractice that privileged blind nationalism. As I read this
harrowing example from history scholar Frank Smitha, I can't help but think that the Panthers would've done no better (maybe worse), were they to have seized power in America,
"Some in the communes had risen as leaders more by their enthusiasm and patriotism rather than their management skills. Instead of the communal egalitarianism and spontaneity that Mao had envisioned, leadership developed into regimentation. In 1958 there were good harvests, but eager leaders, wishing to look good, passed on to the central government inflated figures as to how much food they had produced. Reports that year were that crop production had doubled. Based on these figures the government set higher production goals and requisitioned more food from the countryside than they should have. Rather than commune leaders confessing their error and refusing to send food that was needed to feed their fellow communards, they distributed the inadequate supplies to those they favored and left others to starve," ("Communes and Starvation, 1958-61").
Newton also claimed that integrating colored minorities into majority white spaces, was inspired by Mao's supposed integration of minorities in China,
"Ah, I think that as I remember back, I was influenced by the situation and the condition in China, in the People's Republic of China where there was, there were many, many minority groups. I think the Huns are the majority group. All of the, in the areas of the minority ethnic groups, the Chinese, this, this ethnic minority controlled its community. Get that full access to the public facilities."Mao's treatment of minorities was hardly ideal, most notably, he cheated them out of self-determination, as
Foreign Policy has
said, "During China's civil war in the 1940s, he lured China's ethnic minorities — Tibetans, Uighurs, and Hui Muslims, among others — into fighting for the Red Army with promises of independence if he prevailed. But once the war ended, Mao retreated from talk of "independence" to talk of "autonomy," borrowing an experimental concept from his northern neighbor, Joseph Stalin," (Larson). Indeed, it was Mao who invaded Tibet in 1950, claiming it has a part of China's rightful inheritance.
Since that invasion, approximately 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a direct result, (
Friends of Tibet). Or take the Uighur Muslims, who live in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, and are routinely denied the right to express their religious beliefs. Mao gobbled their land as a part of his new communist state
not long after the Uighurs tried to declare themselves as a new state, "An East Turkestan state was briefly declared in 1949, but independence was short-lived-later that year Xinjiang officially became a part of Communist China," (
BBC News). Suppression of the Uighurs is so terrible that some are driven to violence to express their frustrations, as we saw in the 2014 Kunming attack. Human Rights Watch
has reported in detail the invasive and cruel suppression of the Chinese,
"Highly intrusive religious control extends to organized religious activities, religious practitioners, schools, cultural institutions, publishing houses, and even to the personal appearance and behavior of Uighur individuals. State authorities politically vet all imams on a regular basis and require "self-criticism" sessions; impose surveillance on mosques; purge schools of religious teachers and students; screen literature and poetry for political allusions; and equate any expression of dissatisfaction with Beijing's policies with "separatism" – a state security crime under Chinese law that can draw the death penalty." Of course, one could point out that the China's Hui Muslim minority are treated rather well in comparison to the Uighurs or the Tibetans. In fact religious expressions by the Hui have never been so high as they are now. The reasoning has little to do with the Chinese Communists suddenly growing a conscience, and everything to do with pragmatism. The Huis do not desire any autonomy or self-determination of any sort, thus they don't pose any threat to the stability of the state. This is because the Huis have long been ethnically integrated into China and see little reason to break away
, Time Magazine explains,
"Unlike Tibetans or Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and are racially distinct from the Han, the Hui are not agitating for increased autonomy, much less a split from China. One reason may be influenced by geography. While Uighurs are concentrated in Xinjiang, and Tibetans clustered on the high plateau in far western China, the Hui are spread out across the nation. True, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is dedicated to them, but Hui communities exist in practically every major Chinese city. A significant population lives in Beijing," (Beech).
This is to say nothing of the Kafkaesque theater that was "thought reform" or the infamous "Cultural Revolution" that indoctrinated children into attacking their parents and teachers. Indeed, China still suffers from the consequences of Mao, with the Tienanmen Square massacre, the continued avoidance of the Dalai Lama, and the imprisonment of dissidents like Liu Xiaobo. Yet this was the man around whom Newton revolved much of his ideology. What kind of impact do you think that would have? The fact that Newton was still praising Mao in a year that would become infamous for the massacres at Tienanmen Square, seems to reveal that much of his support for these regimes was based more in
ideological commitment than on any critical analysis. Not exactly a leader I could trust.
The Panthers also supported North Korea, yes,
that North Korea. Dennis Rodman got a heap of crap for his "basketball diplomacy", which included singing "Happy Birthday" to Kim Jong Un, Marilyn Monroe style. Yet like Fonda, he's a small fry when compared to the Panthers. Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of that rapist Eldridge, then
lauded the hermit kingdom as a "Stalinist Switzerland." While her late husband proclaimed "the DPRK is an earthly paradise," (Branigan).
NK News writes that their group idolized Kim Il Sung's "Juche" as the supreme "tactical method for the total destruction of imperialism and the liberation of the oppressed in our time," (Young). Kathleen Cleaver accounts these apologetics to the political polarization brought about by Vietnam War, "There was a discounting of almost anything imperialists had to say. Under that very harsh and very bloody divide, I'm sure we were much less critical of Korean positions than had it been another time," (Branigan). If this is meant to be an excuse, it hardly makes the Panthers look any better. If anything, it shows how quick they were willing to discard democratic principles for the greater cause of a Marxist revolt. The Panthers certainly claimed to be "anti-imperialist", but that stance only seemed to hold when the United States did it. Not a word was said over Kim Il Sung's invasion of South Korea in 1950,
causing a war that took the lives of an estimated two million Koreans, nearly 20 percent of the population (Armstrong).
The core problem here is
the moral myopia of U.S. anti-imperialism. Once one views America as the "Great Satan", the root of all the world's ills, anyone opposing this system becomes that much more righteous. In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is seen, again, with the Panthers' explicit
endorsements of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose "killing fields" would later lead to one of Asia's worst genocides that
killed up to two million (
BBC), but never mind that. A Panther who was there has assured us not to heed the imperialist propaganda,
"There were reports by AP and other news agencies of mass executions, rape and pillaging by Khmer Rouge troops. From what I saw, the Khmer Rouge tried to avoid the slaughter of innocent civilians on the last day of the war."For contrast, Eldridge Cleaver, who went to many of these communist nations for "solidarity", pronouncing them as allies to the Panther struggle, later admitted to Henry Louis Gates Jr that these nations weren't as
ideal as the propaganda
proclaimed,
"...I had a chance to witness Marxism up close in action. So in my travels around the world, I saw that it wasn't working. I saw that the dictatorship of the proletarian was the last thing I wanted to have. That's when I began to see that with all of our problems in the United States, we had the best formal government in the world. We had the freest and most democratic procedure. "I'm telling you after I ran into the Egyptian police and the Algerian police and the North Korean police and the Nigerian police and Idie Amin's police in Uganda, I began to miss the Oakland police. The last time I saw them suckers, I was shooting at them; and they were shooting at me. But regardless of what our standards are in this country, we do have some laws; we do have some principles that to a certain degree restrain our police." Given how unapologetically communist the Panthers were, it seems all the more strange for the $450 million dollar Beyonce to pay them tribute at one of the most commercialized events of the year.
Panther Purges"Every Communist must grasp the truth; "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."" - Mao Zedong,
Quotations of Mao ZedongCommunists aside, the Panthers had some purges of their own. Most infamously Alex Rackley, a man whose name has fallen down the memory hole in many leftist circles. Rackley was young and illiterate, as many a poor black man was in those days, who probably joined the Panthers out of naivete. In those days, Hoover's FBI was on the warpath, trying to disrupt any movements that challenged the status quo. Considering that this same organization tried to have Martin Luther King commit suicide, it's hard to imagine them giving any quarter to the Panthers. In addition to their abuses (which included the murder of Fred Hampton), the FBI also infiltrated the Panthers with various informants. It's been speculated that one such informant was Richard Aoki, a gun enthusiast who gave the budding Panthers their very first arms. As a result, the already conspiratorial Panthers were desperate to purge the traitors in their midst. They became suspicious of Rackley, and subsequently had him tortured into "confessing" his supposed alliances with the FBI. The
Daily Beast sets the horrific scene,
"Rackley, a slight, 19-year-old black kid from Florida, was tough (he had a black belt in karate), but hardly in a position to resist his psychopathic interrogators. During a previous beating he had gamely tried, kicking and flailing and swinging his arms. But this time he was tied to the chair, with a towel stuffed in his mouth to mute the screams. The women upstairs were tending to the children while assiduously preparing pots of boiling water—because traditional gender roles applied in the torture business, too."When the bubbling cauldrons were brought to the basement—four or five of them—they were thrown over Rackley's naked body. Then they worked him over some more. With him burned, battered, and bloodied, the towel was removed from his mouth. As a warning to those who would sell out the party to the Feds ("jackanapes," "pigs," and "faggots," in the party's nomenclature), the Lubyanka-style proceedings would be recorded on half-inch tape," (Moynihan).
What set them off about Rackley was that a supposedly illiterate man was reading Mao Zedong in the community library. Of course, any objective observer could see that Rackley was only
trying to read, if that, the Panthers found him asleep. Regardless, paranoia took over common sense, and right there, in Ericka Huggins's words, "...the brother got some discipline, you know, in the areas of the nose and mouth, and the brother began to show cowardly tendencies, and began to whimper and moan," (Bass). After a ludicrous show trial in which Rackley produced a false confession of connections to the FBI, he was subsequently executed in cold blood,
"Two days after the show trial in the Ethan Gardens basement, two days that he spent tied to a bed and lay in his own waste, the Panthers drove Rackley in a Buick Rivera (borrowed from a police informant) to a secluded swamp in the town of Middlefield. They shot him in the head and the back. They dumped his corpse in the Cochinchaug River," (Bass).
Four high-profile members of the Panthers were involved in the killing and trial of Rackley: George Sams, Warren Kimbro, Lonnie McLucas, and the aforementioned Huggins. All three of them were brought to stand for trial in New Haven, Connecticut for Rackley's murder. Though another Panther, while not directly involved, was implicated in giving the order to execute Rackley. This man was none other than the Panther's co-founder, Bobby Seale. To many on the Left, these New Haven trials were seen as yet another instance of racial injustice. Many protested on their behalf, including high profile names like Dave Dellinger, Benjamin Spock, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman.
At the trial, Sams, Kimbro, and McLucas all confessed to the murder and were convicted to serve time in jail. However, Seale and Huggins's convictions proved more difficult. While Huggins was certainly involved in the kangaroo court that tortured Rackley into confession, she wasn't involved in the murder. How far could she be implicated the execution? Seale, it seems, just happened to be in town for a speech, arriving only hours before the murder. Sams confessed that he told Seale of Rackley being an informant, to which Seale supposedly ordered him to kill Rackley. Since Huggins and Rackley were party leaders in the Panthers, the FBI saw executing them as a means to dismantle the group,
"But the government, under a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO, wanted two people executed for the murder: national party leader Bobby Seale, who had been in town to speak at Yale the day before the murder, and local party leader Ericka Huggins," (Bass).
Indeed, the government "had almost no evidence tying Seale to the murder" (Bass), so he was set free by the judge. We may never know if Seale ever ordered the killing of Rackley, but columnist Dan Flynn has noted an odd coincidence while Seale awaited trial in jail,
"...while Bobby Seale was in jail in 1969 and 1970, waiting trial for his role in the torturemurder of Panther Alex Rackley, a party member named Fred Bennett had an affair with Seale's wife and got her pregnant. Fred Bennett was subsequently murdered. Like more than a dozen other murders committed by the Black Panther Party in its heyday, Fred Bennett's murder remains unsolved."Unsolved though it may be, you don't need to be neurosurgeon to figure out what happened here. Though don't take Flynn's word for it, The Bulletin reported that a Panther informant led the police to the scene of the crime (UPI). These Panther purges, like the communist purges, were right in their eyes, because they were the oppressed, not the oppressors.
During the trial, Huggins's lawyers used the Nuremberg Defense. She was just following orders, and the orders of a gun-toting George Sams, no less,
"Now I want you to remember that George Sams is walking around there with that gun in his belt. He had been brutalizing another party member. And Arnold Markle would somehow have you believe that when Ericka Huggins made that tape, she was just performing some little function. She was looking at Alex Rackley, who had been brutalized by these men, and even then was sitting there with a gun held on him by George Sams. And she began to talk. …"… If you know, as I know Ericka Huggins knew, what George Sams expected of her, I think you too would have said, 'We decided he was phony,' and didn't say, "George Sams decided he was a phony.' You, too, might have said, 'We then stood him up.' Not: 'George Sams and so-and-so stood him up," (Bass).
The argument was enough to garner the jury's sympathy, and Huggins was set free. Surely, with George Sams no longer around to bully her, Huggins could free herself of such an oppressive group? Well, it isn't that simple. Huggins had invested a great deal of her time into the Panthers, and as a result, was victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. This means that people are more likely to stick with a bad idea, if they've held to said idea for a long period of time. Of course, none of this absolves Huggins of responsibility,
who stayed with the pack, in her words, because the FBI was a greater evil, "...I was committed to the party, not to orchestrations of the FBI. I was committed to serving the people. That's why I stayed," (Anthony). This position didn't change much after Newton murdered Kathleen Smith, a murder which Huggins still believes to be an "accident", she stood firm, "However, I had my work to do in the Black Panther party, so I continued to do it," (Anthony). Huggins is now a college professor who gets to pompously lecture students about justice, poetry, and meditation.
It deserves to be said that Warren Kimbro sincerely sought to atone for his violent past. The
Los Angeles Times reports that while serving his time for the killing of Rackley, Kimbro be became a Christian, which compelled him to be a model prisoner. He counseled fellow inmates, published a prize-winning newspaper, earned a college degree, and even ran a drug-treatment program. After prison, Kimbro ran Project MORE, which was dedicated to helping ex-felons find new lives (Woo). Kimbro was famously confronted by ex-Panther George Edwards. The
New Haven Independent reports that George Edwards refused to join in the torture of Alex Rackley, and as a result, was subsequently tied to a chair with a gun to his head. Somehow he escaped, but the police arrested
him in connection to Rackley's murder. Kimbro was one of the interrogators. So at Kimbro's New Haven book signing, Rackley demanded an apology, which Kimbro gave him, but also gave him something more. Kimbro was ordered to hunt down Edwards by dialing his phone numbers, yet refused to dial the number where he probably was, saying, "I dialed all your numbers but one, George. I said I couldn't get you," (Bass). Edwards and Kimbro are
heroic Panthers, far more honorable than Huggins and her ilk.
Another Panther you might not know about is David Horowitz. We all know him today as a provocateur of the far-right, with a penchant for the offensive, but haven't you ever wondered how he got to be that way? Give the Panthers credit, they were happy to include many whites into their ranks, a move which was disdained by black activists such as Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the term "black power." Horowitz joined the Panthers in California during the 1970's. In 1974 he recruited a white woman, Betty Van Patter, as a bookkeeper. In
Salon, Horowitz
wrote a detailed essay about her rape and murder.
Horowitz suspected that the Panthers were behind the killing, but he did not know why. Given the absence of media investigation into the issue, Horowitz took it upon himself to do the research. Over the course of his readings, he found that such purges were common, given that "the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto." It wasn't until the 1990's that Horowitz received a letter from fellow Panther activist Art Goldberg, who
blamed him for the killing. Goldberg whines about how Horowitz
should've known that sending a naive waif like her to work for the Panthers would've been like sending a KKK member into the streets of Harlem,
"In my mind, you are the person responsible for her death. Sending her in to audit the Panthers' books at that particular time was tantamount to dressing her in a Ku Klux Klan white sheet and sending her up to 125th Street in Harlem or to West Oakland." Horowitz responded in kind,
"Give this, at least, to Betty. She wasn't killed because she was white or stupid. She was killed because she had the integrity and the grit to talk back. She wasn't spineless, the way you and your friends are. She was killed because she wasn't a feckless servant of rapists and murderers like you and Marty were then and apparently still are now."The
East Bay Times records that Van Patter "
believed she had discovered that the party doctored its books and had major tax problems, which she threatened to expose," (Bender). The head the Panthers at the time was Elaine Brown, who had briefly taken over while Huey was exiled in Cuba. Brown denies killing Van Patter, but concedes to firing her, because, you know, she wanted to expose financial malpractice, "While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her," (Bender). This may well be true, but surely, Brown was aware of the violent atmosphere that could allow for such killings? In recent years, Brown has been obsessed with deifying the Panthers, saying, "The Black Panther Party was the last time black people stood up with their backs straight," (Campbell). So while she may be "sorry about the individuals that fell by the wayside", she maintains that Newton "was a hero and he remains a hero," (Campbell). What's all the more perplexing about her stance is that she has suffered misogynistic abuse at Panther hands. Why she still makes apologies for them is something I'll never understand. Regardless, Newton
himself admitted to journalist Ken Kelley, not only to the murder of Kathleen Smith, but to ordering the murder of would be whistleblower Van Patter,
"In a story published in the month following Newton's death, which appeared in the East Bay Express, Kelley revealed that Newton had admitted to him shooting 17-year-old Oakland prostitute Kathleen Smith and ordering the killing of Betty Van Patter for refusing to clean up the party's books. Van Patter's end was gruesome, according to Kelley: "They didn't just kill her. They kept her hostage, they raped her, they beat her up, then they killed her and threw her in the Bay," (Wasserman).
Perhaps the Panthers' penchant for violence came from their idolization of guns, done with a fervor paralleled only by the National Rifle Association. During his failed presidential run, Dr. Ben Carson got into trouble for
claiming that if the Jews only had guns, the Holocaust may not have occurred, "You know, mid- to late-30s, they started a program to disarm the people and by mid- to late 40's, look what had happened" (Greenberg). Surely someone told him about the Warsaw Uprising? Regardless, as offensive and agitprop as Carson's statements were, the Panthers
echoed similar ideas in their so-called "newspaper",
"The Jews never defended themselves, never revolted. The most piteous saw them as a punishment from God, the others as natural phenomena. They heard the truth, but didn't even weigh it for it's worth. Just as you are doing when you say you won't even get yourself together JUST IN CASE. If those six million Jewish people were armed and also politically aware, they wouldn't have perished so easily. There is a difference between 40 million un-armed black people and 40 million black people armed to the teeth," (Hill).
Panther Whitewash"The Panthers were controversial in their day and remain so. Their history is swaddled in propaganda, some of it promulgated by the party's enemies, who sought assiduously to destroy it, and some by its apologists and hagiographers, who, as often as not, have refused to acknowledge the party's crimes and misdemeanors, preferring to attribute its demise almost entirely to the machinations of others."-
Steve Wasserman
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."-
Winston ChurchillIn light of all of these things, Beyonce's celebration of the Panthers at the Superbowl comes off as historically ignorant at best, and criminal apologetics at worst. Her feckless behavior isn't that much different from a naive college student who wears a Che Guevara T-shirt or praises Ron Paul's gold standard economics. Yes, the Panthers had a free breakfast program, but guess what? Fidel Castro provided healthcare to the poor. Muammar Qaddafi increased the literacy rates in Libya. Sun Myung Moon helped open diplomatic relations with North Korea. A few good deeds shouldn't exonerate greater evils. In any case, some of the Panther social programs weren't as "honest" as many had been led to believe, The
Los Angeles Times reports,
"There were, of course, many serious and dedicated Black Panthers around the country, people who had no idea that Newton operated a parallel organization devoted to crime. But Newton sometimes used their efforts to line his pockets and those of his fellow thugs. Early on, Panthers everywhere collected money for sickle-cell anemia research. Newton later admitted that effort was a con, and that his organization siphoned off the money collected. Later, government and foundation grant money for social programs was similarly diverted, a fact exposed by an Oakland Tribune investigation," (Coleman).
Did I expect Beyonce to know the transgressions of the Black Panther Party? No, but then, I hardly expect today's liberals to know, either. Politics is advertising, and to this end, the Left is willing to whitewash its own history in order to sell their brand to naive youths. This is why the "Buzzfeed" model of journalism works so well for them. When complex political matters can be reduced to listicles and memes, all the better for weaving a morality tale of left-wing agitprop. You probably won't hear much of Noam Chomsky denying that Srebencia qualifies as a genocide, or that Angela Davis sided with Czech dictators over Czech dissidents. Much of this revisionist history began with the New Left historians of the 1960's, who believed that history should be distorted to serve political ends. Among the most famous of these historians was Howard Zinn, whose
People's History of the United States has become the standard narrative of American history from the liberal perspective. David Greenberg
described the Howard Zinn approach to history as so,
"Zinn justified his overt display of sympathy with a stark methodological declaration. He abjured any pretense of having written a comprehensive or balanced account. Having long ago disavowed objectivity, having dismissed even the hope of unpoliticized scholarship, Zinn stated plainly that he meant to take sides. Since "selection, simplification, [and] emphasis" were "inevitable," what mattered was only which selections, simplifications, and emphases the historian chose. And while the canons of academic culture might hold that those choices, those acts of historical interpretation, were "technical problems of excellence," Zinn said that they constituted "tools for contending social classes, races, nations." Thus, even more than its sympathies for the proper set of good guys, A People's History enchanted readers with its knowing iconoclasm. The Constitution, the Civil War, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima—all were self-serving acts, Zinn said, perpetrated by those in power to maintain power. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, this stance was alluring. To ascribe noble or even mixed motives to the powerful was to fall into a retrograde naïveté; but to share Zinn's blanket contempt for society's elites conferred a hip, superior cynicism. Moreover, it wasn't just the particulars of American history that Zinn's book claimed to expose: it was the enterprise of scholarly history itself. In reducing previous scholars' interpretive arguments to "tools for contending social classes, races, nations," Zinn was in effect saying that Big-Time History—with its formidable air of authority, its footnotes and archival documentation, its vetting by communities of expert scholars—had really just served to shore up the power of established elites and put down stirrings of protest."This type of Zinnian selective memory was best seen in Stanley Nelson's documentary
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The PBS produced film, while both informative and entertaining, has enough misrepresentations to make Michael Moore cringe. I realize that having only two hours to explain several decades of history is daunting, but
surely the film could've mentioned Alex Rackley, Betty Van Patter, Kathleen Smith, Crystal Grey, or Eldridge Cleaver's rapes? To Nelson's credit, his film of the Panthers offered a glimpse into the conflicts therein, particularly between Newton and Cleaver. Indeed, while the film leaves out Newton's murder of Kathleen Smith, it doesn't shy away from the degenerative and destructive state that he fell into. I appreciated this divergence from Spike Lee's film adaptation of
A Huey P. Newton Story, which portrayed the charismatic leader as a hero to the end. This very change, oddly enough, was what
angered Elaine Brown about the Nelson film, who might've preferred that such inconvenient facts be excised altogether,
"Nelson's Huey is then reduced to a thug and drug addict killed by his own "demonic" behavior. Although Huey was killed 10 years after the Party's demise, Nelson ties Huey's tragic murder to the death of the Party. This opens the way to his wholesale condemnation of the Party as a fascinating cult-like group that died out on account of the leadership of a drug-addicted maniac. In this, he exonerates the government's vicious COINTELPRO activities, and discredits and destroys the very history and memory of the Party."Brown's negative reaction to what is, by many accounts, a sympathetic documentary, seems emblematic of the so-called "Regressive Left." That any condemnation of Newton or the Panthers at large, is equivalent to an exoneration of J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO, reveals her entrenched dogmatism. In this very film, Ericka Huggins speaks of how Newton violently assaulted her, but Brown, it appears, would much rather ignore such things in favor of continued "hero worship" to her Supreme Leader. Though she isn't the only one.
After all,
Vox would have us believe that "the most radical thing the Black Panthers did was give kids free breakfast."
Pass the baloney.
Further ReadingThe Case Against Book Purism
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-case-against-book-purism.htmlThe Case Against Awards Shows
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-case-against-awards-shows.htmlThe Case Against Gamergate
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2015/10/gamergate-exposes-our-insecurity.htmlThe Case Against "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children"
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-case-against-final-fantasy-vii.htmlThe Case Against Trump
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