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Thursday, September 17, 2020

DK ACTIVISM, THEN AND NOW. PT II CONTD THE WAGES OF WHITENESS

"...And this in turn leads me to a last comparison between leftism then and now.  The student radicals of the late 1960s--few of whom came from genuinely poor backgrounds--claimed to identify with the people of Vietnam and other parts of the Third World, and with poorer Americans, especially nonwhite ones.  Today, white activists effectively argue that their race and privilege makes it impossible for them to form correct political programs on their own and forces them to defer to others for leadership. This tendency has a few older roots too, as I discovered reading a remarkable article, "The Wages of Whiteness," in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

"That article is an interesting document in itself.  Its author, Hari Kunzru, appears to be a native born Brit of South Asian descent, and a very successful novelist.  The essay is among other things a detailed treatment of leftist ideas on race in the United States.  Kunzru quotes from a 1970 Weather Underground manifesto, Prairie Fire, on the relationship of white and nonwhite revolutionaries. 'The Black struggle for self-determination is the strategic leading force of the US revolution…. Black and Third World people’s right to determine the direction of their struggle is undeniable. Self-determination means the right of oppressed people to seize and organize their future and the future of their children…. Whatever decisions Black people and other oppressed peoples make in exercising this right to self-determination, white revolutionaries and anti-imperialists have a very clear-cut responsibility to support those decisions once they are arrived at. This does not mean to support only those choices one approves of.'  Kathy Boudin was a white member of the Weather Underground who helped carry out a 1981 armored car robbery on Long Island in which a guard and two police officers were killed.  Twenty years later, in the midst of a long prison sentence, she claimed that she hadn't known  anything about the robbery in detail but had willingly participated in it because she supported a struggle that was 'not my struggle.   I certainly don’t have the right to criticize anything. The less I would know and the more I would give up total self, the better—the more committed and the more moral I was'...." DK

'...The American colonist radicals of the late 1760s--few of whom came from genuinely poor backgrounds--claimed to identify with and to be equal to all men (Vietnam and other parts of the Third World, and with poorer Americans, especially nonwhite ones)....' Not DK

With this paraphrase, I want to reiterate here my arguments made in prior installments re this post. The 20th Century Radicals were trading on principles and doctrines going back to the founding, brought forward by American leftism, and Wilsonian self determination, of the early 20th Century, and merely continued in the 60s from their immediate leftist forebears.

The Wages of Whiteness, perfect Soviet subversion developed here, setting up white front organization leftists as stooges for radical violent negro organizations. 

The Weather Underground, discussed in the article and by DK in his post, is a classic example. 

Boudin is a classic, pinnacle, definition of a political stooge, in this kind of case, a white stooge for a radical negro nationalist cause, of the kind Arendt discussed in The Origins of Totalitarianism

One difference though is that the Weather Underground was itself a sort of Fellow Traveller Radical organization, hardly a relatively innocent front organization, although clearly willing to lend itself to other radical groups as the impulse struck. Maybe it is better to think of it as a Stooge Radical, or Radical Stooge, Group. Boudin obviously qualifies as some kind of stooge.

White stooges will be among the first to be eaten.




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