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Leftist Riots Are Nothing New in American History

07.06.20 22:00 ET

The overly dramatic response of so many on social media and the fake news media today does not do justice to the insanity the American people witnessed over the past 12 days. As someone who is fortunate enough to reside in “flyover” country, where our Second Amendment rights have not been impaired and the state believes in individual freedom I slept tight last night, not worrying about any of this insanity.

Why?

It’s happened before in American history. Many times before, as most would know if they still taught United States history in our high schools and colleges.

A few quick examples might enlighten those who are proclaiming “global conspiracy” or this is the end of America might be worthy of review.

The 1919 May Day Riots

In Cleveland, OH, New York City, and Boston there were numerous riots at the tail end of the Spanish Flu pandemic (a historical coincidence perhaps) as the Communist Menace was being viewed as a reality by the American public in the post World War One time period. After the fall of the Russian empire, most Americans were willing to physically fight against the Marxists on the streets who were spurred on by the trade unions with the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) being the most infamous. Cleveland saw the most violence with two killed, 116 arrested and numerous businesses destroyed.

Not long thereafter, the communists attacked Wall Street in 1920 with a massive bomb which killed 30 people.

1949 Peekskill Riots

To illustrate the fallacies of today’s “Black Lives Matter” movement, one needs go no further than the 1949 Peekskill Riots. The first two paragraphs of this article from History Today outlines why the bitterness and riots occurred:

Angry locals from Westchester County, New York shout hate-filled insults at the carloads of concert-goers arriving to hear the singer Paul Robeson, the most famous African-American of the day, perform at an open-air concert in Lakeland Acres, north of Peekskill, on September 4th, 1949. A state trooper smirks and does nothing.

The first attempt to hold the concert, in aid of the Civil Rights Congress, on August 27th had to be called off when the audience was attacked, Robeson was lynched in effigy and a cross was set on fire – the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan. The police did little to intervene and 300 hostile young veterans made their presence felt. Why was there such bitterness now, when Robeson had already performed at three concerts in the neighbourhood without incident? There was not much secret about his sympathy for Soviet Russia, his anti-war stance and calls for the decolonisation of Africa – both labelled as Communist causes – or his championing of civil rights. But in June he had attended the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Conference in Paris and remarks he made there were grossly misquoted. It was claimed he said that the US government was similar to Hitler and Goebbels and that it was unthinkable that American negroes would go to war against Russia on behalf of those who had oppressed them.

I put the last sentence in bold only to remind everyone of the arguments being presented by the protesters within Antifa and Black Lives Matter regarding their statements today. Interestingly enough, it was the left-wing trade unions which blocked any further concerts by Paul Robeson as the anti-Communist movement swept over America, unlike this current era.

1965 Los Angeles Watts Riots

Despite the drama being depicted by social media and the “We are Desperate for Ratings” leftist news networks and papers of today’s era, the 1965 Watts riots make what we are seeing pale in comparison, as this front page from the old Los Angeles Times illustrates:

I have highlighted key stories for everyone to relate this event some fifty-five years ago to the events of today. The Los Angeles Times also did a retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the riots where this excerpt points out how violent the protests in Los Angeles alone really were:

The chaos that enveloped South L.A. left 34 people dead and 1,032 injured.

The vast majority of those who were killed or hurt were civilians. Of those who died in the riots, 23 were killed by LAPD officers or National Guardsmen.

At least 600 buildings were damaged by fires or looting. Two hundred buildings were destroyed. Almost 3,500 people were arrested, the majority on charges of burglary or theft.

The violence in Watts had eclipsed the toll in a wave of race riots that had struck the East Coast the year before. Seven riots in 1964 had resulted in less death and destruction than did the rioting in Los Angeles.

For the snot nosed privileged college elites and students of this era, a trip down memory lane to illustrate real pain and suffering might be in order. These riots were truly an unfortunate disaster and Los Angeles never recovered from them.

1968 Chicago DNC Riots

Weird. The Democrat Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley was wondering on national television how anyone could support attacks on police by radical elements. My, my how times have changed, or have they?

The riots in Chicago had strong support from radical elements like the Communist Party USA affiliates plus numerous other extremist groups which wished to impose their will of the “pro-peace” elements on the DNC convention. The funny part about all this is that they had “their” candidate who was a late middle aged white male who cow-towed to the extremist line even though it was their party’s Presidents who started the Vietnam War and plunged our nation deeper into it.

1992 Los Angeles Rodney King Riots

Ah, some of my favorite Americans, the RTKs (Roof Top Koreans). They did not put up with the bull crap from the Rodney King riots and verdicts, nor did they abandon their rights as the Los Angeles Police Department, Sheriff’s office, and CHP were overwhelmed with the rioters response. Interestingly enough, there were some people involved in the looting and destruction who bear a distinct parallel if not identical identity to the “Antifa” rioters of this recent episode.

From TheNewAmerican article of June 15, 1992 by William F. Jasper, Anarchy in Los Angeles: Who Fanned the Flames, and Why?

Excerpt:

One of the organizations involved in instigating violence at several of the riot sites was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block said in a May 3rd interview that there was “no question” that members of the RCP were involved in rioting, looting, and arson at a number of locations in Los Angeles. The RCP and other communist groups have been “working” the various ethnic and immigrant groups for years and have become expert in crowd manipulation, especially during times when passions are inflamed. Almost every May Day, they engage in some physical, violent confrontation with the police. It just so happened that this year May Day (May 1st) coincided almost perfectly with the Rodney King verdict.

The RCP’s inflammatory flyers are scattered all over the city. In one of them, dated May 9th, national RCP Spokesman Carl Dix declares:

 This racist system delivered its statement [the King verdict] last week ….  This outrage has to be fought …. We got to make this part of getting ready for The Time — and it could come soon — to wage revolutionary war.

The RCP’s newspaper, Revolutionary Worker, on May 10th carried this headline over a full page photo of rioters: “Los Angeles It’s Right to Rebel!” The following is a sample of its text: “Amerikkka today is not the same Amerikkka it was before the King verdict …. It shows the deep truth of Mao’s words: ‘It is right to rebel’… there is more to come.”

Sounds sort of like Antifa, right? And even the Los Angeles Times validate the article above with their story published on September 11, 1992 by Bob Sipchen, Fueled by the Flames : Revolutionary Communist Party Sees L.A. Riots as an Opening to Be Seized.

The more things change, the more they seem the same. A police action which was questionable was blown out of proportion by the usual suspects.

1999 The Battle of Seattle, aka, The WTO Riots

On the face of it, it was not a big deal. The mainstream media refused to cover the marches of 40,000 radical neo-socialists united against big oil, big industry, big government, etc. The unions who were supposed to be the allies of the radical lefts were not even included in the planning sessions and blocked from the the primary access roads while the socialists, anarchists, environmental whackos, and others humiliated the Mayor of Seattle, Governor of Washington State, and their supposed ally, President Bill Clinton.

All one has to do is refer to their own writings to get a flavor of what they intended some twenty years later and how they interpreted their actions. This excerpt is from an article at Open Democracy by Michael Galant on November 30, 2019 and should provide some deep background of the events of the past week and in Seattle:

The Alter-Globalization Movement rejected the compromise. While activists in the Global South had long resisted destructive free trade agreements and World Bank austerity, occasionally with solidarity from the North, the extremity of turn-of-the-century neoliberalism led to the explosion of a movement that refused to accept the mere crumbs of neocolonial extraction, and sought instead to build an alternative global economy for the many, both North and South.

This was a movement that brought together American anarchists with Korean peasants; libertarian socialist indigenous groups in Mexico with US anti-sweatshop activists; the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions with the Industrial Workers of the World; the Brazilian Movement for Landless Workers with Greenpeace; Filipino anti-capitalist scholars with French farmer activists best known for physically dismantling a McDonald’s. Their demands were many and varied – from land redistribution to the abolition of the World Bank, from a renegotiated NAFTA to the protection of indigenous knowledge of seeds from privatization – but all shared a vision of a global solidarity that would overcome the forces of neoliberal globalization.

In other words, everything we have seen in the past 12 days appears to have been unified under the ideals of the radical left with improvements in planning starting some 20 years ago. In fact another warning was posted by a somewhat more “mainstream” leftist “journalist”, Daniel Denvir in his article from Jacobin in November 2019 also:

The global justice movement exploded onto the scene in protests against the Seattle WTO meetings twenty years ago today. The movement was far from perfect, but its anarchist, direct action-oriented politics were crucial learning experiences for a left that has today finally found its footing.

Thus the idea of unifying the so-called “peaceful protesters” with anarchists and radical Marxists has come full circle from the protests of the 1960’s and before. Once the dust settled and the fires were put out in Watts in 1965, the radical Black Panther Movement emerged, promoting racism and confrontation as they have still to this day. The old RCP-USA (Revolutionary Communist Party-USA) has re-branded into “Antifa” to proclaim purity and innocence by opposing their definition of “fascism” which basically consists of any action or opinion opposite of their beliefs in global Marxism regardless of race or political “purity” which they test at random.

The truth of the matter? Most of the recent riots except the 1965 Watts Riots seem to have been inspired by or enhanced by radical socialist elements in our society. Why? They can not win on their ideas and where their sympathetic leaders are in charge, the cities, counties, and states are failing badly. Thus that brings them back to their only course of action as they have engaged in throughout modern American history.

Violence is the new norm under a recycled name.

America has a decision to make; we can accept another decade of riots, bombings, anarchism, and unbridled socialism like the 1960’s, or we can start supporting those crazy old ideas like pure capitalism (not what we have now), our republic as intended by the Founding Fathers, and voting for competent Constitutional elected officials instead of bitching about the existing power structure.

America has been here before, do not panic, just think and act properly as it is not the end of the world; unless you enjoy freaking out and becoming paralyzed by your own fears.

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