by William F. Jasper
The most striking feature of every totalitarian state (whether communist, fascist, or Islamist) is the dreaded police-state apparatus, the iron fist that enforces the will of the Party, the State, the dictatorship. Whether called the KGB, Gestapo, SS, DGI, Stasi, or IRGC, the function is the same: to spy on and surveil the people; to enforce conformity of thought, word, and deed; to suppress freedom; to root out and punish even the slightest opposition to the regime; and to spy on, subvert, and wage “soft” war on foreign adversaries. In our age, it is the communist secret police/intelligence agencies of China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and their allies that present the most terrifying images of the Orwellian police state.
As far back as the 1920s, but especially from the 1960s onward, it became apparent that the Free World police were (and are) a primary target of all communists. Locally controlled sheriffs and police are condemned by communists as tools of “imperialist oppressors” and upholders of “capitalist, bourgeois society.” They are correctly seen by the communists as a force for stability and ordered liberty, and a bulwark against the type of centralized police state that the communists want. Thus, the global communist conspiracy has carried on a century-long effort to vilify and destroy local police forces everywhere, utilizing for this purpose both its official communist parties as well as innumerable front groups for “police reform” that camouflage the communist orchestration of the subversive operations. As we will see, this is still true today, especially as manifested in the communist influence within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its “defund the police/abolish the police” agenda. Whatever the intentions and ideals of the rank-and-file BLM activists may be, the police “reform” demanded by the communist-directed BLM leadership is unquestionably moving the United States toward a truly oppressive, communist-style police state, complete with a nationalized police force.
The BLM-George Floyd riots, which resulted in the torching of our cities in 2020, were the recrudescence of the communist-directed college riots and race riots during the 1960s, and the Rodney King race riots of 1992. The riots that we are experiencing currently are being “scientifically” created using, quite literally, the same riot-making manual used by communists the world over. On June 13, 1961, this manual, along with crucial testimony, was presented to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. The testimony was provided by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., inspector general on the staff of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who testified concerning use of the manual by Communist Party operatives in various countries to train cadres in how to orchestrate mob violence and riots.
The communist manual and Inspector General Kirkpatrick’s testimony were reproduced in the subcommittee’s report entitled “A Communist Plot Against the Free World Police” and subtitled “An Exposé of Crowd-Handling Methods.” The manual provides simple diagrams demonstrating how to create incidents to stir up crowds, lead the crowds through streets and intersections, confront the police, and then engulf, trap, and attack the police.
The tactics outlined in the communist manual were put into practice by “student” and “civil rights” activists in the 1960s, causing deadly and destructive riots in dozens of American cities. Communist leaders of the misnamed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and similar organizations also went to communist countries (Cuba, Russia, North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) for training. Significantly, some of those “activists” then “graduated” to terrorism, becoming leaders of the Weathermen/Weather Underground, the May 19 Communist Organization, and the Black Liberation Army.
Key Players
There is a direct line from that generation of 1960s communist-terrorist rioters to the rioters of today. One of the most notable direct lines concerns the three co-founders of Black Lives Matter: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. In a 2015 video interview with Jared Ball of the Real News Network, Patrisse Cullors matter-of-factly stated regarding herself and her co-founders, “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Cullors’ quote on being a “trained Marxist” has been widely cited by BLM critics, but it only tells a small part of the story. Who trained them? In other interviews, Cullors revealed that she had been mentored for years by Eric Mann at his Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles.
So, who is Eric Mann, the personal trainer of the leaders of BLM, the global, multimillion-dollar enterprise that has taken the world by storm? Well, he was the New England coordinator for the SDS, and later joined Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and company in the Weathermen. In other words, he was a “domestic terrorist.” He served 18 months in prison for his role in leading a group of some 20 to 30 Weathermen in a 1969 rampage at Harvard University. And for the past 50 years — like Ayers, Dohrn, and other Weathermen terrorists — he’s been training not just Marxists, but Marxists-Leninists. Marxists-Leninists combine the communist theory of Marx with the organization and practice of Lenin.
Like Bill Ayers, Mann refers to himself as a “small ‘c’ communist.” It’s a “New Left” thing. Inasmuch as the Communist Party USA was widely recognized in the 1960s as merely a pawn of the brutally oppressive Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the communists formed what they called the New Left, which would preach and promote Marxism-Leninism without being overtly connected to the “Old Left,” the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It was a ruse. Top leaders of the New Left worked closely with top leaders of the Old Left, as, for instance, when New Left leader Tom Hayden went with Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker to communist North Vietnam to propagandize in favor of communist Leader Ho Chi Minh and his National Liberation Front (NLF). During their rampage through Harvard, Eric Mann and his Weathermen cadres chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh; NLF is going to win.” In other words, they were cheering for the communists who were killing American soldiers in Vietnam at that time.
The BLM leaders have also shown their true colors in aligning themselves closely with other Communist Party/New Left avatars of the 1960s-1970s, such as Angela Davis (former vice-presidential candidate on the CPUSA ticket) and Bettina Aptheker (daughter of CPUSA theoretician Herbert Aptheker). They also idolize JoAnne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army terrorist and convicted murderer who is hiding out in Communist Cuba.
Since we’ve mentioned Herbert Aptheker, we should note one of his outbursts that exemplifies the communist view of riots. Aptheker, a top official of the Communist Party, was the concluding speaker at the First Annual Conference of Socialist Scholars held September 11-12, 1965, at Columbia University in New York City. He exulted to the gathering that “Watts was glorious!” He was referring, of course, to the Watts riots. Los Angeles was still smoldering, yet he found that tragic scene of death and carnage “glorious.”
Author and former Salt Lake City Police Chief W. Cleon Skousen wrote of the riots:
This writer saw the Watts riots and was there during the five long days and murderous nights of shooting, killing, looting and burning. The final tally went something like this: KILLED: 37, including 2 white peace officers, 1 white fireman, 28 Negro civilians, 4 other civilians. INJURED: 895, including 93 peace officers, 45 firemen, 10 National Guardsmen, 747 civilians. ARRESTED: 4,070, most of them adults. BUILDINGS BURNED: 787 damaged; 209 demolished. PROPERTY DAMAGES: Fire damage alone estimated at more than $50,000,000. Looting and vandalism added many additional millions.
Like most of the other riots that have ravaged America, it was the black population of Los Angeles that was most devastated by the death and destruction of the Watts riots. But to Aptheker, who claimed to be a champion of “racial justice,” the deadly riots were “glorious” because they advanced the communist agenda of sowing more exploitable anger, despair, and race hatred.
In June 2020, a group called People’s Strike organized a “Mass March to Defund the NYPD & Abolish the Police” in New York City. Their declaration stated, in part, “In light of ongoing police violence against our most vulnerable communities, we demand that the City Council cut the NYPD police force and the NYPD budget in half and re-invest in community and social needs. Power concedes nothing without a demand and it is crucial to back our demands with mass actions.” Among the co-sponsors of the anti-police event were the Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America.
More Communist Connections
There are many other communist connections to the BLM behemoth, but we must use our limited space here to mention a particularly significant one: George Soros. We do not have proof that Soros, the globalist billionaire, is a communist, but he certainly funds many Marxist-Leninist organizations and activities throughout the world. It may not be a stretch to say Soros created Black Lives Matter. He certainly put the group on the map, providing millions of dollars in dark money for its startup, and more recently has poured $220 million into related leftist groups such as the Black Voters Matter Fund.
Another direct line tying the anti-police rioters of the 1960s to the rioters today is their dependence on attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG) to defend them and spring them from jail after they’ve been arrested for rioting or other unlawful acts. Thanks to its allies in the media, the ACLU has been able to cultivate an image of “liberal” lawyers standing up for the little guy and for the right to free speech, free assembly, etc. The reality is quite different. For more than a century, the ACLU has been intimately tied to the CPUSA and has been an indispensable aid to communist subversive efforts. Its national chairman from 1920 to 1940 was Harry F. Ward, a Communist Party member.
The ACLU’s chief founders were communists and fellow travelers. Key founders included top Communist Party officials William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Louis Budenz. In 1940, in response to public concerns, the ACLU made a pretense of purging the CPUSA influence from its ranks. Harry F. Ward and a few other well-known communists departed, but it carried on as before.
Roger N. Baldwin, another of the co-founders (and the ACLU’s executive director from 1920-1950) may not have been an official, card-carrying CPUSA member, but he was an enthusiastic collaborator. He wrote:
I am for socialism…. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal…. I don’t regret being part of the communist tactic. I knew what I was doing.
The U.S. House Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States reported in 1931, “The American Civil Liberties Union is closely affiliated with the Communist movement in the United States, and fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of Communists who have come into conflict with the law.” The California Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities noted in 1943, “The American Civil Liberties Union may be definitely classed as a Communist front or ‘transmission belt’ organization.”
The National Lawyers Guild, on the other hand, has been much less concerned about disguising its Red connections. In 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities issued a lengthy report denouncing the NLG as “the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party.” In 1953, Attorney General Herbert Brownell referred to the guild as “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.” Those are apropos descriptions.
The ACLU and NLG work hand-in-hand to handcuff police and assist revolutionary lawbreakers. This is true not only as it applies to local police, but also with regard to the groups’ support for the Occupy ICE/Abolish ICE campaigns against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. We noted in 2018:
The NLG and ACLU also have been in the forefront of the open-borders efforts for many decades, and their involvement is a major factor in both the current schemes to tie up the Trump administration’s immigration-reform efforts in the courts and the efforts to keep the street radicals out of jail…. The list of NLG-ACLU legal ploys is now much longer, with the more recent Occupy ICE obstructions being some of the most recent additions. Two of the most militant Occupy ICE efforts — in Portland and Philadelphia — are telling examples. The websites and Facebook pages for the NLG and ACLU, along with mentions in local media, make it clear that they are the primary defenders of the street radicals when they run afoul of the law.
Taking Control
In his 1966 book The Communist Attack on the U.S. Police, the aforementioned Skousen recounts his 1965 visit to New York to speak with Dr. Bella Dodd, a former member of the National Committee of the Communist Party. Dodd, who defected in 1948, was emphatic in condemning police “civilian review boards” as a communist objective. She “stated that she was appalled at the success of the Communist Party and its cadre of fellow travelers in persuading New York politicians to accept the idea of a civilian police review board,” Skousen wrote. Dodd “said it was invented by the Communist Party in the 1930’s when it was felt that the country was ripe for revolution. The idea was to somehow get the police out from under the control of elected officials and subject the police to the discipline of a ‘civilian’ group which the Party could infiltrate and control.” By this means, she said, “they intended to mete out harsh and arbitrary punishment against the police until they were intimidated into a benumbed, neutralized, impotent and non-functioning agency.”
A “civilian review board” sounds like a reasonable idea, but we already have legitimate mechanisms in place to deal with issues of police corruption, brutality, or other misbehavior. Our system of mayors, city councils, county commissions, district attorneys, county grand juries, governors, state legislatures, and state attorneys general provides the proper avenues for redress of grievances against police officers, officials, or departments that violate the rights of the people. Like everything else in this imperfect, fallen world, this system is imperfect, but it is far superior to the proposed review boards.
“Beginning with Philadelphia in 1958 a few cities concluded to experiment with the highly controversial idea of civilian police review boards,” Skousen wrote. “However, the results were soon devastatingly evident. Not only did the police find such boards to be guilty of biased decisions but the impact on police morale was so virulent that it left certain phases of police service an empty shell. In fact, when the Communist-inspired race riots broke out in 1964, it seemed significant that they were launched in some of these very cities.”
An FBI investigation of the 1965 riots gave a sobering warning: “Where there is an outside civilian review board the restraint of the police was so great that effective action against the rioters appeared to be impossible.” The FBI investigators found, “In one city with such an outside review board, police action was so ineffective that the police were ordered to withdraw [and] limit themselves to attempting to prevent the riot from spreading. In another such city the police frankly admitted the making of arrests was ‘unfeasible’ and mob action continued without deterrence.” Does this sound familiar to what we saw more recently in Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Oakland, New York City, and dozens of other ravaged cities?
This article was originally published at TheNewAmerican.com and is reprinted here with permission.