Anti-Fascist Series #2: The 1980s

“No Fascist USA!” by Hilary Moore and James Tracy, 2020

This book covers anti-fascist activity in the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the election of Ronald Reagan, focusing on the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s (JBAKC) 13 year effort against the Klan, Nazis and others. 

For those who lived through this time in left politics, this is familiar territory.  The alphabet soup of fascists and racists in those days is different than now.  At that time besides the KKK and the Nazi Party it was the Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus, David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, White Citizens Council, the Order, the Minutemen and others. 

What is obvious is that fascism is embedded in bourgeois U.S. politics and its economy, as it openly appears again and again.  After Mexico was expelled from 5 states, indigenous people sent to reservations and the slave South destroyed in 1865, it still needed a domestic movement.  This started with the violent destruction of Reconstruction in the 1870s; continued in the 1920s when the Klan marched in their thousands down Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate years of Jim Crow; came out against the labor movement in the 1930s; opposed the 1950s-1960s’ Civil Rights movement; then reappeared in the 1980s during the Reagan administration and into the 1990s.  Now the racist / fascist “Alt-Right” supported by the Trump administration has come out to scapegoat again.   Over and over, like some sick Groundhog Day.

This book describes the JBAKC’s efforts in Texas cities, small towns and suburbs around Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York and in Chicago. 

JBAKC was what I would call an ultra-left group that had problems working with other groups, with extreme rhetoric, with stupid tactical decisions, with isolation from the working class.  At the end, the book admits this.  They supported other ultra-left groups in the U.S. like the Weatherman and their ‘above ground’ supporters, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, along with revolutionary nationalists in the Republic of New Africa, the Black Liberation Army and the Puerto Rican FALN.  They say nice things about the Progressive Labor Party’s fight against racists. The JBAKC were gutsy, and did believe in self-defense and later learned to work in temporary coalitions with other anti-fascists.  They were clearly not socialist, but saw themselves as white people ‘supporting’ national liberation struggles.  In a sense they never understood the material reasons why so-called ‘white’ proletarians actually materially benefit from anti-racism.  Their main attitude towards all ‘white’ people, like so many present liberals, was concerning white privilege.  Which means their revolutionary attitude in a capitalist society only went so far.   

JBAKC first got started out of New York in the late ‘70s when black prisoners in upstate prisons wrote asking for help against Klan organizing among guards and white prisoners.   During their existence they did research to ‘out’ Klansmen and other fascists and protested police killings and brutal racist thugs like the “Cowboys” in the Richmond, CA police. They organized confrontations and rallies, worked in coalitions and appeared before city councils to get Klan rallies banned.  They supported prisoners, worked with left-wing punk bands, opposed Klan border patrols, even held anti-Klan 5K-10K runs in the Bay area.  They once got physically attacked by the ultra-right Jewish Defense League in an LA suburb for their opposition to Zionism and support of Palestinian rights. 

The modern takeaways from this book is that an openly pro-racist president conjures up fascist support, as Reagan did.  That both physical AND propaganda action is required against fascism.  That ‘ignoring’ or normalizing of fascists by liberals or conservatives is how they reclaim legitimacy and electoral power, allowing them to hurt minorities, labor and leftists.  That the same ‘freedom of speech’ liberal ACLU line still with us now was used in the ‘80s too.  The JBAKC opposed it then – as fascists are not polite debaters, they are domestic terrorists.  That you need a cultural side, as the JBAKC worked among young punk rockers to counter fascist skinheads in the punk scenes in Chicago and San Francisco.  That fascists are big supporters of the police and police murders of minority people in the ‘80s too.  And that some police reciprocate, as shown in the travesty of the 1979 killing of 5 anti-fascists in Greensboro, North Carolina by the Klan and Nazis, which the local police, BATF and FBI enabled.  Oddly in the last week the City Council of Greensboro finally 'apologized' about the role of their police in this incident - 41 years late.

Again, same stuff, different decade.  The liberals lying to you about how ‘the arc of progress ascends to heaven’ are pulling your leg.  This is a good book for present anti-fascists to learn the pros and cons of prior movements, as some now might see themselves in this history.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Fighting Fascism”(Zetkin); “The Ultra-Right,” “It Can’t Happen Here”(Lewis); “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Coming Storm,” “A Fascist Edge,” “Clandestine Occupations,” “The Way the Wind Blew” (Jacobs); “Charlottesville, Virginia,” “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Panzer Destroyer,” “The Unwomanly Face of War,” “Enemy at the Gates,” “Life and Fate”(Grossman), “Cloudsplitter” (Banks) or reviews on prior U.S. leftist organizations:  CLP, PLP, RU/RCP, DRUM, WU.

And I bought it at May Day Books excellent anti-fascism section!

Red Frog

October 13, 2020