Who’s behind the far right
Published Aug 10, 2005 10:53 PM
Nothing is more dangerous for the working class of the United States than the
rise of neo-fascist and KKK-type groupings.
The armed vigilantes
aiming their racist terror at immigrants on the Mexican border; the Klan cross
burners in an area of suburban Detroit; and now a racist gang in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
that jumped out of a van, beat and might have killed a young Black man except
for the courageous intervention of a Black couple driving by.
These
racist, neo-fascist attacks cannot be dismissed as isolated events carried out
by a few miscreants. The paramilitary Minutemen are openly encouraged by the
Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security, which even offered
to give them legal status. Attacking immigrants is cheered nightly by Lou Dobbs
on CNN. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate is now spread all too frequently, from
judges’ seats to political cartoons in local newspapers to Hollywood
blockbuster movies.
The politicians decry “intolerance,” but
the fact is that behind the emergence of these racist, neo-fascist groupings and
attackers are the very forces that are behind the war on Iraq. These are also
the very forces that put Bush into the White House.
Big Oil and the
military-industrial complex create the climate of fear and hatred as they pursue
open wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and clandestine wars on Venezuela,
Iran and North Korea, as well as the occupation of Haiti. With every one of
these interventions, the message is that people of color are expendable if they
stand in the way of U.S. global ambitions.
We’ve seen that Big Oil
and the military will use any means—legal or illegal, paramilitary,
torture, whatever—to obtain their goals. But this does not stop at the
U.S. borders. These same means—illegal, paramilitary, racist torture,
whatever—can be resorted to by Big Oil and the military-industrial complex
domestically to keep their domination at home. The prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo has its parallels in the racist treatment of working class
prisoners in the U.S. In fact, some of those guards got their training in the
prison-industrial complex here.
And while Bush professes to be spreading
democracy around the world, thousands just demonstrated in Atlanta on the
anniversary of the Voting Rights Act to protest the racist exclusion of Black
people in the elections here.
Sheer might is never enough for domination,
as imperialists have to be taught over and over. People will resist occupation
and oppression, as Iraq has shown.
Here at home, the only way to stop the
threat is to act now, not to wait. Neo-fascist groupings and racist terror are
not stopped by ignoring them and hoping they will go away. What has stopped them
every time was a mobilization of the working class and the oppressed into mass
action.
As leaders of the Million Worker March Movement point out, the
labor movement here has been greatly weakened for decades because of the
leaders’ tolerance of racism and imperialist aggression. Any rebuilding of
the labor movement has to put these issues at the top of its agenda.
But
most workers aren’t even in unions. What’s required is the broadest
possible alliance of all progressive forces for a united struggle that can
really put a halt to war, racism, anti-immigrant terror and neo-fascist threats.
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