“Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by International Communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth.†– Monty Python’s Flying Circus
There are times when you write something that you think is important, and you want to get it right. This is one of those times. I hope you find this post worthwhile.
A few weeks ago, a very good friend sent me an article. The article intrigued me, and I began to research the background of the article. What I found was stunning. The article itself is this (LINK), from Time® magazine, you don’t have to click – I’ll summarize it below. Time™, I’ll note, very appropriately has a red border but they haven’t added the hammer and sickle yet. Yet.
I found this article disturbing, but it really matched with the research that I’d done up to this point.  There is a cultural shift of the Left, and the Left is moving ever farther, ever faster left. I wrote about that here (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg), which is probably what made my friend send the link.
I read Tayari Jones’ Time® magazine piece. I found it to be an example of the outcome of the most brutal form of programming and child exploitation that I’ve seen recently, though I will admit that I try to shy away from Disney® movies. In short, her parents were Black Nationalists (Her description, not mine.  “Black Nationalists†refers to a group that wants to either repatriate to Africa or to carve out a separate nation for blacks in the United States.) that convinced a five-year-old that Gulf Oil© was responsible for killing black children in Africa so much so that the child, Tayari, would not ride in a car fueled by Gulf Oil® to the zoo. The piece ends with simplicity. All to the Left is joyous and moral. All to the Right is evil death.
Should we celebrate our tolerance and civility as we stanch the wounds of the world and the climate with a poultice of national unity?
Jones wants to further divide us, or destroy those who don’t and won’t conform to her (undefined) viewpoints.  Also, the last time the word “poultice†was used out loud was by Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies. But her title says it all, “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground.â€
That led me to wonder more about the author – what was going on in her head that led to this article? What are her ultimate goals? Featured prominently in the article was the Soweto Uprising, a 1976 confrontation between black students and the police, which appears in hindsight to be an unplanned 4th Generation Warfare (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means) offensive. I hit Wikipedia to learn more. Then, there it was, the missing link.
“No Middle Road,†an essay by Joe Slovo is listed as influential in the communist African National Congress (ANC) at that time.   The original title of the article by Jones, as enshrined in the URL, is telling: “Moral Middle Myth.â€Â Obviously they are connected. Again, from Jones:
I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,†as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse.
Okay. Now you have my attention. We have a person actively preaching division and implied violence whose suppressed essay title echoes an influential essay from 1976. My next question was simple: Who the heck was Joe Slovo?
Joe Slovo was communist, born Yossel Mashel Slovo in Soviet Lithuania who moved to South Africa with his family when he was eight. Slovo was a deeply loyal communist who admired Stalin. He was exiled from South Africa for 27 years and spent that time launching and orchestrating terrorist strikes in South Africa while abroad. His operations included bombings of civilians. Slovo did have some spare time to oversee the murder and execution of people thought to be traitors to the cause, often through putting a tire around their neck, filling it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. The nickname for this practice was “necklacing.â€Â Now Slovo didn’t actually do these things himself, he merely planned them and was in charge of the organization that made them happen. See? His hands are clean.
Slovo was such a leftist, the only thing he on the right of is this picture.
Slovo had to be an influence on Tayari Jones. Understanding the influences can be important, besides, Tayari Jones didn’t mention exactly what she wanted done with those she opposes. Maybe the essay she was influenced by would?
I decided to look for it on the Internet, where I can find out what was on TV on NBC® on a Sunday evening in June of 1983. I spent more time than I’d like to admit spend sifting through Marxist websites, looking for the essay. I went to the second page of Google© results. Exhaustive research, indeed. I even found where Marxists who had previously posted a copy were looking for a copy to post. It’s like the document had been purposely scrubbed from the web. Odd – once information hits the web, it normally flies free and multiplies. Not this.
I finally found that the essay was included in a book, Southern Africa: The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin/Pelican, 1976). That’s the only place I could find it. A seller on Amazon had a copy for less than $8, so I bought it. It took weeks to arrive. It was old – the pages were yellowing. It also looked like a socialist’s mind: it had never been opened.
What had I expected? The usual Marxist language designed to be confusing and cult-like.
Whenever anyone talks like this? They want you to nod and pretend you understand.
No. Slovo was very clear in his writing. Much of what Slovo writes are about conditions and history that are unique to South Africa. And, reconstructing and solving the problems and historical injustices of South Africa, real as they were and are now, is far beyond this post. But Slovo very clearly sets out a battle plan that is being used against the United States right now.
For instance, on page 118, Slovo states: “To be born white means by definition to be born privileged . . . .†I hadn’t heard of the concept of “White Privilege†until 2014 or so, and then it was related back to an essay (White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) by Peggy McIntosh, who you can read more about here in this excellent essay on Quillette: (LINK).
The important idea is that McIntosh didn’t originate this divisive concept – Slovo wrote about it in his 1976 essay.  It may be even older, but this is the earliest reference I’ve found. And Slovo specifically introduced it to open additional divisions in South Africa.
Slovo continues: “. . . the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.â€Â In a further parallel with today, Slovo describes the history of struggle for liberation as “The Resistance†as he builds a case that his dreamed-of communist state can only be brought about via violence, which he calls “armed struggle,†rather than “killing people I don’t agree with, and also kids on my side, if we can get good pictures for the press.â€
Slovo clearly expected and desired a war. In the time he lived, Slovo completely misread what happened in the communist takeover in Vietnam and he was thinking that the Vietnamese had won a military victory. They had not. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been defeated in almost every engagement. The North Vietnamese won because they demoralized the United States and made the politicians feel the war was unwinnable – clearly a Fourth Generation warfare victory.
Ultimately the ANC realized, however dimly, that the deaths of black South Africans during the Soweto Uprising was their victory. They won by appearing to be the victims. And they won by creating a coalition of victims who would never feel that they could never be repaid for their pain – no reparations would ever be acceptable.
Page 205 contains the telling sentence: “The struggle can no longer be centered on pleas for civil rights or for reforms within the framework of white dominance; it is a struggle for people’s power, in which mass ferment and the growing importance of the armed factor go hand in hand.â€Â Slovo worked to use the ethnic divisions in the country to create a situation where raw power would end up in the hands of the communists.
There we have it: the end goal is not rights, or prosperity, or freedom, or liberty. The end goal is naked power.
Back to the United States, we find that could never happen here:
Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours.
Reparations for us are not only necessary because we are economically harmed, exploited and stolen from — while the violence against us is never acknowledged — but because in order for us to create and move work for Black liberation, it requires resources and MONEY. We live in a white supremacist capitalist world, so ain’t no spinning webs of lies around “money isn’t the answer.†It is because money and exploitation and power are interconnected concepts of violence. Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma.
We need housing, transportation, food, clothes, free space for meetings and work space; we need laptops, cell phones, encrypted systems for communication, solar power and LAND. Stop playing. Y’all really thought pulling up to the protest in your Hyundai was gonna be enough? Nah. You have to give us everything we need and more, because even if it means you go without — it doesn’t matter because that’s how we been living for 400+ years. Reparations will never be negotiable. So if you’re not willing to talk money, you are not here for #BlackLivesMatter as a movement or for us as individuals.
(H/T Liberty’s Torch (LINK)) Original that I tracked down is wearyourvoicemag.com.
I thought this quote was a parody until I found it at the website it was originally posted on. It appears that she’s serious.  That’s from Ashleigh Shackelford, who seems really nice when talking to people that support her, as that passage above was a shout-out to her white supporters. I left her spelling, emphasis, and capitalization intact. Ms. Shackelford is the product of the same mentality of Marxist Joe Slovo and (I’m assuming) Marxist Tayari Jones.
As I wrote about earlier (Seneca’s Cliff and You), it’s far easier to destroy something than to make something. In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight. This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society. Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.
He’s going to have to work awfully hard.
One thing we’ve seen – when this tactic works, ending it is difficult – look at the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  Once before in the comments on this blog people brought up the Irish Troubles and people started arguing about who was responsible in the comments. On this blog. In 2018.
I was certain that when the Soviet Union fell, that the world was safe. In my mind, it should have been clear from the horrors of Cambodia, to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe winning their own freedom from oppression that the subject was closed. Even if people couldn’t see that communism was evil, at least they could see that it didn’t work, right?
No. Like Jason or Michael Myers communism keeps coming back. It appears that, like Freddy Kruger, communism will keep going as long as people like Slovo, Jones, and Shackelford will fight and kill (even kill people on their own side) for power. But only as long as there are people stupid enough to believe them.
Thankfully there’s no one like that in the United States.
Slovo grave picture:Â Andrew Hall [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
