Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The SDS All Over Again

If all of this #Occupy claptrap, as well as the modern Democrat Party, sound familiar, it is because it is recycled crap from the 1960s.
Click to enlarge, or look at the archive of the Students for a Democratic Society newsletter, New Left Notes, Volume 4, Number 22, 18 June 1969 (PDF) in full.

Some choice bits:
What is now a classic line, from near the top of column two (bolding mine):
The crisis in imperialism has meant triple taxes (really strange to hear Leftists complain about taxes), cutbacks in safety (which ironically allowed terrorist groups like the SDS to flourish), speed-up, falling wages, and death on the front lines to working people.  Black and brown workers have been hit the hardest . . .

Update: this is the oldest use of the "minorities hardest hit" gag that I can find.

(middle of column four)
Up until now, a lack of international solidarity on the part of US white workers has meant that they were objectively scabbing on the rest of the word proletariat.

One of the ways in which we build this solidarity is by attacking white supremacy.  We should see that white supremacy and national chauvinism are key factors in the war in Vietnam and that the war is a white supremacist war.  By attacks on white supremacy, we can also connect the war in Vietnam to the war in the black colony in the minds of the people.

The big demands for what they wanted, and when they wanted it (column five):
  • Immediate withdraw from Vietnam
  • Immediate release of Huey Newton and all political prisoners
  • No more surtax
  • Independence for Puerto Rico
  • Support for GI's rights and GI rebellions
The article closes with an ironic quote from the murder most grand, Mao Zedong:
Mao says that "all reactionaries attempt to stamp out revolution by mass murder, and they think that the more people they massacre, the weaker the revolutionary will become.  But contrary to this wishful thinking of reaction, the facts are that the more people the reactionaries massacre, the greater the strength of the revolution becomes, the nearer the reactionaries are to their doom.  This is an irresistible law.

The bombings conducted by the Students for a Democratic Society began a few months later, on 7 October 1969, at the Chicago memorial statue to police officers murdered at the Haymarket riot of 1886.  After the statue was replaced, they blew it up again almost one year later to the day.  The SDS blew up more things and people over the coming years during their armed struggle.

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