>>> <Rkmickey at aol.com> 10/29 11:30 PM >>>
Charles Brown, I am a digest subscriber so I'm not able to easily search through the different posts but I would like to ask a couple of questions, and hope you will bear with me if I don't remember your positions precisely and correct me if I misstate them.
(1) You indicate that you want a law to ban "fascist racism" but not other forms of racism -- I think you mentioned George Wallace as someone who's racism you wouldn't ban and you mentioned "The Bell Curve" as a book you wouldn't ban. Could you give a definition of fascist racism, suitable for inclusion in a statute, so we could know a little more definitely what it is you want to outlaw? _______
Charles: Actually, the law is already on the books ! In 1988, the US adopted a domestic criminal statute (18 USC something or other) as part of the process of signing on to the UN Convention (i.e. "law") against genocide. It is called the Proxmire law because the former senator from Wisconsin made it his crusade to get the U.S. to sign on (decades after most other nations had). This statute has a provision making it illegal to incite to genocide. The world or international interpretation of this is that Nazis and KKK type speech and organization is illegal. However, in adopting the law, the Senate put specifically in the legislative discussion that it was using the U.S. Supreme Court standard on incitement , which is that it must lead imminently to lawless action , (from the case of Brandenburg vs Ohio in which an anti-KKK law was struck down as not meeting this test.
So, the "new law" would be a new interpretation of the U.S. First Amendment such that KKK oraganization period would be incitement or a shift to the international standard on incitement.
The definition of "fascistic racism" would be "committing or inciting genocide". By the way, genocide is defined as killing, maiming,torturing, taking the children of members of an ethnic, racial et al
group. To me KKKers and Nazis are by defintion genocidalists by this statute. The meaning of KKK and Nazi is fixed by history. One KKK lynching is genocide under this statute. You don't have to have Nazi ovens to violate the statute. Just one murder motivated by a genocidal organization's racism is a violation of the statute.
____________
(2) You criticize the ACLU for not spending more time arguing against the content of the speech of racists or otherwise specifically fighting racism. I think that a distinction should be made between the ACLU staff, who do their civil liberties work full time and even overtime and may not have the energy to take on other tasks which require different types of expertise (surely they are entitled to some leisure!) and, on the other hand, the many members of the ACLU who agree with its principles and support it with their dues payments and with their letter-writing, etc., but who, in many cases, devote most of their activist time to other causes. Isn't there room for a division of labor within progressive ranks? _______________
Charles: I am not focussing criticism on the staff. Here is the point on the ACLU. It is not that their civil liberties work in general is not a contribution to the movement. It is that unlike most organizations or people, they take a special stand and go out of their way to defend the fascistic racists' right to speak. They do this on the theory that the best way to fight bad ideas is to allow them to come out in speech and then battle them in the arena or marketplace of ideas. But, since they take this position and actually are active in carrying out the first part - defending the right to disseminate the bad ideas ( by the way , I assume the ACLU agrees the fascistic racists have bad ideas) - they have an ESPECIALLY strong obligation to insure that the battle AGAINST those ideas is carried out in the "marketplace". It seems to me they have more of an obligation to wage the battle against those ideas, including such underpinnings for such ideas like the book _The Bell Curve_, more than the average person or group who does go around helping to release these ideas into the public discourse. It seems to me that the ACLU only carries out half of its theory, because it doesn't meet that standard of carrying out a more vigorous than average struggle against the bad ideas that it helps release.
The battle against the bad ideas which the ACLU theory assumes does not just automatically occur. REASON is not self actuating, a la Hegelian absolute idealism, where the idea just unfolds in the world. It takes people to make reason work. As Rakesh pointed out, given the Big Brother, bourgeois monopoly of the mass media and all mass opinon making institutions, it is UNreason that is most likely to prevail in the "marketplace of ideas" in general and on this issue in particular. For example, it is the racist program of David Dukes' gubernatorial campaign that underpins the Republican Contract on America.
(3) Would your estimate of the role of the CPUSA and its allied organization's be at least largely similar to that of Gerald Horne? ____________
Charles: Gerald Horne and I are comrades and friends We have been members of the National Lawyers Guild and National Conference of Black Lawyers together. I just heard him give a presentation on the 150 anniversary of the Communist Manifesto at the National Lawyers Guild convention.
Our estimates of the CPUSA and allied organizations are similar , although I broke with the CP along with Angela Davis, Charlene Mitchell, Herbert Aptheker, et al., but Gerald was still publishing in Political Affairs after the split, so there may be some difference.
Of course, given the shaky U.S. record on First Amendment rights for Leftists, I don't mean that anybody is now or has ever been a member of the Communist Party.
I can't remember whether Gerald Horne agrees with me on the issue in this thread.
Charles Brown