>I buy Art's story that blacks feel like the rest of the worlds'
dispossessed
>about S11, which can't be said about any other group. As blacks seem to be
>the only radical force left at a time when the US is in danger of turning
>fascist - for real, this time - is anyone in the left doing anything to
>awaken the political consciousness that is buried under their nihilistic
>hatred?
Respectfully, there are so many wrong-headed things packed into that paragraph, from the homogenization of blacks into a monolithic "force" (undivided by class or gender), the assumption that other people need to "awaken" their consciousness (when it's pretty clear folks know what's wrong, if not as clear what to do about it), the stereotype of "nihilistic" hatred (as opposed to a quite wide range of approaches to being pissed off), and the idea that no other group in the US (say Arab Americans for example and even some poor whites) has any identify with the world's dispossed against global corporate power.
And describing the US turning towards fascism (without going into another LBO round of definitions) in the present circumstances is pushing the term pretty hard. Vengeful liberal democracies are quite capable of all sorts of global atrocities-- Hitler didn't invent those. Recent anti-civil liberties laws are appalling but they have not shut down the opposition press or sent all political opponents to prison.
That the US is committing these acts without fascist oppression is not said in praise, since it gives the citizens less of an excuse for accepting them. Hysterical democratic politics may be in application do terrible things, but it needs to be analyzed and organized against with quite different theoretical and practical tools than one would use under fascism or dictatorships or any kind.
-- Nathan Newman