Yeah. I think this line is trumped by the Alinsky/Obama/Satan connection.
Dennis Claxton
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I should clarify what's pissing me off about comparing the current rightwing street and media tactics with Alinsky and the old civil rights and anti-war movements.
I was dead broke. Most of us were. The bigger civil rights groups depended on church contributions and had to raise money in their communities to keep going. A lot of the legal support and legal work was either low paid or volunteer. SNCC and CORE had to hold local fund raisers for their summer projects. We had to make our own posters because there was certainly not enough money around for commercial printing. HQ wasn't sending any either.
The other thing that is bothering me, is these rightwing groups are hate mongering nasties. Their goal is to generate as much rightwing American Populism as possible.
Our goals were to end segregation, stop discrimination, extend human rights, stop the war, get more radical and integrated unions, etc. Whitewing populism was our enemy. How to break it down was the goal.
If we had the kind of money, connections inside establishment political parties and major news networks behind us that these rightwing fucks have, we'd would have been ... in heaven ... or I don't know where. We didn't have any of that kind of backing. Nobody was paying for our rides to Mississippi, DC, or Chicago.
And the whole rightwing think tank industry... What did we have? We had a pretty good book list, some old time radicals from US history, some literature and some music---where most of the contributors to that tradition died broke and or were hung or shot. And we had to re-construct a lot of these sources because they were completely off the approved reading lists.
Back then we had whole photo essays on the war, civil rights, police brutality. There was some official documentation like the Pentagon Papers. Most of these did little or nothing. All the iconic photos and film of the era caused a brief media stew sometimes and then no government response, except to send the FBI after somebody. Bombings and murders often ended with hung juries, pathetic federal investigations and no suspects found.
Compare that to a couple of shitty video tapes from one white freak, and all federal funding is cut off from ACORN in a week, without a second look?
We were trying to appeal to people's better nature, not provoke their worst demons. We were living under some of their worst demons and wanted out.
Mike Perelman writes, ``Anyone remember Nixon's hard hat demonstration?''
I am getting too long in tooth. Yes of course. And the George Wallace pro-war Dixiecrats, with their local Chamber of Commerce KKK, southern gun toting groups and their fire bombings, night riding murders, etc.
Another big part of what is also pissing me off is the whole liberal and progressive wing of the Democratic party acts like none of that ever happened. It's all behind us now. Many of these Democrats were voted into office by people my age who remember all that and tried to teach it to our kids, who also voted for them. And that goes especially for post-race America and Obama.
A lot of the more threatening whitewing hate mongering has gone on and is deliberately ignored by the media. Where is the media exposure on that. Worst yet where is the damned IRS, DoJ, FBI, wiretapping, protect and serve federal apparatus?
And last, what is pissing me off is the comparsion between the former progressive and left groups of yore and current rightwing. This comparison in itself is a smoke and mirrors hokum generated by the right.
So if you fall for the comparison between the right and left, you end up buying the rightwing propaganda that they are just defenders of the flag, the family, the constitution and bill of rights. In fact they are enemies of all four. The whole comparison is part of the Gingrich style twisted dis-information campaign to destroy political discourse.
CG