Counter-Currents
1,610 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here, Part 3 here)
Earlier this month President Trump instructed the National Archives to release hundreds of previously-sealed documents which pertained to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Included among these documents were two FBI files which, curiously enough, have little to do with the Kennedy assassination but could have great bearing on the current struggles of the Dissident Right. In 1994, the National Archives JFK Task Force marked both of these documents for “total denial” of their release (the other two options were “release in full” and “release in part”). Why these documents were kept secret and why they now have become available remains a mystery. Much less mysterious, however, is how the Dissident Right can use these documents to further their cause.
The first of these files, “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer,” appears attached to a cover letter sent from J. Edgar Hoover to CIA director Richard Helms on May 26, 1967. In it, Hoover expresses concern that in the upcoming summer, cities with large Negro populations would erupt in violence. He also mentions Civil Rights Movement icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael as “extremists” who were fanning “the flames of racial discord” and “embracing the communist tactic of linking the civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam-War protest movement.”
The entire document clearly, if inadvertently, supports the notion that “Diversity + Proximity = War” so often promoted by Chateau Heartiste and other Dissident Right sites.
Sporadic youth-led riots throughout the country must be expected this summer and every summer for the next decade, Bruce Coles, Program Director for the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association, told House Education Subcommittee. The continuing tumult, according to Coles, can be traced to a conflict between the promises of an affluent society and society’s limited ability to spread that affluence around. Unable to get jobs and rise out of the slums, the youngsters — mostly teen-age Negro boys — simply “blame whitey and raise hell,” he said.
The 70-page document assesses the cities most likely to erupt in violence, and was indeed prescient given that 159 race riots did take place during the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.” The riots became deadly in larger cities such as Detroit (16 killed), Newark, N.J. (26 killed), and Milwaukee (4 killed) as well as smaller ones such as Cairo, Illinois which also left 4 dead. All told, the race riots of 1967 killed over 76 people, injured over 21,000, and led to over 11,000 arrests. And this was sandwiched between three previous summers of racial strife and a couple more which would follow the same revolting program.
Of course, the source of all this unrest was black-white race relations, or, rather, black-on-white resentment, which never seems to need solid reasons to manifest itself. In fact, any reason will do. Early in the report, the authors point to “hot weather” and “crowded, depressed conditions in ghettos” as potential reasons. They also attribute less-than-tangible reasons such as “restiveness” and “alienation” and “the combustible temper of the times,” as if these things can be quantified. They also discuss the agitation and propaganda of the communists and similar extremist rabble-rousers always looking for an opportunity to promote their dubious agendas. King, Charmichael, Floyd McKissik, Cassius Clay, and Dick Gregory get called out by name. More common reasons such as poverty, unemployment, and underemployment predictably claim some space in the report as well.
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On page two, one Ernest Chambers, a black militant, is quoted ascribing yet another reason for the racial tensions, the most ridiculous one yet. “Violence is the only way left to the black man to achieve his manhood in America.” According to Chambers, it’s up to whites to prevent racial tensions, presumably by making it easier for black men to achieve their manhood, whatever that means. Another reason amounts to crass extortion as a District of Columbia Commissioner claimed that racial tensions would likely occur in the summer “unless funds for recreational programs for school children are approved.” We all know what this means. Yeah, it’s a nice little city you have here. It would be an awful shame if something were to happen to it. Catch my drift, honky?
Makes you wonder how people kept from rioting in the days prior to publicly-funded recreational programs for school children.
In chess, they say that if you keep changing your strategy, that’s a good indication that you really don’t have one. Transposing that dictum to the issue at hand, if you keep changing your reasons for rioting, then that probably means you don’t have any reasons at all. All the reasons listed could be ascribed to whites or any other race of people throughout history and still no rioting at the obscene rates we saw in the Long Hot Summer of ’67 would manifest. These reasons, in other words, are weak reasons, and are used both in this report and in the Kerner Report which followed as transparent excuses for bad behavior.
Reminds me of the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story:
The trouble is he’s lazy!
The trouble is he drinks!
The trouble is he’s crazy!
The trouble is he stinks!
The trouble is he’s growing!
The trouble is he’s grown!
Krupke, we got troubles of our own.
So why do blacks riot so much? Maybe it’s because as a group, they’re not terribly bright, they’re violent, and they lack sufficient impulse control. Or maybe they just really like rioting? But in either case, the desire is there, which makes it easy for them to latch onto the flimsiest excuse in order to start busting heads. There is nothing in this report that says this conclusion isn’t true. And an awful lot that says it is.
Page four gets down to the heart of the problem. “Events have unmistakably shown that any municipality in the country with a Negro population is susceptible to a racial outbreak.” Isn’t this an eloquent argument in favor of ethno-nationalism and White Nationalism in particular? If you wish to prevent racial violence, wouldn’t it make sense to keep the races apart? Wouldn’t it make sense to wish to live wherever there is no Negro population, as the report calls it? It’s also interesting how the report’s authors describe racial violence as if it were a disease. If the Negro population is the one constant during every “outbreak” of this disease, perhaps we should quarantine the Negroes? That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?
There is one paragraph which I think needs to reproduced in its entirety because it so clearly reveals how the pathologies behind the racial unrest of the 1960s have not changed one bit:
But there is one aspect of racial violence that can be predicted with some precision: the pattern it will follow. In virtually every instance where major riots have broken out in Negro communities in recent years, the pattern and sequence of events have been identical: the escalation of an initial minor episode involving police action; a rapidly growing crowd and mounting excitement and hysteria fomented by troublemakers, extremists, and subversives; overt hostility towards the police, accompanied by wild charges of “police brutality”; the explosion of blind, irrational mob fury and action; street fighting between Negroes and police; hurling of rocks, bricks, bottles, fire bombs, and other objects; looting, vandalism, and arson; and, finally, summoning of police reserves and frequently the National Guard to restore law and order.
After fifty years of racial integration, affirmative action, Left-wing cultural control, and social engineering it must be both frustrating and gratifying for us on the Right to be given proof that we had been correct all along. Nothing has changed. Integration didn’t work then, just like it doesn’t work now. Like a recently-discovered time capsule, “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer,” offers a clear glimpse into the past and what see reflected back to us is our present and, God help us, our future.
On September 20, 2016, a black man named Keith Lamont Scott was shot and killed in Charlotte, North Carolina by a city police officer. This sparked two nights of rioting in which one person was killed and numerous others, including police officers, were injured. If you follow the course of events described in the linked article and compare it to the above paragraph from the 1967 report, you find them eerily similar. Blacks riot because they want to riot. Never mind that state investigators later found that the officer had acted lawfully and that Scott had been armed at the time of the shooting. Never mind that the officer who shot Scott, one Brentley Vinson, is also black. Blacks riot because they want to riot, and it doesn’t take much to set them off.
Other than Vinson’s race (which would presumably give the blacks of Charlotte reason not to riot), how is the Charlotte riot dissimilar in any meaningful way from the race riots of 1967? Or 1966? Or 1968? Answer: it’s not, and despite fifty years of painful effort, sacrifice, and expense, we have gotten exactly nowhere. This is an embarrassing fact we need to shove down the throats of any leftist, liberal, and cuck we encounter who try to find excuses for behavior which is both logically and morally inexcusable. We can also use this document to show how racial violence is not only an inevitable result of sharing a society with large black populations; it’s also something we shouldn’t have to settle for. Things don’t have to be this way.
By releasing this document to the public, the President of the United States has given us an opportunity, and we should take it.
In Part 2, we will discuss the second Civil Rights Era file Donald Trump released this month: “Martin Luther King, Jr., an Analysis.” Stay tuned.
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9 comments
“[…]how is the Charlotte riot dissimilar in any meaningful way from the race riots of 1967? Or 1966? Or 1968? Answer: it’s not, and despite fifty years of painful effort, sacrifice, and expense, we have gotten exactly nowhere.”
Maybe they just need even more programs! Also, micro-agressions; I’m sure now that we have begun to acknowledge and hold ourselves accountable for micro-agressions, this will truly begin to heal the wounds of black oppression, right? How many riots could have been prevented had we known about micro-agression?
Look at the progression of black agitation since the end of World War II.
Initially this was in the form of the “legal struggle,” court cases such as Shelley vs Kraemer (1948) and Brown vs Board of Education (1954). Once these victories had been won, the struggle transitioned into civil disobedience (i.e., deliberate lawbreaking), with Martin Luther King taking the lead.
The next decade saw mass actions such as boycotts and sit-ins. While officially billed as “non-violent,” civil disobedience tactics intentionally maneuvered the opposition to over-react, providing media imagery of Southern cops and segregationist vigilantes attacking “peaceful” demonstrators, very useful as radical agitprop. By 1965, civil rights were the law of the land and the struggle moved into outright violence with years of Long Hot Summer rioting following.
Some observations:
* Each stage of the civil rights struggle prepared the way for an increase in militancy of the next. The legal struggle de-legitimized segregation, thus justifying civil disobedience. Civil disobedience created sufficient contempt for the law to justify urban “uprisings” (as riots were perhaps realistically termed by black militants and their allies).
* The Long Hot Summer riots began with Watts (August 1965) right at the moment when the full civil rights agenda had been implemented. Blacks had been given everything they (or their handlers) demanded – integration, voting rights, open housing, the beginnings of the welfare state – and at that moment rose up in rebellion. (Perhaps they saw the reforms as concessions and thus weakness on the part of the power structure, thus inciting even more militancy.)
* While King and company liked to portray themselves as underdogs fighting “The Man,” they were backed by the full force of the federal government, the national media (especially television), many major corporations (like Coca-Cola(tm)), the armed forces (which had integrated under Truman), and the standard array of liberal and communist front organizations. Imagine what White nationalists today could accomplish with only a fraction of such support!
* King, for all the hagiography, did not hesitate to backstab President Johnson by opposing the US war effort in Vietnam. This was after Johnson had given the civil rights movement everything it had demanded. What does that say about the content of King’s character?
* The Kerner Commission’s Report on Civil Disorders is worth reading (I have a well dog-eared paperback edition). While essentially an establishment liberal document, the report betrays an unease about the growing size and militancy of the American “Negro” demographic. Its general proposals included massive government social programs and de facto federal control of law enforcement; these were in fact implemented in the years following its publication and remained largely in force thereafter. This did not end the struggle.
The 1970s and into the 1990s saw a White backlash with various law-and-order crusades. Extreme police measures, and numerous social programs, kept a lid on the ‘hood…for a while. Blacks retreated to urban guerrilla warfare via gangbanging, driveby shootings, Black Panther style agitation, and occasional flashmob forays into suburbia. There were periodic major offensives such as the Rodney King Riot (1992). Even so, the situation seemed to be under control during the early 2000s, perhaps because national energies were diverted into the Global War on Terror.
The Obama second term saw an organized effort to mobilize black violence for political ends, notably in the Trayvon Martin era. Like the civil rights movement before it, Black Lives Matter has had the support of elites: “liberal” politicians, the mainstream media, networks of activists, and shadowy international figures providing the financing. Strategy involves a combination of street violence, info ops, lawfare, de-policing, and providing spaces on national platforms to BLM agitators. It’s all similar to the strategy employed in the various Arab Spring and Eastern European “color” uprisings, and has involved many of the same actors (e.g., Obama, H Clinton).
As with the Long Hot Summer riots, the BLM “uprising” occurred after blacks were given everything they had demanded, including the Oval Office. Unlike the Long hot Summer riots, there has been little in the way of organized White backlash to BLM, notwithstanding the Trump presidency.
What do blacks hope to gain by rioting? A better question is, what do the people who exploit black violence hope to gain?
For the radical activists, blacks are the vanguard for action in some real or imagined revolution. For liberals, the riots are an excuse to implement more rent seeking programs, as well as engaging in another round of self-flagellation over “racism.” For the media, it’s sustaining the narrative about White oppression versus black victimhood (decades after this has lost any meaning). And for the usual hostile elites, it’s black muscle in the streets to neutralize law enforcement as well as undermine the White middle and working classes in the overall struggle to de-nationalize America and pave the way for a globalized New World Order.
What can White nationalists do, given all this? For starters, let’s repeat a meme common around race realist websites:
Stay alert
Stay alive
Thank you, R. Your comment is informative and lucid as usual. I did not know about Coca-Cola supporting King.
Very good comment but please explain globalized New World Order. Because to me it seems globalism is center piece of current world order. Along with multuculturalism, feminism, LGBTPism, etc. I cant believe New World Order just more extreme version of current world order for so many WNs.
The number 16 killed in the Details riot of 1967 is incorrect. That is the number of police and soldiers killed, only. In addition at least 23 citizens were killed, inclding a few whites who died defending their businesses and property. It was the most deadly and costly riot of the era, and effectively sealed Detroit’s fate.
Right, I was going to say, just from the stories I’ve heard that sounds absurdly low.
they won’t riot outside of the black areas…whites would shoot them if they do…let ’em riot..the police won’t do their jobs…just let ’em riot…
I like Steve sailors theory of this, where he calls these “victory riots.” A disconnected urban black population is one underlying cause, but that condition existed before, after, and all during the 70s and 80s. What was different about the late 60s and early 2010s? It’s the tolerance of the administration in power. The urban population seems to have a good horse sense of what they can get away with when, much like a naughty child knows which adults it can act out with. The liberal Johnston administration would not come down hard on the rioters; indeed, the cause it named was white racism. Similar with the outgoing Obama administration, where although those riots were nothing compared with the 60s violence, there seemed to be an active media/establishment encouragement and instigation of the violence. Sailor claims that all the major gains of the civil rights error were a reality before the riots, that in fact the sense of political empowerment contributed to the riots, hence victory riots. Of courese a sort of extortion is at work here—more gibs or else.
I wonder if this logic carries over to the LA riots as well. Was Clinton already in office when these occurred?
Also, there’s the theory that the 60s riots ended with the expansion of welfare benefits under Johnson, that it was a big bribe to pacify the urban black population, like some Danegeld, which has been sputtering along with mixed success ever since.
In keeping with that hypothesis is the rumor that the LA riots stopped on the day the welfare checks came, if there’s any truth to that! It’s a temporizing solution, I suppose….
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