BLM's Dubious Ideological Roots

Black Lives Matter has been very much in the news recently as one of the participants in the turmoil besetting our cities. The media would have us think that BLM is an organization like, say, the NAACP in which people strive within the system to prod Americans to live up to the ideals of our founding.

On the contrary, BLM is an organization founded by Marxist revolutionaries like Patrisse Cullors, who openly acknowledges her Marxism, and which is not averse to employing violence to achieve its goals.

An article at Brietbart about Cullors says this:  

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a newly surfaced video from 2015 that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists” – making clear their movement’s ideological foundation, according to a report. 

Cullors, 36, was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization, and spent years absorbing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that shaped her worldview.

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers,” she said, referring to BLM co-founder Alicia Garza.

“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk,” Cullors added in the interview with Jared Ball of The Real News Network.

While promoting her book “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” in 2018, Cullors described her introduction to and support for Marxist ideology.

She described ... how she became a trained organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which she called her “first political home” under the mentorship of Mann, its director.

The center, which describes its philosophy as “an urban experiment,” uses grassroots organization to “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the US empire.”

It also expresses its appreciation for the work of the US Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as its support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s.”

Here’s what Black Lives Matter says about itself on its website:

We … do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege. We build a space that … is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered. We dismantle patriarchal practices … We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure … We foster a queer-affirming network … with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking …

This is not unlike the language employed by Marx himself who, in his Communist Manifesto, stated that one of the goals of communism is the disintegration of the traditional two-parent family.

BLM's communist roots are all the more chilling when one considers that communism was responsible for the murders of over 100 million people during the 20th century, and that never in the history of communist revolutions were people more free and less oppressed after the revolution than they were before. Every communist state is built on lies, terror, oppression and murder.

Seattle's short-lived dalliance with CHAZ, with its murders, rapes and intimidation, was a microcosm of what it's like to live under communist rule. Communism robs people of their humanity and enslaves them to the state. The literature of George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler paints a vivid picture of communism's horrors. It always promises heaven and always delivers hell.

The president of Greater New York Black Lives Matter, Hawk Newsome, promised in a television interview that, “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.”

And what is it Mr. Newsome wants? “I just want black liberation, and black sovereignty. By any means necessary.”

And what does black liberation and black sovereignty mean, precisely? Presumably, that, too, is to be left as "a matter of interpretation."

BLM and its progressive allies claim that America is irredeemably racist, that blacks are oppressed by a system that has had racism baked in from the beginning, but despite what Mr. Newsome and others would have us believe, it's simply a fact that there has never been a country in the history of the world in which blacks were better off, freer, with more political and economic opportunity and a higher standard of living than they enjoy in America today. It's why millions of blacks from Africa and the Caribbean have emigrated here.

Why would they do this if this country was such an oppressive tyranny for blacks? Why would they not emigrate to communist paradises like Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba?

The fact that some Americans, both white and black, are racist no more makes America a racist nation than the fact that some Americans, both white and black, hate Jews makes America an anti-semitic nation.

Just as the United States has been the best country, aside from Israel, for Jews to live in in their entire history, so, too, the United States, especially over the last fifty years, has been the best country for blacks to live in.

But none of this seems to matter to progressives or people like Mr. Newsome who think that as long as there are still flawed (white) human beings, as long as there are inequities in society, it doesn't matter how prevalent or minimal those flaws are or what the causes of those inequities are, everything must be destroyed, burned to the ground.

It makes no sense whatsoever.