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As a Marxist, Bill Fletcher Jr’s daily task is to “heighten the contradictions.” By consistently pointing out the hypocrisy of capitalism, religion, borders, and gender, the masses will come to understand a new world is possible. What will that new world look like? Internationalism will replace nation-states (nationalism), state-sponsored atheism will replace religion, passports will become relics of a bourgeois past, and gender will be a political statement.
As a Black Marxist who first learned world affairs from reading the Nation of Islam’s Final Call, Fletcher’s disappointment with the state of the Black-Palestinian Solidarity Movement makes sense. After almost six decades, he admits that the only takers in the Black Community are Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and Black Communists. Fletcher’s keywiki details his impressive work as a Marxist organizer who centers Palestine. Here he is addressing the United Nations in 2010 on Palestine Solidarity Day.
For almost 150 years, the Movement for Communist/Socialist Lives has tried to collapse America to build a world they need to be “free.” Antisemitism has been part and parcel of every radical freedom dream.
As early as 1843, the French Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier rejected industrialism, individualism, and the concept of morality. The Era of Perfect Harmony, he believed, could be created by dividing society into self-sustaining cooperative agricultural communes. Fourier considered trade to be the source of all evil and associated it with Jews. He advocated that Jews be forced to perform farm work in the communes. His followers called Harmonians, believed all sexual forces — including bestiality, perdasty and incest — should not be repressed, that the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade, and that the North Pole would become milder than the Mediterranean in a future phase of Perfect Harmony. Between 1843-1845 Fourier’s chief proponent in the States, Arthur Brisbane, helped establish 30 communes in the US including one in Sodus Point, NY.
From Julius Wellhausen’s attack on the Old Testament via the Higher Criticism Movement to Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel, the Jewish people remain a central target for the re-theologizers and the re-imaginers.
In Stalin and the Jews, Arno Lustiger writes how immediately after the revolution, the Yevsekzi held a trail in Kiev against the Jewish religion and its rabbis. Religious activities were taboo and Jews could be expelled from the party for circumcising their male children. Eventually a pseudo-religious movement with “living synagogues” and “Red rabbis” took over and Judaism went underground.
In a recent chat with Felicia Eaves, former Co-Chair of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and current Black-Palestinian Solidarity Coordinator for American Muslims for Palestine, Fletcher discusses why he believes Black Marxists can change American minds about Israel if they put aside domestic issues and focus on nothing but Palestine.
Sad but true.
Patti Munter is the Co-Founder of the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Rochester for Israel. Before that, she worked at Rolling Stone Magazine.
