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Democrats and Non-Democrats
| Article
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14434 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
5,450 Words |
| Author
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Harvey Klehr
Harvey Klehr is Candler Dobbs professor of politics at Emory
University. His most recent book, Far Left of Center: The
American Radical Left today, was recently published by
Transaction Books. |
Right-wing extremists have become the major source of domestic political violence in the United States in the past decade. Groups like the Order, Aryan Nations, and Posse Comitatus, all spouting Nazi rhetoric about the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), have engaged in bank robberies, violent shoot-cuts with law-enforcement agencies, and murder. Not so long ago, it was their left-wing counterparts, Weathermen and Black Panthers, shouting about imperialistic capitalism, who were busy planting bombs, holding up armored cars, and murdering suspected informers.
While the media have been exposing the dangers of right-wing fanatics in our midst, left-wing extremists have, for the most part, dropped from public view. They have not disappeared, however, but only learned the lesson that overt extremist behavior, while it wins media attention, does not translate into significant influence in American society. While a handful of right-wing extremists have been plotting guerrilla warfare, their left-wing counterparts have been busy infiltrating the political mainstream, gaining funding, respectability, and support from the very institutions and organizations they hope to destroy.
In retrospect, the shoot-out between American Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen and members of the Maoist Communist Workers Party (CWP) in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979 hastened the decision of many left-wing radicals to forswear their extremist rhetoric and behaviour. Five Maoists were killed after the Nazis and Klansmen appeared at a "Death to the Klan" rally called by the CWP. In the aftermath of the Greensboro killings, some left-wing radicals learned not only that armed confrontations were potentially lethal, but also that any effective appeal to public sympathy required them to moderate their image. It took the CWP several more years, however, to learn the lesson.
The Greensboro shootings helped launch the National Anti-Klan Network (NAKN), founded in Norfolk, Virginia, in August 1979 at a meeting called by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The first meeting, attended by some forty persons, was chaired by the Reverend C.T. Vivian, who was then acting executive director of SCLC. The NAKN claimed to represent thirty organizations from eighteen states.
Summing up the meeting, Vivian stated that "we studied the Klan and we analyzed it and we see it as a major threat to this country--not in its present numbers, which are still small, but in its potential. We intend to build a mass movement to stop it all across the
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