Have the media induced political colorblindness in you? We provide therapy.
While “a rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not necessarily the case that “red is red is red.”
By long-standing tradition going back to Europe, political movements have colors. For instance, when I lived in then-West Germany (1980-1985), “green” referred to environmentalist-anarchists, as it does here (though today in America, “environmentalist” groups are often communist fronts); “black” referred to conservatives; “brown” to Nazis; “blue” to libertarians; and “red” to socialists and communists. Indeed, “red” had long been the worldwide expression and color of communism, by agreement of both Marxists and their enemies, though Marxists hated their enemies identifying them as such.
(When I lived in West Germany, it was only socially acceptable to refer to Austrians in general as “brown”; living, West German Nazis were powerful and had great legal privileges, such that calling a real Nazi “brown” could lead to a ruinous civil suit. Practically everybody who was anybody was a “former” Nazi, and even old workingmen Nazis were heroes to many of the postwar-born German men they worked with.)
A competing, contemporary use of “red” is by genocidal black supremacists, who wear clothing, buttons, and such in the red-black-green “pan-African flag” designed by Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), the Jamaican-born founder of the back-to-Africa movement. While the black stands for the “black” race, and the green for the land, the red is for the blood of whites that the wearer hopes to shed.
Garvey sought to lead blacks in a worldwide racial Armageddon, in which they would kill all whites, and take their place as the world’s dominant race.
“The Red, or the blood, stands as the top of all things. We lost our land through blood; and we cannot gain it except through blood. We must redeem our lives through the blood. Without the shedding of blood there can be no redemption of this race.”
Notwithstanding their wearing of black-green-red accessories in the shape of Africa, the land that genocidal “Africans” seek to gain is that of the good, old USA.
(Though I no longer see it used as much, during the 1990s, the black, green, and red were typically joined with yellow, as an expression of tenured City College of New York black supremacist Leonard Jeffries’ teaching that blacks are the “sun people,” the moral, intellectual, and biological superiors to the racially inferior, white “cave people.”)
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“Brown” also has an interesting contemporary significance. It is the political color of Reconquista, of the pan-Mexican, mestizo racial supremacy of groups like MEChA and “La Raza” (“The Race”). Note that the Reconquistas seek not just land that Mexico lost to America in the first Mexican-American War (and for which America compensated Mexico), but vast lands to the North and West of those, including Colorado and Washington, which they claim to belong to “Aztlan,” an ancient Hispanic/Indigenous nation. And since “Aztlan” exists only in their fevered imaginations, I suppose that those lands do belong to it.
And that’s what they admit to. Like the black supremacists, the Reconquistas aim to conquer all of America and kill off all whites, or as the Reconquistas say, send them back to Europe.
Keepin’ It Red
But my primary color of concern is traditional red.
Since at least the Great Depression, American reds have sought to manipulate “blacks” into fighting their revolution for them. (Most American “blacks” would more accurately be termed “browns.”) In Woody Strode’s (1914-1994) autobiography, Goaldust (as told to ghostwriter Sam Young), the legendary athlete-turned-actor told of his folks warning him against getting sucked into the communist vortex. The reds would sponsor mixers at which pretty white girls would seek to seduce promising young black men into the movement.
(One generation later, the reds would succeed, when they joined with black preachers in creating the so-called Civil Rights Movement.)
White American socialists and communists—I call ‘em SCWs (socialist/communist/whatevers)—have no more regard for blacks than does your average WS/NN/W (white supremacist/neo-Nazi/whatever).
Twenty years ago in Brooklyn, I rented a room from a well-to-do, white political operative. I suspect he was a communist, because while socialists occasionally lapse into honesty, this guy could lie in his sleep. Anyway, he lived in an integrated, luxury co-op, with blacks who hated whites, Asians who hated whites, and whites who hated whites. The street around the corner from the building was all black, and variously working-class and poor. Although that street was dilapidated and desolate, with a numbers parlor hiding behind a phony fried chicken storefront, it had a lovely little Sinclair’s bakery (no longer there), a seedy (since buppified) supermarket, and even a butcher (I’m not sure if that’s still there).
If I was hungry, and knew that there were stores open, I went to that street and got something to eat, day or night.
Not so, my landlord. (He called the set-up a “share,” but the sharing went one-way. What was mine was his, and what was his was his. While claiming to be against private property, reds are as greedy as your average venture capitalist.) Although he was almost a foot taller than me, unlike me was trim and athletic-looking, and had all the right beliefs about treating blacks better than whites (whereas I said that blacks should be treated just as lousy as whites), this guy was so terrified of blacks that he wouldn’t set foot on that street at high noon, accompanied by his dog, even though the next overpriced, yuppy shopping area was almost a mile in the opposite direction. Eventually, he hired a black West Indian woman to do his family’s shopping and cooking.
In the late spring of 1988, long after it was obvious to everyone that Tawana Brawley and the Three Stooges (Alton Maddox, C. Vernon Mason, and Al Sharpton) had engineered the most despicable race hoax in modern American history, many blacks, their media sycophants, and non-media reds still refused to admit it. At the time, another red political operative I used to know (based on her rare lapses into honesty, I’m guessing she was only a socialist), remarked to me in private, “You can’t expect blacks to participate as equals in public discourse.”
Translated into English, she was saying that blacks are mentally retarded. Of course, had the operative made that statement publicly, her professional career would have been over, and she would have had to leave New York and change her name. (And that was 19 years before James Watson!)
In mixed company, that operative would ape black supremacists, with phrases like, “We need unity against those who would divide us.”
As Tonto says in the apocryphal joke, “Who is ‘we,’ Kimosabe?”
Since the 1960s, reds have likewise sought to conscript “browns” into the revolution, notwithstanding that blacks and Hispanics (excepting many New York Puerto Ricans) have always hated each other. The solution to overcoming black-Hispanic hostility was to engage in ever more intense anti-white rhetoric and practices. It never seemed to occur to the reds that: 1. Racism is evil; and 2. They are white!
If you spend years indoctrinating blacks (who need no invitation to hate whites, in the first place) and Hispanics in anti-white racism, and giving them incentives to violently assault whites, at some point, they are going to notice that you are the same color as the “racist” whites. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the regimes of apartheid and genocide well underway in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Even then-82-year-old, “anti-apartheid” (read: red) writer Nadine Gordimer, who was rewarded for her literary activism with a Nobel Prize for literature, was targeted last year by racist black thugs, who robbed and beat her in her Johannesburg home. Or just take a look at America’s cities.
America’s reds think that the “blacks” and “browns” they seek to exploit politically are simple-minded and easily manipulated. Unfortunately for the reds, the blacks and browns know this.
Towards the end of the Weimer Republic (1919-1933) and the beginning of the Nazi Era (1933-1945), reactionary, “black” monarchists who helped the Nazis ascend to power, thought the same way about Hitler and his henchmen. Hitler saw through their vanity. By the time the “blacks” realized their folly, they were climbing the steps to the gallows.
* * *
According to Democrat Party legend and the New York Times, if you’ll pardon the redundancy, the 1950s were an age of McCarthyite “red-baiting” and “hysteria.” On June 19, 2003, a New York Times house editorial commemorated the 50th anniversary of the execution of communist traitors and Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for instance, by fabulating in Marxist language that they were the “victims” of “anti-communist hysteria” and “McCarthyism,” and called their case, including the execution of Julius, an “injustice.”
In other words, giving our mortal enemies atom bomb secrets which helped them build their own bomb was not a crime.
But then, the Times has since 1992 been run by “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., who during the War in Vietnam supported the North Vietnamese communists, and who has never changed. And long before Sulzberger’s time, TimesmenWalter Duranty wrote propaganda for Stalin, covering up his Ukrainian Holocaust (for which Duranty was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize), and Herbert Mathews provided similar services for Castro.
Also typical of the left was Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne’s August 18, 2005 assertion that people merely “alleged” that the Hollywood Ten were communists. Such claims are on a par with Holocaust-deniers saying that Jews merely “allege” that the Holocaust occurred. But that’s what the Left has been engaging in for over 40 years—communism-denial.
It can be hard, at times, to say where Marxist evil leaves off and Marxist ignorance begins. But if someone repeats a lie out of ignorance, he’s still a liar. For instance, for over fifty years, leftists have repeated the lie whereby Richard Nixon coined the term “the Pink Lady,” in referring to Democrat California Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent in the 1950 U.S. Senate race. As historian Irwin Gellman showed in his exhaustively researched Nixon-biography, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946 to 1952, Nixon did not coin the term, Douglas’ Democratic primary opponent, Ralph Manchester Boddy, the publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, did.
If anything, calling Douglas, then one of the two most radically left members of Congress “pink,” was too gentle a description. “Red” would have been more accurate.
The other congressman I alluded to above, East Harlem communist Vito Marcantonio, also lost the 1950 election, to Democrat James Donovan, who had stressed Marcantonio’s refusal to vote in favor of war against communist North Korea. (Marcantonio’s claim, “I vote my conscience,” was a code for his following the Party – as in, Communist Party — line.)
However, the leftwing campaign against Nixon, continued by dead-enders even today, 13 years after the man’s death, was always based less on his electoral victories over congressmen Jerry Voorhis (in 1946) and Helen Gahagan Douglas, than on his successful 1950 prosecution of Alger Hiss, who had earlier been the number-two man in the State Department, for perjury. Hiss had in fact been a traitor and a Soviet spy, but the statute of limitations precluded prosecuting him for those hanging offenses.
Leftwing ignorance is so pervasive, that in an unintentionally comical moment in the 2005 propaganda film, Good Night, and Good Luck, director/screenwriter/communist sympathizer George Clooney felt the need to have his character, CBS News producer Fred Friendly, point out to another character—without irony—that the House Un-American Activities Committee is in the House, while Sen. McCarthy is in the Senate.
But leftist propagandists have always worked hard to ensure that everyone in America is as ignorant and confused as the average lefty. Thus, they have since the 1960s labeled any political action or criticism opposing them, “McCarthyism” or a “new McCarthyism.”
The tactic of calling opponents “McCarthyites” serves the dual purpose of making them look evil, and of reinforcing a fictional history, according to which, on the one hand, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were victims, rather than traitors, and the State Department was not, as McCarthy revealed, lousy with communist infiltrators.
Conservative writer Ann Coulter returned to this issue in her 2003 book, Treason, vindicating the memory of McCarthy. Conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans has just published his 672-page swan song, blasting the leftwing, anti-McCarthy tradition, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America's Enemies.
Republicans and conservatives have aided and abetted the Left by referring since circa 1989 to leftwing totalitarianism on college campuses and in the nation’s schools as a “new McCarthyism.” That unfortunate rhetorical habit is a form of surrender that it will take more than Evans to overcome.
Another form of surrender long practiced by Republicans and conservatives is in referring to “liberal bias” by the mainstream media. The media figures in question do not think of themselves as “liberals,” they think of themselves as socialists or worse.
But the socialist MSM’s ultimate victory in table-turning was in monolithically imposing, during the 2000 presidential election, the usage of the phrase “red states,” in referring to Republican-majority states, and “blue states,” in referring to Democrat-majority states.
Socialist MSM types no doubt cluck, whenever they get a non-leftist to speak of Republican areas as “Red America,” or “red-state America,” but “Red America” rightfully refers to America’s newsrooms and faculty lounges.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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