Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”—Mao Zedong, “Problems of War and Strategy” (Nov. 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224
During the 1960s and 1970s, when African-American revolutionaries launched street violence in cities across the United States, their close ideological and personal working relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was very much out in the open. When Black Panther Party leaders Elaine Brown and Huey P. Newton or avowed militant revolutionaries such as Robert Williams visited Beijing in those days, it was often a photo op—sometimes with Mao Zedong himself.
On Aug. 8, 1963, the Peking Review published a statement that Chairman Mao issued at the direct request of Robert Williams, former president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and later affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, and members of the Communist Party USA. Mao’s statement was entitled “Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism.”
Mao’s words make reference to the “American Negroes’ struggle against racial discrimination,” and claim that “American Negroes are awakening and their resistance is growing stronger and stronger … [in a] continuous expansion of their mass struggle against racial discrimination and for freedom and equal rights.”
After citing some of the early developments of the U.S. civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Mao called upon “the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colors in the world … to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practised by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against the racial discrimination.”
That sort of full-throated, public backing by the top levels of the CCP is absent for the revolution currently being led on America’s streets by the openly Marxist, pro-Maoist Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its allies among the equally communist Antifa and others. But that doesn’t mean that the ideological affiliation of Antifa and BLM leadership with communism and Beijing or even tangible CCP support for today’s communist street insurrection is absent. It’s just a little more discreet these days.
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