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An Interview with Robert F. Williams CLICK THIS!


Of the many pillars for control of public opinion and ideology in the RL USA and elsewhere, of the multiple mechanisms, as Citizen Chomsky so eloquently put it, for the manufacturing of consent, the religion of anticommunism has long been one of the main ones.

Here in the New World, e-communism and its siblings have had an easier time of it. While some of that old time RL anticommunist religion seeps in from time to ime, and some of the dogmatism of RL authoritarian socialists does too, in general e-communism and the broader family of class-analytical e-left thinking is its own thing in the eRepublikan game context, rather distinct from its reflection of the Real. The extent to which left-side analysis and praxis has succeeded or might eventually succeed, in some ludic sense, in exercising its e-agency is another question.




And not one I will attempt to address any further here today. The rest of today’s meanderings deal mainly with the “real”… if there must be a connection to the “new”, then perhaps it will suffice that I explain, perhaps obliquely, why I chose to reincarnate “PQ” in the shape of “RFW”.




At this time of the year, my thoughts turn, as they usually do this time of the year, to the legacy of not only Dr. King, but to all those who struggled and fought and thought and worked and prayed and shot back in the long struggle for civil rights in the United States.



It might be obvious that my choice of a re-born avatar following the burning of Phoenix Quinn’s karma speaks to my obsession with this topic. Real-life Robert F. Williams, husband of community organizer and teacher Mabel Williams, was a marine who served in WW2. Upon his return to segregated Monroe, North Carolina, Mabel and he became leaders of the local NAACP chapter. He also formed the first all-Black chapter of the National Rifle Association, which was called the Black Armed Guard, made up mainly of veterans. The Monroe NAACP was closely allied with other more-radical members of that organization, like Rosa Parks’ in Birmingham, who along with her husband had long been active defending the Black community in Alabama from rapes and disappearances, as well as everyday discrimination, before she had her moment of fame on that fateful day on the bus: December 1st, 1955.

Rosa Parks delivered the eulogy at Robert Williams’ funeral. Mabel Williams delivered the eulogy at Citizen Parks’ funeral.









There is a terribly interesting and significant inter-relationship between the work done by the Parks family, the U.S. labor movement, the history of resistance to white supremacy in Alabama, and the role of the Alabama Communist Party, especially in the 1930’s and 40’s. I’m not going to go into all of that right now. As for the Williams, their ideological story has some incredibly interesting intersections with communist history as well, though Mabel and Robert were never reds themselves.

Like many parts of Civil Rights and Black Liberation history, which tends towards a storyline that is comforting to white liberals and at least somewhat less-threatening to white reactionaries, the radical part of the story, which is in fact a very American story, is something that has been almost completely ignored in official histories, except when framed by an anti-communist discourse.

One tidbit for today that may be of interest…. Not only was the Alabama CP during that period almost entirely African-American, it was virtually 100% Christian. It operated more like an anarcho-syndicalist community defense organization than a vanguard Leninist party preparing for a mass uprising. Chapter meetings started with a Christian prayer. Meetings of the CP-led Scottsboro Boys defense committees, often held in the Parks’ small living room, typically included pistols on the table too.







R.F. Williams was never a communist or even a socialist. Ideologically-speaking, he was a strong Constitutionalist, a classical liberal in the US sense and strong advocate for fundamental human justice. He took advantage of his military training to organize the local NAACP chapter to arm themselves to defend their liberties. They allied with the local native population to combat the Klan and the racist cops. Women in his district were were encouraged to take collective action. When Black folks in town were unjustly arrested on bogus, trumped-up charges, an event that could and did (and still does) lead to extra-judicial killings, the Monroe women were known to march on the local jail armed with butcher knives and clubs, demanding the release of those unfairly incarcerated.

After “too much” of such actions, when the authorities raided the house of Ella Belle Stitt’s daughter — a woman whose mother had been born into slavery , whose every aunt had been “given away” to a planter-oligarch as part of a “deal” — the interior of every wall of her home was packed with guns. Citizen Stitt was taken away to prison and never heard from again, her 2nd amendment rights not exactly protected by authority. Rather the opposite.

Rosa Parks liked to tell the story of how, when she was a little girl, her grandfather always slept in a rocking chair in the front room, with a shotgun across his lap in case the Klan attacked their home. When asked why she slept on the floor next to him instead of in her bedroom, Rosa told folks, “I wanted to see him use that gun.”

The popular storyline that those years of militant resistance to white supremacy leading up the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent legal dismantling of Jim Crow was solely a matter of peaceful marches, nice little ladies refusing to give up their seat, lots of prayer, and the good-heartedness of Democratic Party politicians, is, to be rather diplomatic about it, only “half” the story.





R.F. Williams was friendly with black nationalist leaders, including Malcom X. He’d met with Fidel Castro during his tumultuous visit to New York in 1960. He openly quarreled with Dr. King and other revolutionary pacifists, and he quarreled even more with those bourgeois spokesmen in the NAACP who wanted him to “apologize to white America” and so forth.

Williams provocative book titled “Negros with Guns”, published in 1962, was an important influence on Huey P. Newton and others. A 2004 documentary of the same title provides first-person witness testimony to many of the events described in that book. His ideas were taken up by the Deacons for Defense, by the Black Panthers, by SNCC, and many others. It is perhaps noteworthy that while some of the other radical groups suffered personnel losses from assassinations by killer cops, the Monroe NAACP never lost a single member to a police or Klan bullet.







Authority became furious with the Williams. The Feds came up with bogus charges against him. Even then, the only U.S.-based communists to come to his defense were a few Trotskyist lawyers from the Socialist Workers party, who tried to help defend him once the Feds started to come after him. Understanding the alternative, he fled to Cuba in 1961, where he and Mabel ran a radio station — Radio Free Dixie — for several years. Then they moved to China in 1965 after meeting Ho Chi Minh and becoming disillusioned with the misogyny and racism of the Cuban leaders. He was also openly criticized at that time by the CPUSA for being “divisive”.

The Williams returned to the USA in 1969, with help from the State Department, where at least a few folks recognized that he was one of the few American citizens who knew anything about Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership. He was granted a college chair in recognition of his remarkable achievements. His old enemies gathered around Sen. Jesse Helms made sure that charges were brought against him back in Monroe. But all charges were finally dismissed in 1975. In an interesting twist, upon returning to the USA, he was notified by the Republic of New Afrika, a leftist black nationalist group, that they’d made him President in absentia. He declined the honor, reminding them that he was friends with black nationalists, but did not share that ideology. He and Mabel more or less retired in the 80’s to enjoy a quieter retirement in rural Michigan, where Mabel continued to do community organizing into late in life.

At his funeral in 1996, Rosa Parks said, “"The sacrifices he made, and what he did, should go down in history and never be forgotten."











Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting large property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions were humiliating traumas to Western elites, and the well-publicized abuses in the Communist states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology is used to mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the “anti-communist” concept is in fact incredibly fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests, support accommodation with communist states or others that work to be autonomous from the institutions of global capital, or just radicalism in a general sense.

Its purpose is to fragment the left and labor movements and to break up the solidarity of oppressed people. It is, first and foremost, a political-control mechanism. The “triumph” of communism is depicted as the worst imaginable result, and the support of fascism is justified as a lesser evil. This is slippery slope. Opposition to social democrats and democratic socialists who are, supposedly, “too soft” on communists is rationalized in similar terms.

Liberals, too, are accused of being pro-communist or insufficiently anti-communist, and thus are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. The recent cries from alt-right and neo-fascist circles about the “dangers” of “cultural marxism” become even more ludicrous than usual when seen in this light. For over 100 years, the powers-that-be have taken every possible opportunity to attack, outlaw, demean, demonize and criminalize anything that can even remotely be construed as revolutionary marxism. The problem is not “cultural marxism”; it is “cultural anticommunism” that rots peoples’ minds and takes down their natural defenses against Control.









Most liberals are still under great pressure to demonstrate their anticommunist credentials even after fully internalizing the religion.

This causes them to act, all too often, like servile reactionaries. A recent example: when my Facebook buddy Trevor Hill from the DSA (at the time, he has since become more of an outspoken communist) had the opportunity at a televised “town hall” to ask Nancy Pelosi to make even the mildest critique of capital in 2017, she fell all over herself insisting “we are all capitalists”.


Looking further back, let’s see how the great liberal hopes of the late 20th century, two liberal lions central to the civil rights story, JFK and LBJ, operated in this regard…

Juan Bosch, in his brief tenure as the first democratically-elected President of the Dominican Republic in 1963, attacked corrupt military officials, undertook mass public education programs, and advanced an open form of government that promoted civil liberties for all, including communists and radicals. His overthrow had —at least — the tacit support of President Kennedy’s State Department, followed two years later by an armed invasion of the Dominican Republic under the Johnson Administration, at virtually the same time the landmark civil rights legislation was finally signed by the White House.

Kennedy liberals were also enthusiastic about the 1964 overthrow of President João Goulart in Brazil, who sought to socialize the profits of large companies. The brutal right-wing pro-military, pro-USA regime that followed lasted 20 years, until 1985.

A similar story unfolded in Guatemala from 1947 to to 1954 (events which were, incidentally, key to the ideological radicalization of a certain Argentine fellow named Ernesto Guevara). And again from 1981 to 1987, the Reagan regime used the alleged “communist threat” in Nicaragua to support a brutal and illegal counterrevolutionary intervention there, while many were cowed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with infidelity to the national religion.









When anticommunist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support of claims of “communist” abuses is suspended. Instead charlatans of every description thrive as evidential sources. Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists and outright paid actors move to center stage as “experts” and remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars.

The anticommunist control mechanisms exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as in period of “red scares”, issues tend to be framed in dichotomized terms that completely ignore the actual complexities and contradictions, not to mention the actual interests of poor and working people, with gains and losses allocated to contesting “sides”, and rooting for “our side” considered an entirely legitimate news practice.




As we take some time this weekend to remember and commemorate the work of Dr. King, of Rosa Parks, of Mabel and Robert Williams, of Huey P. Newton, and perhaps to re-affirm a commitment to live like them, it is worthwhile also remembering that the ideology and religion of anticommunism is a potent ideological filter that will always be deployed to try to crush any opposition to global capital — just as it was deployed against King, Parks, the Williams and many others.