Destroying a Revolution

Question 1: How do you destroy a revolution?
Question 2: Who said: "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution."

If you know who that quote comes from then you'll know the direction this piece is headed.

Setting a scene: the American Civil war has ended, but not much has changed over the intervening years. "Sharecropper" is the new term for the newly "freed" black Americans, but wild inequities still confront them in nearly every facet of life. The slow churn of time progresses, and after black soldiers returned from Europe after WWII, they started grumbling about their treatment at home.

That it had to be grumbles says a lot about a country that professes its love of liberty, freedom, and equality. Civil Rights becomes a thing.

The general acceptance of the deplorable conditions of how black people were treated lead to the organization of two types of black American groups. The first are the vocal leaders of a movement, which every movement needs, and the second were the armed patrols.

The most revered vocal leader of the Civil Rights movement in white America today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I can tell you the reason why: his was a stance of non-violence.

It's easy to forget, or wipe away from American history, the fact that there were plenty of fiery, militant Civil Rights leaders that professed revolution. They were taken seriously enough to have been pushed into exile in Algeria.

In any case the armed patrols were meant to provide protection in the black neighborhoods, protection from roving bloodthirsty gangs of white folks--police included--who'd get ginned up and head across town looking for somebody to beat up. The violence meted out on the black people of America throughout the history of the country is also white-washed out of the books.

Angela Davis' father belonged to a group of one of the armed patrols in Birmingham, Alabama. Davis herself studied philosophy with Marcuse (!), did her doctoral thesis on Kant's reaction to the Spanish Inquisition, and was arrested because guns she'd purchased and registered were used in protection actions in Oakland's ghetto.

Angela Davis, today seen as a Civil Rights treasure, is an outspoken leader of the right black Americans have to protect themselves against violence.

Answer to Question 2: Huey Newton, one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers.

The Panthers started out in Oakland as a more organized armed patrol group. The entire name of the organization was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The leaders of the Panthers became more visible to black Americans, and their rhetoric became ever so much more dangerous.

Speakers like Stokely Carmichael were more subdued in delivery than the recently killed Malcolm X, which made him harder for white leaders to dismiss. The mood from the era, if you pay attention to interviews with common black citizens in the newly unearthed Swedish documentary "The Black Power Mix-tape", is one of "there is no America, it has no future...it's over..." Their connection to the idea of America was completely gone, and the emergence of rampant consumerism being the new force keeping the status quo intact was still a few decades out.

This was a serious problem. Discontent in the masses, armed guerrilla infrastructure, and a largely charismatic group of militant leaders calling for revolution. The government took this revolution talk very seriously. There were riots in Chicago, Watts, Memphis, Baltimore...it was a tinder box.

Answer to Question 1: easy, Heroin.

The draft helped, sending young men off to Vietnam, where the availability of dope was wide, and when they returned, if they were men of color, they found their neighborhoods flooded with it. Heroin gave poor people with little prospects in the business or political or civil world, with very little connection to a perceived culture that didn't want them around, a modicum of good feeling and easy distraction from revolutionary leanings.

An armed resurrection that you have to violently stomp out in your own major cities would not look good for America on the world stage. Turning over portions of those major cities to a battle zone of narcotic trafficking is something easier to hide, and maintains that all important status quo.

An added bonus of heroin trafficking for the terrified white government was getting to lock up some very bright young people who'd never get to be leaders in any movement.

Before crack cocaine, heroin ruined revolutions.

Crack never ruined any revolutions, though. That was just a business deal.

The rioting ended, the militant leaders were either jailed, killed, run off, or given tenure, and the struggle of the underclass and under-privileged were the stuff of Pulitzer photo-journalism, not insurgency reporting.

I would argue that a real revolution wasn't ever going to happen, but armed fighting surely would have had things gone differently. Did cooler heads prevail?

If you're of the opinion that America is better off without having had an armed insurgency homegrown of its disconsolate citizens, then yeah. The real question is how different political and civil society today would be had there been an all out organized armed guerrilla insurgency action.

That's an exercise for another time...