A pox on both their houses (National Post, November 03, 2004)

No, I'm not talking about Bush and Kerry -- but rather two evils that have plagued America: the Ku Klux Klan and Communism. The homegrown KKK was overtly depraved and killed or terrorized thousands. Imported communism is covertly depraved, has killed or terrorized 100-million people (and counting). Twenty-five years ago today, in an undeservedly obscure episode known as The Greensboro Massacre, the two evils collided.

On Nov. 3, 1979, Klansmen opened fire on unarmed Communist Workers Party (CWP) members demonstrating against them in Greensboro, N.C. Five people -- four white, one black -- died. Commemorative events today will mark the occasion. They will aim to permanently entrench the narrative of martyrdom and heroism around the fallen that has been assiduously nourished over the years by the massacre's survivors. The victims will doubtless be touted as civil-rights heroes for standing up to the KKK.

That narrative is a myth. Those killed were by no means innocent victims, and their deaths look more like suicide than martyrdom when seen in the light of the incriminating facts their comrades tend to rationalize.

The true story is not a page from the civil-rights struggle for black equality, but one of an entirely avoidable tragedy. It was the climax in a campaign of provocation of the KKK by several communist front groups, former student activists who had transformed themselves into revolutionary Marxists, and whose leadership boldly sought violent confrontation with all perceived forms of capitalism, including the racist and terrorist -- but also stoutly anti-communist -- Klan.

Within the American communist movement, the Greensboro CWP were known as unusually fanatical. They gave up lucrative careers (several were doctors) to work in North Carolina's textile mills, the better to agitate amongst workers and facilitate union drives. They battened on the Vietnam-inspired anti-"Amerikanism" that sapped the will to win against communism at home, and drew strength from the thrusting aggression of the Soviet Union and its acolyte, Cuba, into Africa, Latin America and the Middle East during the 70s.

The South's racial divide was a further attraction, inasmuch as Marxists believe racism is a by-product of capitalism, and Greensboro's one-third black population was indeed powerless. But racial equity was never the essence of CWP militancy; it was an exploitative lever for subverting the status quo, and adopted out of frustration that the workers remained stubbornly anti-union.

So the decision was made to raise the CPW's public profile by confronting the KKK (which, ironically, was composed in large part of the low-end workers -- loggers, millworkers -- the CWP hoped to proselytize). Balancing the evils of the KKK against those of communism was an invidious task. The CWP never understood that the local people, including the police who failed to protect the CWP on the fateful day, and even many Blacks, were fierce patriots, who preferred overt racists to traitors.

As a bizarrely reckless teaser, the CWP first burst in on a KKK recruitment meeting, which naturally aroused Klan fury, stopping just short of gunplay. Then in an open letter the CWP wrote: "The KKK is one of the most treacherous scum elements produced by the dying system of capitalism. We challenge you to attend our rally in Greensboro." Finally they virtually sealed their fate by promoting the march to the national media under the title, "Death to the Klan."

What were they thinking? One is hard pressed to understand how such educated people could have so cavalierly disregarded the proven volatility and gratuitously violent history of the KKK, whose membership was sucked from the dregs of America's cultural and social pool. Orwell's dictum that only intellectuals could be so ignorant springs inevitably to mind.

In the end, the CWP wrecked their own lives, but accomplished nothing for the cause of civil rights or social justice. They never sought to understand why communism was so viscerally loathed by most Americans. They never directed their fine minds to any serious inquiry into the consequences of applied Marxism in the hellholes of the world. Their fanaticism made them self-righteous and intellectually arrogant.

The KKK never found acceptance among mainstream or educated Americans, and is now moribund. But communism, in its Marxist guise, is still the darling of intellectuals, and flourishes here and abroad. The CWP's uncritical peers and successors mobilize in the academy, where they instill their pernicious doctrines in our children's minds, skillfully catechizing them in hatred of America and Israel, support for terror-sponsoring nations and disdain for their own traditions and cultural values.

The tombstone of the CWP "martyrs" reads: "Live like them. Dare to struggle. Dare to win." Not, as it turns out, words to live by.

© National Post 2004