According to LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause,” writes Riva Enteen.
Vice President Kamala Harris in August 2021. (White House /Erin Scott)
By Riva Enteen
Special to Consortium News
Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:
“A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.”
Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I.
The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.
She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.
Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.
Honkala in 2012. (Jill Stein, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.
The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that,
“More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.”
However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.
Malcom X Comes to Mind
But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change? At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.
Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.
Oct. 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after Oct. 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.
Oct. 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.
These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year?
The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?”
Notice how Tony Blinken keeps addressing nation regarding all conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine over the last week?
Joe Biden is effectively AWOL & Kamala can’t be bothered to be questioned on what looks like could potentially be WWIII.
The U.S. gov is on autopilot pic.twitter.com/yZjBDXpfuX
— Duopoly Destroyer (@realnikohouse) August 6, 2024
While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate. He confuses Haifa with Rafa, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.
According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”
The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have. Of course the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?
Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected? There is no way to know for sure.
As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Demonstration outside the The Watergate Hotel in Washington, where Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu was staying, July 22. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
“The key organizers,” the professors write,
“the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.”
If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.
Rather than using labels like ultra-leftist, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential. The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.
According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.”
They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.
Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.
According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.” It’s not?
Insane story from Seymour Hersh…
Biden was threatened with the 25th Amendment by top level Democrats.
"Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 21] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” pic.twitter.com/pxL27A7fhB
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) July 28, 2024
Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:
“The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.”
People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous. Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sign me up. We need to get that foot off our necks.
Riva Enteen is the former program director of the San Francisco National Lawyers Guild. She is a lifelong peace and justice activist, retired social worker, lawyer, and editor of ”Follow the Money,” interviews by Pacifica Radio Flashpoints producer Dennis J. Bernstein. In 2019, she went to Russia with a 50-member peace delegation. Black Agenda Report printed many of her articles. Riva can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I lived through the Sixties protesting in the streets. I don’t recall once asking a police officer if it was okay to do so. I’m one of those silly people who actually believes in the First Amendment and the protections that it affords. Clearly complaining about the mass murder of Palestinians hasn’t done anything to stop it or our funding of it. I will be in the streets of Chicago in spirit as I was in the flesh in 1968. There are worse things than a Trump presidency, and one of them is actually believing that Trump is worse than our endless wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The US isn’t giving up its power easily. It overthrows and kills democratically elected people that it doesn’t like. Mossadeq in Iran and Allende in Chile come to mind. We American citizens need to stand up to the war machine that our tax dollars pay for. In the streets, with or without the permission of our overlords.
I hope the Democratic convention in Chicago is even MORE aggressive than in 1968. This country is falling apart. Genocide is called “self defense” and is applauded (literally) by the Congress. Proxy war in Ukraine after the overthrow of their elected government is called “freedom and democracy” (see also Venezuela). A senile president sits, no doubt mumbling to himself, while his clueless and incompetent VP tells protesters to shut up while she’s blabbering. The corporate media does nothing but lie and attack independent journalists like Scott Ritter and the Gray Zone (see also Julian Assange). Holy fucking Hell.
Anyone who can look at the depraved support Biden and his junta are giving Israel’s genocide, war crimes, and other unspeakable acts, and then say we shouldn’t protest these things because, you know, Trump, is just dishing yesterday’s news. When the Democrats are complicit in war crimes, it is morally imperative to challenge them…because if we don’t, and Trump does get elected, on what moral high ground can we stand to challenge him on Gaza? Both parties are complicit in genocide, and we must confront both parties. Gaza is not a partisan issue — it is above and beyond partisan politics.
They know who writes their paychecks.
All universities these days are corporate training schools funded by corporate money. The old concepts of a ‘professor’ at a ‘university’ are dead. They are just corporate employees in a different corporate division. The whole set of ‘university President’s and their actions as their students protested against the ongoing genocide made this perfectly clear. It was nothing new, but it did reveal rather clearly that the old universities as bastions of education, knowledge and debate were dead, dead, dead. The term professor now carries the same lack of respect as the term journalist, and for pretty much the same reasons. They’ve been willing to sell ‘respect’ to the highest bidder for too long now.
Are these the same professors who used to do studies saying that smoking tobacco wasn’t harmful? Or the same professors who take oil money to say there is no global warming? These days, anyone with a checkbook can hire a professor to say anything they want to pay for. And the Democratic Party has a very big checkbook. Welcome to extreme capitalism, where absolutely everything is for sell. Its a surreal world out there, I hope you brought your pillow. :)
You bet. That’s why I support socialism.
These are two committed Zionists who will support anything that regime will do to Palestinians. Don’t trust them.
A ‘private organization’ with automatic ballot access.
Yep, that is what democracy looks like.
The Democratic Party to Americans ….. Sit Down and Shut Up!
The voter-free nomination process is now supposed to be accompanied by the citizen-free convention. Dear America … you are not wanted, and we don’t give a damn about your opinions.
The admonishments of the two professors sound like the admonishments of a concerned overbearing parent who is very positive of what an older or grown child needs for the child’s “own good”, and is very insensitive to some real needs and issues the child might have.
“People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous.”
But what did they achieve?
Well, the prospect of those protests may well have been what ensured that Mayor Daley would tell President Johnson to stay away from the convention and not try to seek the nomination for a second term.
Protesters often achieve far more than they realise.
“On the White House tapes, we learn that Johnson wanted to know from Daley how many delegates would support his candidacy. LBJ only wanted to get back into the race if Daley could guarantee the party would fall in line behind him.
They also discussed whether the president’s helicopter, Marine One, could land on top of the Hilton Hotel to avoid the anti-war protesters.
Daley assured him enough delegates would support his nomination but the plan was shelved after the Secret Service warned the president they could not guarantee his safety.”
Source:
“LBJ Considered Hijacking 1968 Convention”
“President Lyndon Johnson considered flying to the 1968 convention and offering himself up for re-nomination.”
(James Joyner · Sunday, March 17, 2013)
The actual Hitler tried to take the riches of Russia at a cost of 25 million Russian lives and also undertook a much more publicized holocaust of Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma etc.
Now the Trump Hitler certainly supported a murderous Israel but it took the effort of the Biden/Harris Hitlers, and a willfully blind 81 million voters, to repeat the campaign to own Russia and to fund and run political cover for Netanyahu’s Zionist state to realize its Holocaust II.
So the US unity party presents a clear “choice” … of would be vs. actual Hitler II.
Where are the learned academics demanding demonstrations against THAT depravity?
Had Barack Obama’s ultimatum to Joe Biden, step down after this term, hand your candidacy to Kamala Harris, if not, she’s ready to enact the 25th Amendment. A threat. It tells Joe Biden you’re unfit to carry out his duties as president, step aside in a few months. A smart move by Biden would be to force them to be seen as traitors they are. If Biden is unfit now, why wait?
Biden could have put a spotlight on the real Barack Obama and Kamala Harris— if ever two more phony people existed.
Kamala Harris’ agreement to enact The 25th Amendment means she is immediately to be sworn in as president. Lets imagine she had, what is at stake?
Plenty, Kamala Harris would be seen as having stolen the presidency from Biden. This, after her 2020 presidential debate where Harris accused Biden of acting as a racist, not a racist just acting like one. Afterwards, Harris enlightens us why she accepted the vice presidency after she accused Biden to be anti-busing, “It was a debate!”
Keeping Joe Biden in the Oval Office until Kamala Harris is ready, allows her time to campaign; time to practice with her voice/speech coach, time to find a new-more presidential wardrobe. Be well coached on dealing with protesters.
Simply handing the candidacy to her, no voice from the voters, has anyone wondered if this is this legal?
Imagine, had Joe Biden responded to Obama’s ultimatum , “Go ahead, make my day. Put your puppet in the Oval Office, I dare you” with or without the aviator glasses, one wonders if Harris would enact the 25th Amendment. My guess is no.
Inasmuch as the Democratic Party is a private organization it is legal — although perhaps not always politically wise — for them to choose their candidate anyway they want.
Thanks to Riva Enteen and to Consortium News for publishing this important rebuttal to the usual soft-liberal exhortations that always say the same thing: “NOW IS NOT THE TIME to rock the boat… the stakes are too high” . As we know, for this type, the time is NEVER right to speak out and show displeasure.
Right. And I remember the banks were too big to fail. Ha, ha, ha. The joke’s on us.
Absolutely correct!
“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Blinken is one authentic light weight. What he said
was sufficiently vacuous, that its significance evaporated as fast as
water on a N J sidewalk on 102 degree day. Vacuous as
we the hearers all know one phone call to Bibi by Biden –
announcing the USA’s bombs, bullets, drones, intel and
personnel will no longer be delivered – will effectively
end Israeli barbarism. Some promises are made to be broken.
This past one especially.
I lived through those same 1960s, and watched in horror as protestors were savagely treated by police goons. These professors want to call them bad protestors? That is the same as saying the victim of a rape is responsible for the criminal action of the perpetrator. What B.S.! These two professors should shut their mouths and hang their heads in shame. 40,000 dead in Gaza and the country in absolute ruins speaks so loudly that none dare ignore the agony, suffering and death being inflicted by the international criminal, Netanyahu. How hard can it be for Kamala Harris to advocate for peace and declare her intention to withhold all U.S. armaments from Israel, now and forever, in light of the horror that continues to unfold there?
I watched it as well. Funny, I can remember Fannie Lou Hamer, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the Chicago police. I can’t remember the name of a single one of those “good protestors’ who stayed home.
Right on. I lived through the 1960s protesting, too. Those two professors are total bourgeois sellouts, lower than a snake’s belly.
Obviously Kamala will not advocate for peace since she’s pocketed 5 million from AIPAC….
ps: the professors are aware of what they are doing and which side they have chosen.
and which side their bread is buttered on.
56 years after the fact, the demonstrations in Chicago continue to provide us a flash point for discussion. That would have never happened had people not gotten into the streets.
This article makes it clear that the “Democratic Party” is neither democratic, nor leftist, nor progressive, nor anything but a Deep State tool whose primary purpose is to defang and delude through fearmongering, even more constantly and consistently than Lucy deludes Charley Brown about finally getting to kick the metaphorical football. If you love perpetual war, genocide and polarization, the Democrats are perfect; if not, stop letting them manipulate and fool you.
“The Company You Keep”
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