#AntiWarSoWhite - Responding to a Braindead Article
At first, I wanted to quote Jacqueline Luqman’s disgusting piece in full. I’ve decided to spare the reader, but the masochists among you can read the full thing here.
The basic summary of her article is “I disagree with some anti-war organizations on matters entirely unrelated to war, so I’m gonna discredit the entire anti-war rally”
I’m sure Raytheon, Boeing, and NATO are very pleased with her article.
Let’s begin.
Leftists, especially the Black left, do not share common cause with everyone who wants to end U.S involvement in Ukraine. The politics of some who call themselves anti-war cannot be ignored.
The Black Panther Party were Maoists, and Mao promoted the idea of “primary contradictions” which led the Chinese Red Army to focus firstly on defeating the Japanese imperialist aggressors before moving secondarily to the contradiction of the national bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, Lenin (one of Mao’s inspirations) says in “Only those who are not sure of themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances even with unreliable people”
I’m looking at this Rage Against The War Machine rally that is being organized by the Libertarian Party and I am genuinely confused about how folks on the left are involved in this at all. Oh, I understand the need to revive and mobilize a strong not just anti-war movement, but an anti–imperialist and people-centered human rights movement, so sure, sometimes we’re going to have to organize with people we don’t agree 100% on everything with. But THESE people?
The Libertarian party is more anti-oligarchy than the liars and charlatans of The Fraud Squad who claimed to be progressive. I myself certainly don’t disagree with Libertarian economic policy (the “free market” naturally inclines itself towards oligarchy, as an example) but the primary contradiction is, again, imperialism. The Libertarians are the only ones opposed to US imperialism. AOC and Bernie are bloodthirsty imperialists.
Oh I forgot, you don’t care about white progressives. So yeah, let’s move onto Jamaal Bowman; he’s also a rabid warmonger who’s been confronted by people on the question of his support for sending military aid to Nazis in Ukraine.
Bonus points for your own racialist worldview! That reporting was done by a Black woman so now you can’t criticize it and it must be true!
… if one would look at the list of demands on the Rage Against The War Machine webpage […] one easily agrees with not sending one more penny to Ukraine, to slashing the Pentagon budget, to abolishing war and empire, to disbanding NATO, and to freeing Julian Assange, among others reasonable sounding demands and think, “Well this is great, I agree with all of these things, so of course I’ll support/align with them!”
But, if you compare those nice-sounding words to the actual ideology of today’s Libertarian Party, and particularly of the Mises Caucus that has gained control of it, something starts to smell funny.
The only thing that smells funny is a supposed anti-war activist like Luqman siding with the Deep State and the War Companies in helping to divide an already-weak anti-war movement.
So let me hip you to who these people are and why I’m now calling this and the support from too many white so-called leftists in the anti-war movement, #AntiWarSoWhite.
How do you do fellow kids? Let’s get hip to this and take up arms behind the least-catchy hashtag ever.
In fact, your hashtag isn’t even just bad. It’s easily memed into the reverse.
#AntiWarSoWhiteSoWhat? are white people not allowed to be anti-war? are people who hold conservative views about LGBT+ cultural issues not allowed to oppose imperialism?
Again, Mao united with the anti-communist KMT to defeat the Japanese. Did Mao (the famous communist) become an anti-communist in so doing?
If woke Jacqueline Luqman unites with anti-woke anti-war activists, does she become anti-woke in so doing?
Luqman might not budge, but this is an appeal to the peace-loving reader: Unite to defeat the American Empire!
Back in May of 2022 Reason Magazine…
I’ve removed this entire section. We get it. The Libertarian Party isn’t your favorite organization in the world. Have you considered that maybe there’s bigger things at stake? Perhaps the avoidance of nuclear war?
She’s fucking ridiculous. It’s called a coalition. Coalitions by definitions include different and separate entities, otherwise those entities would just join and have no need for a coalition.
Let Mises Caucus Libertarians tell it, though…
Several more paragraphs about the minutia of the Libertarians. I’ll again generously point the so-inclidned to the original.
Because it is worth noting that the money is drying up for the Libertarian Party because of this rightward shift the Caucus has created. Long-time significant donors to the L.P. have said that the Mises turn made them stop funding L.P. candidates. At the time the Reason article was published in March 2022, the number of active donors to the LP including several major ones, had been falling for seven straight months following the four-year battle for control of the party between the old-guard Libertarians and the Mises Caucus. And now that the Mises Caucus has won, this rally is part of their strategy to win and expand their party’s political power.
Maybe the money’s drying up because they’re becoming increasingly hostile to the existing status quo. Maybe corporate donors controlling our political system isn't a good thing, actually.
Perhaps you should be more suspicious of the organizations that are buried in money, like how Black Lives Matter turned into a posh profiteering scheme after the original Ferguson activists mysteriously died.
You don’t believe the Libertarian Party (who hates the CIA and FBI!) would be allies with you to find out who killed those Ferguson activists and bring justice against our evil corrupt government?
And here I have to go back to the folks who choose still after all that has come to light about the Libertarian Party and the Mises Caucus. I wonder if they are asking themselves what the Mises Caucus-led Libertarian Party will do with the political power they win if they are able to cash in on the legitimacy they are looking for with this event. And if they are asking themselves that, who do they think they would wield that political power against?
Of course, they will use that power against the people they have already told us with their own words and actions that they want to use it against, to disenfranchise the marginalized the way the GOP that they are actively courting to grow their ranks are already attacking. The Libertarian Party under Mises Caucus control will help the GOP do it, and what will these white Latte Leftists do then? Despite the delusional assurances of some who have engaged me, they will not change the minds of these people because the L.P. is not interested in changing their ideology. And these white Latte Leftists are not demanding that they do.
Left-wing attendees aren’t seeking to change the Libertarian Party. They’re seeking to build the broadest-possible coalition of anti-war people, which includes the anti-LGBT anti-trans anti-whatever-the-fuck else you’ll find in rural America (which is derided by woke freaks like yourself as “fascist” on the basis of their social views.)
Among many of the white alleged leftists who challenged my analysis of this L.P.-backed #AntiWarSoWhite rally, I seem to recall none of them engaging with other anti-imperialist groups for nationwide protests against a potential war in Ukraine as far back as the beginning of February 2022. Facebook reminded me that I was at such a rally. You see, we anti-imperialists have been protesting imperialism, war, and THIS war in particular for quite some time, even before this war with Russia using Ukraine began. We saw it coming and were protesting against the possibility, if not the inevitability of the US/EU/NATO coalition pushing it. But let these alleged white veterans of the anti-war movement tell it, a real powerful anti-war coalition couldn’t have been built until the L.P. rally came along, so if we value our lives we’d better hop on that bandwagon.
The truth is, however, that if they ever valued our lives, they would have been organizing with us all along, but too many white so-called anti-war veterans have not been, and that’s why much of what is considered the anti-war movement - as much of it as there is left - is also an #AntiWarSoWhite formation.
So if someone hasn’t been there from day one they’re not trustworthy? Have you considered that maybe subjective conditions of the human consciousness have a delayed response to the objective conditions of reality?
That is, things have been bad for Black Americans for a long time, nobody disagrees with this, but now that whites are also beginning to wake up to the evils of this bloody empire, you’re suddenly going to push them away?
Have fun losing.
… Hell, these white leftists won’t even ADMIT that the folks organizing this rally have a bigotry problem, let alone require them to repudiate it as the Black Panther Party did with the members of the Young Patriots who may have been racist, as Frederick Douglass did in challenging the system of white supremacist domination. No, these white Latte Leftists are not making ANY demands of the organizers of this event for their party’s bigotry and that of some of the speakers aligned with their party, but they are making all the demands of US to capitulate to them, So the misuse of our own history against us is an additional racist insult committed by the #AntiWarSoWhite crowd on the so-called left.
Come to the rally and talk to these people. Interview them. Do what Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition would’ve done. Figure out if they’re really this insane caricature you make them out to be.
The Russian Revolution was carried out by a working class that had just years prior being doing anti-semitic pogroms, but the Bolsheviks found ways to rally them up and turn them against such backwards racists ideas.
Further, there is also the very uncomfortable truth that too many white people on the so-called left do not want to be in coalition with people who aren’t like them. They don’t want to have to deal with conversations about their racism and white supremacist tendencies, their patriarchy, their homophobia and transphobia, their ableism, their superior attitude as if they know All Things Organizing, and their resistance to being led by nonwhite non-men. They want to organize with people who only want to talk about how war and maybe capitalism affect our class as a whole, but they do not want to talk about the additional oppressions that are heaped on those of our class because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. There, I said it out loud for you - too many so-called white people on the so-called left who claim to be anti-war do not want to be led by people of color because they’re tired of talking about racism, and they want to continue to call the shots.
You’re literally guilty of this, unwilling to be in coalition with people who hold different social views than you. Social views are less important than class views. The highest stage of capitalism is imperialism. The primary imperialist force in the world is the United States and its lapdogs in NATO.
You are rating homophobia as a higher threat than nuclear war.
I myself am opposed to bigotry, but I also recognize that if someone is anti-gay for religious reasons, but they’re opposed to nuclear war, I can work with them. The Nation of Islam, due to their religious beliefs, are opposed to abortion, I’d still work with them on the many other points I agree on.
And look where that’s gotten us, a bunch of people who claim to be anti-war activists tripping over themselves to give a bunch of bigots legitimacy because western chauvinism and American exceptionalism has them really believing that a movement ain’t right unless it’s led by whites. The resistance to focusing the anti-war effort on the people who are and always have been most impacted by imperialist warmongering is something they refuse to confront, struggle with and overcome. So they don’t want a real anti-imperialist coalition, they want their own #AntiWarSoWhite movement.
Luqman’s galaxy brain: Opposing the US War Machine is western chauvinism and American exceptionalism.
My observations here are less of a condemnation of any of these groups - organizers or participants - and more an honest analysis of the factors that lead me to see this Rage Against The War Machine rally of the L.P. as a dangerous distraction from true anti-imperialist coalition building and organizing. People and formations must make decisions about who they align with based on their own principles of unity and shared interests, but there should also be principles of solidarity with the most marginalized to bring no harm to them with the alliances we make.
The point of making anti-imperialist coalitions is to win. That means you’ll need as many people as possible. That means people you’ll disagree with. Grow up.
I just know that the interests of the working class, poor, oppressed, and colonized people who are marginalized additionally by racial oppression, gender oppression, ableist exclusion and other intersectional points of struggle are not served by aligning with people who would continue those oppressions should they ever win enough power to be able to do it.
We cannot afford to lend those groups legitimacy now, only so they can win the power to use it against us later. It is a grave betrayal of our humanity to demand that we do.
Thank you, Jacqueline Luqman, for your thoughts. The peace-loving world abhors you, and your legacy will be enshrined in infamy as the woman who opposed an anti-war rally on the basis of their not being woke enough.
“Only those who are not sure of themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances even with unreliable people”
Rage Against the War Machine
Now that all of that is out of the way, come to DC this Sunday to attend the rally and meet normal people with all sorts of diverse opinions who all agree that the war must end!
P.S. Luqman will probably accuse me of ableism for using the word “braindead” in my headline, instead of “neurodivergent” or some other Ford Foundation-approved language.