Who’s behind the far right

Nothing is more dangerous for the working class of the United States than the rise of neo-fascist and KKK-type groupings.

The armed vigilantes aiming their racist terror at immigrants on the Mexican border; the Klan cross burners in an area of suburban Detroit; and now a racist gang in Brooklyn, N.Y., that jumped out of a van, beat and might have killed a young Black man except for the courageous intervention of a Black couple driving by.

These racist, neo-fascist attacks cannot be dismissed as isolated events carried out by a few miscreants. The paramilitary Minutemen are openly encouraged by the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security, which even offered to give them legal status. Attacking immigrants is cheered nightly by Lou Dobbs on CNN. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate is now spread all too frequently, from judges’ seats to political cartoons in local newspapers to Hollywood blockbuster movies.

The politicians decry “intolerance,” but the fact is that behind the emergence of these racist, neo-fascist groupings and attackers are the very forces that are behind the war on Iraq. These are also the very forces that put Bush into the White House.

Big Oil and the military-industrial complex create the climate of fear and hatred as they pursue open wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and clandestine wars on Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, as well as the occupation of Haiti. With every one of these interventions, the message is that people of color are expendable if they stand in the way of U.S. global ambitions.

We’ve seen that Big Oil and the military will use any means—legal or illegal, paramilitary, torture, whatever—to obtain their goals. But this does not stop at the U.S. borders. These same means—illegal, paramilitary, racist torture, whatever—can be resorted to by Big Oil and the military-industrial complex domestically to keep their domination at home. The prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has its parallels in the racist treatment of working class prisoners in the U.S. In fact, some of those guards got their training in the prison-industrial complex here.

And while Bush professes to be spreading democracy around the world, thousands just demonstrated in Atlanta on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act to protest the racist exclusion of Black people in the elections here.

Sheer might is never enough for domination, as imperialists have to be taught over and over. People will resist occupation and oppression, as Iraq has shown.

Here at home, the only way to stop the threat is to act now, not to wait. Neo-fascist groupings and racist terror are not stopped by ignoring them and hoping they will go away. What has stopped them every time was a mobilization of the working class and the oppressed into mass action.

As leaders of the Million Worker March Movement point out, the labor movement here has been greatly weakened for decades because of the leaders’ tolerance of racism and imperialist aggression. Any rebuilding of the labor movement has to put these issues at the top of its agenda.

But most workers aren’t even in unions. What’s required is the broadest possible alliance of all progressive forces for a united struggle that can really put a halt to war, racism, anti-immigrant terror and neo-fascist threats.