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Papa Doc Baraka Fascism in Newark
PDF downloadable here (2.8 Mb.)
By Costas Axios and Nikos Syvriotis
including a special appendix
Why the CIA Often Succeeds
By Hermyle Golthier Jr.
Sections of this pamphlet first appeared in New Solidarity, the newspaper of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
To document the rise of fascism in Newark this newspaper has committed a substantial portion of its staff resources to an extensive investigation of the public record, cross referencing every bit of information with existing files, interviews, and on-the-spot investigations.
Published by the National Caucus of Labor Committees August,1973
This pamphlet is part of a nationwide campaign by the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, to expose and destroy the fascist machine of Newark's Imamu "Papa Doc" Baraka, LeRoi Jones.
We do not hide our aims; at this point in history we cannot afford to.
Around the country millions of welfare victims, youth, drug addicts, and increasing numbers of unemployed workers are being herded into slave labor. As the economic depression worsens, slave labor becomes the immediate objective of Hie bankrupt capitalist class.
Baraka is the criminal who funnels Newark's black population into the government's slave labor machine.
Shortly we will be witnessing the National Guard, the army and the police invading any ghetto that attempts to rebel against the crimes practiced against Troops will be sent to crush workers who dare to challenge the government's effort to recycle them into slave labor. Para-military bands of fascist desparadoes will be hurled against any sector of the population that raises a protest against the slave masters.
Already Baraka uses his fascist thugs to crush workers who strike and struggle for a better living. Baraka works with the police. Baraka justifies the brutal killing of ghetto residents.
To prevent the new potential for a classwide workers' movement emerging out of this depression, the CIA preys upon the backwardness of masses of people. The CIA buys up local militants who exacerbate divisive tendencies within the population—who divide the working-class ferment along racial and ethnic lines so that the banks may conquer. The CIA is not Mission Impossible, mysterious and far away. If s in the "community board" down the street from where you live, in the pimp who organized you to beg for non-existent government crumbs, in the agent who herds you into slave labor with a "Win Through WIN" pamphlet, in the hireling who drivels about "local control of your slum," in the cultural nationalist who teaches you that poverty is a race issue.
Baraka is a CIA pimp, Baraka is on the CIA payroll. He organizes under CIA direction to prevent the ghetto from allying with working-class forces of other races and nationalities in a fight against the government
In preventing a socialist movement from emerging, the government prepares the population for fascism. The working class will remain fragmented, with each little group reduced to desperate, violent hustling under depression conditions. "Radicalized" whites will invade black ghettos. Blacks will be used to scab on whites. Lumpenized youth will be organized to crush the struggles of their own parents. Each community will ultimately find itself divided along racial and ethnic lines, each one governed by its local slave labor Fuehrer, under a national fascist dictatorship.
Baraka collaborates with white fascist Tony Imperiale to reduce the residents of Newark to two desperate mobs that will accept "local control" government whose austerity programs—pro-poverty programs— will make Newark's miserable past look like a paradise of freedom and prosperity.
The capitalists consciously prepare the population for fascism by spreading ideas that confirm people's current belief that they are powerless, doomed beasts. Academic leaders like R, F. Skinner teach that man is an animal who adapts to any environment—even to slave labor which Skinner promotes. Arthur Jensen teaches that blacks are inherently inferior. Rockefeller funds a zero-growth movement which preaches that the capitalist crisis is a result of too many people, thus paving the way for future genocide against a "surplus population."
[Caption: Baraka's slave sharecroppers planting cabbage and beans in Newark's dump—while Papa Doc prepares them for the " final solution."]
Baraka is a vanguard part of this fascist propaganda machine. He receives funds; he gets access to the media in order to spread bestial racist filth. He propagandizes the Skinnerian lie that man Is nothing more than a "complexified" piece of meat He commits racist crimes by teaching that black people have an inherent 'black soul" which makes them into good slave-labor sharecroppers.
Baraka is a criminal agent of the capitalist class. He is one of the foremost enemies of black people in this country. If the CIA's "Operation Newark" is allowed to succeed, if machines like his are allowed to grow and spread through the country, we will be crushed by fascism in the next five years.
The Labor Committees do not hide our aims. We build the movement of the employed and the unemployed, welfare victims and the unionized, the youth with no future. We organize to seize power. In the process it is imperative that Papa Doc and Newark's counterinsurgency apparatus be driven out of town—that all Papa Docs, white and black, be defeated throughout the country.
" So what's happening with a guy (LeRoi Jones) who says he is for us but not against the government? Or one who says he's for us but against all whites —except the ones who kick his ass? "
— George Jackson Soledad Brother
LeRoi Jones Baraka: A Poet for Hire
'A Tramp with Connections'
Writing on Hitler and the Nazi movement^ Allan Bullock noted that in Germany "the gutter had come to power." It was there—in the gutter—that capitalism found Everett LeRoi Jones, just as in past moments of need it dredged the cesspools for the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the down-and-out political tramps. It will be remembered that Adolf Hitler, the radical eccentric super-nationalist received his education in the flophouses of Vienna while he was trying to gain acceptance into the higher circles of established "culture." Jones, in a rare moment of honesty, acknowledged both his heritage and his past: describing the lumpen of New York's Bowery, he once wrote: "They're just tramps. But I'm a tramp with connections."
Like his predecessors, he too had to tramp a long way before history created the necessary conditions which allowed for his connections."
According to a biographical sketch written by LeRoi Jones himself for "Who's Who" in lDGO he claims to have received a bachelor's degree from Howard University and a master's degree from the New School for Social Research in the field of German literature. Subsequent research by our staff has shown that his claims to academic stardom are a sad fabrication and that he never graduated from any of the above, or any other universities.
The fact itself is immaterial. But the reason why Jones chose to lie in that period about his academic background provides insight into his later development
Bohemian Poet on the Move
In the early 1960's, LeRoi Jones, the aspiring poet, tried to burrow into the world of poetry. He very quickly realized that the adage taught in freshman literature course, "art for art's sake," was as relevant as the moral code outlined in the pledge of allegiance or America the Beautiful.
The arrangement among poets then, as now, was "you publish me in your magazine, I'll publish you in mine." The catch being that you become publishable to the degree that you ally with the leading coteries that control the art columns, the professorships, the, journals and the like.
At the time Jones was desperately courting each contending school of poetry, begging for favor and recognition. Now plagiarizing from T. S. Eliot in a gesture to the latter's powerful followers, now and then copying from CyHara ("My poetry is whatever I think l am… I can be anything I can") and finally settling down in the peer group led by Charles Olson.
Jones modelled his life-style accordingly. A typical Greenwich Village Bohemian, with a RADICAL Jewish wife as he was fond of pointing out, and of course, a master's degree in German literature to boot Even his views on Black Nationalism were tailored to fit the tastes of literary companions. His followers today would no doubt be surprised that Guru Baraka in his earlier incarnation as LeRoi Jones had said that:
"African culture, a contemporary phenomenon, is almost as much a diverse collection of socio-cultural elements as the culture of the American Negro.
Only anthropologists and crackpots can formulate some kind of 'pure' African culture, i.e. if they want to arrive at some mythical ethnic statement that has very little to do with actual human existence."
The Dead Poet
For LeRoi Jones, poetry was not the celebration of feelings that liberate man by making him aware of the reality of the human condition. Poetry was merely "How you Sound." In other words, 'I can be anything I can," provided that the right hustle got dressed up in the appropriate mask for the suckers in the audience.
Having entered poetry with this motto it is impossible to say precisely when Jones, the artist died.
In his early, 'adolescent' period, he comes forward lamenting his impotence, prolonging his burial with confessionals, assuring us that it will all end in suicide.
...My life
seems over and done with Each morning I rise like a sleep walker and rot a little more.
The real Mr. Jones, however, suffered no greater agony than the miniscule audience that read these profundities. The long-established tradition among dead literati is to wear the mask of perpetual agony; to confess to each other and to sigh daily about an inevitable impending suicide which is forever delayed. This pastime among impotent artists provided a way to evade the real struggle to liberate oneself from the muck of surrounding society.
Jones's suicide notes circulated among the bored little groups of little poets, who read and wrote the little magazines in which they banalized their impotence —so as to live withlt comfortably from day to day, from coterie to coterie.
Jones lamented: "AH the lovely things I've known have disappeared/ He sought to escape from the real horrors of his plight by nostalgically indulging in the puberty fad of his times: " 0, God... I must have a belt that glows green
in the dark. Where is my Captain Midnight decoder?
I can't understand what Superman is saying!
THERE MUST BE A LONE RANGER !!!"
After a few years of the same rot Jones underwent a total collapse in morale. But it is in this period that our poet actually begins to speak of his real self—as evidenced by the dark gropings in the areas of impotence, sexual terror, and self-hatred.
... Disconnected
flesh.
the cock
on skin like
a dead insect
Or bestialized homosexual yearnings which he repressed in horror:
"... my flesh
a woman's
Walking all night
entwined inside. I mean
I tasted you, your real and fleshy
and choked"
And his fantasies of sexual terror, tinged with necrophilia:
-...Beneath her slippery meat The smell of Insides on the ground."
No doubt even this brief subterranean journey through the lower depths threw Jones into utter spiritual despair. Shackled by his bestial fantasies, unable to transform or roaster them, his verse tends to break down i into disconnected phrases and incoherence. In total impotence, his mind stopped functioning. Whatever little struggling humanity Jones had rapidly started to fade away and ultimately died out Jones turned to man and saw only the fascist beast that had already triumphed in himself.
"We are meat in the air,.. Meat complexified by evolution from the original stuff..."
In place of mind whose powers had failed him, Jones tried to discover the source of creativity elsewhere:
"The penis feels. The penis is also, because it
is able to feel, conscious, and has intelligence
of its own. No one can deny that intelligence
or at least no one should try...."
After burying all that which is human and alive, Jones begins to celebrate death like a vampire, as the only source of life. Ultimately he can locate his own identity only by sadistically parasitizing on the identity of others:
"I want I want what you have, having nothing, myself…"
He continues to exist as a soul-less person only by wearing the mask given to him by his latest of beholders:
"I can't say who I am
Unless you agree I'm real"
"Black Magic": A New Mask for LeRoi
Towards the early 1960's Jones decided toleave the small Bohemian world with its dead-end journals. Like the young Hitler in Vienna, he heaped scorn on those who had fed him. Olson et al. were unceremoniously tossed off into the "white mothafukin faggits" category. Rubbing it in, or rather stomping like the storm trooper he was to become, he turned on former friends with his newly acquired anti-Semitism.
IN HIS LONG CLIMB from gutter dweller to dashiki-clad counterinsurgency agent, Imamu Baraka, alias LeRoi Jones, has learned the art of "protective coloration," During his Greenwich Village bohemian period he spoke out against black nationalism saying that "... Only anthropologists and crackpots can formulate some kind of 'pure' African culture, i.e., if they want to arrive at some mythical ethnic statement that has very little to do with actual human existence."
"...I got the extermination blues, jewboy. I got the hitter syndrome figured... ... one day, jewboys, we all... gonna put it on you all at once."
Jones and a handful of self-described black militants, all living in Greenwich Village with their white wives— all now pretending to be Super-Black-Men—now made it a habit to meet in Harlem to discuss ways to express their "Blackness." Their blackness, however, was considered in Harlem to be a crankish perversion, though downtown it was acclaimed as the in thing by white liberals and the children of suburbanite ex-communists who had faded out during the 1950's.
By castigating them as honkies and devils; by labeling them as "oppressors," Jones rationalized FOR THEM their own lack of commitment to developing means of common struggle with the oppressed black population. His " revolutionary" plays were no more than a counterrevolutionary pandering to the instincts of his middle class audience.
His suburbanite clientele was not shocked but RELIEVED that they, the "oppressors," must stand aloof from the misery of the ghetto. Remit their sins by submitting to the flagellations of Super-sadist Jones; send in their once-a-year checks to the usual civil rites.
?????p9 missing
"What you have to do is picture Johnson, Khrushchev and Castro all lined up against a wall —naked. Mow honestly, who would you rather screw?"
In an exchange with Jules Feiffer of the Village Voice Jones admitted his confusion over the meaning of socialism. But he had a readymade solution to alleviate confusion: "I can be anything I can,"—socialist today, Democrat tonight, fascist tomorrow.
Now, having broken with his past literary and political backers, Jones proceeded to set up the Black Arts Repertory Theater with m ore money and notoriety than Greenwich Village could have ever provided.
The Molding of a Fascist
Jones's new career had an inauspicious beginning. His theater never managed to get off the ground and shortly it was actually falling apart. As the March 19, 19G6 New York Times put it:
One friend (of Jones) said the seed of black nationalism Mr. "Jones planted... just grew wildly, until, respectable Negro artists and intellectuals who had been attracted by Mr. Jones's reputation as a playwright were choked out and only the group of violent black racists were left."
Unexpected financial difficulties also took their toll. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, then leader of Harlem's political Mafia, was trying to take control of HARYOU's poverty funds by ousting Clarkand cutting out the small-time pimps. Jones and a few of his theatre goons would tail Powell on his infrequent walking tours through Harlem, denouncing Mm, heckling, shouting — expressing in their own way their outrage over a possible loss of funds.
When Powell successfully forced Kenneth Clark out of HARYOU, the funds for the Black Arts Repertory Theater were not long afterwards cut off.
The Office of Economic Opportunity's previous laudatory attitude ("we'd rather see those kids fussing on the stage than on the streets") was now discarded as Sargent Shriver attacked Jones's Harlem Theater in March 1966 because of its "vile racist plays in language unfit for the youngsters in the audience."
Washington cut off funds and Jones was left out in the cold, a tramp, only now without any connections.
Our hero, dejected, broke, ignored and ridiculed as a crank... how much like Adolf Hitler he must have felt in that period — like Hitler of the cold Vienna days. Jones's Mein Kampf experience as an outcast thrownin the oblivion of the gutter had only begun.
Bankrupt in every sense of the word, Jones was forced to use the kind of recruitment methods now well known in Newark.
In March 1966 the police arrested six of Jones's henchmen for shooting and wounding Lawrence P. Neal, a black poet and magazine editor who refused to join their organization.
Neal was shot one block from Jones' s theater, and a subsequent police raid on the theater "turned up a loaded .30 caliber carbine, two rifles, a pistol, a cross bow, clubs and bandoliers of ammunition,"
Jones, fearing he would end up as a common jailbird, let it be rumored that he 'broke with the militant remnants of his staff early this year (1966)."
During his sojourn in the gutter, it was only natural that he acquired its culture and peculiar habits, of which the art of mugging is only one.
In July, Jones happened to meet Sheppard Sherbell, editor of the East Side Review, during the intermission of a jazz concert in the Village. Jones demanded a $100 fee for his neocrophiliac play " Experimental Death Unit No. I."
According to Sherbell, "Whenltoldhim thatl thought he was making no charge as did Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg... he and three men who were with him jumped me and took my wallet (and watch) with $10... the other three guys at least punched roe... but LeRoi bit and scratched."
Jones must certainly have spent time soul-searching after this shady incident Ten measly dollars and a wristwatch — certainly mugging was not the trade to satisfy his prodigious appetite.
As he mused over his predicament, the word was going around that big money could be made in Newark.
In 1964 Prudential had brought in Cyril Tyson from Harlem's HARYOU to prepare the way for "community control." The fight between Addonizio and the community poverty pimps was in full swing. No Black Mafia of the Clayton Powell variety that had tossed him out of Harlem had yet been created. Newark as seen1 from the lower depths was a hustier's paradise; Jones packed up and returned to his home town with a new name and grandiose aspirations for a new career.
He would be of no use to anybody there and would continue to tramp for a while. It took a major catastrophe, the financial bankruptcy of a whole city, a ghetto riot, the mass execution of ghetto residents and the disintegration of Newark's political machine before LeRoi Jones, now renamed Imamu Amiri Baraka, would be picked up in the tender nourishing hands of the insurance companies and the federal OEO apparat and made into a major figure.
[Caption: Dr. Kenneth Clark
…At the research center, ... we hope that we can begin to demonstrate ttiat many of the techniques that have worked so effectively in developing the war machine... by Rand and other such organizations can with equal effectiveness be used in addressing problems of the cities, ghettoes, the poor, and the like"]
The 1967 Riot and The ClA-Baraka Deals
In Arabic, "baraka" describes the quality, say, of an old pot, dented and grease-encrusted, -which by every reasonable standard should be replaced by a more modern utensil. It nevertheless is kept on because of that intangible "spiritual" something its possessor imagines it imparts to that which is cooked therein. According to Aunt Jemima Baraka, the slums of Newark have such irresistible "baraka" or 'soul."
The choice of his new name was appropriate, for he rose by way of the total disintegration of Newark. This devastation is now policed by Imamu, who preserves the rat infested " baraka" for Prudential Insurance and the government.
While roost U. S. cities have been sliding into a depression since the early 1960's, the economy of Newark had already collapsed in the late I950's. It has moved downwards ever since. The character of Newark was once pinpointed by Addonizio's Mayoral Assistant Donald Malefronte, when he remarked that "wherever America's cities are going, Newark will get there first."
Newark's "Baraka"
Today 30 per cent of Newark's pre-dominantly black population is on some form of welfare.
There is 14 per cent unemployment, including 12 per cent among whites. The percentage of underemployed is another 25 per cent.
Forty per cent of the teenagers who are out of school are totally unemployed.
The local and state governments have consistently pursued a vicious policy of systematic destruction of the city's manpower potential. A 1967 report of the Business and Industrial Coordinating Council indicated that "Newark high school graduates are generally unemployable because they have not mastered the basics of reading and writing..."
In order to remain a tax haven for business, the State of New Jersey has the lowest education budget in the U. S. A.: $18.88 per capita, while more than half the states spend $41.53 per capita.
The state's remaining manpower-maintenance programs—such as health, welfare, correctional instruction, employment security, personal service expenditures, etc.—also have very meager funding: $37.17 per capita, whereas the median for the nation as a whole is $62.69.
Of Newark's 75 schools, 31 were built in the nineteenth century and 44 are more than 50 years old.
Official agencies have estimated that "the cost of improving the school system and providing a full education for everyone under IB is roughly three to four times the present outlay for operations and capital improvement—or about $150 to$200 million for operations and well over $200 million for new construction.
In the meantime, under these depressing circumstances, Newark's high school drop-out rate is well over 32 per cent, while an official survey showed that "the reading medians for Newark show that well over one-half oi the secondary school pupils are or will be functionally illiterate."
The city's drained and squeezed working class, left with little or no work, drained of its productive power, the illiterates, the welfare victims, the brutalized and underemployed manual laborers, black, Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, all live in a hellhole of housing, built decades ago. rotten, collapsing and overmortgaged. Since 1967, twice as many housing units were made totally uninhabitable as were built. Within the last ten years rents rose by 62 per cent
While this looted population is the main source of tax revenue, it has been hit by a severe decline in medical services, an alarming spread of malnutrition, and a high incidence of drug addiction.
In short, the population of Newark has been programmed for final extinction. They will be allowed to exist as long as there is a drop of blood left in them to pay for taxes, rents and mortgage payments. This sums up the economics of Newark's inner city.
The Chamber of Commerce and all concerned authorities agreed that as far as housing, education and employment went, criminal squalor and bone-crushing poverty were here to stay.
'Where then, are the required resources to come from?" asked the authors of former Governor Hughes's report.
• The city has reached its limit in revenue raising capacity... Nor should it be assumed that the Federal Government, for avariety of reasons, is going to produce the-amounts needed/ Taxing capitalists being taboo, and unable to squeeze the needed amounts under the existing political framework, the government turned to community-control counterinsurgency to dupe the population into accepting the austerity of the future.
Addonizio: Politician of the Past
Mayor Addonizio, an old-time ward boss liberal, was not destined to lead Newark's march into the future.
Addonizio's machine, based on Mafia connections and Uncle Tom storefront ministers, did not offer the right type of apparatus required by counterinsurgency plotters.
[Caption: Repairmen try to patch up the roof at one of Newark's dilapidated schools. Like Garvey's steamship company it fell through!]
As the 1967 riots were to demonstrate, that machine, relying on a nineteenth-century ward boss system with its patronage relations, the petty handouts, the favoritism, the back-door deals and small-time corruption, was politically inadequate to the task of administering the vicious martial environment of Vietnamization it had already begun to impose.
When the first installment of the Vietnamization funds came, they were swallowed down in the old familiar way without advancing the operation one bit
The New Careers Program, administered by the Rev. Councilman Calvin West, swallowed $1.7 million by creating unauthorized positions filled by 125 people who happily munched a total of $350,000 for sitting listlessly on their desks.
The Department of Labor, seeing that counterinsurgency was not getting anywhere with the Addonizio machine, discontinued the program.
Prudential Insurance, which according to the Wall Street Journal" exerts a quiet but powerful influence at City Hall and in the government," prepared for Addonizio' s dismissal by inviting Cyril Tyson to oversee the counterinsurgency in that city.
The early days were far from smooth, and it was to be some time before "Operation Newark" really got underway. From the start Addonizio was well aware that under the guise of the new "area boards" apolitical machine was being built to replace him. He used every opportunity, each incident, to discredit the new program and to pressure Washington into giving up the project.
On the other hand, Prudential had to face the mounting opposition of Newark's residents to their communlty-1 control scheme. The community's attitude was apathy at best and at times vociferous disapproval as can be seen from one resident's account before a Congressional Committee:
"I represent Area Board 9. At the inception of the poverty program the people in the area felt we did not need this Area Board 9... Now the CAP (Community Action Program) came Into our area and said you must have an area board. They would load the meeting with people who didn't live in Area Board 9 and say, 'Well, you must have an area board; we have to have nine boards; this is the way we want it"
Despite Tyson's need for extra help, Baraka was judiciously excluded at this very delicate stage. Even .though he was virtually begging for apiece of the action •and some of the funds, his reputation as a racist mugger was still fresh in peoples' minds—and Prudential could not then afford the type of scandals that had driven him out of Harlem.
Up until the 1967 riots Baraka had neither influential friends nor funds. Left out in the cold by the government, he had to depend on his own meager political capabilities, which never took him very far.
He tried to mimic other black organizations in the wishful hope that some of their growth would rub off on him. He professed to be an "orthodox Suni Muslim" and gave the usual soapbox "kill whitey" speeches while agitating for "militant community defense,'
None of these shenanigans worked. At the end he was left with an unstable cult of a handful of followers, who for lack of any other activity were recruited into his Spirit House Theater.
Karenga
Ron Karenga—the " Great Teacher " —a police agent and murderer of Black Panthers.
Perhaps demoralized by this state of affairs, Baraka took some time off from his Newark organizing and went to the University of California as a guest lecturer. It was there that he made the acquaintenance of the person he looks up to as the high Priest of Kawaida—the notorious police agent-cultural nationalist, Ron Karenga. Ever since their fatefui meetings in Los Angeles, Baraka has elevated Karenga to the position of a Black Moses, reverently referring to him as the 'Great Teacher,"
Like Moses, Karenga showed Imamu a path leading out of the wilderness, a method with which to guide the lost tribe in Newark to the milk and honey of fascist organization.
The history of the 'great Maulana" is quite revealing. He began his political career by forming a small cultural nationalist sect called the US, in Los Angeles.
Most of his time was taken up by designing custom-made dashikis for his members and devising weird rituals and strange fashions, like shaved heads and Fu Manchu moustaches. All this was calculated to impress ghetto residents during his group's nocturnal ritual of cursing out the police on street corners.
With the growth of the Panthers in Southern California, the police finally found some use for their local afro-cosmic lunatic.
Karenga was hired by the Criminal Conspiracy Section of the Los Angeles Police Department. His duty, as later exposed by Ms liason man Louis Tackwood, was to "stop ttie spread of Pantherism." Karenga's US hoods harassed BPP organizers, broke up a few of their meetings—all of this under an umbrella of police protection.
In 1969 things came b a head when Karenga's hitmen assasinated two Black Panther leaders in the hallways of UCLA.
According to Tackwood, both the orders and the weapons came directly from the Criminal Conspiracy Section.
The ensuing cover-up was so scandalous that the police were sheepishly forced to admit that Mayor Sam Yorty "consistently" hindered persecution of the US
Baraka was greatly impressed by the fact that this man who resembled himself so much was able to rise out of the gutter onto the police payroll. Obviously fascinated he adopted flie Seven Principles of Kawaida—as his own.
The "Seven Principles"—"Seven because the number is a meaning symbol of this world. Like a throw of dice it speaks of spiritual concepts and scientific principles"—add up to a regurgitated version of the Nazi credo.
The Fuehrer Speaks:
"Thbe Zionists control the radio, the television, the movies, the education, the intellectual life In the United States, the morality of the United States...The minute yon condemn them publicly, you die. They will declare war on you forever... What is weird is that certain peoples always get niggers to fight harder for them than they fight for niggers. For instance the radicals, the Jewish radicals have bloods willing to die to see Jews get political power... We must not become the peasant army for the rising tide of Jewish political power."
Among the first principles is a commitment to "Ujamaa,"a mythical African socialism—the same type of socialism that Hitler's storm troopers pledged their allegiance to—a vague radicalism lacking any positive notion of human development
Then comes the "volk" under the heading of 'Umoja" "to strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, race." There is even a little Fuehrer Principle, "Imami," which calls upon the faithful "to believe with all our heart in our ...leaders,"
Up until his arrest (for rape) the "great teacher" would always be beside his pupil during crisis periods. Not so much to provide spiritual consolation, as to lend his hired assasins for the purpose of convincing Baraka's opponents about the righteousness of the Fuehrer's new Kawaida.
For the time being, though, Baraka had to leave his teacher and get back to Newark to prepare his group for the "long hot summer" that everyone was predicting with scientific certainty.
There was a minor two-day riot in Newark between Wednesday, July 12 and midday Friday, July 14, 1967. Ghetto youngsters roamed in the streets, throwing stones at police, burning and looting liquor stores. The city's police, with neither plans nor training in riot control, opted for a low profile posture, avoiding excessive use of force mainly out of fear and bewilderment.
In the early morning hours of Friday, after a long vacillation and confusion, Police Chief Dominick Spina tended to conclude that the riot had spent its momentum and that things would soon return to "normal."
A few minutes later, nevertheless, the decision was made to turn Newark into a lesson for potential rioters throughout the country. The New Jersey State Police and the National Guard were called in.
The real Newark riot started on Friday. About 4,000 National Guards and 500 state troopers were deployed around the city by 7:00 Friday morning. In the meantime New Jersey Governor Hughes, Colonel Kelly of the State Police, General Cantwell of the National Guard, Newark Police Chief Spina, Mayor Addonizio and some others were holding a general-staff planning session in Newark's Roseville Armory. Although reports came in that the ghetto residents' riot was definitely over by midday, Governor Hughes had decided to carry out a punitive operation.
He relegated operational command to Colonel Kelly and excluded Mayor Addonizio from further involvement in Hie operations. Hughes made an official statement characterizing the situation at hand as an "insurrection." The significance of the term lies in the fact that it Justified legally the Vietnam-type search-and-destroy operation that followed.
(Later, when the Governor was informed that no business in Newark was insured against "insurrection," he changed the characterization to "riot."}
The National Guard and the state and city police forces sealed off 14 square miles, setup 173 roadblocks, ordered a curfew and prohibited any movements to and' from the Newark ghetto.
Inside the sealed off area, troopers started an orgy of shooting, burning and mass arrests, breaking into homes and indiscriminately killing men, children and old women. National Guard units on numerous occasions engaged in coordinated mass firing at housing projects. The ghetto had been declared a free-fire zone.
During the actual riot of the ghetto residents on the previous Wednesday and Thursday, nobody had been killed and only 60 people had been arrested. On the other hand, Governor Hughes' punitive expedition re-suited in 24 deaths by shooting, with 1,020 wounded and 1,510 arrests. R319 rounds of ammunition had been fired.
While during the day troops were busy shooting at the frightened population, at night, under cover of darkness, they systematically engaged in destruction of black-owned stores. When the affair was over by Monday, the total damage of buildings was estimated at
[Caption: AFTER THE NEWARK RIOT, Jones was "persuaded" to become Prudential's local insurance representative.]
$1,967,140 and the value of goods destroyed, stolen, etc. at $8,284,060.
The objective of Governor Hughes' punitive expedition was to terrorize the ghetto population into quiet withdrawn submission. When the troops left, there is no doubt that the blood-bathed ghetto's spirit was broken, But that was merely half the job,
The government's real objective was not mere physical intimidation. No ruler in history ever relied successfully on simple raw violence. The basic ingredient of domination, i.e., moral terror and moral subjugation, was indispensable for the long-term stabilization of the ghetto.
The task of the authorities after the bloodbath was to instill in the ghetto a sense of guilt, to extract a declaration of repentance, to make the ghetto believe that it had sinned, and to turn repentance and guilt into a source of PRIDE for the mutilated victim. Without that, no stability or authority could again take root in Newark or in any other ghetto in the country, LeRoi Jones, willing to provide this essential service to the government, all of a sudden plunged into political stardom.
The Communist Conspiracy
The authorities used two approaches to implement their post-riot pacification plans. Though seemingly contradictory, both approaches were indispensable.
The one, mainly pursued by the local police authorities and by the anti- communist cranks of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was the fabrication and dissemination of a number of 'communist conspiracy" theories. The other, advanced by think-tank counterinsurgency agencies, was that LACK OF COMMUNITY CONTROL was the cause of all evil.
LeRoi Jones, unworried about consistency, embraced both theories. Actually, he and Governor Hughes, the original discoverer of the insurrection-communist conspiracy theory, seem to be the only two persons who managed to subscribe to both theories about what caused the Newark riot.
There is no mystery about the harmony of Jones's views with those of former Governor Hughes. As Tom Hayden and Ramparts Magazine put it back in 1968, Jones was trying to" save his ass." Jones had been arrested on Friday afternoon, July I4duringthesearch-and-destroy operations and, charged with illegal possession of firearms, he had been sentenced to two and a half to three years in jail.
Reliable sources point out that while in jail, Jones met with a number of people, including government agents and Prudential Insurance Company officials. At any rate, upon his release on bail, he immediately started contacts with Kenneth Gibson, already planning for a future mayoral electoral campaign.
After serving only a few days of his sentence and already out of prison on Mil, Baraka was quite frank a-about his future prospects. In replying to an interviewer's question "Would you accept money if they offered it to you now?" he said, 'Sure I would. But the only way .they would give me money now would be to do something they can use against black people.... "
The CIA was just about ready to hire Baraka, but before they did they had to make their lackey stoop low— low enough to lick up the excrement from his masters' floor. ..and to give a big, wide smile while carrying out this, Ms first assignment
Jones was called on to convince the ghetto residents that they had been duped by white left-wing radicals who had organized the riots.
OUTSIDE AGITATORS? Cops, not "communists," were responsible for bloodshed inNewark's!967 ghetto riot
Some months later, Jones appeared on a CBS radio show with Tony Imperiale, Police Captain Charles Kinney, head of the Newark Police Department's anti-subversion squad, and others to publicly affirm that an international communist conspiracy was behind tin Newark riot. Jones started with the statement:
'Recently, in the recent developments, sort of situation in Newark, the unrest caused by Dr. King's death, we found that a lot of the, in general, the kind of riotous situation has been caused by instigators, people who really have no interest in the community except to cause riotous conditions,
• We the Black Nationals in Newark believe that we can gain power in Newark through political means, and there are white-led, so-called radical groups, leftist groups, that are exploiting the people's desire for power, the black people's legitimate desire for power, exploiting it and actually using the black people as a kind of shock troops to further their designs....
• We know that there have been a lot of professionals working in the communities—a lot of white people working in our communities to do things that were not beneficial to black people." When CBS's announcer asked Captain Kinney if the Communists involved were "Chinese Communists" or "Russian Communists," Kinney replied:
'Well, again, though there are distinctions between them and some periodicals make great distinctions between them, they are communist-led, whether they are pro-Peiping or pro-Moscow. Some of this information that is coming and that's being used is coming right from Peiping, as a matter of fact, and it's coming from China by way of Canada, as a matter of fact, and this information is being used by these people and we're the target for today." The microphone was subsequently given to LeRoi Jones to explain the details of why these sinister conspirators had chosen the innocent Newark Police Department for their target. Jones never uttered a word about the real riots in Newark, the riot of the police and National Guard—nor about the real conspirators, Governor Hughes and the others who guided the punitive expedition. " Papa Doc" Jones actually not only whitewashed the butchers of Newark's black population, but also presented the police as a victim of vicious communist scheming.
In his 'riot" essays Jones tells quite a different story. There it is 'PowpowpowBoom !... On the roofs the marksmen of Shango and Allah look down and judge the dancers. A devil whirls into the flames, a new eye blind in the center of his skull Allahu Akbar...." One must keep in mind that writing has never been more than a hustle for Jones—an easy way to steal lunch money from suburbanite petty-bourgeois radicals who want to have a little peep at Mr. Superfly.
The Mysterious Dr. John (CIA) Rees
The CBS radio show did not suddenly materialize out of thin air; it was shrewdly put together by the domestic CIA.
Un the day of Dr. King's assassination, a meeting took place in' the office of Police Chief Dominick Spina, attended by LeRoi Jones and some of his United Brothers cronies, by Tony Imperiale, Bob Curvin of Newark CORE, Mayorai Assistant Malafronte, Kamiel Wadud, an orthodox Muslim leader, with suspect connections with various prison authorities, and finally by Professor John Rees, a Briton who appeared in Newark as mysteriously as he disappeared.
It was subsequently established that this meeting of reconcilation between Jones, Spina, and Imperiale, as well as one that followed it eight days later in Rees's own office, was the brainchild of Professor Rees. The CBS radio show was also his idea.
Rees, nearing his fifties, holds the position or Reader in Political Theory at University College at Swansea, Wales in Great Britain. When he was in Newark in 1968, he posed as director of a company he called New Goals, file, which he then said, was based" in Trenton, N.J.
Nobody has seen the offices of Ms company and persistent research to this date has failed to locate it or to establish flat a company under such a name was ever incorporated. Nevertheless, John Rees had absolutely no trouble contacting and gaining the confidence of the police and city authorities in Newark. He was, in feet, a top-level counterinsurgency expert who had been sent from "higher up" to coordinate the on-the-spot implementation of the pacification plan.
John Rees has gained notoriety in counterinsurgency circles by two of his better known works. One, titled "Lenin and Marxism," propounds the intriguing argument that Lenin overstepped the bounds of the "Marxist" theory of stages, in effect insisting that the Mensheviks and the pre-April Theses Lenin were the true Marxists.
Rees's other book, "Equality," contains in essence the blueprint on which Jones's overall assigned role, including the CBS broadcast, was based: equality, Rees argues, is " conditional" in that interest groups will always exist with varying abilities. These must be harmonized, and that demands a continuation of formal authority, shading over into coercion,
John Rees did a phenomenal job in implementing his theories to the letter in Newark. In an exchange between Tony Imperiale, representing one "interest group," and Jones-Baraka, representing another, the following was said:
IMPERIALE: "I don't say I love LeRoi, but I respect him."
JONES: "At least Tony Imperiale is an authentic ' spokesman for his people."
Rees's concept of "harmonization" of these "interest groups" with "varying abilities" was further implemented with the establishment of a "hotline" of communications between Imperiale's and Baraka's headquarters,
The whole strategy triumphed with a peculiar assertion of "continuation of formal authority, shading' over into coercion" when Captain Kiraiey, testifying before Hie House on Un-American Activities Committee, propounded at tedious length his theory of the "communist conspiracy" behind the not. said Kinney, Newark's chief anti-subversion cop:
"It was a very happy occasion for me to find myself in total agreement with LeRoi Jones."
Rees's books have been published by Praeger for the Hoover Institution, a government-sponsored left-surveillance agency, Praeger specializes in books put out by such notorious counterinsurgency organizations as the Institute for Defense Analysis, Ford Foundation, African Studies Center. Vienna Institute for Development, Hudson Institute, etc. Counterinsurgency titles promoted by Praeger include "The Fourth Dimension of Warfare," 'Rural Pacification in Vietnam," "Counterinsurgency: Theory and Practice," "Defeating Communist Insurgency," "Vietnam—Can We Win?," etc. Quite appropriately, Rees's publisher was the original publisher of Ford Foundation czar McGeorge Bundy's celebrated thesis in favor of community control and school decentralization.
Before his abrupt disappearance from New Jersey, John Rees made another gift to Jones, one that promises to become of paramount importance. Rees prepared a study for the government recommending that "Papa Doc" Baraka be supplied with his own private police, his Ton-Ton Macoutes, provided of course that Tony "Il Duce" Imperiale would also be assisted to organize his white Community Alert Patrol.
Although Rees's proposal for the ghetto's self-policing was not accepted at that time — it was the first «sueh plan to simultaneously arm two opposing communities — after the 1970 Gibson election it came up for implementation under the guise of the Impact anti-crime program, headed until recently by Baraka-sponsored Earl Phillips.
How Baraka Was Made Fuhrer of Newark
After the riot, in a comical gesture of despair, Newark's two century old newspapers dropped "Newark" from the masthead. In polities it was the other way around. The masthead — bourgeois democracy — with its liberal facade was retained while its structure and content were torn to shreds. To govern the scrapheap of Newark it was necessary to atomize the population by sinking goon-squad organizations into the very gut of the ghetto — organizations that would prevent any class-conscious movement of the oppressed from developing, that would terrorize and isolate any would-be organizer into a state of submission.
These organizations existed in the form of "area boards* and "community organizations,' but they were still in the hands of Hugnie Addonizio who seemed to believe tnat poverty programs were created in order' to nourish the appetites of ambitious mayors.
As late as 1967 an Addonizio poverty appointee, W. K. Wolfe, could tell Congress with a straight face that "one of the reasons for holding staff conferences in hotels, including a recent weekend conference at a nearby resort hotel, costing $3,000, was to provide the staff more opportunities to (eel at home in unfamiliar places."
Acting as organizer for the major banking, corporate and government interests, Prudential Insurance moved swiftly to dump the wasteful Addonizio machine at the earliest possible date.
On April 7,1968 Donald S. McNaughton, the executive vice-president of Prudential, formed the Newark Urban Coalition. This agency was to serve as a funding and personnel conduit servicing Jones's operations. Once the takeover was completed the Urban Coalition took a respite from Newark's political scene.
In the same month Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination nearly sparked off another riot Jones was provided headquarters at the CEO's United Community Corporation office, There he taped pacification radio speeches while shotgun-armed policemen guarded his valuable life. The Greater Newark Chamber of Commerce, whose head was a Prudential vice-president, sent over enough money to cover the expenses, including $5 a night for 500 youths recruited by Baraka into peacekeeping patrols.
In May McHaughtan appointed Gustav Heningburg fulltime president of the Urban Coalition Heningburg's .major asset for the job was that he had served in the U.S. Army's counterintelligence corps in Newark, functioning as a special agent and assistant operations officer. Heninburg was the ideal counterinsurgency field coordinator since he was black and knew the shadier parts of Newark's political terrain. A year later he would also appear as the chairman of Baraka's Black and Puerto Rican Community Convention.
With these maneuvers rapidly mounting Baraka was encouraged by his political backers to launch a premature head-on assault against the Addonizio machine as a test run. The targetwas the Model Cities program, whose funds haii been held up in Washington until the mandatory "elections* were held.
The same Baraka who only a year before was nearly murdered by the police in the streets of Newark now challenged the Addonizio-Mafia machine by declaring himself and a handful of rabble followers the "Ad Hoc Committee* to organize the Model Cities elections.
After legal bouts, trips to Washington, private elections by Baraka, howling from Addonizio and hectic activity by Prudential agents on all fronts, open elections to the governing board of Model Cities were held under OEO supervision on Aug. 14 1968.
Baraka the future Gauleiter received 28 votes; his mother, who was also on his slate, even fewer.
So in this fight, which was only a mild prelude to the storm ahead, Baraka's community support was exposed for what it was — zero. Prudential knew this quite well, and began to prepare the conditions under which Baraka would take over the city without any support at all.
Get Addonizio!
The counterinsurgency strategists, Shriver'sfeder-al agents, the governor of New Jersey, Prudential Insurance, Newark's Urban Coalition, and the Chamber of Commerce had by 1968 resolved to unleash a war
[Caption: Gustav Heningburg, fulltime head of Newark's Urban Coalition and former member of the U.S. Army counterintelligence corps.]
against Addonizio and the entire liberal political machine he was heading. The mayor and his cohorts were the main obstacle to their plan to Vietnamize Newark.
Obviously, it is impossible for any city to be run by two parallel, competing power networks. If Baraka's fascist structure was to be deployed and put to operation, Addonizio had to be destroyed first
The campaign was spearheaded by Governor Hughes's report, February 1968 in which it was explain-ed, the riots were caused by 1) the corruption of city government and 2) by the lack of community control which was "alienating" and frustrating the "people." In fact, Hughes's report was Baraka's and file Urban Coalition's transitional program: destroy city government and set up community control.
Baraka's defeat at the Model Cities election had demonstrated that Addonizio was still alive and kicking still had powerful connections in Washington among his own ilk, as well as support among the black ward bosses and storefront ministers of Newark. The important thing for the counterinsurgents was to destroy Addonizio's respectability among his bourgeois supporters and accomplices. Hence, all the filth about his Mafia connections was brought out in broad daylight, with every gory detail blown up to extraordinary proportions.
The campaign to get Addonizio was national in scope. Every major newspaper in the country was fed tidbits which drove Addonizio into a frenzy. NBCs Huntley-Brinkley Report ran a series on the mayor which quite fittingly ended with a commentator standing in Newark's cemetery delivering the following message: "Here lie the men who built Newark," an obvious hint that Addonizio was soon to join Newark's founding fathers.
When even the "Women's Wear Daily" ran an article on the Mafioso Mayor, Addonizio got his few remaining business supporters to finance a publicity campaign. Ads were put in newspapers saying "IT'S THE IN THING TO KNOCK NEWARK, BUT IPS THE WRONG THING." No matter how much he tried, however, Addonizio was becoming too hot for any of his cronies to touch. As his isolation increased, he felt the controls rapidly slipping out of his hands.
Coalition of Millionaires and Thugs
In the meantime, Baraka and his newly formed United Brothers forces were going into a frenzy of activity, deploying around the various poverty agencies, infiltrating, disrupting, harassing, softening up the victim, preparing to move in for the kill. One dark December 1968 night, Baraka met with Prudential vice president McNaughton and received $75,000 to finance a voter registration drive for the election of a Baraka-con-trolled mayor.
Addonizio's forces, especially his black stooges, seeing the danger posed by the Urban Coalition's support of Baraka, moved to counterattack. These upstanding clergymen formed the Committee of Concerned Citizens and issued a warning that the Urban Coalition represented an "unholy alliance between big business on one hand and the most violent and disruptive elements of the community." Baraka, undaunted by the assault, came out strongly in support of the Urban Coalition. He knew where his bread was buttered.
The Urban Coalition's board of trustees, which had impressed Baraka so favorably, consisted of the following: Henry Connor of the Greater Newark Chamber of Commerce; C. Malcolm Davis of Fidelity Union Trust; Leslie Blau, representing Newark real estate interests; Robert Lilley, Hew Jersey Bell Telephone 'President; and others, not the least distinguished of whom represented Prudential Insurance.
Baraka and his organization mobilized a variety of front organizations and "concerned individuals" and finally convened a meeting at the Abyssinian Baptist Church where they mercilessly castigated the Addonizio forces. The meeting issued a statement saying: "We commend the program of the Urban Coalition under Heningburg (former counter-intelligence officer) and McNaughton (the Prudential veep) and praise all its achievements,"
The alliance between Baraka and CIA-Big Business was to be consummated a few months later with the Black and Puerto Rican Convention. The mobilization that led to that convention was financed exclusively by Urban Coalition and Prudential donations. The convention itself, a product of many months' footwork by Jones and his organization, was chaired by Gustav Heningburg, the McNaughton-appointed executive president of the Urban Coalition. Kenneth Gibson was handpicked as their puppet mayoral candidate.
Before the culminating, point of the July 1969 Black and Puerto Rican convention, the Baraka forces had been capturing positions and wreaking havoc in their opponents' ranks for the entire previous year.
As first things are taken care or first, Baraka's
"The only way they would give me money now would be to do something they can use against black people...America...is a monolithic structure and you are either used by it or you knowledgeably work for it."
livelihood was secured by his appointment as chairman of the Robert Treat Elementary school Tifle I program. His appointment came after Baraka had mobilized his Black Women's Union front group into a campaign of picketing, intimidation and harassment. The person responsible for his appointment confessed that he put Baraka in charge of administering the $80,000 federally funded program 'under instructions from people with interest..."
Urban Coalition and Guerilla Warfare
But the main weight of the offensive was concentrated against the Addonizio stooges who were at the time in charge of the United Community Corporation, Newark's overall umbrella poverty organization that was handling over $5 million federal counter-insurgency funds per year. The battle plan against the UCC leadership was a fascinating ease study of guerrilla tactics.
Jones and Prudential agreed on a certain division of labor. Prudential and the Urban Coalition would spearhead the attack from above, discrediting Addonizio and his UCC stooges, sabotaging the UCC's board of trustees' meetings. Baraka would take care of assaults from below, mobilizing hooligans, packing meetings, terrorizing opponents and disrupting their meetings. The objective was to break the opponents' will to fight, to demoralize them completely and then move in for the kill.
In early 1969 the Baraka forces launched their attack in earnest. Baraka held a meeting with an aspiring Puerto Rican gang leader, Ramon Rivera. Rivera, who has been described as a "leader of a motorcycle club without motorcycles," agreed (for a
[Caption: MAMU BARAKA (LeRoi Jones) who pulls the strings for Prudential from Ms Newark headquarters, the Spirit House.]
small fee) to lent! his services in helping Baraka to take over the UCC. His gang, renamed Puerto Rican Youth United, attended UCC meetings along with Jones's goons, overturning chairs, threatening and demanding money from the "honkies."
Addonizio was trying to keep control by playing the ostrich game. In the first six months of 1969 The UCC was able to convene only two meetings for lack of a quorum. The Federal government stopped delivery on $181,000 and threatened to cut off all funds unless Addonizio made "constitutional changes," Addonizio meanwhile had his backers inundate the newspapers with articles and letters supporting the "good record" of the UCC and the "democratic" nature of its leadership.
At the fifth annual UCC meeting Baraka made his move. Before the meeting opened hoodlums from Rivera's gang, along with Baraka's people under the leadership of David Barrett, his second in command, moved into the auditorium and took their positions along the walls and corridors.
"As soon as the session got under way, the dissidents set up a din, waved signs, jumped on seats, shook their fists and even ran on stage to grab the microphone."
Rev. Levin B. West, President of UCC and one of Addonizio's trusted Uncle Toms, "was repeatedly shouted down. At one point he had to wrestle with someone from the audience to regain the microphone." A member of Puerto Siean Youth United got up and demanded $10,000, and a Baraka agent seconded him by threatening West "Either these brothers will be heard or there will be no meeting tonight"
"While Mr. West sat helplessly on the edge of the stage and some other top UCC officials left for home," Barrett, Jones's chief lieutenant managed to ram through a resolution calling for new elections in the immediate future. The Reverend made a plea that these proposed elections be clean and orderly and that ballot boxes be used to ensure their honesty.
A Baraka agent took the microphone and declared: "We will not use the machines... we feel the machines are rigged." The Star Ledger reported that "when
the meeting was over many were still trying to figure out what had happened."
Jones was not one of the perplexed. Four of his henchmen were "elected" to at-large positions; he had managed to pack and disrupt one of Ms opponent's stronghold organizations — and all of tMs without police intervention and with favorable press coverage to boot,
Addonizio threatened to take over control of all tbe poverty programs under the Green Amendment if "disruption did not come to a halt." He could not dare to do so as the forces against him grew and the Grand jury Indictments were handed down. His defense was now turning into a bankrupt vaudeville show,
One of Us publicity stunts included a Louisiana Congressman who came up to Newark and gave a speech at an Addonizio rally. While the Southerner rambled on about how Hughie Boy was the victim of an international commie plot, Addonizios boys handed out leaflets saying that "the Mafia is a myth"!
Baraka Frontal Assault
By then Addonizio's supports were crumbling all over the place. In mid-July Baraka directed a frontal assault on the UCC by his Puerto Rican Youth United front group. They took over the UCC office, threw everybody out, Dew the Puerto Rican and the Black Liberation flag and asked for a ransom of $12,000. UCC President West in consultation with his boss Addonizio, judged the situation to be desperate and opted for negotiation with the demonstrators.
This was a tactical blunder; the minute the Addonizio establishment agreed to negotiate the $12,000 ransom to the Puerto Ricans, in moved Baraka's Committee for a Unified Newark and claimed authority to supervise the negotiations. At that point, the discussion was thrown open for the "reform of UCC."
The Puerto Rican street gang got its $12,000 and its members went to buy motorcycles, leather jackets and other liberating items. The Baraka men stayed. The whole incident had been concocted in order to
strengthen the hand of the Barakaite quartet that had been elected a month before. This group, headed by Barrett, Jones's lieutenant succeeded in paralyzing all UCC functions till about October. At that point, the Addonizio forces in a last gast purged the "dissident group," as it came to be known, with the subsequent result of having federal funds held back.
The Prudential-counterinsurgency coalition retaliated with its coup de grace: Mayor Hugh Addonizio finally got indicted for " conspiracy to commit extortion" and sixty-five counts of actual extortion. The coming year was mayoral election year for the city of Newark.
The Blitzkrieg
Baraka and his people unleashed a veritable terror campaign against their black-liberal opponents, complete with assassination threats, actual beatings, huge vilification propaganda campaigns and the like. Non-Barakaite black mayoral candidates like Wright and Wheeler were harassed, their offices broken into and smeared with red paint, their cars slashed, their meetings disrupted with smoke bombs. Baraka's followers were all over the city breaking windows, ripping down signs and defacing political posters with their jests.
Addonizio and his people, seeing that not one penny-was coming from the business community to finance their campaign, started reacting like trapped animals. Uncle Toms like the Reverend West were running around screaming that "there is a conspiracy to victimize the Italian people."
In a last desperate gesture, Addonizio put all his faith in the old-style politics that had served him so well in file past: right before elections he raised salaries of municipal employees by $1,000. It was all in vain.
On election day, the Addonizio machine was smashed. Gibson, the stooge picked by Baraka and Prudential was the new mayor-elect.
The night Kenneth Gibson, a one time Junior Chamber of Commerce award-winner and petty clerk, was celebrating Ms victory rally, Prudential executive Charles N. Hayes showed up at campaign headquarters to look up his boys who dismantled Addonizio's archaic machine. "What the hell," he declared, "I'm a Republican, but this is a matter of conscience...Gibson is a very middle-class guy... a guy I can identify with."
In the midst of the electoral onslaught, on June 18, the Baraka machine had quietly taken over the United Community Corporation and the entire poverty apparatus of the city of Newark. It had been a rump meeting, packed with Baraka people. When UCC President West stepped into the lion's den, he immediately smelled something foul going on. He leapt to the microphone, announced that there was "no quorum* and adjourned the meeting.
Baraka's crowd, which had kept growing, felt disoriented for a moment But only for a moment. In the crucial minute of puzzled silence, a lawyer from the U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity made one of those timely CIA appearances and announced that the meeting was legal and that it could go on with the business at hand.
West received six votes and the road for the presidency was opened for David Barrett, Baraka's chief of operations. In a subsequent board meeting, the post of treasurer of the UCC was retained by Prudential Vice President Quillan.
After the takeover, the flow of counterinsurgency funds from Washington was restored. On July 17,1970 the Baraka team got approval to operate on a $5.5 million dollar budget A few months later it received the Baraka team got approval to operate on a $5.5 million budget A few months later it received an additional $4 million grant
Papa Doc Baraka was now Newark's king and he began to live on royal budgets. His next task was to implement the ruthless policing of the ghetto.
The shattered members of the Addonizio machine did not lick their wounds for long. True, they had been routed and their old cMef was on his way to a federal prison. But those responsible citizens could not stand idly by watching the Baraka people munch on Federal dollars. They came around begging for a piece of the loot
By mid-19 71, the old Uncle Tom cronies had put together a campaign to oust the Baraka forces from the United Community Corporation. They flooded the city with posters and page-long newspaper ads. They charged that Barrett had "not accounted for" over one million dollars and that he was "diverting an unprecedented amount of UCC money from community use to programs sponsored by a LeRoi Jones group." They tried to enlist the support of the New Jersey State administration and that of Mayor Gibson. They were turned away everywhere.
Finally, they resorted to a pathetic attempt to pack the June 18, 197! election meeting. But Baraka would not be beaten at his own game. The new UCC election was a closely policed affair. Baraka goons were deployed all over the place, controlling all access to the election hall.
While over two thousand "members of the community" were waiting outside, impatient to get in and cast their votes, the Baraka security forces were looking them over and allowed in only their own strictly reliable supporters. They were distributing membership cards to completely unknown newcomers as they were being unloaded from vans.
The more than two thousand supporters of the "responsible citizens" never got in to vote. Only 752 hand-picked oppressed members of the Black Nation voted the Baraka team for a triumphant second term. The total number of eligible voters was 12,000.
Ten days later Jones's goons invaded a Newark radio station and forced Miss Bernice Boss and her program "News and Views" off the air. The topic of the show was to be "the real story behind the UCC elections."
Newark now not only had a new government, but it also had a government of a new type. When the dust had settled it was evident to everyone that tae government was not in the hands of City Hall but in the iron grip of the nine area boards coordinated by the UCC and supervised by Imamu 'Papa Doc' Baraka,
The residents of Newark were soon to discover why the former tramp had been promoted. Very shortly and with a vengeance they would discover what was behind the new fascist machine and the new" community control" form of government.
The Vietnamizotion of Newark
Prudential-CIA Pull the Strings
Within months of Baraka's 1970 takeover of Newark his fascist cohorts received orders to move against Newark's predominantly black working class. Baraka's first assignment was to act as chief revenue collector tor the leading banks and corporations,
1970, the year in which Penn Central was forced into bankruptcy, was a very difficult one for institutional investors. Newark's financial powers decided that the only safe area for investment was in municipal bonds: consequently, the city administration was induced to float an "education" bond that increased the city's school debt from $57 million to $71 million.
At the same time, the Board of School Estimate REDUCED the school budget by $15 million. When Gibson took over the city administration in July 1970, running the school system and simultaneously paying interest to municipal bondholders was an absolutely impossible task.
Gibson himself declared in September that the city lacked the $5 to $8 million necessary to keep the schools open beyond December, 1970.
He never dreamed that this deficit could have anything to do with the $12 to $13million debt-service burden of the city. In fact, Prudential Insurance and Imarou Baraka had made him mayor in order to ensure the punctual payment of these millions.
Since the education budget is the major item in municipal expenditures, maintenance of debt payment obviously depended on the destruction of Newark's already inadequate school system. But between the insurance companies and their victim stood the Newark Teachers Union. Baraka's machine was immediately assigned to the task of destroying the 40 per cent black NTU.
In the course of the fight the NTU represented the most advanced working-class program, calling for the complete overhauling of Newark's school system, for the construction of new schools, reduction of class sizes, and a massive educational rehabilitation program which included a demand for $2,000 increase in teachers' annual pay. Newark teachers' starting salary till then had been $5,600 a year !
The modest working-class forces supporting the teachers' strike of 1971 included the Black Panther Party, the predominantly black Local 1199 and, of course, the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
The Axis
The strike was confronted with the formidable enemy coalition of the School Board, the Governor of New Jersey, the Chamber of Commerce and the entire Newark poverty apparatus spearheaded and directed in all its details by Imamu Baraka himself. Eon Karenga's organization, which had been slaughtering Black Panthers in California on police orders, had also sent its operatives to Newark for the double purpose of continuing the war against the pro-working class Panthers and boosting the fledging Baraka machine. According to reliable sources, VISTA, the Federal Government's domestic Peace Corps, played a role in gathering and sheltering Baraka mercenaries, including the assassins from Karenga's police outfit
Baraka's plan to bust the teachers union depended on forcing the teachers into a strike. With the NTU battered by its 1970 strike, which resulted in excessive fines, arrests, injunctions and submission to a complicated grievance procedure, very few chances existed for a 1971 strike victory.
In order to prepare the trap for the NTU, Gibson had been instructed to appoint three new Board of Education members right after his election, among whom Jesse Jacob was the most conspicuous Baraka front-man. The Board of Education began its union-busting campaign with massive firings and transfers of teachers in September 1970.
Simultaneously, Jesse Jacobs hired a certain Donald Saunders from Burlington County as a labor relations consultant for $28,000 a year. Saunders was a professional strike breaker, fresh from a struggle to break the union at RCA's plant in Camden. The Baraka-controlled Saunders soon became the Board's chief negotiator.
The scenario prepared by Baraka had assigned the Board of Education negotiator the task of provoking the union into a strike. Baraka's own personal role, and that of his lieutenants, would be to attack the union in the streets, on the picket lines, inside the schools —to throw an effective cordon sanitaire that would isolate the striking teachers from the rest of the black community.
In effect, Baraka's hooligans were to impersonate the "community* and to physically assault the teachers under the chiefs personal command.
Saunders kept his part of the bargain by postponing the negotiations into January 1971. Then, he broke up the very first negotiating session, saying that he had been "insulted." He insisted that he would not negotiate with "lackey" Carole Graves, the black president of the NTU.
Terrorizing the NTU
In the meantime, the Baraka machinery was put on a war footing. The same hoodlums who had helped him take over the United Community Corporation (UCC) and had terrorized black candidates who opposed the Gibson
[Caption: Baraka's credo: Serve government Beg from government. Ally with government. Terrorize the poor!]
[Caption: EDUCATION FOR WHAT? Baraka's African Free School emphasizes obeying "mama" (the teacher), chanting, inarching and memorization,]
ticket were regrouped and put on the payroll. David Barrett, Baraka's second in command, took over the field operation; as president of the UCC he issued a statement denouncing the NTU as a "sick, barbaric teachers' union," This man of culture then proceeded to organize a roving " squadistri" force of armed strike breakers. The resources provided by the Federal Government for community control were put to their intended use.
Trucks bearing the UCC insignia cruised through the- city transporting the fascist thugs to picket lines where teachers would be attacked, cursed at and threatened, Carole Graves, The black leader of the NTU, was physically attacked, windows in her house were broken, acid was thrown at her and her car was burned. Baraka's puppet Mayor denied her police protection on the grounds that the police lacked the manpower! On the second day of the strike teachers were given a foretaste of what was to become a routine affair. Fifteen teachers who were leaving the NTU offices for picket duty were attacked by an organized squad that was armed with clubs, pipes, fire extinguishers and wooden milk cartons.
The next phase, which had been planned months before in secret meetings with government agents and imported strike breaker consultants like Rhody McCoy of New York, was put into operation. The Board of Education obtained a court order against the NTU; the signers of the affidavits were none other than two self-appointed spokesmen who belonged to Barafca's Committee for Unified NewArk. Both Mrs. Broadusand Mrs. Banks gave the Spirit House—Baraka's headquarters—as their legal place of residence.
What followed was a barrage of arrests, legal blackmail and attempts to have striking teachers drafted into the army.
The end result has been to leave the union buried under a battery of suspensions, fines and convictions. The entire law enforcement machinery hangs over its head; Baraka hangs over its head, with its treasury empty, its membership left exposed to arbitrary dismissal, transfer) etc. at the whim of Barrett's so-called "flying parents' squads," the semi-permanent gangs of Baraka goons currently used for teacher harassment
Most important, the corporate investments in Newark school bonds have remained secure, with an AAA rating, and the educational system has been effectively destroyed, depriving ghetto children of any hope for decent education.
A lesson in Union Busting
If a worker wants to learn how a fascist movement operates to break labor organizations, he can look at Barafca's exemplary operation: the government and courts lead the attack from above while the street thugs spread 'terror in Oie street and on the picket lines. In Newark the ultimate success of this conspiracy was guaranteed by the failure of the Left to attack mercilessly the "community control" rhetoric of the Baraka forces and by the failure of the entire organized labor movement of Newark to come to the support of the battered and Isolated Teachers' Union,
Baraka's next task, and one to which he turned eagerly, was to transform his youthful victims into grotesque, countercultural zombies, if only on a limited experimental scale.
The Free African School
In September, 1970 the Federal Funding Office of the Newark schools granted Baraka $37,000 for his experimental brainwashing program known as "The African Free School," Baraka, whose literary output will provide psychologists with case study material on the necrophiliac mind, was given an experimental project of his own — "experimental" meaning that if it succeeds it will be implemented elsewhere.
Because of Baraka's reputation both he and his funders have kept the experiment as quiet and low-keyed as possible — for the time being at least Interviews are not granted, no questions are answered, and it is virtually impossible for an outsider to gain admittance into this or other Baraka project schools. The reason for this cloak-and-dagger atmosphere is quite simple—government connivance in this project is so scandalous that it must be hidden.
Federal guidelines demand that all federally funded programs be evaluated each year before new funds can be approved. In previous years, evaluations of federally funded programs were made by a well-known Newark consulting firm.
Baraka's school was analyzed by an unknown agency, the Communications Technology Corporation, which gives its address as a post office box and keeps its staff writers anonymous.
The favorable report which they submitted to the Federal funding agency is ungrammatical, inconsistent, and, when it delves into amateur statistics, outright comical.
The report describes some of the courses taught, like 'Language Study," a euphemism for pidgin Swahili, and "the study of Hieroglyphics" also "the requirements for science, health and safety are met... through its Simba Wachanga, history and 7th wonder studies."
The government previously knew the educational nature of the school. In another laudatory evaluation by Harlem-based AFRAM Associates, Inc. the results of Baraka's brainwashing are strikingly apparent
[Caption: IT'S OFFICIAL: Mayor Gibson handed over Newark's addicts to Baraka Henchman Donald Tucker.]
When a "consultant" asked a student what he thought of the school he replied: "The experience was upends all weusi watu. Get a Kusoeza. Kujichagiia, Umoja, respect, honor. I said that this darasani is better than the other classes because sisi get a better and the mamas upends all weusi eatu," The consultant, unable to conceal his ecstasy, comments: "It appears like a drill but in a real sense, it comes across as a rare opportunity to deal with the truth truthfully."
The official report gives data comparing the achievements of Baraka's victims to those of a control group. The scores showed a catastrophic decline in reading, computation and "problem-solving"—despite the fact that Baraka's school had a ratio of one teacher to every six pupils. And students below scale were dropped from the sample analysis!
The students, however, did learn how to march around and around in a circle "with arms folded in a gesture called,..' ungalia.'" They also became adept in reciting a prayer of allegiance to tneir tormentor Baraka.
All this the government knew and THEREFORE funded, and continues to expand funds for, this fascist prep school, which will soon be incorporated into Newark's public school system, A school for the creation of tomorrow's stormtroopers deprived of the ability to think or work productively, capable only of following der Fuehrer's orders.,, an "experiment" which the principal hopes will provide "an alter native to traditional education,"
The Drug Pool
No fascist movement is really complete without its chemically stimulated zombies, its addicted Sturm-abteilung, its Goerings. Since no amount of Free African Schools can turn out the required numbers of living-dead automata on a short notice, the government has therefore decided to hand over to the Baraka machine the entire methadone maintenance program, which is aimed at transferring control of the city's 20,000 drug addicts from the hands of the Mob to those of the government.
The government and the business leaders need this massive pliable reservoir of obedient scabs as a standby force to meet any strike emergency that may arise in the upcoming period of economic attacks against Newark's workers.
The pathetic victims of heroin taken under toe protective wings of government methadone maintenance program are compelled to appear early every morning in front of the "clinic," waiting in long queues to be administered their dose.
In this way, the addict is salvaged from having to pay the Mafia's exorbitant prices. Instead, he is obliged to go to work wherever the benevolent clinic assigns him for the day. In this way the victim, although freed from the mobster's extortion, becomes the helpless obedient slave of the supplier of methadone, which is equally as addictive as heroin and physiologically more
Baraka As Pusher
Although no official statement has leaked out yet, members of New Solidarity's research team succeeded in obtaining true copies of official documents according to which this methadone-controlled scab operation is being placed in the hands of the Baraka machine, with Donald Tucker being named director.
In addition to direct control over the drug addicts under the jurisdiction of the centralized "Multi-Phasic Drug Treatment Center far Newark" Baraka will exercise control of an additional $4 to 4.5 million in federal funds through his appointee Tucker.
Donald Tucker first associated himself with Baraka a few years back in the voter registration days, Just before the campaign to install Gibson was launched. Though Tucker is not noted for his brilliance (a fact which bears testimony to the regrettable effect that counter intelligence courses at Rutgers had on Tucker's intelligence) he was nevertheless picked by Baraka to run for councilman at large. Having lost the election, he was earmarked by Baraka (who hates to waste good people) to head the lucrative methadone program.
The truth is that as soon as this comprehensive program started threatening other existing private drug operations {like the one of nouveau riche Richie Roselli, a former small-time dope operator and reported Mafia man who now poses as Doctor Roselli), a minor row began over who gets to dip his fingers into the Federal methadone pool, with Tucker currently on the defensive and Mayor Gibson going through the motions of legality before relinquishing final control to Tucker and the Baraka machine.
Meanwhile Baraka is mobilizing the "community" to ensure that Tucker's "community minded" proposal is swallowed by the press and the so-called socialist press. Up to now the latter has given Baraka the best of publicity whenever he most desperately needed it When this sordid police operation is presented under the guise of community control, will the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor once again rally to Baraka's defense? Will credulous leftists once again become accomplices of a CIA pacification scheme?
Papa Doc's Ton Ton Macoutes
Presently it is aim ost impossible for the researcher to'gain access to information on the inner workings of Baraka's fascist machine. The reign of Ton-Ton Macoute terror within Papa Doc's organization inhibits past and present members from divulging the horrors that mold recruits into fascist zombies.
Solidarity staff researchers, however, were able to interview two female members who spoke of ritualistic beatings as part of "cadre development." One of the women, evidently a drug addict, still bore the marks of her latest training session. She had gotten impregnated by one of the inner-circle members and was then advised in Stefan George fashion to "get out of here and go on welfare." In hysterical outbursts she pleaded with the interviewer: "You people know about welfare, please get me on the rolls. They won't do anything for me."
An essential part of the animal training is to deny women their humanity—to instill a contempt for "miss blackie." Women wear ankle length black dresses, speak only when spoken to, and are taught that the highest female virtue is slave obedience. Baraka's wife has promoted the "children, church, kitchen" ideology German fascism exploited. This Nazi attitude towards women conditions members to a sadistic state that prevents them from developing relationships involving even a modicum of compassionate human feeling. They are reduced to the same impotent plight of their Fuehrer-poet Baraka.
The object of the ritualistic beatings is more than terror per se. After repeated exposure to this procedure the victim begins to lose his identity, to the point where any sense of personal integrity is lost The victim becomes a dead zombie dependent on the orders of the inner circle to bring him to life. With no soul of his or her own, the member becomes bestialized, and deals with other human beings as it they were no more than "complexified" slices of meat The recruit is molded into a "blood and iron' fascist, fully prepared to break strikes, to lead ghetto victims to slave labor, and someday to the death camp.
Of Lice and Men
Baraka has also made It a practice to recruit desperate drug addicts and criminals for special assignments. One such Baraka hireling attempted to disrupt a Labor Committee forum one year ago. The next day, after he was released from the hospital, he was arrested by the Newark police on multiple robbery charges. If New Solidarity researchers had the power to subpoena police files, many shameful details of this particular type of recruiting could easily be brought to light
A thorny problem with criminal recruits is that they cannot be trusted to patiently carry out long-term work which does not constantly involve some form of deadly entertainment During the periods of calm they become unruly and get drawn back into the underworld.
The coterie of Nazi killers around the SA murderer Heinz is an appropriate example. During upsurges his men served a useful function for carrying out killer missions; in the doldrums of the ebb they had to be fish-ed out of opium dens and brothels, or rescued from the police for their numerous criminal activities. In Newark it is well known that at least one government agency, VISTA, has provided a doldrums haven for such cutthroats, keeping them <on the dole and grooming them for their next assignment
The government's drug-program gift will give Baraka a new source of much needed recruits to carry out the future tasks that Heningburg and other government agents outline for Papa Doc.
The Next Step: Volkspolizei?
In schools, in housing, in welfare Baraka's organizer-thugs are ever present, with threats and forces sufficient to disrupt and demoralize those who even hint at challenging the capitalist bankers responsible for Newark's phenomenal devastation.
But even these methods—fine for now—are considered to be inadequate for future exigencies. The same forces that brought Baraka to power are now slowly preparing the way for his own police force. The long-term plan first drawn up by CIA agent John Rees demands that the Fuehrer have a police force to supplement his storm troopers.
[Caption: One of Baraka's animal trainers teaching...' **Lions how to pounce on the ghetto.]
[Caption: Papa Doc thanks his willing tool Gibson for his services.]
Recently Earl Phillips, the head of Newark's federally funded State Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, presented a proposal to Washington demanding that $36 million be donated to Baraka and Ms counterpart in the Italian ghetto, Anthony * Little Duce* Imperials.
The Newark plan called for a community police patrol force of 4,000, and included requests for 2,000 walkie-talkies, 56 patrol cars, a "night vision system,' a "recycling plan" of prisoners into Baraka's front groups, sophisticated transmitters and other communications equipment for the new area board police force, Such a force would be much larger and better equipped than Newark's present police apparatus.
The proposal was vehemently turned down in Washington and Phillips was forced to resign. Liberal remnants, old die-hard narrow-minded police chieftains and the FBI joined forces to bury this proposal for different and contradictory reasons. But the proposal is there, ready for implementation if art when the present police force proves to be inadequate for the block-by-block, house-by-house Gestapo term that the future will require.
Phillips charges that he had been the victim d "institutional racism." Baraka, Imperiale and Newark Poverty pimp Adubato are all in close collaboration in their effort to get the community police patrol plan finally approved.
Gibson recently divulged that the project has in fact been given final approval, but that Washington is holding up the funding for inexplicable reasons. There is no mystery in this. The CIA is merely waiting for the last phase of "Operation Newark" before setting up its Gestapo apparat.
The Kawaida Plot
Towards A Final Solution
Operation Newark, initiated by the imported CIA agent John Rees, now nears completion. The working class population has been fragmented into submission, adequately softened up for slave labor, recycling, and vicious austerity in all areas of life. The South and Central Wards are ruled by Papa Doc while the North Ward is increasingly falling into the hands of Il Duce Imperiale.
The story of fascism in Newark would not be complete without a look at Baraka's soul brother Imperiale, who has been entrusted to oversee the death of the white ghetto.
Soul Brother Imperiale
As the Duce himself has admitted, "I was a creature of the 1967 riots. Up until 1967 no one heard of Anthony Imperiale." Before his rise to fame Tony passed from hustle to hustle—selling fish and old clothes, driving a bus, running a delicatessen, a construction firm, teaching karate—each time trying to strike Eldorado and each time finding himself back on the street in a new hustle.
But the secret dream of this man of the "little people" was to become a big tough cop. Through the years Imperiale made 13 applications to Newark's police force, but each time was rejected. Tony began working for the Longstreet Detective Bureau as a "detective" specializing in surprise visits to the motel rooms of unfaithful spouses.
Like Baraka, Tough Tony sports a super-masculine mask though in the more elegant tradition of the Latin rnacho. Imperiale does not call his opponents "white mothah-fuckin' faggits," but rather prefers to concentrate on their underwear: Liberals are "guys...who wear lace on their underwear. They're sissies." In the Assembly our little Caesar has protested the lack of manliness: "I thought I was dealing with gentleman. I'm surprised you didn't check the color of my underwear," As for the mayor: "If he didn't wear lace on his panties, he would be better."
This chivalrous macho has been known on occasion to incite his goons to physical attacks by first shouting out indignantly: " Did you see that? He hit that lady !"
Tweedledee's Tweedledum
In politics n Duce is as fervent a racist and nationalist as his counterpart Baraka. According to the New Jersey Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Imperials was inducted as a member in 1967. n Duce denies this, but freely admits that he teaches Klansmen karate, that he supported Goldwater and Wallace, and sees "no reason why I couldn't join" the John Birch Society. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Imperiale protested "I didn't see any flags lowered to half mast in Newark when Governor Lurleen Wallace died. Why not— when they could do it for that Martin Luther Coon?"
A typical fascist demagogue, Imperiale appeals to the "little people," as a defender of their rights. He passionately advocates community control, i.e. his right to rule over his own turf.
Imperiale's anti-working-class direction is fudged by his pro-labor rhetoric. Since his constituency is made up of workers Imperiale must pose as a defender of adequate wages, a man who will defend unions from strike-breaking. He does this in the traditional fascist way, by directing the rage against the "black menace," by organizing around the lie that workers' homes and Incomes can be defended only by organizing against the black population.
Imperials came to the fore in 1967 when he organized 40 men into a fascist gang called the North Ward Citizens Committee. 'We formed a group of men," says lmperiale, "who wanted to fight If they tried coming Into our community, we were ready to shoot and shoot to kill."
Since then Tony's infantile police dreams have been fulfilled. His storm troopers patrol "the jungle" in cars called "jungle cruisers," while his own head-
[Caption: Baraka and Imperiale pretend to argue over Kawaida Towers at a recent Newark City Council meeting.]
quarters resembles an army barracks — complete with a command radio connected to the city police.
Baraka's rise was dependent on the CIA; Tony's very existence depends on Baraka, The only credibility of his paramilitary organization is to pose as a shock troop protecting the North Ward from the encroachments of Papa Doc. When there are racial clashes Il Duce's group swells in numbers, whenever there is a return to racial calm, his vigilantes fade away, and the leader himself becomes no more than a curious phenomenon.
When there are no riots Imperiale tries to provoke one, or he contrives assasination attempts against himself to keep the hysteria from dying down. Without Baraka to constantly point at as the black monster, Tony would probably be back to selling old clothes.
Ever since John Rees's intervention the two archenemies have been in close collaboration. Each one knows his role, and each has been assigned his turt If their constant bickering seems to contradict this alliance it should be obvious that providing this sort of •community tension" which fragments the population is precisely what they are paid for.
The counterinsurgents who direct both careers have recently launched a project calculated to complete the pacification of Newark, At one stroke they are aiming to beef up n Duce's forces, while simultaneously enthroning Papa Doc in his new palace. The project is Kawaida Towers.
Kawaida's Political Credit
That the Kawaida project is a calculated counter-insurgency scheme involving officials at the highest levels of the federal and state government can be deduced from the innumerable "irregularities" surrounding the Towers approval and construction.
Although the project is valued at $6.4 million, certainly one of the largest undertakings to be approved in Newark, the city's Central Planning Com mission was bypassed in the process of obtaining municipal approval for the project. Although this procedure is technically legal, it is totally without precedent in Newark.
The "corporation" which was granted the mortgage was incorporated only a few months before applying for the mortgage. Listed as corporate officers are five Baraka henchmen: George Reed, John Bugg, Leroy Johnson, William David and David Barrett. It is certainly highly irregular for capitalist finance to empower such a new corporation with the disbursal of such a large sum when it lacks any experience in dealing ventures of such magnitude.
In addition, three of the corporation officers have outstanding court judgments that have resulted from the non-payment of bills and debts: 10 judgments against George Reed (the corporation president); 10 judgments against Barrett. Not to mention the repeated charges of pilfering funds from anti-poverty, Model Cities and educational programs against these same individuals.
By all customary market standards, these men were extremely bad credit risks. As a matter of fact, when they received the loan from the FHA, they didn't even have title to the plot of land that would normally have to be presented as collateral. They used loan money to buy collateral for the loan!
The credit they had in the eyes of the government financial agency was political credit—their demonstrated ability to put together a fascist movement In this sense the entire transaction was political.
Die fuehrer Bunker
In precisely the same way, the function of Kawaida Towers is also entirely political and has absolutely nothing to do with the housing needs of ghetto victims. The Towers are scheduled to become Baraka's Bastille, a regimented barracks that will radiate nationwide prestige and authority for his movement, the Kawaida movement seeded by Maulana Karenga. Future tenants will be handpicked for the allegiance to Baraka's ideology and politics—or they will be blackmailed into political submission. This much has been made clear by Imamu's own declarations.
The entire project has been designed as a political headquarters with offices, intercom system, auditorium etc. Its location has been wisely chosen in the middle of Imperial's Italian territory: it will provide a visible enemy both for Baraka's black victims and the white victims of Imperiale.
While Baraka is counting on ousting Italian residents by the massive inflow of black people in Newark's North Ward and thus securing another electoral district, the white masters who financed the Kawaida Towers venture are cynically aiming at providing the provocation - that will build Tony Imperial's parallel fascist organization among Newark's whites.
There can be no doubt that the most enthusiastic supporter of Kawaida Towers outside of Baraka's own organization - is Bone other, than "Il Duce" himself. '
Imperiale has lately been making speaking tours up : and down New Jersey telling his audience that poverty awaits them if they don't stop the black menace,
Kawaida Towers is a "dispute" that was well thought out; Imperiale will build a state wide fascist group of his own and Baraka will further establish himself as the : "moderate statesman" concerned with the well-being of black people. Despite all appearances, collaboration between these two pimps which began in 1967 remains. '
Hard Cash Benefits
There is another motive behind the plot. For a mere
$6 million in promotional outlays, the government, bond
holders and corporate rent collectors are using Papa
Doc to divert attention from the devastating collapse
in Newark's public housing.
Newark has the highest per capita public housing in the nation, roughly encompassing 10 per cent of the population. It is also the most dilapidated; conditions are so bad that until recently rent strikes (one lasting for three years) were a common occurence.
The federal cutbacks in public housing subsidies hava
inflicted more infernal deterioration, accompanied by
further rent increases.
Since a significant portion of public housing dwellers i are welfare victims unable to meet the new rent in-r creases, the Housing Authority is preparing implementation of "concepts other than mere paying of money i to alleviate the problem of delinquent rents"—namely, I a slave labor program. Welfare recipients will be forced I into repair, maintenance and janitorial duties, while | another new "concept' of turning the lower floors into dashiki factories using forced labor has already been circulated.
While the government practices genocide on the ghetto, Kawaida allows it to come forward as a principled advocate of low-rent housing! Papa Doc in turn creates a phony movement to channel the rage and despair towards a harmless, phony issue.
Baraka is the most contemptible, vicious enemy of Newark's poor precisely because he is in the pay of the corporations that have reduced the city to a devastated, disease-ridden, bombed-out ruin. He is in their pay precisely in order to make sure that the devastation will not be disrupted by any sort of working-class resistance.
Arguing that the construction of Kawaida Towers helps solve the housing crisis is like insisting that enrollment in a fascist police force helps solve the unemployment problem.
The left and Kawaida
Some so-called socialists Insist that the black population of Newark is supporting Kawaida Towers. Must we admit that Newark's black people have succumbed to fascist politics? Do we dare oppose something that (he People themselves are supporting? The fact is that the ghetto population has from the very outset displayed a remarkable distaste for Baraka's fascist rhetoric, as well as for the entire community control-poverty pimp apparatus.
What made Kawaida Towers and other Baraka ventures palatable to the ghetto population is this: absolutely no other alternative, no other solution has been proposed to their life-and-death problems, The not-inconsequential left represented 'by the CP, SWP and PL have at no point in recent history addressed the despair that is born out of the material imuniseration of the ghetto. At no point did they seriously organize for the solution of the housing shortage and other problems. So, when Baraka came along, the despair of the ghetto played into his hands. The standard attitude of the ghetto toward Baraka is: I may not agree with all his crackpot propaganda, but Baraka is the ONLY one who is at least trying to do something about housing. Kawaida may nut solve all our housing problems, thinks the ghetto resident, but it helps, even it only a little.
This attitude, which allows the building of a fascist bastion to masquerade as an innocent housing project, was born out of the left" s failure to provide an actual solution. That failure created a false image in the eyes of the ghetto, an image of Baraka as " the only one who is at least trying."
Socialist" buffoons "solve" the housing crisis by •supporting Hi-Rise fascism.
But the criminal stupidity of the CP-SWP-PL -left" is not confined to this only; their passive indifference has finally led them to active support of fascist Baraka. Confronted with the drift of public sympathy toward Kawaida Towers—a drift of the government's making and their own—they have all plunged into support of Baraka's barracks.
Out of sheer stupidity, the Maoist and "Trotskyist" factions have become, as so often in the past, unwitting (in fact witless) accomplices of government counter-insurgency. In the ease of the CP it is not so much stupidity but part of their national organizing in support of slave labor and slave herders.
'It's Nation Building Time'
The collapse of the independent black nationalist movement and the virtual dissolution of the Black Panther {Salvation Army) Party, has left a gaping vacuum which the government hopes to fill by greatly Branding Papa Doc's sphere of activities. The nationwide campaign to build Baraka's image and prestige is being conducted in the press and in appearances before "respectable" institutions which give Imamu an aura of authority as the "poet and statesman" of the black people.
The organizing drive is geared to regrouping the temporarily disoriented shards of the former black movement into a Barakaite fascist organization modelled along the successful Newark prototype. There is obvious haste in this venture, out of the government's well-grounded fear that a socialist working-class movement may reach these potential cadres first
The immediate need for a national machine to police the country's ghettoes is obvious in view of the capitalists implementation of a nationwide slave labor policy, Consolidation of the policy that herds weliare recipients, drug addicts, youth and unemployed into forced labor, will require an interconnected web of 'local control" agencies to supervise implementation on a block to block basis. Nothing short of tnis will suffice in the brutal depression years ahead.
A historical precedent which serves as a model for this operation is the Jewish Judenrat, foe council of prosperous Jews who oversaw the destruction of their subordinates.
In Poland the Nazis herded the Jewish population into ghettoes while taxing them heavily, where the Judenrat, consulting with the Nazi overlords, organized them into slave labor battalions. Out of scrap metal, rags and plain junk supplied by the German authorities, the Judenrat organized the production of underwear, gloves, synthetic soles, shoes and other " community-control" items destined for the German army. When the Jewish slaves could no longer follow the grueling pace of work, the Judenrat itself chose who should go first to Auschwitz extermination. The Ordnungsdienst — the Judenrat police—escorted the victims to the cattle cars.
The slogan of the Judenrat was "work will save us." It will also be recalled that flie Nazi maxim inscribed over the entrance to Auschwitz was "Work Makes You Free.*
In preparing for the "nation-building" task ahead, Papa Doc Baraka has unofficially added a new eighth principle to the Kawaida commandments: "KAZI" ~ work—"is the blackest of them all."
Building a national organization for Baraka remains at the preparatory pilot stage, with most of the effort confined to propaganda and to opening up areas of collaboration with other Papa Doc machines around the country. Full-scale mobilization awaits the completion of Operation Newark.
The final act ends with the two puppet hirelings— Papa Doc and n Duce—enthroned as the supreme Gauleiters of Newark; with the city itself finally divided into self-policed fascist wards.
The rush of events in late July leaves no room for doubt that a top-level government decision has been taken to proceed to tiie final phase. The scenario for the finale centers on Kawaida Towers.
The charge of secret collaboration between Bafaka-Imperiale-government in the Kawaida affair, was first made six months ago when this series originally appeared in New Solidarity. Fearing that Hew Solidarity researchers would spill all Hie beans, Baraka has recently tried to cover himself by admitting that "one-such meeting took place last September, but slyly insists that the purpose was to discuss which of Imperial's construction chums would get some of the government gravy.
It has now been established that these secret tete-a-tetes were arranged by Wadud — the operative who worked closely with John Rees in the early stages of Operation Newark.
Wadud is a government agent who functions as "our man in the ghetto." He gathers intelligence from his web of contacts, monitoring ghetto activity to higher up strategists like Heninburg et al.
Wadud himself is neither a strategist nor a "plumber," but rather a liaison man involved in all sh3<J
Decree of the Fuehrer —
October 12,1939 "In every community a representative body of the Jews is to be formed...The Jewish Council is to be elected by the Jews In the community."
In the ghetto Jews rationed the food, Jews organized other Jews for Nazi slave labor, Jewish police escorted other Jews to Auschwitz — that is the meaning of Baraka's community control.
the work, usually Its shadiest part. Having his fingers in everything, he serves as "neutral turf* for delicate planning sessions between conflicting parties. The Baraka-Imperiale meetings took place in Wadud' s own horme.
The purpose of these gatherings was to iron out an agreement around the tactics for the first phase of the operation.
It is now obvious that Phase One was intended to build up II Duce's loose, anarchic macho dub, into a stable ward organization with a mass following. During that stage he was given the upper hand: government intervention made it appear that he had stopped the construction of Kawaida Towers, and predictably this "success" brought him both prestige and a flock of new members. More significantly, his rise has brought about the dissolution of the old-time Italian political machine.
Under Phase Two, it is now II Duce's tarn to build Baraka's organization by sending enraged (and unemployed) North Ward youth to attack the ghetto. As Imperiale provokes a series of controlled riots, black residents in the South and Central Wards will be put in a position of defending "their turf" and naturally they will turn to strongman Papa Doc to lead them.
The signal for the escalation was given by the government this month.
Litigations on the construction of Kawaida Towers were allowed to languish in the courts for months; then suddenly as July 10 a court decision was made in Baraka's favor. The ruling comes at the beginning of the
On the next day the City Council abruptly approved the nomination of the Baraka-sponsored Kerr, as the new police director—even though the Council had seemed to be hopelessly deadlocked on this issue. The crucial votes were east by two Italian Councilman at a time when this action is more than enough to destroy their political careers in the North Ward. Their sudden conversion was engineered by a son-public government threat delivered to indict them for graft if they didn't vote for Kerr.
On the same day Il Duce moved into action. He delivered soap-box speeches in the North Ward, "appealing for calm," while his goons moved through the streets inciting youth to march into the ghetto. At night the first riot of the summer ended with the mysterious shooting of one youth in the North Ward. Imperiale's men are presently haranguing crowds demanding "revenge" and "action."
The controlled riots are planned to last through the summer, setting the groundwork for Phase III around the fall. At that time Baraka and Imperiale (or representatives) will announce their candidacy for mayor.
Gibson's late has more or less been sealed. If he makes his exit peacefully he will be allowed to retire with a gold watch; if he protests he will be given a dose of the Addoniaio treatment This former derk was after all picked up by Prudential as an interim solution when conditions had not yet matured to the point where a fascist type regime could be openly imposed. He has served as a good cover for the consolidation and growth of Baraka, but now he has outlived his usefulness.
The government is steadily tightening his leash: it now threatens to become a noose. Several of his appointees have been arrested on drug and graft charges. Several scandals involving "misappropriation of funds" have been made public. These charges have been brought up, then allowed to die down, then brought up again, all very slowly—Just enough to keep them in the news, and capable of being turned into a real Waterloo-Watergate when called for.
Gibson's dismissal hinges on (be ability of lmperiale and Baraka to sustain a race-riot atmosphere by using Kawaida as a rallying point Under those conditions their respective mayoral campaigns will render all other campaigns and issues irrelevant in the eyes of the population. The issue will become "black or white?," "Papa Doc or il Duce?. "The city will then be neatly divided into two desperate racial camps, effectively excluding any possibility of joint working class struggle.
Neither of the two machines governing separately will be able to provide the suitable martial environment To implement a vicious austerity budget, and to construct a streamlined slave labor apparatus, will require a stable regime whose tentacles reach into all three of Newark's wards. No matter who wins—obviously the Baraka man—the result would have to be a coalition government, a government of the two fascist machines, an alliance between il Duce and Papa Doc!
Perhaps Prudential and the government will allow Papa Doe to contribute an element of poetry to the last lines of the script If all goes well, obviously a pageant Is called for, with banners and floodlights and a carnival atmosphere for the populace.
On the podium the two Fuehrers could appear and pledge a thousand-year friendship in the interest of racial harmony between their two "volk." n Duce can reminisce over his tough climb from rejected cop to super-cop to top cop of the North Ward.
And Baraka? He can deliver a poem commemorating the day when his childhood fantasy finally came true: Foots is reconciled with Karolis—not in the grimy Toilet—but out in the open, in a necrophiliac pageant, for the "complexified" meat below.
As this pamphlet goas to press the CIA agents in Newark have initiated an operation to stop the National Caucus of Labor Committees from organizing against their twin fascist stooges. We reprint here extracts from recent press releases from the Newark Labor Committee:
The threat of NCLC organizing and its socialist electoral campaign to mobilize the working class and ghetto youth to run the whole "community control" counterinsurgency operation out of Newark, has necessitated the assignment of "plumber squads* from the CIA to personally supervise the harassment of LC organizers in that city.
On June 19 three men posing as a news team from the New York black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, infiltrated the kick-off press conference of the campaign to elect LCers Jim Rotonda and Dennis Speed to the mayoralty and the City Council of Newark.
The three, who were later identified as members of Baraka's organization, carried expensive camera equipment One identified himself as "James Turner," a News staff member. "Turner" took numerous photographs of the candidates during the presentation of their statements, then asked general questions. Bis questions served as a cover for the inquiries of the second man, who identified himself as "John Davis," about LCtacH-cal strength in Newark ("How many people?, 'Where's your office?" etc.). The third, claiming to be a 'student of journalism" assigned to Turner, fell asleep soon after the conference had started. Rousing briefly, he thumbed through the New Solidarity series on the rise of fascism in Newark, and managed to give the whole show away when, finding his own face in one of the pictures, ,he BOinted it out to Ms partner with a great glee.
Subsequent inquiries to the Amsterdam News have confirmed that no newsmen were assigned to the LC press conference, nor are Turner or Davis members of the paper's staff.
The infiltration was ordered to secure photographs and intelligence for the professionally-forged leaflet that appeared on June 27, The leaflet, claiming to represent the NCLC, was distributed throughout the North Ward by members of Baraka' s organization. The leaflet Is topped with a photograph of Imperiale, captioned, "A Fat, No-Good Punk." It announces a rally in Newark's Military Park at which candidates Rotonda and Speed will "tell the real facts about Mr. Imperiale and his mobsters."
The text of the leaflet consisted of connected quotes from the LC press, plus a description of Imperiale as a "mob member, dope pusher, and full-time racist* Featured prominently on the leaflet are the address and phone number of the LC office in Newark, and one of the pictures of Rotonda ana Speed taken at the June 19 press conference.
Following the appearance of the leaflet, tne LC office received a number of phone calls from North Ward residents, including one which threatened that "there are people in the North Ward who won't like this."
This tactic of sophisticated forgery was last used by Watergate "plumber" James Segretti after his infiltration of the Muskie campaign staff in 1972. The fraudulent Newark leaflet was meant to incite members of Imperial's organization to violence against the LC office and members. The Watergate hearings have turned up dozens of incidents in which this type of forged, disruptive device has been used, from provocateurs in the anti-war movement to the planned attempt to beat up Daniel Ellsberg before the Pentagon Papers trial.
Failing to immediately provoke violence from Imperiale-sympathizers, Baraka was advised to attack the Labor Committee himself. Early in the morning of July 2, two Labor Committee members were assaulted by a four-man Baraka goon squad.
Dressed in Karate uniforms, the goons set out by car to find and harass LC organizers after seeing an LC poster entitled 'Baraka Moves To Stop Slave Labor Fight: Seeks Alliance With Imperiale Against Labor Committee." The goons found two LCers posting the leaflet on a North Ward street They drove the LCer's car onto the sidewalk, broke the window on the right side and began to attack. They were driven off without injury to the Labor Committee. The car has been identified as belonging to David Shakes, whose address is Baraka's headquarters, the "Spirit House."
On July 11 Tony Imperiale joined Baraka in his CIA-directed attempts to "set up" the Labor Committees. At a press conference Imperiale repeatedly referred to Baraka as "Papa Doe." It is well known throughout Newark that the nickname "Papa Doc" was coined by the NCLC 18 months ago and has been used extensively and exclusively by that. organization in its press and propaganda since then. The nickname's use at an Imperiale rally which directly precipitated a riot by North Ward youth (in which one man was shot and killed) is an attempt to link the NCLC to Imperiale's renewed fascist demagogy, and thus make the NCLC a suitable target for "vengeful" Baraka sympathizers.
by Hermyle Gvlthier, Jr.
Recently, in dosages ranging from the MIT-"Club 'of Rome" Limits of Growth, through the publications of John D. Rockefeller Ill's burgeoning Zero-Growth movement, and Herman Kahn's latest bestseller, intellectual and semi-intellectual readership circles are being deluged with an eerie genre of literature coming to be called "futurology." Although the collection reeks of the traditions of Nostradamus, Churchward, and L. Ron Hubbard, most of the research behind these publications is sponsored in dead seriousness by such CIA-type agencies as the RAND Corporation, Ford Foundation, and a proliferation of only less celebrated institutions throughout the advanced capitalist sector.
Those agencies are not wasting their time and funds; in a certain sense, the stuff works.
Two of the papers presented at the recent Linz conference attempted to unravel some of the recent output The first, by Columbia University's Edward W. Said (1), offered a scholarly overview of a sophisticated U.S. Mid-East policy developed, in part, by the RAND Corporation, The second, which veered off its track at the end, was the provocative review offered by Lund University's Research Director for the Division of Social Psychology and Conflict Research, Lars Dencik.(2) The Labor Committee delegation's differences with Dencik provide the point of departure for an account of why CIA operations so often succeed.
Dencik characterizes the genre:
"So called future research is not only humbug, it is not only the last spasmodic attempts by a senile positivistic social science to get out of its hopeless impotency, not only a death-throe in the body of late capitalism. On the contrary, it is something to look out for in the struggle against imperialism, since what 'future research' really is, is an instrument of power in the hands of the most important forces of imperialism."(3)
Our issue with him was made clear during the plenary discussions of his paper and oral presentation. During that presentation and subsequent exchanges, lie emphasized the need to combat futurology by debunking it. According to both his replies to several queries on on the point and the internal evidence of his paper and presentation, he locates the main significance of the genre in its use for journalistic "brainwashing* of large populations.
Said's reporting on the Arab counter-insurgency programs locates Dencik's mistake. Futurology studies may have an incidental significance as they provide the direct propaganda for influencing mass opinion; their important application — and purpose —lies elsewhere. All important futurology studies represent A STATEMENT OF OPERATIONS POLICY, TO BE IMPLEMENTED AS FIELD WORK CONDUCTED BY TRAINED TEAMS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIVES.
The CIA's Vietnam Hamlet program could easily provide the material for a futurology best-seller of the Kahn type. The policy would be used by such a writer to paint a picture of Southeast Asia in the year 2000 A. D., a culture developed around the principle of "local control," The significance of such a book would not be that identified by Dencik. Its import would be the elaboration of a policy being conducted in South Vietnam by counter-insurgency teams.
The Limits of Growth and Blueprint for Survival are the two leading examples of futurology writing in circulation today. As portraits of the future, both are humbug. As statements of operations policy, they are dangerously effective tactical formulations. They set forth a policy to be applied by trained counter-insurgency operatives using a "radical" cover, to mobilize tens of thousands of lumpens and "radical youth" into strikebreaking, even fascist mobs, to break the unions who are "threatening the ecology."
To analyze the import of any futurology publication, one concentrates on adducing from the guise of speculations about the future those present-day operations policies which a trained CIA counter-insurgency operative would read into the document.
It is not necessary to travel to the Mid-East or Asia for clinical material on this subject. The same agencies (e.g., Ford Foundation) which plot counterrevolution abroad have been effectively applying the same counter-insurgency techniques at home in the U.S.A.
Using the same methods employed against Arabs and others around the world, major foundations and government agencies, conspicuously spearheaded by the Ford Foundation, effectively took control o key leaders and organizations of the black militants by about 1968.
These methods have effectively destroyed the former INDEPENDENT Black Nationalist movement. To the extent that some small independent such groups exist, they are life-boat-sized relics and splinters of formerly large and growing organizations. Most of the cadres of those former organizations are now scattered as demoralized individuals or local groupings. Otherwise, excepting the Black Panther Party, now resigned to imitating the Salvation Army, the only large Black Nationalist organizations in the U.S.A. are outright counter-insurgency groups along the lines of the "colonial administration" of the "President Thieu of South Newark" (New Jersey), Imamu(LeRoi Jones) Baraka.
The same methods used to subvert, isolate and destroy independent black organizations, have been applied to the shattered and demoralized National Welfare Rights Organization, with the intent of either turning Welfare Rights organizers into government agents herding blacks into slave labor, or driving the unmanageable organizers out of the NWRO,
What is to be emphasized in all such examples is that counter-insurgency works — when it does work — by providing TACTICAL DIRECTION TO FORCES OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY AGENTS WHOSE FUNCTION IS TO CREATE "RADICAL" MOVEMENTS WHICH SET ONE SECTION OF A POTENTIALLY UNITED ANTI-CAPITALIST MASS AGAINST OTHER SECTIONS OF THAT MASS. It represents, in short, a sophisticated modern version of the ancient policy of "divide and conquer."
Dr. Said emphasized the relevant points in his presentation. Determined not to have another Vietnam in the Mid-East, he argued, the imperialists probed for ways of preventing the sort of mass confrontations which would demand costly and hazardous direct military intervention.
He identifies the type of background research necessary to develop effective "divide and conquer" tactics:
"Sociological, anthropological and psychological methods expose a region in all its ethnic and cultural diversity, pointing to the Interests, dynamics, and sensitivities of each unit." (4)
Said himself does not develop the appropriate observations which ought to follow at that point in his reporting. The implication remains obvious.
The problem continually confronting the counter-Insurgency agency is that of preventing a potential mass force from being consolidated under conditions of stress into an actual, unified mass force. As Vietnam demonstrates, once the mass force has been constituted, the usefulness of further counter-Insurgency efforts diminishes rapidly. The counter-insurgency specialist must do his work before the mass force can be consolidated.
His successful effort depends upon locating those pluralist tendencies of local ideologies and notions of self-interest which can be exploited to organize various local units of the mass against one another. He must organize around special local issues of the type which tend to set one local group of the mass against the others. He must attempt to make this system of fragmentation self-policing, through creation of attitudes of hostility toward meddling by "outsiders."
The basic techniques he uses for this purpose in the field are not extraordinary. Many skilled social workers have been trained in them. The counter-insurgency "community organizer" manipulates his clients through a show of "non-directive" advice. The manipulation is located in showing the local leaders where and how to obtain certain rewards for approved behavior, and what role they ought to play as leaders. Provided that the counter-insurgency social worker succeeds in winning the group to desired reward-seeking behavior and winning the leaders to the role-playing "suggested," the local group is very much under control.
Domestic U.S. counter-insurgency in the ghettoes, in particular, has the following main features.
1. An experienced militant is awarded a small pilot "funding," usually sufficient to open a store-front office, buy a mineograph machine, install a telephone, a few office supplies, and make a few weekly hand-outs to neighborhood youths who become active in the "project."
His operations now become dependent upon continued funding, which he can obtain only by per
forming in a way which will bring renewal of his
pilot-project funding.
By defining the performance goals for renewed
funding, the controlling agency (e.g., CIA, Ford
Foundation, VISTA, etc.) has defined the group's
goals, and has effectively taken over the local
militant and his following. This is the most crucial aspect of counter-insurgency "social engineering" technology — the proper definition of goals.
Collections of such controlled groups are easily
mobilized to attack and eliminate competing
groups independent of agency control, thus rid
ding the ghetto of almost every "radical" influ
ence but those controlled by one or another
counter-insurgency agency.
To obtain the deployment of the controlled group
for special operations, the controlling agency
need only threaten to withdraw or delay re
funding in a suitable fashion. The technique is
to define conditions for re-funding or targets
through which alternative funding can be secured.
The Ford Foundation's 1968 effort to break the
New York City union, the United Federation of
Teachers, is a now-classic illustration.
The mechanics of such operations are within the competence of the counter-insurgency operative, often himself a corrupted ex-radical organizer. What such an operative can not efficiently contribute is the set of performance goals required for success. On this point, the field operations of the agent depend upon the "disinterested" contemplations of the social-science specialist "innocently" engaged in compiling his dissertation on the subject of the particular "interests, dynamics, and sensitivities" to be later played upon by field operations.
Said referred in his report to the enormous expenditure of effort on content analysis of field interviews of Palestinians by counter-insurgency agencies and their academic accomplices. This must, no doubt, be typical of current operations. It is such "content analysis" of prejudices, etc., which provide the designer of counter-insurgency tactics with the clues he needs.
On the surface, counter-insurgency tactics appear quite elementary. Nothing more scientific than an experienced confidence trickster's craft seems essential. What makes such craft useful in the end is the performance goals around which the operation is constructed.
That latter topic takes our inquiry into the most advanced realm of investigations.
Dencik came close to the truth —a mom ant before turning away from it. He was close to the kernel of the problem when he referred to the problem of EP1STEMOLOGY during the discussion period following his principal presentation.
He was correct as far. as he was willing to trace out the problem. The "humbug" of "senile positivistic social science" is a significant case-study of pathology for the epistemologist.
For example, the case of the notorious fiitoologist, Professor B.F. Skinner. Skinner is a primitive reductionist in his epistemology, with whom it is impossible to profitably debate facts, since Skinner's epistemology admits only the existence of those "facts" which concur with his reductionist world-view. For, certainly, he cannot be ignorant of the empirical studies of Wolfgang Koehler and Koehler's successors, which facts totally destroy the very premises of Skinner's alleged psychology.
The fault with all positivistic social science, the point which Dencik implies by his remark, is that it is a delusion corresponding to psychotic states, maintaining internal consistency by inventing whatever factual judgments of experience are necessary to maintain the appearance of such consistency.
Dencik's relevant arguments during the discussion period strongly suggest a mere academic view of the problem posed. He regards humbug social science in the genre of futurology as essentially an extension of the problem of the senile professor down the hallway in the university: an old fool who fills students' heads with reactionary nonsense. He proposes to deflate the charlatan's reputation; one must wish Dencik only success in such a useful enterprise. Unfortunately, his effort will not solve the problem posed to us by the old fool's counter-insurgency techniques.
The paradox of futurology is that it involves not merely epistemology, but APPLIED epistemology — and, humbug though it may be in a certain sense, IT WORKS!
It works principally because the ideology of the positivists humbug social science is a distilled version of the prevailing implicit philosophy of the subject populations of counter-insurgency operations. The essential technique of all counter-insurgency operations in the advanced capitalist sector is to play upon the deeply-rooted pluralist ideology of the ruled to create radical, highly-energized special social formations which intensify the endemic pluralist antagonism toward mass institutions, toward "interference" by 'outsiders" in "local affairs."
This point is underlined by the way In which even self-styled revolutionary-socialist groups have been co-opted into counter-insurgency operations during the recent period. In the paradigm case of the effort to break the New York City teachers' union in 1968, the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party (Mandelites), Progressive Labor Party (Maoist-syndicalist), Workers World Party (Maoist-Trotskyist — sic!), and Third-Campers were all engaged as voluntary workers for the Ford Foundation in strike-breaking in behalf of the slogan of "local control," a slogan which expresses the essence of reductionist sociology and is the key term in the counter-insurgency specialist's armament.
Seen in such terms, counter-insurgency is a struggle of an existing ideology OF THE RULED against the imminent new world-outlook of something approximating a class-for-itself. The process of fusion of fragmented sections of a working class and its potential political anti-capitalist allies into a mass force consciously united around a common program of general self-interest represents the material (social) premise for a break with the ideology to which those same masses have been heretofore subject all their lives. Counter-insurgency is essentially applied epistemology, the appeal to radicalized versions of pluralist ideology at a point immediately prior to the consolidation of masses into a new kind of social formation more appropriate to a new (class-for-itself) world-outlook.
One suspects, on the strongest grounds, that the essential source of fallacy of aborted insights such as Dencik's is that he and others at least implicitly assume that counter-insurgency ideology involves the imposition of some alien set of beliefs on a subject people FROM THE OUTSIDE. Such a view assumes that the social science professors represent an ideology alien to that generally accepted by the subject population. If that explanation of his view is the case, as the evidence compels us to assume, then Dencik et al. have missed all the key points.
Although there are features of positivism, for example, which pertain to the caste position of the es-pouser of such formal doctrines, the essential feature of positivism is the same reductionism, or anarchist belief in individual or parochial self-interest, which is normally the ideology of the ruled. The professor designing counter-insurgency tactics does not impose an alien ideology upon his subjects, but rather appeals to certain features of the ideology which he and his intended victims share in common.
The counter-insurgency tactic. advanced by positivist ideologues is often effective despite the fantastic delusions involved from the standpoint of science. It is often effective because the counter-insurgency specialist, in falling back upon his own pluralist ideology, is more or less effectively reflecting upon the most reactionary prevailing beliefs and prejudices ram pant among the population against whom he connives.
CIA Technology
The critical feature of the operations put into effect is not located in the pernicious ideas themselves. Ideas, pernicious or virtuous, find root only in fertile soil. A mere appeal to common reductionist prejudices would not suffice under the unstable conditions in which the services of a counter-insurgency agency might be wanted. The fertile soil for counter-insurgency ideas is established and maintained by creating those "radical" forms of social organization in which the interplay among the participants creates and energizes the sort of pluralist notions on which the operation depends.
All ideas are in essence abstractions of on-going social practice. Their immediate content, in that respect, is the plenum of propitiatory and other actions by which the individual finds social identity of the sort he desires within the interplay of the immediate group where he is situated. It is in those processes that notions of self-identity and self-interest are situated and molded.(5)
In the normal course of capitalist society (for example ), such determining features of social formations are functions of established institutions. To construct a counter-insurgency operation for such societies would be worse than wasteful from the capitalist standpoint, since counter-insurgency means organizational change, which is precisely what the capitalist abhors under such "normal" circumstances.
The chore of the counter-insurgency specialist occurs as social crises break up long-established stabilizing institutions, so that those institutions no longer inspire confidence, and no longer exert the ideologically stabilizing control of "normal" periods. It is into these circumstances that the counter-insurgency agency is called, to improvise radical new institutions which will accomplish by design what now-failing institutions accomplished by evolution.
The CIA-type must ultimately define new institutions which perpetuate pluralism in an intensified, outright chauvinist form under the special conditions of general radicalization. In order to produce such controlling institutions, he must find the pathway from present conditions through intermediate transitional forms of organization.
The evolution and degeneration of Black Nationalism in the U.S.A. of the 1960's is an excellent example of his problem — and how he solved it.
For the black young male, especially, Black Nationalism was an essential step to A SENSE OF SOCIAL IMPORTANCE, a precondition for serious struggle in his class interest. Without counter-insurgency interference, the normal course of development of Black Nationalism would have been toward alliances with white workers. The exemplary cases of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers (for a period), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, are merely better-known instances of such a TENDENCY among INDEPENDENT Black Nationalist movements.
What happened to prevent this? In part, the Black Nationalists found no sizeable vanguard group to respond to their tendency for such alliances in an effective way; class alliances between black and white working-class forces remained a mere tendency which ebbed and re-surged without acquiring a self-sustaining determinate character. More important, the well-heeled counter-insurgency agencies stepped in, buying up demoralized and ambitious black militants in dozen lots. These recruited agents were funded modestly, enabling them to hustle together small coteries. These groups were given guidance in role-playing and performance goals, mainly aimed at both keeping radical outsiders out of the black ferment and harrassing independent black leaders who refused to get into line with the current project being pushed by the controllers.
These tactics were developed through "content analysis," adducing vulnerable points of Black Nationalist "interests, dynamics, and sensitivities" for counter-insurgency use.
That was the TRANSITIONAL phase: abort tendencies toward class alliances by emphasizing the "nationalism" in Black Nationalism.
The organizational forms toward which this work was aimed are exemplified by today's South Newark under "Papa Doc" Baraka, or almost any of the hideous ghetto enclaves riddled with corruption and bossist hooliganism against dissidents, which represent finished products of "local community control."
As a result, organized Black Nationalism today is mainly a police department of the U.S. government — except for those handfuls of young, independent blacks wondering how it all happened.
Can It Be Defeated?
In some cases, such as the "Philadelphia Plan" or the 1968 Ford Foundation operations against the UFT, the evidence of counter-insurgency would be conspicuous through a low-power telescope on Mars. What makes such schemes most transparent to the analyst is the characteristic organizational features whose design bears the -thumb-print of the counter-insurgency mentality.
In the general case, it is more difficult to distinguish the agent from the radical fool. In the transitional approaches, before the situation is yet ripe for the controllers to push for radical organizational forms, the agent is exploiting endemic reactionary tendencies among the mass to build a faction which is not essentially unlike a faction formed by Third Campers, anarchists, pseudo-Trotskyist "local control" advocates, etc. In such circumstances, the agent is merely working to increase the odds in favor of what reactionary self-styled socialists and others would do naturally.
Usually, today's factional leader without a visible organizational backing from the existing left is an agent — we find from experience, either a conscious agent or simply an individual working as a radical on the payroll of some counter-insurgency front organization for governmental, Ford Foundation, or similar controllers. It is generally a useful rule in the U.S. today that the outline of the socialist movement has already been determined, such that any person able to attain factional influence comes from some where among established political tendencies. The disembodied "individual charismatic leader" who Goats from "movement" to "movement" TODAY is in most cases an agent.
Whether particular persons are agents or not is usually of no decisive importance in dealing with related problems.
The problem facing the revolutionary is only typically the problem sometimes represented by the actual counter-insurgency agent. What the agent must do, characteristically, is to organize a faction to oppose the intervention of "outsiders" into the particular trade-union or radical bailiwick the government is attempting to control. In such matters, the agents are usually vastly outnumbered by the reactionary militant trade-unionists arid other radicals naturally produced by the effects of bourgeois ideology in those strata. The problem of fighting the agent is subsumed by the general problem of opposing those indigenous radicals or "militants" who do the work of the government without pay or Ford Foundation guidance.
It is Marxians, not the counter-insurgency specialists, who represent the " alien ideology" from the standpoint of the world-outlook previously prevailing in the milieu among which he works!
The Marxian, like his opposite number in the CIA, works on the basis of attempting to establish social forms which provide the fertile ground for special ideas, etc., of the subject populations, to locate those points of entry around which to establish transitional forms of propaganda and agitation leading in the direction of the forms of social organization we aim to establish. Marxians, too, have a program for those intended institutions. Marxians, too, adduce from these if their operating policy a definite futurology.
The nature of the struggle between socialists and the CIA is that, bat also one more thing. The CIA-type proposals cannot, by their nature, deliver on the promises implicit in their organizing effort; Marxians can.
History is not "with" anyone in this battle —in the case that the outcome of the struggle is somehow fatalistically pre-determined. The only aspect of history which is with socialism is the underlying potential, and the fact that as revolutionary organizers create the class-for-itself approximating institutions they are committed to build, those institutions are by epistemological principles impervious to the counter-insurgency operations of any CIA.
Edward M. Said, "United States Policy and The Conflict of Powers In The Middle East."
Lars Dencik, "Imperialism of the Future."
Ibid., p. 23.
Said, op. cit.
Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Sections 29-33. Compare with
Gramsci's treatment of "organic philosophy."
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