Sam Marcy: The Klan & The Government, Foes Or Allies?

http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/samklan/index.htm

“…The Klan is one of the very few organizations in this country which has avowedly been a secret terrorist organization. Murders, kidnappings, burnings, lynchings, whippings, and downright mass terror have characterized its existence since its inception more than 100 years ago.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, the most authoritative but highly conservative encyclopedia in the U.S. and abroad, bluntly characterizes the Ku Klux Klan as a “secret terrorist organization.” That puts the Klan on a fundamentally different plane than merely an organization which promotes racism, no matter how viciously…

There are embryo fascist organizations all over Europe. The U.S. finances fascist gangs in the less developed countries as a means of threatening, intimidating, and overthrowing, where possible, governments which are striving to be independent of U.S. imperialist interests.

The lessons of armed self-defense are especially necessary and indispensable in the light of the congenital propensity of monopoly capitalism to rely more and more on illegal force at home and abroad. The fact that the Klan has been numerically small in different periods of U.S. history has not prevented it from suddenly surging forth as a mass organization, as it did in an earlier period of the U.S. when the ruling class needed it more frequently.

Now, with the capitalist crisis ever deepening and widening, it is inconceivable that the ruling class, which through the CIA promotes covert operations on a world scale, will suddenly drop its interest in supporting and maintaining clandestine, extra-legal support groups to promote its domestic objectives.

The capitalist crisis is bound to produce a tremendous resurgence of the working class. It is equally certain that the ruling class will attempt to inhibit, derail, and utilize all sorts of support organizations in the struggle against an aroused and united working class and oppressed peoples’ united front. It is in light of this perspective that one needs to view each and every step in the development of not only KKK activity but other forms as well, and to properly organize against it with all the diligence, energy, and devotion which are necessary in the struggle…”