Farrakhan, Alex Jones and Facebook. Socialists and all Workers Must oppose Ban

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
Member DSA

"When you strip away anti-white invective, what you really have from Farrakhan today is just an updating of Booker T. Washington. There is nothing that would not fit in with the Republican Party platform. It's pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps. He's considered a militant, because he says things that become controversial, but his program is anything but radical."   Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford

As I point out in the video, socialists, workers and trade unionists should oppose Facebook's ban on certain political groups and individuals as "dangerous". Without a doubt, more of us will be next especially the union movement. In addition, Lumping the right wing preacher Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam as equally dangerous along with white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other antisocial elements that are prominent in the US body politic and throughout society, is ridiculous. Despite his divisive tone and the sexist nature of his organization, when it comes to the damage and divisive influence such characters can have on society there is no comparison. But the white power structure ensures that this fairly obscure individual who lives among the white bourgeois in the Chicago area is portrayed as an extremely dangerous man that threatens white society.

There is no need to fear Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam or its leader has not and will never hold state power. There is no history of the NOI or any other organization of black America, political or otherwise, dragging white people out of their homes and hanging them from Poplar trees like some Strange Fruit.  I worked for many years on the streets of Oakland CA and in some very economically depressed areas with high unemployment, crime and large black populations. In the event of a riot of sorts, what Martin Luther King called, the language of the unheard, a white worker that might be a target of uncontrolled anger would find a safe haven heading for a NOI Mosque as there is no history of them committing such indiscriminate violence against whites as far as I can see.

In the struggle against racism and for basic civil rights, many black Americans of varying political views found themselves in the same boat, it would only be natural that on the issue of racism and the violence and brutality that has meant for black folks, that people like Farrakhan and the great Aretha Franklin would see their paths cross. (Farrakhan was at her funeral and kept on a short rein). Their generation is the 1960’s and the struggles of that period.

It is ridiculous to focus on Farrakhan or attempt to compare him and the NOI with Alex Jones and white nationalists as most black people, workers especially, are not of the same mind and would find his anti-Semitic and racial comments disagreeable. But any individual that rightly condemns racism and US capitalism’s racist history will get an echo in the black community. You won’t get black folks to throw him to the wolves.

Despite the mass media whipping up white fear, with the exception of Mark Zuckerberg apparently, the white capitalist class that holds the real power in US society does not fear Farrakhan,