2020 Hindsight: G. Edward Griffin, Manning Johnson, and Black Lives Matter

Gary North - September 15, 2020

The co-founder of Black Lives Matter has discussed the fact that she was a student of Marxism.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors: It’s not all intuitive, it’s deeply scientific, thinking about how to build a movement and make it grow. There is such a thing as being a trained campaigner, as well as being self-taught where you learn by example. I went through a year-long organising programme at the National School for Strategic Organising (NSSO), and it was led by the Labour Community Strategy Centre. We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao, learning all types of global critical theory and about different campaigns across the world, and most importantly every day, five days a week we were out on the ground actively recruiting people into the organisation we were in, as a way to learn how to bring people in, how to keep them in an organisation. There’s an entire skillset to this. . . .

https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/39587/1/black-lives-matter-founder-interview-patrisse-khan-cullors

With this as background, consider this.

WE'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

G. Edward Griffin has been in the conservative trenches for a long time.

He is most famous as the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, (1994), a detailed and accurate critique of the Federal Reserve System. This was late in his career.

In a 1969 lecture, he discussed a book by Manning Johnson. Johnson was a black man who had been recruited by the Communist Party in 1930. He broke with the party after the Hitler/Stalin pact of 1939. There is an accurate summary of his life on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manning_Johnson. He died in 1959.

A handful of us knew about Johnson in 1969. I had been tipped off a decade earlier by the lady who recruited me in 1956.

Here is an extract from Griffin's discussion of Communist tactics. It covers Johnson and his book. Over half a century later, it sounds familiar.

The American Communist Party went to its reward in the aftermath of the suicide of the Soviet Union in 1991. It had never had much direct influence. Except for a handful of intellectuals, Americans never had any interest in Marxian communism. Karl Marx's idea of proletarian revolution was poppycock from the day he developed it. But some of the CPUSA's tactics were adopted by activists.