"We have nothing to lose but our chains! We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

The chant erupted across the nation and around the world at demonstrations (and riots) in response to a St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. It was heard again following the vote of a New York grand jury not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, and again when Attorney General Eric Holder addressed a crowd in Atlanta, Georgia.

Is it merely a coincidence, a fluke, that this slogan echoes the most famous lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto? “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” Marx declared, in the concluding lines of his revolutionary tract. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” he continued. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains…. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”

Communist sloganeers condensed and paraphrased Marx’s wordy text into a catchier war cry that has accompanied tumults, riots, and revolutions on every continent since the Manifesto’s release in 1848: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

Do the young demonstrators chanting “We have nothing to lose but our chains!” realize that they are channeling Marx? Probably not, but the older revolutionaries leading them certainly do. In the forefront of the Brown/Garner demonstrations, stoking the fires of resentment, race hatred, and class warfare, are 1960s veterans of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Black Radical Congress, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Organization for Black Struggle, and other more moderate-sounding “peace” and “justice” organizations. But don’t expect CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, or the New York Times to report the facts we will detail here concerning this crucially important connection to the ongoing violence and civil turmoil.

One of the other new propaganda memes in the planned race war that is currently unfolding in our cities, “#Black Lives Matter,” is, likewise, the product of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists who dominate much of academe and that special class of citizens known as "community organizers," whose political cachet has soared under professional "community organizer" Barack Obama. The co-creators of the #BlackLivesMatter slogan that has suddenly appeared on posters, T-Shirts, Tweets, and protest banners, are Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, three far-left, black, feminist activists who idolize communist terrorist revolutionaries Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, as well as the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Movement.

Alicia Garza, for instance, writes at #blacklivesmatter.com: “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what it’s [sic] political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.” Garza provides a hyperlink for Assata’s “demand” that takes one to LiberationInk.org and Assata Shakur’s “We have nothing to lose but our chains” quote.

So, who is this Assata Shakur, whose name is invoked with great reverence and increasing frequency amongst those leading the Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/Eric Garner street protests? Assata Shakur (née JoAnne Chesimard) is a convicted bank robber/murderer who escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Communist Cuba, where she is believed to be still living. Chesimard/Shakur was a leader of the Black Liberation Army, an ultra-violent splinter faction of the Black Panther Party that adopted Marxist-Leninist doctrine as interpreted by Mao Tse-tung (China’s mass-murdering dictator) as its guiding philosophy, and killing police officers as its main task. Cop-killer/bank robber/fugitive Shakur, who has been a darling of the hardcore Marxist-Leninist activists for decades, is now being mainstreamed as the ideological elder stateswoman for the new generations of demonstrators who are learning to loot and riot in the name of “racial justice” and “social justice.”

Garza, Cullors, and Tometi, who identify themselves as “queer Black women,” are given to ranting against an irredeemable America that they condemn for alleged “genocide,” “racism,” “anti-blackness,” “hetero-patriarchy,” and “oppression.”
 
Garza, of Oakland, California, is an organizer and projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Tometi is the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), the Oakland/San Francisco-based radical group funded by George Soros, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Acorn Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Tometi’s BAJI has produced a Ferguson Toolkit for use by protest organizers and proudly boasts of its role in the “Shut it Down for Mike Brown” direct action, an illegal blockade that caused a shutdown of the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) trans-bay service for two hours this past Black Friday.

Patrisse Cullors leads Dignity and Power Now, an anti-police coalition in Los Angeles. She was honored by the radical funders at the Tides Foundation with their annual Mario Savio Young Activist Award, named in honor of the best-known leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Cullors is also currently enjoying a fellowship at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, an institute at Kalamazoo College in Michigan that seems to have a requirement that its participants be militant lesbians who are “women of color.”

Cullors, Garza, and Tometi organized and led the national Ferguson Freedom Ride bus tour that took hundreds of demonstrators to the St. Louis/Ferguson area for months of demonstrations.

This militant trio at the center of so much of the current tumult over policing and race, as we have noted above, draw much of their inspiration from mentors Assata Shakur and Angela Davis. Davis, like Shakur, was once a Black Panther terrorist and a fugitive from the law; but, like fellow comrade Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist (and friend of Obama), she managed to evade a life sentence in prison (and the death penalty) and instead was rewarded with lucrative book deals and teaching positions at prestigious universities. She was a top official and spokesperson of the Communist Party USA, and twice ran as the party’s vice presidential candidate. In 1997, Davis announced that she is a lesbian. She wrote the foreword to Shakur’s self-promotional Assata: An Autobiography, which is required reading in many college black studies and feminist studies programs.

Davis lectures widely, and the byline of her frequent columns identifies her as “Distinguished Professor Emerita, history of consciousness and feminist studies, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.” In one of her recent rants for The Guardian, entitled “From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists,” the “distinguished” Comrade Professor Davis wrote: “Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri ... represent an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extra-legal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan, to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.”

It is clear from their interviews, writings, and speeches that the founding trio of #BlackLivesMatter have memorized large portion’s of the Shakur/Davis book and absorbed the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Garza/Cullors/Tometi team spout the Davis/Shakur communist narrative that America is racist and that every time there is a deadly encounter between a black American and a non-black police officer, it is automatically a case of anti-black racist oppression, regardless of the facts. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were “murdered,” goes the narrative, by a “racist vigilante” and a “racist cop” and exonerated by a “racist system.” They were “murdered” merely because of their “blackness,” because “black lives don’t matter” to the “white oppressors” who control our society and enforce the injustice of “White supremacy.”

It doesn’t matter to them that three autopsy reports, including an independent one by Michael Brown’s family and one by the Obama/Holder Justice Department, support Officer Darren Wilson’s story of the event and contradict the claims that Brown was shot in the back while running away, or that he was shot cold-bloodedly while meekly surrendering in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” position. It doesn’t matter to them that “gentle giant” Michael Brown was captured on video engaged in the strong-arm robbery (a felony) of a convenience store and aggressively intimidating the much smaller storeowner, shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson. Those facts (and many others) cannot be allowed to cloud the narrative of an “unarmed black teen” brutally gunned down by a “racist white cop.” It doesn’t matter to the professional activists working the Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/Eric Garner cases even if all the facts end up contradicting their narrative; they can still be depended on to erupt on cue into a new round of the communist mantra, “No justice, no peace, no racist police.”

UN International Road Show

Unfortunately, the Garza/Cullors/Tometi/Shakur/Davis choir is but one ensemble in a much larger well-funded and highly organized Marxist-Leninist chorus singing the “No Justice, No Peace” hymn. Take, for instance, the highly publicized trips of the parents of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Did these grieving parents come up with this idea all on their own? Of course not; the pilgrimage to this forum of the UN’s infamous Human Rights Council (comprised of regimes that are the world’s worst practitioners of oppression, torture, and genocide) was arranged, stage-managed, and paid for by the U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of hundreds of extreme-left militant groups, including Opal Tometi’s Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) — and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG).

The NLG, which can be counted on to be in the forefront of just about every anti-American campaign, was described in 1950 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." In 1953 U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell denounced the guild as "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party." Little has changed in that regard; the guild is still a staunch defender of Castro’s oppressive communist regime in Cuba, still a defender of terrorists, spies, and rioters — and is still receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Ford Foundation, and the other usual suspects among the liberal-left tax-exempt foundations. Ditto for the U.S. Human Rights Network, another recipient of Ford’s revolutionary largesse, and many of the other organizations in the USHRN coalition as well.

The written statement presented by Michael Brown’s parents to the UN committee in Geneva says it was being “submitted on behalf of the Family of Michael Brown, Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), Hands Up United and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE).” Of those three listed groups, due to space limitations, we will examine here only the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS). The OBS says on its own website that its program “is based upon the Black Freedom Agenda that was introduced at the founding of the Black Radical Congress in 1998.” The Black Radical Congress, which OBS seeks to ape, was organized by Communist Party USA stalwarts Angela Davis, Jarvis Tyner, Charlene Mitchell, James Wilkerson, Frank Lumpkin, Debbie Bell, and Joe Sims, as well as longtime Marxist-Leninist fellow travelers Bill Fletcher, Cornell West, Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, Barbara Ransby, Abdul Alkalamit, Amiri Baraka, and (former Obama Green Jobs Czar) Van Jones.

Organization for Black Struggle leaders Jamala Rogers and Montague Simmons work closely with Bill Fletcher and other Black Radical Congress veterans. Rogers and Simmons have been key organizers at Ferguson protests, manning the bullhorns in the streets, starting the chants, and revving up the troops. They have also been showered with media attention and invited on a White House conference call with Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the plans of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief Barack Obama. And, naturally, all of this qualifies OBS for funding from the Ford Foundation, as well as honorable mention in Ford’s study "Close to Home: Case Studies of Human Rights Work in the United States."

Black Radical Congress co-founder and OBS ally Bill Fletcher is also a longtime senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the notorious Marxist think tank that has collaborated with agents of the Soviet KGB and Castro’s DGI, as well as members of terrorist groups throughout the world.

The list goes on and on. Prominent Ferguson agitators/commentators/demonstrators include such seasoned radicals as Cornel West, Lisa Fithian, Zaki Baruti, Brian Becker, Leith Mullings, Malik Shabazz, Louis Farrakhan (to name but a few), and such extremist and subversive left-wing groups as the Revolutionary Communist Party, Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, Nation of Islam, New Black Panther Party, Palestinian Youth Movement, Committees of Correspondence, CODEPINK, ANSWER Coalition, United for Peace and Justice, New Students for a Democratic Society, Occupy Wall Street, ACLU, Amnesty International, Institute for Policy Studies — and a great many more. But the extremist pedigrees and connections are never mentioned when these “activists” are featured by CNN, NPR, NBC, and Democracy Now!, or in the Huffington Post or the New York Times.

The same “news” organizations that invent a vast right-wing conspiracy of racists amongst Tea Party groups, have remained obstinately blind to the overwhelming influence of the Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyists, and others of the far-Left in the escalating racial conflict. The same media outlets have also failed to mention the salient fact that many of the groups most actively involved on the front lines of the demonstrations and riots around the country, far from being genuine grassroots, are completely synthetic Astroturf, funded by the big tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, et al) that have been funding revolution for decades. Most of these groups would not even exist, let alone be able to provide boots on the ground in Ferguson, without that steady transfusion of foundation funding. They can count on those funding transfusions to continue as long as they keep agitating for more federal intervention and control over local communities, as well as more United Nations intervention and control over the United States.

That’s what the globalists at the big foundations have always been about: creating and exploiting crises to justify breaking down our constitutional separation of powers so that power can be concentrated and centralized, first at the national level and then at the global level.

Photo of Ferguson protest: Jamelle Bouie