Re: More on fascism and ideology

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Oct 1995, Doug Henwood wrote:

>
> Lou, we're not talking about Malcolm X, we're talking about his sworn
> enemy, Louis Farrakhan and his organization, which has a vile political
> platform and a lunatic theology, and which once burned a bookstore that
> displayed Malcolm X's picture. You're always (rightly) calling for us to

Louis: As head of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was literally the Louis
Farrakhan of the early 60's. If you read James Baldwin in "The Fire Next
Time", written originally for the New Yorker in 1963 (sigh, how the times have
changed...), you will discover that people had an identical take on
Malcolm X at the time. Mainstream media dubbed him the black equivalent of
George Lincoln Rockwell. Now Malcolm X was indeed going around using words
identical to Farrakhan's today and attracting the same kind of outrage.
NOI ideology hasn't changed much in 32 years. Malcolm was peddling the
same kind of nonsense about whites being invented by Yacub, the evil
scientist in the flying-saucer, etc.

All of the left attacked Malcolm. The only person who said, "hmmmm, there
might be more here than meets the eye", was George Breitman of the SWP.
Now nobody could have predicted that Malcolm would have broken with the
NOI and set down the path he did. But the same methodology that concludes
that Farrakhan is a fascist today was used in the early 1960s to indict
Malcolm X.


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