New Open Letter To Radicals

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Note by Hunter:  As I very occasionally feel obligated to note, I've been
around for awhile -- and my open and fully conscious Left radical career
began at the very beginning of 1955.  I've been an active radical
organizer -- and sometime professor [who still organized]  -- ever since.
I've been many places and I've "seen the elephant and heard the owl" in some
very, very strange settings and times and epochs.

And these are damn sure strange and challenging -- and exciting and
promising -- times.

I have full faith in Humanity and History and thus I have a very basic
optimism about things.  Anyway, here are my thoughts. [ We're also posting
this on our website.]

Fraternally, Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]


NEW OPEN LETTER TO RADICALS  [Hunter Gray,  Fall 2001]

The smell of a kind of fascism [cloaked, as always, in ostensible
"Americanism"], is floating ever more freely over the myriad of flags in the
land of the free. In an atmosphere of spontaneous and deliberately initiated
and manipulated fear and hysteria, the  cowardly capitulation of Congress to
the repressive Bush/Ashcroft "anti-terrorism" proposals and the now emergent
massive incursion into civil liberties and personal privacy -- bound up with
such labels as "Patriot" and "Uniting and Strengthening America" -- is
rapidly becoming ever more reminiscent of the late 1940s and early and mid
1950s.

Meanwhile, we have  a sanguinary war [yet another] initiated by the United
States against the poverty-stricken and faction-torn Afghanistan [a
sovereign nation against which nothing of international criminal nature has
been proven] -- blending mounting military aggression with token
contributions  of "humanitarian" food and sanctimonious U.S.
government-sponsored collections of  money for children.  This extends the
frontier of national hypocrisy even further than most of this tortured world
's 20th century examples.

To exhibit my enduring and very basic optimism, I'll use a Mississippi
phrase, "This mess will pass." This isn't going to last nearly as long --
not by a very long shot -- as the horrific mid-century Red Scare atmosphere
in which some of us came of radical age.

Many of us, fighting ever onward, survived that. And everything since.  We'
re still here.  Still fighting.  And, as always, there are the younger
people rising up -- fresh vision and vigorous commitment and burning passion
and clear-eyed optimism.

 Within the United States,  things will eventually settle 'way down on the
terrorism front  -- and maybe even much sooner than later.  The "War,"
stumbling on in confused and blood-thirsty fashion, will fade [even as some
of the "Allies" presently seem to be doing themselves.]  Unemployment is
mounting across the country -- cities big and small, and in the little
out-of-the-way places -- and significant dimensions of the economy are
indicating clear, fundamentally recessionary signs.

The hideous legacy of death and injury and hatred in those sections of the
world which we [and others] for decades have tortured with  mainly
safe-from-on-high bombing will last, of course, for many generations.

The essentially totalitarian complex of  repressive laws will remain with
us --  but only if their proponents and advocates have their way.
Eventually, the witch-hunting pathology carried by FBI et al. will move from
the "easy" targets -- "known radicals" and dark-skinned people with "ethnic"
names -- into more "mainstream" America:  liberals, Left newspapers and
journals and websites,  more and more educators and journalists,"guilt by
association," ex post facto fish-nets.  And, given the New Faith , these
government attacks on civil liberties and personal privacy will eventually
come to plague [fiscally and otherwise] the very corporate captains of
cyberspace themselves.

And  there'll be, too, the growing realization that this totalitarian poison
ivy and  belladonna [nightshade] isn't going to be effective in preventing
bona fide terrorism or in apprehending its perpetrators. [After all, it's
been obvious for decades that FBI et al. have consistently carried out
illegal, repressive operations against a vast number of people in our land.]
Only genuinely global social justice will prevent terrorism. And, at
whatever tragically glacial pace, that will inevitably proceed.

Mounting economic crises and concerns and demands will move to the fore.
And the voices from that deepening nightmare will grow ever wider and
louder.

And as all of this inevitable and complex sociology progresses, thinking
America will lose its enthusiasm for the expensive -- liberty-wise and
fiscally -- security of the barbed-wire corral, the rabbit hutch, the
barricaded closet.


But we cannot wait for that.

Our job right now is to fight -- sensibly, militantly, effectively -- with
every ethical resource at our command.  And to keep fighting -- for a full
measure of bread-and-butter and a full measure of liberty and for peace with
justice/justice with peace.

We need to organize -- and organize again and again on every social justice
front: in our own little corners of the world, and with national
perspective -- and with international vision.  And indeed, some of that is
gathering momentum and its thunder is more frequent -- and louder.  But most
grassroots organizing -- and such critical components as local leadership
development and blending long-range vision with shorter-range pragmatism and
much much more -- is slow, hard, tedious struggle-work over the long, long
pull.  It's absolutely critical in the Save the World Business.

We need to use every single available legal resource. There is still due
process and judicial review -- discouraging as they often are. We're going
to see more and more genuinely effective legal advocacy outfits developing
and joining the older tried-and-true organizations.  But, again, much good
law is still made in the streets.

We need to use the political process.  Even though almost all politicians of
"the two old parties" may frequently leave us cold, we can make some use of
some of them.  And, more and more, I'm sure there will be positive and
constructive independent and third party political action.

We need to make use of massive non-violent demonstrations in every social
justice sector.  People need to be prepared to go to jail and, in some
instances, to stay there for awhile.

We need to make full use of every media and cyberspace and associated
resource at our disposal.

And if you can do witch-craft, do that.  Witch-craft for good purposes is
"good medicine."

We must always remember that, in the final analysis, an organized and
militant and genuinely radical grassroots is the most basic foundation for
the successful catch of "the good things of life."  Rights don't come from
politicians and courts.  Rights are inherently ours as human beings.  But we
always have to organize to take and keep and to advance those rights -- ever
upward and together -- to the Sun.

So  we keep fighting, always and onward, because this struggle for full
social justice -- for a full measure of food and a full measure of liberty
and for just peace -- will never really end.  And when we fight, we must
always fight in the context of "an injury to one is an injury to all."

And success will be ours -- always ours -- in the long run.

=====

[A note:  Even though the situation involving repressive legislation and
witch-hunting by FBI et al. is rapidly worsening,  this country has had an
anti-civil libertarian Federal/state/local "task force" operation in the
shadows ever since the still very  functionally operative Clinton-initiated
Anti-Terrorist Act of 1996.  Some of us on the Left have been targets of
that for years.  Our large social justice website www.hunterbear.org
continually documents as much of this as we can pin down [and it's a lot] of
what has been and is outright surveillance and harassment.  Now, of course,
the totalitarian, repressive mechanisms are certain to widen considerably
and deepen sharply -- with an ever broader circle of victims.  If you haven'
t already, take a look at our website --and the experiences of ourselves and
some others will provide some indication of the methodology of FBI and its
sycophants.]

Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]  Mid-October  2001


Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]
www.hunterbear.org (social justice)

Left Discussion Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Redbadbear

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