Re: [Marxism] Return of the Minutemen

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lance Murdoch" <lancemurdoch@xxxxxxxxx>

> "I felt the only way to get something done was to do it yourself,"
> said Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant and decorated Vietnam War
> veteran who is helping recruit Minutemen across the country.
> [...]

Dig the hilariously titled article on this guy (i felt it was shor tenough 
to put it here complete, if I was wrong please The Leadership indicate so).

More seriously, third positionism, a "left-wing" form of fascism, has been 
increasingly gaining favor in Europe, most notably the National Bolshevik 
Party in Russia, but also smaller and less known groups. It is also a big 
debate in the European "New Right" (ie Alain de Benoist et al).

The American Front, an organization that operated in the mid-to-late 90s out 
of Oregon and some mid-western states, was the first openly third-position 
organization that I knew of in the USA. Their website had an interview with 
the head of a Florida KKK splinter who claimed he used to be a SDS leader, 
and that he mostly still agreed with a lot of the Maoist politics he had at 
the time.

Such examples, while rare, are not unknown, the most famous perhaps being 
Horst Mahler, the former RAF lawyer turned fascist and NDP leader.

This people are very different from ex-radicals or ex-liberals who turn to 
the right, such as our dear friend David Horowitz. They are an entrirely 
different kind of animal. While Horowitz is a renegade, who has denounced 
vigorously all aspects of his previous politics, and who only vaguely 
identifies a certain "long held belief in freedom" as a connecting thread, 
third positionists of all brands actually throw themselves fully into 
left-wing politics, down to wearing Che shirts and engaging in civil 
disobidience.

In Europe, many causes identified with the left-wing, from anti-imperialist 
commitees to animal liberation groups to anti-capitalist convergences, have 
run into problems with this kind of people, and some even unknowingly count 
them in their numbers, not as infiltrators, but as comrades in arms. One 
outfit, the PCN-CPN, a "communitarianist" group from Belgium and France, 
even leads left-sounding coalitions for everything from the Defense of 
Milosevic to the

They are fascists, but you wouldn't know from the way they talk about Cuba.

They make Walter Lippman sound anti-Fidel.

They are a serious problem for anti-fascists, in particular anti-fascists 
who are also part of wider political movements in which the 
third-positionists operate. Since they are not infiltrators in the classic 
sense, but for the most as genuine in their desire to move coalitions 
forward as any avaerage left sectarian is, they move undistiguishable from 
the rest of the fauna.

Maybe this here character is the latest expression of that phenomena in the 
USA.

sks

http://www.ocweekly.com/printme.php?&eid=61048

http://tinyurl.com/43v5o

The Anti-Immigrant Movement's Trotsky

Jim Gilchrist wants to stop illegals, 'Capitalist Pigs'

by Gustavo Arellano

You really want to loathe Jim Gilchrist, you really do. One minute, the 
56-year-old Aliso Viejo resident rails against illegal immigrants, warning 
ominously that "40 years from now, I see neighborhood armies of 20 to 40 
going out and killing and invading one another. The United States is going 
to have 100 tribes with 100 languages and no common bond. It's future 
mayhem."

But just a couple of breaths later, his tone softens. Illegal immigrants, he 
says, "are not barbarians coming over here, chucking spears and swinging 
swords. This isn't the Gallic Wars. They're just looking for a better life." 
Then, a sentence or two later, Gilchrist resumes his apocalyptic 
predictions. "The first place I lived in Orange County [in the early 1970s] 
was Santa Ana," he says. "Everything was English. Ten years later, it 
changed into mostly Spanish. Twenty years later, it was completely Spanish. 
Talk about colonization!"

And then, some minutes later, Gilchrist mulls about what he just said. "They 
just want to get away from that rotten Mexican regime that has no respect 
for them," he says. "There's something seriously wrong with a country where 
half of the population wants to get out.

"I would support a revolution down there," he spurts. "I'd only give money, 
though-I'd probably be executed as a foreign mercenary. "

Gilchrist, a retired CPA and Vietnam War Purple Heart veteran, heads the 
Minuteman Project, a call-to-arms that promises to place more than 1,000 
people on a 20-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border near Tombstone 
during April. Their goal: prevent any illegal immigrant from entering the 
United States.

"At the current rate of invasion, the United States will be completely 
overrun with ILLEGAL aliens by the year 2025 . . . only 20 years away," 
Gilchrist writes on the introduction to his website, 
www.minutemanproject.com. "ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the 
dominant population in the U.S. and will have made such inroads into the 
political and social systems that they will have more influence than the 
U.S. Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. That ugly consequence is 
already taking place. The United States of America is under invasion."

The Minuteman Project has become a cause célèbre among conservatives, 
publicized via e-mail and highlighted on the FOX News program Hannity & 
Colmes, MSNBC's Scarborough Country, and Bill Handel's radio show on KFI-AM 
640.

"We're going to have 40 outposts down there," Gilchrist enthuses. "We're all 
going to have military-style radios. There's going to be para-gliders from 
Texas, pilots, police officers and lawyers."

He insists that his quasi-militia will not actually apprehend anyone. "That's 
not our job," he explains. "If we see an illegal alien, we're going to 
report them to the Border Patrol. None will cross-we're going to be 100 
percent effective."

This goal seems quixotic. After all, Arizona saw more illegal-immigrant 
border crossings last year than California, New Mexico and Texas combined. 
And the Border Patrol has already voiced its objection to the Minuteman 
Project. "We don't want to say we don't want the public's help," a 
spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times. "We just don't want it in this 
format."

Nevertheless, around 441 people from 44 states have already signed up with 
Gilchrist, including 12 Orange Countians. He won't dissuade volunteers from 
carrying weapons, though he plans to patrol the borders unarmed. And 
co-heading the Minuteman Project is Chris Simcox, who in a March 2003 speech 
to the Huntington Beach-based California Coalition for Immigration Reform, 
warned prospective illegal immigrants, "Take heed of our weapons because we're 
going to defend our borders by any means necessary."

But if Simcox is the Minuteman Project's Stalin, then Gilchrist is its 
Trotsky. After patrolling the border for 30 days, Gilchrist wants his 
volunteers to begin assisting the Internal Revenue Service in cracking down 
on companies that hire illegal immigrants. "It is more effective," Gilchrist 
says, than waiting around in the middle of the Arizona desert. And on the 
Jan. 26 broadcast of Hannity & Colmes, Gilchrist described himself as a 
"former '60s liberal . . . turned quasi-conservative in the '90s." And 
glimpses of his former ideology emerge if you ask Gilchrist about the root 
cause of illegal immigration.

"I blame it on the corporate barons," Gilchrist thunders. "Not just the huge 
ones, but the smaller corporations who know they can get desperate workers 
to work for literal peanuts to do the same work American citizens would want 
twice the salary for. They laugh all the way to the bank. They're 
professional slave traders, just like in the Southern states back to the 
Civil War. . . . I do not like these capitalistic pigs."
He laughs, seemingly aware of the contradiction inherent in his remarks.

"Part of me is conservative," Gilchrist concludes. "And part of me is a 
left-wing wacko."

GARELLANO@xxxxxxxxxxxx 



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