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On the Call Not to Protest in Chicago

Vice President Kamala Harris in August 2021. (White House /Erin Scott)

Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an  opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:

A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.

Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I.

The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.

She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.

Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.

She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.

The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that:

More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.

However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.

Malcom X Comes to Mind

But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change?  At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.

Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.

October 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after October 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.

Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.

October 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.

These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year?

The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?”

While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate.  He confuses Haifa with Rafah, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.

According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.”  The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”  

The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have.  Of course, the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?

Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected?  There is no way to know for sure.

As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Demonstration outside the The Watergate Hotel in Washington, where Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu was staying, July 22. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

“The key organizers,” the professors write:

the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.

If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.

Rather than using labels like “ultra-leftist”, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential.  The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.

According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.”

They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.

Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.

According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.”  It’s not?

Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:

The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.

People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous.  Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.  Sign me up.  We need to get that foot off our necks.

• First published in Consortium News

The post On the Call Not to Protest in Chicago first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.