Get the Klan

To the Editors of The Crimson:

William E. McKibben's article "View From the Fringe" (Crimson, 22 Sept.) was basically a liberal's attempt to equate the far left and the far right as members of the so-called unrealistic fringe, hated by a "good segment of society." This equation is the same methodology which led the bourgeois press to characterize the KKK's cold-blooded murder of five anti-Klan militants in Greensboro, North Carolina, as simply a "shootout" between two "violence-prone extremist groups."

The Klan does not simply have a "vision of the past" as McKibben states. It is an active organization of fascist terrorists who have a long history of terror and murder against Blacks, Jews, trade unionists and the left. Fascism is the most naked form of capitalist reaction. The alarming growth of the KKK is a product of the deteriorating economic condition of U.S. imperialism. Workers who are battling grinding inflation, plant closings and layoffs often perceive Blacks and non-white immigrant workers as a threat to the precious few jobs that are left and thus can more easily be taken in by fascist demagogy. While Carter and Reagan bluster about each other's allegiances to the Klan, the KKK won a Democratic primary in southern California while stating that Republican Ronald Reagan is the man for them. It could not be more clear that as far as the KKK is concerned, there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. Furthermore, it was government agencies--the FBI and the Treasury Department--which had paid agents to participate in the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing and the 1979 Greensboro massacre.

Fascism is a real and dangerous alternative for the capitalist class when it is faced with the spectre of workers' revolution. Fascism was used by the bourgeoisie in Germany to destroy a conscious and militant working class that threatened its private property. As U.S. imperialism decays, the threat of the Klan terrorists being unleashed against the labor movement, Blacks, Jews and other minorities becomes increasingly "realistic" for the U.S. bourgeoisie.

McKibben falsely labels the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) as "revolutionary socialists." In fact the RCP has had precious little to do with the fight against fascism and even objectively supported the Louise Day Hicks campaign in its efforts to "unite against Boston busing." Real communists like the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League offer the only alternative to imperialist decay and fascism. So when the KKK wanted to "celebrate" the Greensboro massacre in the labor/Black town of Detroit it was the SL and 500 predominantly Black workers who demonstrated and stopped the Klan. And when the Nazis threatened to celebrate Hitler's birthday on April 19 in San Francisco, over 1,200 trade unionists, Blacks, Chicanos, Jews, gays and socialists supported the SL's call for a mass labor-centered mobilization and actually stopped the fascists' "birthday party." The Blacks whose relatives have been lynched and the Jews who have had Nazism tattooed on their arms understood that there is no equation of leftists with fascists and they took a side with us. Barry Kallio