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So many people inside the United States believe the left’s narrative about the United States today, the question becomes very real: can the nation survive the presence within it of a large and growing population of people who hate it and wish to see it destroyed?
For the left, the truth doesn’t matter as much as the narrative. And if the narrative is incendiary enough, and they can convince enough people to believe it, it could indeed be destructive, and even bring the whole nation down, with incalculable effects for the world at large. The narrative that the left is pushing hard right now is a variation on a theme it has harped upon repeatedly since the war in Vietnam and even before that, from the time of the beginning of the Cold War.
The claim is that the United States is a rapacious imperialist power that sows destruction across the earth in the name of its own narrow self-interests, political, cultural, and economic. It exploits smaller states around the globe out of a racist idea of white supremacy, plundering them of their wealth and destroying the earth’s climate in the process. It trumps up wars in order to do this, hypocritically advancing under the banners of “freedom” and “democracy” while pursuing unmistakably colonialist ends. And it demonizes those who are genuinely fighting for freedom against its monstrous, rapacious power.
And so we come to one Joe Iosbaker, a 67-year-old leader of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which describes itself as “a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States. Our home is in the working class.” FRSO’s rhetoric is pure 1930s-era Marxist agitprop, as if the Stalinist purges, the gulags, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge killing fields had never existed: “We are organizing the united front against monopoly capitalism — with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and oppressed nationality movements at its core. This is our general strategy for revolution in the U.S.”
FRSO, however, is not in Russia, China, or Democratic Kampuchea, and this is a group of people who have not learned the lessons of history. FRSO has 33 affiliate groups around the country, in places including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and New York City, as well as Tacoma, Tampa, Tucson, and the Twin Cities. FRSO, its website says forthrightly, “FRSO is recruiting and building towards the creation of a new Communist Party based on Marxism-Leninism. This is necessary to lead the way to socialism and liberation. Our newspaper Fight Back! is popular at protests, read by union workers and community activists, and can also be found at www.FightBackNews.org.”
On Friday, March 13, according to MEMRI, at the International Quds Day rally in Chicago, FRSO members, including Joe Iosbaker himself, were out in force. International Quds Day, you’ll recall, was the brainchild of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a day on which Islamic jihadis and their leftist dupes proclaim their hatred for Israel and support for the “Palestinian” jihad to destroy it. As the United States is Israel’s foremost ally, it comes in for a good helping of recrimination as well.
In Chicago, old Joe Iosbaker bellowed: “It becomes our job, then, as an anti-war movement, as revolutionaries in the belly of the beast, to take advantage of this crisis that Trump and Netanyahu have created and turn it against them, and make certain that this is the beginning of the end of the settler, colonial, racist regime [Israel] and the end of the U.S. imperialist monster. So as they say in Gaza: There is only one solution!”
This was a prompt for a chant. Iosbaker led the crowd in screaming “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” Then the emcee of the rally chimed in with “IRGC, make us proud!” and “Bomb these genocidal clowns!,” both of which the crowd dutifully repeated as well.
So here was a bunch of Marxists cheerleading for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ruthless Iranian force that has oppressed Iran for 47 years and recently murdered tens of thousands of its own people for the crime of protesting. The Communists not only gave their wholehearted support for the IRGC, but expressed the hope that this conflict would bring down the United States as well.
It was absurd from start to finish. Khomeini welcomed the support of Communists as well, but after he took power, instead of rewarding them with a place in his government, he imprisoned and killed them. But aside from the comic aspect of Joe Iosbaker and his comrades, there is the fact that these people live in the United States, and there are many others like them all over the country. Can a nation long survive the presence of a force within it that hates it? We are in the process of finding out.
