Lost in the media’s reportage of Quentin Tarantino’s using rhetoric scripted by Black Lives Matter is the fact that the Rise Up October event at which Tarantino spoke was organized by revolutionary communists who advocate the armed overthrow of the United States of America.
In an article Thursday titled Quentin Tarantino Boycott Is a ‘Mafia-Style Protection Racket,’ Protest Organizer Says, TheWrap writes:
“It really is a Mafia-style protection racket thing, only the payoff is toeing the political line, not cash,” Carl Dix told TheWrap Thursday as he lashed out against the police groups threatening to boycott Tarantino’s upcoming western “The Hateful Eight.”
Who is Carl Dix, the protest organizer defending Tarantino and equating the police with the mafia?
Mr. Dix is one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group that has held anti-police events in October for nearly two decades and that openly advocates for an armed overthrow of the United States of America.
In other words, Quentin Tarantino was not merely speaking at an event that was anti-police; he was an active, invited participant in a rally that is anti-military, anti-capitalist, and anti-American.
Media Won’t Ask Tarantino about Supporting Revolutionary Communist Event
The claim made by the defenders of the Black Lives Matter movement is that the movement is a reasonable one and simply opposes police brutality. These defenders—from the countless, countless talking heads on television from Roland Martin to Van Jones to celebrity defenders Quentin Tarantino to politicians like President Barack Obama and presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton—claim that, while there may be a few outliers who make crazy claims on occasion, they are addressing legitimate, real concerns.
Also taking the position that the Black Lives Matter movement is reasonable aside from a few bad apples is GOP hopeful Marco Rubio. The Washington Post reported:
[Rubio] told Fox News’s heavily conservative audience that the Black Lives Matter movement really isn’t an irrational or imaginary set of concerns. The people involved are voicing real and legitimate complaints about the experience that too many people of color (like Rubio) in this country have had, he said, and America’s long-term problems with racial profiling and police misconduct are real.
Carl Dix and the Revolutionary Communist Party are clear about what they want, but you would never know that from reading the media reports about Rise Up October.
Carl Dix’s official biography on the Revolutionary Communist Party site says Dix “believes that only all-the-way communist revolution can end the oppression suffered by billions of people across this planet.”
Dix and his comrades are very clear what “all-the-way communist revolution” means: an armed overthrow of the U.S. government.
Why the silence from the media? Why is nobody asking about support of a group that wants an armed revolution?
Part of this is the legacy of the Left’s single-largest victory in the culture war: decades of attacks on “McCarthyism” have smothered criticism of communism.
By portraying the critics of communism as conspiracy theorists and fringe kooks, the Left has created a chill effect on an entire generation.
We see the impact today—nobody wants to call out actual, avowed, self-admitted, proud communists, lest they be accused of being a right-wing nut job using McCarthyite tactics.
However, the facts in this case could not be more clear: Quentin Tarantino spoke at and supported the Rise Up October event put on by Carl Dix—as an actual, avowed, self-admitted, proud representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The History of Rise Up October
A June 2015 article in The Revolution, which is the official newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, called for the event that Quentin Tarantino would accept an invitation to attend, saying:
There is great potential to mobilize the kind of defiant and massive march needed to deliver the message that there is a growing force in society that refuses to accept these horrors in silence. Beginning with the response to the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson and escalating up to today, thousands have taken to the streets in cities all across the country. People need to continue protesting every time the police gun down or brutalize someone. But we need to take this resistance higher. We need to bring this resistance together into a massive nationwide outpouring – and October 24 is the day to do that, and NYC is the place for it.
In a twenty-minute video shot in June, Carl Dix discusses the plan for Rise Up October in a meeting with prominent Black Lives Matter advocate Dr. Cornel West.
The Rise Up 2015 event was not the first “anti-police brutality” event that Dix has held to agitate black Americans in hopes of sparking a revolutionary overthrow of the USA. As Dix’s own bio says, “Carl Dix is one of the initiators of the October 22nd Coalition Against Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. He helped organize national days of protests against police brutality in 1996 and 1997.”
Dix is also a leading, founding voice in what has become a central policy demand of the Black Lives Matter movement: a focus on “mass incarceration,” which is part of the criminal justice reform agenda currently pushed by President Obama.
Another important activist against mass incarceration is James Kilgore, the Symbionese Liberation Army member recently profiled by Breitbart News.
Carl Dix: “Committed Internationalist” Who Wants World Revolution
It needs to be stressed that referring to Mr. Dix and his comrades as communist internationalists who believe in armed revolution is not in any way hype. It’s their own, stated position.
For instance, Mr. Dix’s official biography on the ComRev.com page says:
Carl Dix believes in world revolution. He is a staunch supporter of the Maoist people’s wars in Peru, Nepal and the Philippines. He has actively opposed U.S. imperialism starting with his resistance inside the U.S. military during the Vietnam war–from his work with the African Liberation Support Committee of the 1970s, to his current opposition to U.S. threats around the world.
Dix does not want reform and does not believe in elections as a tool of change. His bio continues, “In 1984 and 1988, Carl Dix campaigned as an ‘anti-candidate’ during the U.S. presidential election season–running against the notion that oppressed people could rely on the election arena to accomplish positive change.”
What Dix and his comrades want are not elections; it’s armed struggle. In a conversation between Dix and Revolutionary Communist Party chairman Bob Avakian, Avakian states bluntly, “You have to have an army”:
What kind of army should we have? Should we have an army like the imperialists because that is more efficient? Should we rely on technology, should we have the hierarchy of rank that’s characteristic of imperialist armies? Should we separate the army from the masses and have it isolated from them politically as well as specializing in the business of waging warfare, or preparing for warfare? These are all very real questions. Or do we want a people’s army, one that’s more integrated with the masses of people, that relies on the masses of people, that fights in a way that brings forward the masses of people as a backbone of defense against imperialist attack, or things like that?
This obsession with violent revolutionary tacts is not new to Dix or his comrades like Students for a Democratic Society’s Eric Mann and his creation, the Black Lives Matter movement, of course. It’s Straight Outta Marx and the Communist Manifesto, which says:
We traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Will Tarantino, Hillary, & Rubio Keep Getting a Free Pass?
There is no question about the origin of the Rise Up October movement, the goals of Revolutionary Communist Party, or Carl Dix. Nor could the connection between Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors and her revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society/Weatherman mentor Eric Mann be any clearer.
Since it is proven that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded and is being led by revolutionary communists, the only question is whether the media will ever call its defenders like Tarantino, Clinton, or Rubio out and ask them one simple question: How can you possibly support a group that is calling for the armed overthrow of America?
If the Revolutionary Communist Party and revolutionaries behind Black Lives Matter got their way, it would not just be patriotic Americans, the devout and registered Republicans killed en masse. No, progressive multi-millionaries like the smiling reporters of the mainstream media, Hillary Clinton, Quentin Tarantino, his film producer ally Harvey Weinstein, and every megastar who has ever been featured in a Tarantino flick would be stripped of their riches, frogmarched into the nearest public square, and then shot or hung in front of a cheering proletariat mob.
It is a scene that even the depraved brilliance of Quentin Tarantino cannot imagine, apparently.
Follow investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism Boot Camp founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.