Since shortly after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have faced a vexing dilemma: “the people” that they love so much don’t seem to love them back.
No matter how much they chant “power to the people,” most actual people have rejected communism when they’ve had a choice in the matter. It turns out that the poor don’t really want an overthrow of the existing social order as much they want to be less poor and so the thirst for bloody revolution never really caught fire in the west.
A group of philosophy professors came together at a university in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s to try and tackle the problem selling socialism to the people. They decided that Marxism could best be spread in the west through the culture, including the arts and academia.
These philosophers pushing this approach of “cultural Marxism” became know as The Frankfurt School, and included a professor named Herbert Marcuse. (For much greater detail on the Frankfurt school, read Andrew Breitbart’s book Righteous Indignation.)
Herbert Marcuse would flee Germany before World War II and come to the United States where he would eventually become known as the philosophical father of the New Left. Marcuse ended up teaching in Massachusetts at Brandeis University, where he would take on a protégé in 1964.
Her name was Angela Davis.
One of Marcuse’s beliefs was that the best chance for a communist revolution in the United States lay in “the ghetto population.” In Marcuse’s highly influential An Essay On Liberation, he wrote:
The fact is that, at present in the United States, the black population appears as the “most natural” force of rebellion.
Of course, the “ghetto population” couldn’t take up arms against America if they were in prison.
After Angela Davis began studying philosophy with Marcuse, she would take up the cause of Marxist thug George Jackson.
George Jackson & Angela Davis
Angela Davis would become one of the most well known and iconic radical leftist of the 1960s and then go on to become a driving force in today’s “criminal justice reform” movement.
George Jackson’s troubled life was a sharp contrast from the cloistered intellectual path that Angela Davis had led. By 1961, Jackson was 18 years old and had spent years in California’s Youth Authority Corrections Facility for a series of burglaries, assaults and robberies.
In 1964, George Jackson and Angela were strangers. In the next few years, Jackson and Davis would become both political comrades, soul mates and lovers. Davis would become George Jackson’s loudest and most visible advocate.
By 1971, George Jackson would be dead, killed in a hail of gunfire in a prison escape attempt, and Angela Davis would be awaiting trial for her role in a bungled attempt to free George Jackson in 1970 that ended up in a bloody shootout outside the Marin County courthouse.
By 2015, both George Jackson and Angela Davis would be not inspiration to the Black Lives Matter movement and Davis would become a leading advocate for the criminal justice reforms being pushed by both Black Lives Matter and President Barack Obama.
After George Jackson was killed trying to escape San Quentin, Angela Davis wrote a eulogy for him and vowed to continue fighting for him:
For me, George’s death has meant the loss of a comrade and revolutionary leader, but also the loss of an irretrievable love. This love is so agonizingly personal as to be indescribable. I can also say that in continuing to love him, I will try my best to express that love in the way he would have wanted — by reaffirming my determination to fight for the cause George died defending. With his exampled before me, my tears and grief are rage at the system responsible for his murder.
Angela Davis kept her promise “to fight for the cause” by becoming a leader advocate and authority on criminal justice reform. She’s an in-demand speaker around the world and the author of several books on the subject, including Are Prisons Obsolete?
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney gave the book a glowing review and makes it clear that part of the appeal of releasing mass numbers of prisoners is that they create a large voting block:
In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book, Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. Her arguments are well wrought and restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how and why more than 2 million Americans are presently behind bars, and the corporations who profit from their suffering. Davis explores the biases that criminalize communities of color, politically disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing short of ‘new terrains of justice.’ Another invaluable work in the Open Media Series by one of America’s last truly fearless public intellectuals.
Make no mistake, however: the modern American left wants a socialist revolution and they don’t care if it comes through the ballot or the bullet.
Angela Davis wasn’t just remaining loyal to George Jackson by fighting for criminal justice reform, however; she’s also fighting for her mentor Herbert Marcuse’s idea of a ghetto uprising by violent thugs who learned Marxism in prison.
Enter The Dragon: The Black Guerrilla Family
A Marxist prison gang called the Black Guerrilla Family gang or BGF remains one of George Jackson’s most enduring legacies.
Jackson co-founded the gang in the 1960s and they still exist to this day.
As InsidesPrison.com explains:
The BGF have been identified by crossed sabers, machetes, rifles and shotguns as common tattoos, as well as an image of a black dragon overtaking a prison, a prison tower or prison guard.
The Black Guerrilla Family has an ideological doctrine that considers all blacks political prisoners, and has attempted to organized black advocacy by the imposition of their commands upon other inmates.
The dragon that’s part of the Black Guerrilla Family tattoo is significant—it comes from a quote from Ho Chi Minh.
George Jackson was a Maoist, like the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. During the Vietnam war, these 1960s radicals were on the side of America’s enemy North Vietnam and its leader, Ho Chi Minh.
The dragon imagery of the tattoo comes from a quote from Ho Chi Minh, who said: “When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.”
Angela Davis is carrying on that communist influenced black liberation goal to this day, using to release as many prisoners as possible to become the street troops for the bloody revolution that America’s radical left has fantasized about for fifty years.
The advocates for ending “mass incarceration” want to release open the prison doors completely and let loose the Dragon.
In Part One of this series, we gave you an in-depth look at George Jackson—a name many people don’t know but who is essential to understanding the history of the radical left, Black Lives Matter, and criminal justice reform. If you haven’t read part one, you’ll want to check it out.
In Part Three, we’ll examine how the current Black Lives Matter movement is a direct descendant of George Jackson’s legacy.
Follow Breitbart News investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.