What happened that socialists & antiwar activists are marching in lockstep with dictators, CIA agents, & fascists?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is considered by many as an unimpeachable source on US hate groups. But many of us disagree with their lists, bans, determinations, & methods. That is particularly so after they spent a month privately training Israeli lawyer Nitsana Darshan-Leitner who founded the Shurat HaDin law center in 2003. Shurat HaDin is a law firm associated with the Israeli government which engages in “lawfare,” i.e., bringing suits on behalf of “terror victims” against “Islamic & Arab groups engaged in terror attacks.” It’s primary political goal is to destroy BDS groups through tying them up in litigation using methods learned from SPLC.

On March 9th, SPLC published an article titled “The multipolar spin: how fascists operationalize left-wing resentment” by a university lecturer named Alexander Reid Ross. The next day they withdrew the article after complaints by Assadist Max Blumenthal because it impugns him & his fascist political associations. What the article addresses in a labyrinth of organizational maps & accusations is the seemingly peculiar amalgam between antiwar activists, “retired” CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials, sectarian socialists, Stalinists, libertarians, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, & Assadists & other fascists which most dramatically manifest on the issue of Syria.

The article lucidly lays out the associations but attributes the problem to fascist interference into progressive but sectarian political circles. There’s no doubt that progressives, especially the social climbers & careerists like Blumenthal, are being played by fascist & Assadist propagandists. But the profound degeneration in progressive politics has been going on since at least the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 & can be said to originate in the isolation of the McCarthy witch-hunt when the left attracted too many social misfits & crackpots. There never has been a political analysis of this degeneration because of the rift which prevails between theory & practice.

It’s useful to read the article though it should not be read as the gospel truth without vetting the accusations the author makes. It’s useful but accusations do not replace analysis about what the hell happened that in 2018 people who call themselves socialists & antiwar activists are marching in lockstep with dictators, CIA agents, & fascists. Analysis is necessary because this grotesque amalgam is engaged in discrediting struggles against war, occupation, & genocide in Syria, Palestine, Kashmir, Burma, Afghanistan, the Philippines, & wherever the hatred of Muslims can be used as a weapon against freedom.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180309225139/https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/09/multipolar-spin-how-fascists-operationalize-left-wing-resentment