The Third World War

The President’s new Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and HUAC have been asking witnesses whether the 1967 summer festival of riots and insurrections has been “the result of a conspiracy.” Actually, the main lines of an answer are well enough known. There most certainly is a would-be conspiracy, or, rather, a couple of dozen overlapping conspiracies: of Black Nationalist and Black Nihilist outfits plus five or six varieties of Communist organizations, including those tied to Moscow, Peking and Havana. Most of these have openly and loudly advised the world that they are doing their damnedest to incite American Negroes to riot, violence and revolution. Some of them have been equally frank in proclaiming their sponsorship of training courses in karate, marksmanship, firebomb manufacture, and other techniques of irregular warfare. Many have at least a skeleton national apparatus, which is in some cases a unit of an international organization. The more-than-local groups have itinerant members who roam about the country carrying the word or receiving it.

So of course there is deliberate conspiracy manifest in the riots, though its specific weight varies from city to city and phase to phase. In some episodes (e.g. Cambridge, Md., Nashville, Tenn.) conspirators have directly triggered the explosion. In others the start has been accidental. In all, once they get going, 1) masses of Negroes, especially young Negroes, have joined more or less spontaneously, according to the usual laws of mob behavior, and 2) the members of the organized groups have gone into action, Blanquist-style, to “broaden the movement,” raise the level of violence, etc.—though of course they are often more the mob’s parasites than its leaders.

JB

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James Burnham

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Martin Luther King Jr

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The President’s new Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and HUAC have been asking witnesses whether the 1967 summer festival of riots and insurrections has been “the result of a conspiracy.” Actually, the main lines of an answer are well enough known. There most certainly is a would-be conspiracy, or, rather, a couple of dozen overlapping conspiracies: of Black Nationalist and Black Nihilist outfits plus five or six varieties of Communist organizations, including those tied to Moscow, Peking and Havana. Most of these have openly and loudly advised the world that they are doing their damnedest to incite American Negroes to riot, violence and revolution. Some of them have been equally frank in proclaiming their sponsorship of training courses in karate, marksmanship, firebomb manufacture, and other techniques of irregular warfare. Many have at least a skeleton national apparatus, which is in some cases a unit of an international organization. The more-than-local groups have itinerant members who roam about the country carrying the word or receiving it.

So of course there is deliberate conspiracy manifest in the riots, though its specific weight varies from city to city and phase to phase. In some episodes (e.g. Cambridge, Md., Nashville, Tenn.) conspirators have directly triggered the explosion. In others the start has been accidental. In all, once they get going, 1) masses of Negroes, especially young Negroes, have joined more or less spontaneously, according to the usual laws of mob behavior, and 2) the members of the organized groups have gone into action, Blanquist-style, to “broaden the movement,” raise the level of violence, etc.—though of course they are often more the mob’s parasites than its leaders.