Kwanzaa: Holiday From the FBI

January 1, 2001

EARLIER THIS WEEK, President Clinton issued a formal White House proclamation celebrating the first day of Kwanzaa. His announcement began with some claptrap about preserving "what we value of our past," and Kwanzaa being a "wonderful example" with its "focus on the values that have sustained African-Americans through the centuries."

Except for the small historical detail that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 amidst the madness of the multicultural '60s by a black radical stooge of the FBI, Ron Karenga, a.k.a. Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the violent '60s, the FBI encouraged the most offensive black nationalist organizations in order both to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. Despite public perception blending the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites and did not seek armed revolution. That was the trope of Karenga's United Slaves. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Interestingly though, in an 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the "framed" murder of two whites included: "the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department" and so on. (He further noted that "the evidence was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt" -- an interesting standard of proof.) Karenga should know about FBI infiltration.

Also, in the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the '70s, Nigerian newspapers were claiming that many American black radicals were CIA operatives. Karenga leapt in to denounce the idea publicly, saying, "Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents."

There is no question now that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves, leading in one outburst to the shooting of Panther Al "Bunchy" Carter on the UCLA campus by Karenga's United Slaves. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Kwanzaa itself is a lunatic blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life -- economics, work, personality, even litter removal ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.") It takes a village to raise a police snitch. Asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from "classical Marxism" in the 1995 interview, Karenga basically said that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the "best of" -- I'm not making this up -- "early Chinese and Cuban socialism," Kawaida practitioners believe one's racial identity "determines life conditions, life-chances and self-understanding." There's a happy Horatio Alger story for you.

Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Least-Great Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA's revolutionary principles (and this sounds like Saturday Night Live's send-up of the second presidential debate in which George Bush rattled off an endless series of Nigerian names): Umojo, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani -- precisely the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa.

With his Kwanzaa greetings, President Clinton is saluting the intellectual sibling of the Symbionese Liberation Army, killer of housewives and police, and the founder of United Slaves, who were such lunatics that they shot Panthers for not being sufficiently violent -- all with the FBI as their covert ally. It's as if David Duke invented a holiday called "Anglica," and the president of the United States issued a presidential proclamation honoring the synthetic holiday. People might well stand up and take notice if that happened.

Liberals have become so mesmerized by the hegemonic multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history -- the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI's tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, blowing away Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named "Jamal" currently sit on death row?)

Now the "holiday" concocted by these violent stormtrooper stooges of the FBI is a "tradition," a celebration of the "value of our past." This is not a tradition. This is a '60s psychosis grafted onto black community, while the Christian leaders at the forefront of the civil rights movement are washed out of the picture.