Natalie and Clayton Morris of REDACTED Are Well-Intentioned But Clueless on the Key Fact: Class Conflict Over What Values Should Shape Society

Libertarianism cannot explain the 'why' of what's happening, nor 'how' to stop the oppressors

The above video by Natalie and Clayton Morris on their REDACTED show illustrates how well-intentioned people (as I believe they are) are nonetheless mis-informed about the cause of the things they rightfully oppose and hence fail to build the kind of movement that can actually end those terrible things. In the case of Natalie and Clayton, I believe the problem is that they are libertarians and not egalitarians; they see the problem being that we have “an empire, not a republic” rather than seeing the problem being that we have a society based on class inequality.

Here are two examples from this video to illustrate what I mean.

Example #1. Natalie, in discussing the BDS movement, says that it arose because Palestinians wanted to have a non-violent rather than a violent resistance to Israeli oppression, because the Palestinians were known by the world as being a violent people and this undermined their ability to gain world wide support. Natalie doesn’t understand that the reason Palestinians have lost world-wide support from (some of) their violence is not because of violence per se, but because of specifically terrorist violence as opposed to class war non-terrorist violence.

Think about it! Did the Union lose world wide support because of its violence in the American Civil War against the slave-owners’ Confederacy¹ military force? No. Did the Allies lose world-wide support during World War II²because of their violence against the fascist military forces? No.

The reason Palestinians lost world-wide support is not because they used violence against the Israeli military force and armed settlers who were violently oppressing them, but because they (mainly Hamas, but also the PLO in its early years) deliberately aimed lethal violence against unarmed non-combatant Israeli civilians, which is by definition terrorism.

Natalie does not seem to grasp the distinction between terrorist violence versus non-terrorist violence (a.k.a. class war violence as discussed here), i.e., violence in collective self-defense only directed against those who are using violence to oppress people or who are members of a military force that is violently oppressing people.

The reason Natalie does not grasp this key distinction is because in order to do so one needs to think in class terms (in the case of Israel/Palestine, the billionaire rulers of Israel and Hamas and the U.S. versus the ordinary working class people of Israel/Palestine regardless of their religion) and not national terms (in this case of Israel/Palestine, “Palestinians versus Israelis.”) As I discuss in the above-linked article about class war versus terrorist violence, the former is based on winning over all oppressed people (regardless of what nation they are citizens of) to resistance against all oppressors (regardless of their nationality) in contrast to terrorist violence that views people only according to their nationality (or some other non-class category such as religion, etc.) A person such as Natalie who doesn’t think in class terms inevitably fails to grasp the key distinction between these very different kinds of violence.

When people such as Natalie view all violence as bad, they inevitably end up opposing oppressed people who use proper class war violence. This is how the confusion typical of libertarians harms the struggle against class inequality and oppression, including the struggle against Zionism, which oppresses not only Palestinians but also working class Israeli Jews, as I prove here and as REDACTED would be well-advised to explain to its followers.

Example #2. Natalie tells us that the U.S. Congress is pro-Israel because the Israel lobby (AIPAC)—essentially the representative of a tiny foreign nation—tells Congresspersons how to vote and can make sure they don’t get re-elected if they don’t follow those orders. Natalie says this is the reason the United States is so pro-Israel. It’s the “tail wags dog” theory, which is absurd because tails don’t wag dogs.

What Natalie fails to grasp is what my article, titled “The Israel Lobby’s Power Comes from the American Ruling Class” (not from the tiny country of Israel) explains. Natalie doesn’t understand that America’s ruling billionaire plutocracy has its own very rational (though evil) reasons for supporting Israel, reasons that I discuss in my article “Why U.S. Billionaires Could Destroy the Israel Lobby But Don’t,” about how Israel helps oppressors everywhere control their own have-nots.

Think about it. Zionist (Israeli) leaders use violence against Palestinians (and fund Hamas and work to keep it in power as I prove here) to create the frightening (to ordinary Jews) Palestinian bogeyman enemy with which to control, oppress and get rich off of Israeli working class Jews as I prove in my above-linked article here. Furthermore Zionist leaders during the Holocaust betrayed ordinary Jews by opposing rescue efforts of them because these rescue plans didn’t send the rescued Jews to Palestine to enable the Zionist leaders to have a working class of their own to get rich off of there, as I prove in my article, “Why, Really, Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted a State of their Own?”

If American billionaires wanted to destroy the Israel lobby, all they would have to do is to tell this sordid truth about Zionism to the American public and in a couple of months any politician getting endorsed by AIPAC would be dead in the water. The billionaires don’t do this because they want the Israel lobby to do its work, and they make sure it does. Zionism helps billionaires stay in power and so the billionaires make sure the Israel lobby is powerful.

But Natalie just doesn’t get it. That’s because Natalie does not think in class terms. If she did get it, then REDACTED would be FAR more persuasive to people. Currently REDACTED on the question of Israel cannot win over people who (wrongly) believe that Israeli violence is for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe and who will not take a side that “goes against the Jews” because of their rightful horror at the Holocaust. Here’s what happens, however, when you talk to passionately pro-Israel people in class terms: you win them to being anti-Zionist, as I recount from personal experience here. REDACTED cannot do this because they are libertarians and not egalitarians; they don’t know how to talk in class terms. But they’d be FAR more persuasive to FAR more people if they did.

The Problem With Marxism!

One reason well-intentioned people avoid talking or even thinking in class terms is because Marxism has attached to the concept of class conflict extremely wrong and dangerous and profoundly anti-democratic ideas that were not attached to that concept before Karl Marx. To see the distinction between the concept of class conflict (as egalitarians use it) versus Marxism please read “Great Ideas That Were Around Long Before Karl Marx” and “Egalitarianism Is Anti-Marxism” and “Communism.”

People such as Natalie and Clayton have perfectly understandable reasons for wanting to avoid Marxist-style class analysis (the only kind they know about, presumably) as a way of opposing the establishment. Libertarianism, with its avoidance of the concept of class conflict, is thus, for such people, an attractive way to oppose the establishment without being a Marxist, and so good people adopt the libertarianism framework for their activism. The problem is that in so-doing they fail to adopt the proper and extremely useful egalitarian-style class analysis that is the basis for all the articles I write, as I discuss and explain here.

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to win the class war.

1. Regarding the Confederacy, please read “Most Southern Whites Hated the Confederacy.”

2. Regarding World War II, please read “The People As Enemy: The Leaders’ Hidden Agenda in World War II” (PDF, also for sale as a paper book here) about how the actual primary aim of the Allies’ leaders was to attack the working class, not the fascists.