America’s Urban Guerillas
It is unlikely that many of the protestors and agitators — paid and unpaid — on the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, and New York City know the name Carlos Marighella, though the far-left organizers and funders of the protests may be familiar with some of his writings. I learned about Marighella in 1981, when reading Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network. Sterling was one of the best investigative journalists of her time (she died in 1995 at the age of 75), authoring books on international terrorism, the Sicilian mafia, and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, among others. Her study of the revolutionary urban guerilla tactics promoted by Marighella, a Brazilian communist, provides insight into the leftist agitators who are causing such havoc over the enforcement of illegal immigration in some of our larger cities.
Although many of the protestors … don’t know it, their actions are generally following the playbook of … urban guerilla warfare strategists.
Sterling described Marighella as “an apparatchik in Brazil’s … Communist Party for forty years” who authored a small book titled the Mini-Manual — a how-to book for urban guerillas and a “clinical study of the step-by-step tactics in the strategy of terror.” Marighella proposed using “revolutionary violence to identify with popular causes,” forcing the government to “intensify repression.” The goal is to provoke law enforcement to physically arrest “innocent people” to “make life in the city unbearable.” Meanwhile, leftist political allies portray the police as unjust and blame the authorities for violence and repression. The urban guerillas cause havoc and chaos, forcing the government to act repressively which will result in “the uncontrollable expansion of urban rebellion.”
Sterling notes that Marighella’s Mini-Manual became the “strategic blueprint” for terrorist groups throughout the world, including the Tupamaros in South America, the Red Brigades in Italy, the IRA in Ireland and Britain, the ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the Weather Underground in the United States. One of Marighella’s ideological comrades, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli of Italy, wrote a paper titled “Italy 1968: Political Guerilla Warfare,” which urged urban guerillas to foster “intensive provocation” to reveal “the reactionary essence of the state.” Urban guerillas, he counseled, should “violate the law openly … challenging and outraging institutions and public order in every way.” When law enforcement reacts, he continued, their repressive conduct must be denounced.
What we saw in the summer of 2020 in cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle, and what we are seeing today in Portland, Minneapolis, New York, and other cities, is a form of urban guerilla warfare that mirrors the strategy propounded by Marighella, Feltrinelli and their followers in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Today’s agitators are openly violating the law by impeding and attempting to impede law enforcement operations, disrupting public order, and committing some acts of violence — engaging in what Feltrinelli called “intensive provocation.” Several protestors have been arrested, one was killed and two others were shot. In Minneapolis, one agitator was shot and killed and in Portland two others were shot when they drove their vehicles at law enforcement officers. Leftist spokesmen and officials in those cities and nationally side with the urban guerillas, effectively fueling the fires of agitation.
Although many of the protestors and agitators don’t know it, their actions are generally following the playbook of Marighella, Feltrinelli, and other urban guerilla warfare strategists. Leftist media personality Rachel Maddow told a sympathetic Jimmy Kimmel that if three-and-a-half percent of the population protest in the streets — what Marighella called the “uncontrollable expansion of urban rebellion” — they will constitute an unstoppable force against President Trump, who she blames for everything. Other agitators have chanted that Kristi Noem should be hanged. Some leftist public officials and former public officials have called law enforcement actions “murderous.” The left is portraying those who enforce the laws as the lawbreakers whose conduct, to use Feltrinelli’s words, exposes the “reactionary essence of the state.” Claire Sterling would understand.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
The Experts Were Wrong About Pete Hegseth
The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York
Xi Jinping: ‘The Reunification of Our Motherland Is Unstoppable’