And My Friends Respond to the Attacks

As most of my friends and many of my fans are aware of by now, there is an ongoing campaign to cancel me, led by an anarcho-puritan cult based in Portland, Oregon, whose non-anonymous luminaries include Shane Burley, Spencer Sunshine, and Alexander Reid Ross, all of whom subscribe to a fake version of antifascism, in which you can be supportive of Israeli apartheid and US imperialism, but still be against fascism.  People like me, who are against Israeli settler-colonialism along with other forms of apartheid, are painted by this cult as antisemites.

Spencer Sunshine has accused me of being a "fascist collaborator" for interviewing -- and trying to understand -- the wrong people on my YouTube channel.  This is a blasphemous activity in the eyes of the Portland anarcho-puritan cult, which believe in excommunication, rather than communication.  For a far more detailed account of their campaign against me and other leftwing musicians and intellectuals, see davidrovics.com/trolls.

Spencer shared a post by Shane Burley on Facebook, in which Shane shared (for the hundredth time) a lengthy article from the anarcho-puritan riot porn platform, It's Going Down, about me and my many transgressions (all related to talking to the wrong people).  

Here is Peter Werbe's response to the post, which I share on my blog with Peter's permission. It's especially notable because Peter is one of the most well-loved anarchists in the United States, and has been a member of the editorial board of the longest-publishing anarchist paper in the country, the Fifth Estate, from the 1960's to the present, a publication which Spencer Sunshine has written for and has otherwise been involved with over the years.

This [post] is vicious calumny, Shane. I’d think it was the work of a police provocateur trying to cause turmoil among our movement if I wasn’t aware of the good work you do. And, Spencer, it is shameful of you to allow this kind of personal attack aimed at destroying someone’s reputation and their work to be posted. It’s Going Down’s article was shameful, as well. It’s known in the trade as a hit piece, one that doesn’t give the person under assault a chance to respond.

David has fully answered all of these scurrilous charges on his own blog and right now is back in Europe and Iceland on a successful tour even though there were attempts to get venues and groups to cancel his appearance. This is despicable.

Rather than arguing about who David has interviewed or who he has defended, things I have discussed with him, maybe we should personalize this situation.

Do you really think I would be good friends with an anti-Semite and a pro-fascist person? Do you think Marius Mason would, who counts David as a close friend? Do you think the Fifth Estate would be offering David’s vinyl album as a Special Offer for new subscribers if your description of him was accurate? Do you think the Fifth Estate would have allowed David to host the Fifth Estate Live podcast doing dozens of interviews with activists and authors if he was any of those things?

Take a look at the guest list and listen to the archive editions and you will see why we had full confidence in David as a host.

I’ve travelled with David on several of his tours and often to visit Marius in prison. He is involved in every struggle with songs that nail the oppressor and encourage resistance and a new society. His commitment is to the same things that I, and you, have devoted our lives to.

If you have a beef with him, why didn’t you contact him directly instead instigating this campaign of vilification? David is an extremely thoughtful person who is always assessing and reassessing his ideas as we all should. He would have discussed openly your complaints about his choices. This way, you’ve unnecessarily opened up a terrible sore. 

There are real anti-Semites out there that need confronting. Keep going after them, not our comrades and friends.

*     *     *

The efforts of my detractors on the Zionist fringes of the anarchist scene to cancel my gigs are constant. Part of their MO is to establish a paper trail of a sort. If they can put forward the assertion that there is some kind of controversy surrounding whether or not I'm an antisemite or a holocaust-denier, or at least guilty of promoting people who are (none of which is remotely true), and they can get some kind of registered journalistic entity to report on said controversy as if it were real, then it becomes real. Facts on the ground. They succeeded in this endeavor, and have successfully updated my Wikipedia entry to reflect this. The publication I'm aware of that referred to "the controversy" as if it were not a figment of the imagination of the anarcho-puritan wing of cancel culture is Portland's own Street Roots.

The comments in Street Roots came in the context of an article about Portland-based hip-hop artist, Mic Crenshaw, with whom I have recently collaborated on a fantastic EP called Take the Power Back. When the reporter was putting together the article, she interviewed various people, including me. Nothing I said was included in the interview, however. Instead, the editor told Mic that he was not going to run the interview after all, due to Mic's association with me. In the end, the editor decided they would run the piece, but only if Mic made a statement about "the controversy" around his artistic collaborator (me).

Here's how Street Roots decided to put me into appropriate context, in the article about Mic:

In Crenshaw’s newest project, ‘Take the Power Back,’ he blends folk music and hip-hop for the first time in his musical career.  The album was made in collaboration with controversial folk artist David Rovics.

Rovics, a figure in leftist music for decades, has been accused of antisemitism due to support for controversial jazz musician and author Gilad Atzmon.  Rovics also interviewed Matthew Heimbach, co-founder of a neo-Nazi group found guilty of civil conspiracy by a jury for aiding in the organizing of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right white nationalist event in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rovics denies accusations of antisemitism and addressed his ties to both men on multiple occasions, including an apology for interviewing Heimbach, though he maintains his support for Atzmon's work as a writer and musician.

In other words, what makes me controversial is that I interviewed someone (Matthew Heimbach), and that I "support" Gilad Atzmon, though the definition of "support" is absent.  Presumably what is meant by "support" is that I thought Gilad's book was very interesting, and I continually fail to denounce Gilad as an antisemite.  This guilt by association is what makes me controversial, in the eyes of this alleged journalist or editor or whoever Rambo (that's the name of the editor) thinks they are. 

The article then went on to quote part of Mic's statement about me, which he was again required to make, if the article was going to run:

“He told me he (interviewed Heimbach) because he wanted to use his platform to understand what the ‘other side’ was thinking,” Crenshaw told Street Roots in a statement.

“David stated to me that he felt that, if there was ever to be a successful, revolutionary, mass movement for social change in this society, that people were going to have to come together based on what they have in common and overcome divisions based on demographic differences. I agree with this, by the way.

“David has been a friend, colleague and comrade for close to 20 years, but he is not me.”

If anyone wants to let Street Roots know what they think of this kind of journalism, please do. 

Ballad of a Cluster Bomb

Propaganda by omission is powerful stuff. I've heard the words "cluster munitions" more on National Pentagon Radio in the past few days than I have in the past few decades. If they are indeed being used by the Russian Army, this is, of course, completely appalling.

 
But I keep waiting for them to mention that although it is true they are now banned, this ban only came about in 2008. I've been involved with campaigns to ban cluster bombs since I was a child, when American cluster bombs were slaughtering the children of Vietnam.

The American version of these bombs are made of brightly-colored plastic. Children love to play with them. Then they explode, and thousands of shards of plastic pierce the bodies of the victims. They usually die, but if not, the plastic is extremely difficult to remove.

They intentionally make the bombs out of plastic so that they overwhelm the hospitals in the countries being destroyed from the air by the US Air Force, like Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq were, with cluster bombs used extensively in all cases.

Cluster bombs are designed to kill every living thing, completely indiscriminately, in a given area where they are dropped. Early versions of them were first used in 1943 by the Nazis in England, though most English people don't know that because of press censorship at the time.

The cluster bombs that the US left behind all over the countries destroyed by the world's biggest military force -- the US -- are still killing children on a regular basis, when kids find the pretty plastic balls scattered in the forests of many US-invaded Asian countries today.

In 2002 I recorded this song, called "Ballad of a Cluster Bomb," in an effort to educate the public about these indiscriminate civilian-killing bombs the US has used so much. There have been so many more Mariupols. Hue, Fallujah, so many more.