“Over the next seven years he ran from dictatorship to dictatorship, escaping to Cuba—where he experienced racism—and traveling through North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, while settling in Algeria for four years. Tasting life under these regimes, he became “disillusioned…. I didn’t dig it.” Looking from afar, America, for all its problems, didn’t look so bad. Like the “useful idiots” who took Stalinism so seriously they moved to Soviet Russia in the 1950s, only to suffer under the group slavery called Communism, Cleaver discovered that “the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.”
Cleaver denounced the anti-Semitism of the Left and the Third World, racism in the Arab world, the hypocrisy of those who rob humans of their freedom in the name of a higher humanity, but mostly for their own power. He told interviewers his new views “would wreak havoc among my old ‘new left’ friends and among a formidable array of blacks who are imbued with a knee-jerk, Third World, skin-game ideology.” But he concluded with insights still relevant today, rejecting “The whole idea of settling political problems and arguments by terrorist activities.”
Read the entire article at Daily Beast.