H. Bruce Franklin

• English professor at Rutgers University
• Co-founder of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, a Maoist vanguard
• Founder of the violent group Venceremos
• Editor of The Essential Stalin. (“Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe.”)
• Member of Historians Against the War

Born in 1934, H. Bruce Franklin is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University. The author or editor of 19 books and hundreds of articles, Franklin earned his doctorate at Stanford University, where he went on to become an associate professor of English. He was a prominent activist in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.

In 1969 Franklin co-founded the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) as a Maoist vanguard. His partners in creating the organization were Robert Avakian (who would later become the cult leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and Stephen Charles Hamilton, formerly a member of the Progressive Labor Party, also a Maoist group. Based in the San Francisco Bay area and drawing many of its members from Stanford, Professor Franklin’s group embraced the ideals of armed struggle in the hopes of establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the United States.

In 1971 a factional dispute caused Franklin to leave the organization, taking about half of its 500-odd members with him. The dispute centered on the issue of “armed struggle.” Robert Avakian’s faction maintained that violent revolution should not begin for another fifteen years or so, while Franklin and his followers wanted to commence with acts of terror immediately. Avakian eventually renamed BARU as the Revolutionary Communist Party. Meanwhile, Franklin established a new organization, Venceremos (Spanish for “We will win” and a slogan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara). Calling for the victory of Maoism everywhere, Venceremos demanded that its members maintain a passionate commitment to armed struggle; supported the victory of the North Vietnamese; and voiced its commitment to violence to support the Communist side in the war.

A San Francisco Examiner reporter who interviewed Franklin at the time, summarized the Venceremos agenda as Franklin described it to him: “[Do] not to fight the draft. Go to Vietnam and shoot your commanding officer. Become an airplane mechanic and learn to sabotage planes. . . . [A]ll police and members of their families must be killed and law enforcement demoralized. All jails and prisons must be opened and inmates liberated.”

An outgrowth of Venceremos was the terrorist Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that kidnapped Patricia Hearst in 1974. Venceremos provided most of the SLA’s members and support.

In 1972 Franklin was fired from his tenured professorship at Stanford for having delivered three on-campus speeches that led to violent rioting. He later sued the university in an unsuccessful attempt to regain his job.

Also in 1972, Franklin edited The Essential Stalin. Identifying himself as a Communist, Franklin wrote: “I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions. . . . But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe. . . . If we are to understand Stalin at all, and evaluate him from the point of view of either of the two major opposing classes, we must see him, like all historical figures, as a being created by his times and containing the contradictions of those times. . . . From a Communist point of view, Stalin was certainly one of the greatest of revolutionary leaders. . . .”

In 2000 Franklin published a book titled Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, which, according to one enthusiastic reviewer, “is the product of [his] long history of critical analysis of the United States’ imperial arrogance.” This text is widely used in college courses.

In the March-April 2002 edition of the International Socialist Review (also known as the Journal of Revolutionary Marxism), Franklin wrote an article -- titled “Vietnam: The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed To Forget” -- glorifying the memory of the 1960s peace movement in America. In Franklin’s view, that movement qualified as “one legitimate source of great national pride about American culture and behavior during the war.” “In most wars,” he said, “a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated.” Added Franklin: “[We cannot] understand what America is becoming if we fail to comprehend how the same nation and its culture could have produced an abomination as shameful as the Vietnam War and a campaign as admirable as the 30-year movement that helped defeat it.”

Franklin is correct in his assessment that the anti-war movement helped bring about America’s defeat in Vietnam. As David Horowitz explains his article, "An Open Letter to the `Anti-War’ Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring The War Home":

“Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years, has affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them. The Vietcong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most of the casualties in the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the fact [that] Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to win it. This is what happened.”


By lauding the movement that facilitated the Communist victory, Franklin implicitly condones the subsequent genocide which that victory brought about in Indochina -- albeit as the lesser of two evils, the greater of which, in Franklin’s view, would have been an American victory.

In 2003 Franklin was a signatory to the Historians Against the War denunciation of America’s invasion of Iraq.