This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini
Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by … a group, or any controlling private power.
Or, I could use the old dictionary as a standard bearer for the concept:
Webster’s —
1. Often capitalized: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
Heading Out Into Portland, Now Known as Resistance City Numero Tres
It seemed like fun, going to Portland’s International Socialist Organization’s meeting at Portland State University on a blustery Northern Oregon Saturday. You know, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and the Trotsky lovers packed into a small space at the state university. . . . Mostly young people, about 60 in all, in a basement at the student union.
The glorious PSU farmer’s market was in high swing just outside with all those ethically-raised kale stalks, free-range lamb chops, trauma-informed cared for llama chunks of feta, and pole-caught tuna ripe for the taking.
Bourgeoise, professors from the halls of academia, couples young and old able to afford the high cost of apartments, condos and homes in the area, looking for local stuff for chow that night.
One of my former clients – Shawn – came up to me from the burgeoning crowd and asked how I was and stated how it was great to see me. He’s homeless, again, living in alleys, but looking fine, job ready, that is.
“You were right,” he said. “Those social workers did nothing for me. Put me in jobs that start at 10 pm and finished at 4 am. Two-hour one-way trips, man, and no public transportation to get to them.”
Fascism is Globalization of Cultures, Crimes of Capitalism, Thought
The ebb and flow of Capitalism, when a guy like Shawn – 40 – is mingling with the bourgeoisie, and his hopelessness is the very foundation of capitalism and the fascism of the financial institutions riding roughshod over all corners of the globe. Yeah, I’d say that banks and even investment companies are part of the cabal of fascists now running the world – why in hell do the neo-fascists of the world need storm-troopers at home (they have them, though, don’t they, in the form of a drone-ridden, militarized and digitized surveillance state) marching up and down main street USA looking for radicals, Communists, labor unionists, etc.?
The morning at PSU was one where speakers and audience responders all tried to force the word fascist into the box of old history, of those stormtroopers and Nazis and Gestapo and smoldering gas chambers. It was sickening, really, to hear some of the rationalizations, how today’s America isn’t even close to fascism, when, in fact, it is a fascist system, tied directly to the above definition of corporations calling the shots in and out of government.
Here, more sickness, which is the monopoly control and structural violence and murder these perps carry out with their $2000 jackets and $500 pairs of shoes. This is the new face of fascism, or at least the face of the corporation is much much more powerful than in old Adolph’s or Benito’s time. From the Intercept:
Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches, but an even bigger Wall Street player stands ready to mold and enact her economic and financial policy if she becomes president.
BlackRock is far from a household name, but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.
Fink has made clear his desire to become treasury secretary someday. The Obama administration had him on the short list to replace Timothy Geithner. When that didn’t materialize, he pulled several members of prior Treasury Departments into high-level positions at the firm, which may improve the prospects of realizing his dream in a future Clinton administration.
Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter. Fink owes his initial backing at BlackRock to Pete Peterson, the former commerce secretary who has been at the forefront of the campaign to cut or privatize Social Security. He sat on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a stalking horse for Peterson’s ideas.
Fink also opposes efforts to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall firewall between investment and commercial banks, as does Clinton.
Again, one hundred years later. Recalling the past: Lenin and Trotsky didn’t view the Russian Revolution as the beginning of “socialism in one country” given the country’s low level of economic development. It was the opening fissure of calling for a world revolution. Western capitalism was facing collapse due to the disastrous effects of World War I.
Two years later, the Bolsheviks launched the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to bring together millions of workers and young people rallying to support the Russian Revolution and rejecting the social democratic parties who had betrayed the working class by supporting WWI. In the United States, the Socialist Party came out in support of the Comintern and went on to create the Communist Party.
more here, 1917 Revolution!
2017 marks the centenary of this world-historic event. This site is initiated by the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) to celebrate the October revolution and the transformation that it heralded – politically, economically, culturally, concerning questions of gender and sexual equality and in many other aspects of working class life. We defend the October revolution against the class hostility, distortions and outright lies perpetrated by the ruling class, the capitalist media, right wing politicians and parts of academia.
In particular, this site aims help introduce the new generations moving into struggle and looking at left and socialist ideas to the crucial lessons of October.
The 2017 Pacific Northwest socialists were in the lower depths of the old university building, readying for an all-day conference. And a few from Seattle, and plenty of “comrade this” and “comrade that.”
Colonized Minds, Not a Pretty Thing, No Matter the Political Stripe
I’m not here as a conduit of constant bashing or criticism, that’s for sure; however, in this exceptionalist society, where the revolution (in their minds) is won on Facebook and with a turn-out of people at the plaza protesting Trump and Hillary, I’ve got a different eye for things as a 60-year-old.
I never thought forty years ago, or twenty, that I’d be pulling out the old and wizened and retirement age (I never will retire) card. In fact, I am not really old in my thinking, but the six decades and few borders crossed might put me in just a different mind space than those younger people who have gone nowhere physically and who have been colonized.
Colonized and set up by the controlled opposition, many, even radicals, with good intentions, are galvanized by a very deep state, deep intelligence insurgency/apparatus, deep psychological discombobulation set around the power of transnationals and globalists to control every move, every financial transaction, every blink positioned at the screens they’ve forced many of us onto in order to be, that is, be informed (sic) and be connected (sic). It’s not even funny being in groups of people who are smart and know their “Russian Revolution History” (sort of) but still lash out on fools like me who deride Facebook or Bill and Melinda Gates or Amazon.
Little things are microcosms of the state of things in my mind. Two fellows from Seattle figured prominently in the eyes of my own discontent with these people occupied by the huge cabal of transnationals globalizing control of us.
While the ‘Globalizers’ may adopt a few progressive phrases to demonstrate they have good intentions, their fundamental goals are not challenged. And what this “civil society mingling” does is to reinforce the clutch of the corporate establishment while weakening and dividing the protest movement. An understanding of this process of co-optation is important, because tens of thousands of the most principled young people in Seattle, Prague and Quebec City [1999-2001] are involved in the anti-globalization protests because they reject the notion that money is everything, because they reject the impoverishment of millions and the destruction of fragile Earth so that a few may get richer.
This rank and file and some of their leaders as well, are to be applauded. But we need to go further. We need to challenge the right of the ‘Globalizers’ to rule. This requires that we rethink the strategy of protest. Can we move to a higher plane, by launching mass movements in our respective countries, movements that bring the message of what globalization is doing, to ordinary people? For they are the force that must be mobilized to challenge those who plunder the Globe.” (Michel Chossudovsky, The Quebec Wall, April 2001)
Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather have a bunch of socialists in a basement pontificating about the petite bourgeois and the ramifications of the lesser evilism of American duopoly politics than being with a bunch of hoarders of Buffalo wings in a hoppy watering hole arguing about the targeting call on the defender for the Oklahoma Sooners against the OSU Cowboys.
I know the average Joe and Jane/Julio y Juanita, in this country, is so-so tied to the crass commercialization of their lives, and their every waking thought seems to be tied to some retail transaction, or fear generated by the fake media and Holly-porn. When I am around people who at least reject that, who are at least trying to strip away the political psychosis and consumer addiction, I feel a sense of ebbing calm. The alternative to this is mind warping:
The stuff I hear daily on the MAX or on buses, well, it’s definitely the Fight Club all over and over again:
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.”
— Tyler Durden, The Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah, so I am down with getting it on intellectually with young and old arguing and debating the next way to push ahead with a unified front. The idea of young and old thinking hard about an alternative to this madness of capitalism is rather compelling. In the context of this hyper-militarized society (pre-Trump) and a culture that holds tightly to its exceptionalist and white supremacist pedigrees (pre-Trump) and has been lobotomized by the culture of celebrity and the allure of money (pre-Trump).
I believe, though, the biggest issue I would take away from this all-day event was the ad nauseum of speakers attempting to define fascism tied to a very narrow time in history, tied only to the likes of Hitler or Mussolini.
One history professor, a socialist who writes for the various publications of the socialist order, sort of went on and on about fascism, sticking to the Hitler script, sticking to the limited genocide script, and as always failing on several accounts to talk to younger people about just how and why this country was created, or why capitalism was created – on the labor of slaves, and on the elimination of the Native Americans.
This fellow – a self-described Jew — just could not accept the reality of America, before Trump, already was setting the stage for all the right conditions for a new fascism, and this fascism, for sure, is not of the same character of that of past forms of fascism, where the brown-shirts and storm troopers and gulags and concentration camps were front and center part of some regime run by a single charismatic character.
Systems Control: The Controllers Act Anti-Fascist
None of us deep thinkers believe for a moment that Trump is Hitler or Pence is Mussolini. We know that the systems in place controlling entire ecosystems, countries, the poor, those systems are the neo-fascistic elements of population control, eugenics and mind pollution.
This professor just could not get past the fascism of 1930s Germany and Italy as his linchpin for defining true fascism. As a lot of revolutionaries teaching with tenure, he caved, fearing tying the Jewish and Zionist project in Israel to any form of internal and exported fascism and global control. It’s unpalatable how Zionists and Israel get a pass every single time. Or in the case of self-identified Jews, the Holocaust industry has colonized them to not give Israel and Zionists abroad (in the USA) one iota of discredit, or credit for this quickening globalist and financial-media-military control of the other – outside their own stolen lands borders.
Of course, in the context of the conference, tied to the 1917 Revolution, the professor’s repetitive connotation of fascism and the conditions to meet it seemed so irrelevant.
Again, a thing to behold, really, the revolution 100 years ago. I know for a fact few, if any, persons outside the activist-socialist frame even knows about the centennial of the revolution or what the revolution signified and literally encompassed.
Additionally, I give it to the young people in Portland Saturday talking about revolution and next steps forward in this media and political battle around the alt-right racists and fascists is a hell of a lot better than hearing educated (sic) men and women go on and on about the sex-rape-harassment-assault stories coming out of Holly-Rape.
Here, Phil Gasper from the current International Socialist Review:
The Russian Revolution in October 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin, is the most important event in history for revolutionary socialists. For the first time, a revolution led by the working class won power in an entire country and began attempting to construct a socialist society based on the ideas of workers’ control and real democracy. For a brief period there was a glimpse of what such a society might look like, before the experiment was destroyed by civil war, foreign intervention, economic devastation, and—above all—the failure of revolutions to spread successfully to more economically advanced countries. This led by the late 1920s to the entrenchment of a bureaucratic dictatorship in the infant Soviet Union. A decade after the revolution’s initial amazing success, the dreams on which it had been based had been destroyed.
…..
There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the revolution, but pride of place must go to Ten Days That Shook the World, originally published in 1919, by the radical American journalist and socialist activist John Reed. Reed was present in Petrograd during the October Revolution and gives a vivid blow-by-blow account of what took place in the days preceding and following the seizure of power. Stalin hated the book because it barely mentions him and correctly portrays Lenin and Trotsky as the revolution’s key leaders, but Lenin wrote a short introduction in which he unreservedly recommended the book “to the workers of the world” and praised it for providing “a truthful and most vivid exposition” of key events.
But back to modern fascism. I talked about the conditions set forth around a neo-fascism. Naomi Wolf, who was on my radio show, also set forth the conditions in her book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. That book came out 10 years ago, and I had her on my radio show for an hour, prefacing her visit to Spokane for a literary event, Get Lit! She has been lambasted, denigrated and vilified for even positing how under Cheney-Bush, our country vis-à-vis US Patriot Act, illegal wars, presidential powers, media control, and the complete blending of private mercenaries and war profiteers into USA government. Here, her conditions for fascism’s germination:
- Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
- Create a gulag
- Develop a thug caste
- Set up an internal surveillance system
- Harass citizens’ groups
- Engage in arbitrary detention and release
- Target key individuals
- Control the press
- Dissent equals treason
- Suspend the rule of law
And this is it, really, at the ISO conference, speaking to people who think fascism is only with one strong-arm moving a society into knee-jerk, xenophobic dictatorial, mass incarceration, disappearances, and one minute of hate.
Amazon, The CIA, Every Retail Transaction in America, The Post
I brought up Jeff Bezos, Amazon, my work in Seattle protesting his libertarian fascism, his dominating the globe in retail transactions, despicable treatment of warehouse workers, his project to run everything through an artificial intelligence and robotics lens, tax evasion. I talked about his media ownership of the Washington Post, his monopoly on book sales (and what gets read). The concept of this fellow being the richest guy in America and his company’s tax dodging. This fellow is a wizard, master fascist.
If the United States derived its might primarily from its economic power, the Washington Post would enjoy the same degree of international influence as, say, the Xinhua newspaper of Beijing. The two countries have roughly comparable outputs, with China’s GDP being about 80 percent the size of the US economy when adjusted for purchasing power, according to the IMF.
But a large part of what makes the United States a unique superpower is its role as the world’s military hegemon, reflected in part by its roughly 1,000 overseas bases. (China has none.)
It is this added power emanating from the Pentagon that helps confer an outsize authority to the opinion pages of the capital’s major paper. The Post’s status as a weathervane for the political winds of official Washington makes its views—unlike those of any other paper serving a city of a mere 630,000—virtually required reading for much of the world.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for the Washington Post—but Amazon is being paid more than twice that by the CIA.
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in August 2013 for $250 million, his acquisition provoked concerns that the paper’s reactionary posture would only harden further. The Post’s dim view of whistleblowing accorded well with Amazon’s, for example. Under Bezos’ directorship, Amazon had stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its web servers hours after receiving a request from the office of then-Senate chair of Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman, in the wake of the news outlet’s publication of State Department cables. “So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website,” wrote FAIR’s Peter Hart (FAIR Blog, 8/6/13). Even more troublingly, Amazon had recently secured a contract to host secret data for the Central Intelligence Agency—a deal valued at over twice what Bezos paid for the Post (Huffington Post, 1/8/14). So one month after the editorial board urged a halt to Snowden’s leaks on US spying efforts (including, presumably, to the Post), the newspaper announced that a financial beneficiary of US spying was to become its owner. As media scholar Robert McChesney (IPA, 12/18/13) analogized:
If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation—say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government—the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press.
Billionaire Internet mogul Jeff Bezos seemed to understand this when he made his first foray into the industry by acquiring the Post, the go-to newspaper for Beltway policymakers, and not, for example, the Los Angeles Times, which boasts greater daily circulation.
And therein lies one under-acknowledged key to understanding the Washington Post editorial board’s foreign-policy stances: As beneficiaries of the prestige and reach that come with worldwide US dominance, board members would just as soon advocate for policies that run counter to US power as they would trade places with their counterparts at, say, the Denver Post.
And yet this bipartisan support for Washington’s supremacy, which the Post mirrors, runs counter to the public will. A Washington Postblog post titled “Team America No Longer Wants to Be the World’s Police” (9/13/13) highlighted two polls showing that by a 2-to-1 margin, the US public disapproves of its government taking “the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solve international conflicts,” and disagrees that the US “should be ready and willing to use military force around the world.”
So naturally, the editorial board must ignore the general population (not to mention its majority-minority hometown) as it cleaves to elite opinion. The board’s unwavering allegiance to US leaders’ belligerent Middle East policies and the surveillance state’s unchecked power prompts it to deprecate the Post’s own investigative journalism and undermine its ethical standards. Bezos’ recent takeover as owner threatens to only solidify this trend.
I didn’t have time to cite these passages or the article from FAIR. The idea of disrupting a meeting at a university of young and old discounting militancy, defense, and offensive maneuvers to fight the enemy, well, I have been there many times. There were the typical anti-Black Block theses and those against Antifa. This crop of revolutionaries never mentioned the Cuban Revolution, and that Revolution was about taking out the fascist armies of the Baptista Despot, a figure only in name for the mafia, both legit and underground, running Cuba.
Nothing about the 50th Anniversary of Che’s murder by Murder Incorporated.
What happened during this socialist meeting was one fellow stood up in his bright Seattle Plaid Fall Colors and hipster eyeglasses, and then he patronized me. By first stating he works for Amazon in Seattle, for more than a decade. “Sure, 60 year old radical (me), Amazon has many problems of controlling way too much of the market, and the owner, Jeff Bezos, does have problems with paying his fulfillment center people fair wages, and sure he has a lot of clout in Seattle, but he is just a plain Jane capitalist, not a fascist.”
Really?
Then the speaker presenting the talk about “what to do next to rally against Trump and this new regime,” Chris, also from Seattle, likened Jeff Bezos’ views and ideology to innocuous capitalist philosophy, akin to most mainstream democrats, like Hillary, and his concepts of how a city (Seattle or wherever he takes his next campus crap) should be planned and organized are parallel to his own, Chris’ that is.
This is the smoke and mirrors and the con game these very powerful and insidious folk like Bezos deploy, on a global scale. They colonize minds. Imagine, a so-called radical, 10 years working as a slave for Amazon and this other socialist defending him. This fellow, the first one, is a worker, a coder/engineers for Amazon, was defensive. And he should be – many people do not work for Amazon or use his insidious services. Some never have or never will, yet, ten years at Amazon, and he has only passing criticism of Bezos, and for what? Being just a plain old capitalist with liberal ideas, so therefore how can he be a fascist?
Hell, the entire cabal of movers and shakers in Seattle wrote a letter of apology to Bezos begging him to come back.
Luckily some council members did not sign this letter: Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant called the letter “disingenuous and craven.”
Sawant said she was stunned to see some of her colleagues suggest that “Amazon’s billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, are feeling unwelcome” in the city. Instead, Sawant said, it’s “ordinary working people, even the middle class, that is quickly getting pushed out of the city” due to skyrocketing housing costs.
Fascism Wrapped Up in A Swoosh and Amazon Smile
This is what Sinclair Lewis wrote in 1935: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.” (It Can’t Happen Here).
And this is what Huey Long said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.”
The “cross” is the marketing swoops of Nike, Amazon, Intel, Boeing, Microsoft, Google. This “wrapped in a flag” metaphor is really the lives of millions, dead, wrapped in the paper (debts) of predatory capitalism, inside the Inside Job, the hacks, the Trojan Horses of an Obama working the midnight hours for Goldman Fucking Sachs, et al.
The “anti-fascism” is the anti-Trump regime, the liberals and neocons and neoliberals fighting economic and military wars against China, Russia, Cuba, Iran and any other country coloring outside the lines of the United Fruit Company on steroids.
It’s as if these socialists do not understand the concepts of US Murder Inc., Hit Man Extraordinaire, and the Death of the Liberal Class. They hearken back to Hitler and the despots, these warring and grinding monsters supported by the capitalists, Christians and Zionists.
These socialists forget that blacks were not allowed to join unions, that women were treated like dirt and that this country and their own measly successes in America were stacked on the backs of slaves, of the expropriation of cultures, lands, peoples, the natural world.
It’s good to see Wolf, fifty-five, still out swinging, in 2017, looking at what happened during that big sleep under Obama, how all those leftists and liberals were unconscious, happy to see the multiracial part of their cultural wars won, with Obama and his extra-articulate policies that added to Bush Junior’s setting up of a fascist country, a state of constant war.
This is a new fascism, bred by the likes of the Marketing Moguls, by the CIA, by the multinationals working to destroy democracies around the world. This is a world that is humming with the trillions in money only a few have, and the power and corridors of military-science-education-media they control.
No – I was mad at my own leftwing tribe. All of January, people on the left would confront me with dazed, grief-stricken expressions, as if they had just emerged from a multi-car pileup on a foggy highway. “How could this have happened? What will we do?” I couldn’t even bear to participate in those conversations. Finally I started explaining my rage to my closest friends.
I had been screaming about the possibility of this very moment for eight years, since I published a piece in the Guardian titled “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps” and wrote a book based on it, called The End of America (2007). Under George Bush Jr, the left had been very receptive to the book’s message about how democracies are undermined by the classic tactics of would-be authoritarians.
But once Obama was elected – “one of ours” – I had to spend the next eight years yelling like a haunted Cassandra, to a room the left had abandoned. I had yelled myself hoarse for eight years under Obama about what it would mean for us to sit still while Obama sent drones in to take out US citizens in extrajudicial killings; what it would mean for us to sit still while he passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that let any president hold citizens forever without charge or trial; what it would mean for us to sit still while he allowed NSA surveillance, allowed Guantánamo to stay open, and allowed hyped terrorism stories to hijack the constitution and turn the US into what finally even Robert F Kennedy Jr was calling a national security surveillance state.
At least near the end of my participation of the event, an older guy talked about the golden era when pickets, strikes, walk-outs, slow downs, boycotts, blockades and the like were weapons to take on the bosses, like Bezos and any of them, fighting us, the worker, from collective bargaining and collective action.
That era in America is gone in the security state, in a place that hobbles young and old with debts, threats of debtor’s prison, fears of bad credit and never reaching up to the mainstream media’s depiction of Keeping Up with the Joneses.
When a word like fascism is reserved for outright thugs like Benito and Adolph, we know that nuance and deep critical analysis is what the new socialists want, instead the age old calling a spade a spade.
Really, Gil Scott-Heron, lives on:
The Revolution Will Not Be Facebooked (Televised)
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and
skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.
There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8: 32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back
after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers;
The revolution will be live.
The Fascists Taking Over Won’t Be Televised!