Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
They were marching shoulder-to-shoulder, young and old, in absolute silence. Some were carrying small placards with names and photos of their loved ones, who disappeared four decades ago, during the pro-Western dictatorship here in Uruguay.
The entire center of Montevideo came to a standstill. Blocks and blocks of this marvelous city were literally inundated by the river consisting of human bodies.
While all attention is focused on how ‘alive our democratic process’ is, with regard to the EU vote, the charade of democracy was played out in full colours with trumpets, tea and cake, at North Yorkshire County Council in Northallerton. The almost festive gathering in the county gardens, of around a thousand people, were there to protest the controversial planning application by Third Energy to ‘frack’ at the village of Kirby Misperton’s, KM8 site.
Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience. For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or ‘hasbara’.
Below is a slightly modified talk that I gave at the 2016 Left Forum, Saturday May 21st, 2016 at John Jay College in Manhattan, NY. The Left Forum is a yearly assembly of progressive forces from social democrats to revolutionary Pan-Africanists. Organizers requested insight on current developments of the Black Freedom Struggle. This is my response.
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
A new song by Time. Chris Time Steele made this song called Flint State of Mind in solidarity with the people of Flint and dedicated it to the Flint Democracy Defense League and Water You Fighting For, and all the other groups fighting for justice.
Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
– Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power“, Voices of Democracy, 1966
It’s a dangerous sign – the consumer crank sold from birth to grave, tied to the perverted narrations of elites and college grads and these under bites we call the creative class. Californians and Big Apple sucks, and for the majority of the tools of lobotomizing and propaganda coming from these distorted humans on Broadway, in Hollywood, in those fake academic circles, the movies and fluff and sickness of this mob crack orgy, well, here we are, sold a bill of goods called weekend leisure and fractured thinking.
