Happy Fourth of July?

So many of the world's current spectacles remind us of the truth of the words spoken by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass back in 1852.

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour."

"The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

Watching the racist media follow the George Zimmerman proceedings, wherein the late Trayvon Martin is virtually on trial for being murdered, or the massive government hypocrisy over NSA spying, or President Obama's cluesslessly unselfaware visit to Robben Island in South Africa, or the US act of aggression in forcing down Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane over Europe, it's clear that so much in the world is just not right, so much of the myths about the United States are just so much red-white-and-blue bullshit. Some small amount of observation reveals that the Civil War that was fought to right some of the great wrongs Douglass condemned failed to rectify some of the major flaws in this nation's founding.

From 1845:

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our churches?”

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

So much work to be done. This fourth of July, time to recommit to a new, real revolution in America.

(You can watch the actor Danny Glover read a portion of the 1852 speech here).
 

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our churches?”

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

Hands (and Drones) Off Assata Shakur!

Crossposted from Kasama. Since I wrote this last night, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has already reported that a giant "wanted" billboard has gone up in Newark, New Jersey. What an obscenity! Assata has been living peacefully in Cuba for THIRTY YEARS. What does it mean that she has now been labeled a "terrorist"?

Today the Obama administration's FBI added black liberation fighter Assata Shakur to its list of "Most Wanted Terrorists." They doubled the million-dollar price on her head; and she becomes the first woman on the list. Fortunately Assata Shakur is living free in Cuba after being liberated from a federal penitentiary in 1979, but it's clear her life is in mortal danger. Labeling Shakur a "terrorist" is a declaration of war against all dissenters and revolutionaries, and sets her up for murder at the hands of the state with complete impunity. It's also evidence of the continued bullying relationship between the United States and its anti-imperialist Caribbean neighbor, Cuba.

If Assata Shakur can be labelled a terrorist, so can anyone who has raised their fist against the empire.

Assata Shakur is a survivor of the vicious COINTELPRO campaign that attempted to smash the Black Panther Party and its offshoots in the 1960s and 1970s. Dozens of heroic black liberation fighters were murdered outright or sent away to prison for long sentences: the U.S. government was determined at any cost to smash a movement that refused to play by liberal rules. She was repeatedly framed with apolitical crimes she had nothing to do with; she went underground but was arrested in 1973 when the car she was a passenger in was attacked by New Jersey State police; and was very seriously wounded while trying to surrender.Democracy Now quotes a letter Shakur wrote to the Pope on the occasion of his visit to Cuba in 1998:

"At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the U.S. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty."

But what Shakur is not guilty of is terrorism. Indicted ten times by the government for supposed crimes ranging from bank robbery to murder and kidnapping, Shakur's only conviction was her final one, by an all-white jury, stacked with family members of cops, who ignored the copious medical evidence that showed she was shot while she had her hands held up high. This accusation of "terrorism" reflects the new reality of U.S. imperialism under Bush and Obama: with drone technology it's a license to kill.
In Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, we closed each of our General Assemblies by linking hands and reciting Assata's words from her 1973 statement, "To My People":
"It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains."
Assata is our hero. We must be vigilant, and protect her and the freedom-fighter legacy she represents.
Check out Common's "Song for Assata" on youtube:


HANDS AND DRONES OFF ASSATA SHAKUR!

Freedom Fighter Marilyn Buck Dies Shortly After Parole

I was trying to decide whether to write about the parole recently granted to Marilyn Buck, an American revolutionary imprisoned since the 1980s. I am saddened to report that according to The Rag Blog, Buck passed away this morning in New York from cancer.

Marilyn Buck was arrested in the mid-1980s for her role in the notorious Nyack Brinks robbery that spelled the end of the road for a particular wing of the American left. Buck was alleged to have been a member of the May 19th Communist Organization, a group with roots in the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. May 19th was the East Coast faction of a tendency that on the West Coast formed the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. It straddled the lines of legality, supporting an network of leftists and revolutionaries driven underground by the government repression of the 1960s and 1970s counter intelligence program COINTELPRO. Buck is said to have taken part in the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison: a truly heroic and selfless act. I disagreed with many of the politics and actions of May 19th, but this was a woman who walked every moment of her talk. I remember those 1980s days of defeat and demoralization in the face of the Reagan juggernaut. I remember the witchhunt the media and the government undertook to paint these people as common criminals or terrorists. But Buck's life is enduring testament to the struggle for freedom not the mistakes of a particular group.

Buck was granted parole just a few weeks ago knowing that the cancer for which she had received inadequate care while in prison was likely incurable.

Here's "Rescue the Word," a poem she wrote in 1992, from the Friends of Marilyn Buck website:

sacred words are in danger
fugitives, they seek cover
bury themselves alive
shamed by the profane
purposes they are forced to serve
dressed in lily-white lies
words are in danger
english only vows
to tear out tongues
exiled witnesses
to collective memory and homeland ties
sacred words are in danger
trapped, they hang on billboards
judas-goats to conjure deception
sing them shout them
teach them
wear them
around your neck
amulets against amnesia

Ibaye. Presente!

There are a shocking number of political prisoners in American jails. They range from leftists like Buck to African-American and Native American revolutionaries, and Cuban fighters against terrorism. Here is a somewhat dated list.

The Forgotten Truth About Racism

"Those who know, define racism as discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation. In other words one cannot be a racist unless he has the power to subjugate.” -- Steve Biko, I Write What I Like.

Steve Biko, 1946-1977, was a black South African revolutionary killed by the forces of apartheid in prison. And by "forgotten," I mean erased.

"I believe in living"

This "holiday" weekend I've been reading Assata Shakur's autobiography, "Assata: An Autobiography." It's the story of the African-American freedom fighter who was framed for murder in the 1970s but who wound up miraculously escaping prison and fleeing to Cuba, where she now lives. The book opens with a poem which I wanted to excerpt here:

"I beleve in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
I believe in life.
And I have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen the bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted...
I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.
And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port."

Check out the book for the whole thing. Powerful, beautiful stuff.

Which One the War Hero, Which One the Criminal?

There's been a big flap over John McCain and his war record. It started when former U.S. general (and now Democrat) Wesley Clark stated that McCain's years in a prison camp in Vietnam after being shot down didn't automatically grant him the experience necessary for the office of president. While some people--mostly right-wingers--went on to suggest some duplicity in McCain's POW time, most everybody, including Democratic candidate Obama went on to laud McCain's service and say it should never be questioned or criticized. McCain's time as a POW and veteran makes him a hero, they said.

Well I for one would beg to differ.

What, exactly, was John McCain doing when he was shot down over North Vietnam during the U.S. war of aggression? Was he delivering humanitarian messages? Dropping toys and candies to babies? Perhaps enlightening Vietnamese with peace propaganda? I think not. John McCain was a military officer on a bombing mission aimed at killing innocent people and destroying Vietnam's civilian infrastructure. He owes the debt of his life, saved by Vietnamese rescuers who McCain continued to call "Go*ks" well into his post-war political life, to those he was mercilessly trying to murder.

In my opinion this does not qualify McCain for the role of hero. He was not some unfortunate draftee forced to serve thousands of miles from home. He was a career military man, an officer not an enlisted man, a member of military management, if you will, plotting and carrying out the near genocidal war the US waged against the Vietnamese using all manner of weapons including chemical weapons and weapons that had no possible intended function but the maxiumum extermination of civilian life. McCain belongs not in the white house but in prison.

Nguyen Van Troi (1947-1964) was a young South Vietnamese man who, acting for the National Liberation Front--the so-called Viet Cong--attempted to assassinate Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who were both visiting Vietnam scheming to increase US military commitments to the corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship. Van Troi was executed at the age of 17.

Now THAT is a hero of the Vietnam war.

yasser arafat, gay hero?

I was too sick to post about this when I first heard it, and it seems to be oddly under-reported, but apparently it has been confirmed that longtime Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat died of AIDS. And it seems to be confirmed that this was sexually transmitted, and that Arafat had well-known homosexual proclivities. In my mind this explains much of why Arafat has not been lionized since his passing, which I've always thought was odd since he was such a symbol of the Palestinian struggle during his lifetime.

While much could be said about Arafat and his choices, I choose to remember him as a hero, and now a gay hero. He never gave up, or sold out, the fight for Palestinian freedom: something that could not be said of the current Palestine authority coup leaders/Israeli collaborators under Abu Mazen. He resisted that final temptation to sell out Palestinian dreams to an intolerable ministate in the last negotiations under President Clinton. Although reviled for his refusal to clinch an almost done deal, I think he showed true wisdom and bravery. While many of his actions could be criticized over the years, this last one, and his heroic last stand in the ruins of Ramallah, redeem much of his blustery checkered past.

I am one gay man who welcomes him into the ranks of beloved AIDS dead.