Occupy Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?
If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.
What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason..
www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-where-whats-it-black-and-brown-people
Occupy These…! Slavery and Abuse by Metaphor
Young white demonstrators should be advised not to complain of being "enslaved" to student loans and such, any more than they would speak of a "Holocaust" of unemployment. Such metaphors of slavery are more than merely inaccurate – they may reveal dark facts about the speaker. But privilege does not brook criticism from the "quarters." "Former Black Liberation Army soldier Asanti Alston recalled his friend's experience at an occupation of being shouted down as 'divisive' for trying to focus attention on Black poverty and mass incarceration." Privilege wants the conversation all to itself, like Empire...
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-these%E2%80%A6-slavery-and-abuse-metaphor
Occupy Harlem Campaign Launched
New York's Harlem is in the process of occupying itself. "We need a radical transformation of the current status quo – the banks financing and controlling the political process, buying out politicians in both parties to protect the economic interest of the one percent." The neighborhood that was once the nexus of Black political thought, and is now besieged by forces of gentrification, is making its own place in the national movement against corporate power. "Attendees eagerly came forward to propose a wide range of issues from the local to the international."
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-harlem-campaign-launched
Plantation Nation"
The u.$. locks up more of its own citizens (and growing numbers of non-citizens) than any other nation on earth. Not satisfied with the reactionary policies of the "War On Drugs", which help to supply one of the fastest growth industries (private prisons), the u.$. now uses tactics it likes to refer to as 'extraordinary rendition' (kidnapping of people targeted by the O-bomb-yuh administration by FBI agents inside the borders of the numerous u.$. client states and other imperialized nations).
But all of this is tied into the true nature of kkkapitalism and white supremacy...
http://allpowertothepositive.podomatic.com/entry/2011-04-26T07_51_29-07_00
In case you missed it!!
Dismantling the Politics of Comfort
(For more details of this excellent article/interview, scroll down to the bottom)
You can gauge the effectiveness—real or potential at least—of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that's exactly what you need to be doing.
People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported—not have discussion groups to endlessly consider the masturbatory implications of the efficacy of their actions or whether or not they are pure enough to be worthy of support. They are by definition worthy. Ultimately, the people debating continuously are unworthy. They are apologists for the state structure; [and] in [effect], try to convince people to be ineffectual...
For all the rhetoric, there is no nonviolent context operating here—not at all.
Basically, nonviolence as it is practiced, espoused in the U.S., is not Gandhian. Gandhi never articulated anything that precluded personal sacrifice. This is a non-Gandhian appropriation of his principles for the purpose of confirming personal comfort. So it's a politics of the comfort zone..."
Pacifism As Pathology
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Pacifism as Pathology By Ward Churchill
The limits of pacificism
Pacifism as Pathology By Ward Churchill Published by Arbeiter Ring (e mail: arbeiter@tao.ca)
I would recommend to republicans a new book entitled ``Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America.'' It is a re-introduction of an essay written by Ward Churchill in 1984. This version includes a supplementary essay by Canadian anti-imperialist Mike Ryan, and an introduction by recently-released American anti-imperialist POW Ed Mead. I think it could be a valuable resource for republicans and their allies.
Ward Churchill, who is of American Indian descent, served for a short time as an Army Ranger in Vietnam. After a short time he realised that he was doing to the Vietnamese what had been done to his people by the US government. He refused to go out anymore, and was soon sent back home.
Immediately after his plane landed in Chicago, he called Students for a Democratic Society, and became an organiser with them. He lived in Peoria, Illinois and had a room-mate who was a Black Panther, named Mark Clark.
In December 1969, when Chicago Police killed Black Panther Fred Hampton in a shoot-to-kill operation, they also killed Clark.
Churchill also became a member of the American Indian Movement at the time that it was engaged in armed conflict with the Federal government in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He spent some time as a national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Despite not having a PhD, Ward's incredible intellect and writing ability has earned him a top place in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I can hardly think of an issue he hasn't written about, but along with his work in American Indian Studies, he has also co-authored the standard works on the FBI's ``internal security'' campaigns (such as against the Black Panthers, labour, etc).
The book's main thrust is to analyze and tear apart the ideology of pacifism, explaining how it is, in many ways (as it is usually but not always practiced), a counter-revolutionary ideology. How in many cases pacifism allows people to pose as revolutionaries while ensuring that they are not in harm's way. Churchill argues that pacifism leads to liberalism and limits the ability of popular movements to create real change.
It is also argued that European-American pacifists, intentionally or not, ensure that the burden of violence is on non-European-American and Third World communities who are the most vulnerable to state violence and often have no real choice other than to use physical force in defence and in altering their situation.
Ward concentrates extensively on the Jewish Holocaust, pointing out that the overwhelming response of Jews was non-violence, but that when they did use violence they succeeded in destroying one entire camp, and one of the furnaces at Auschwitz.
Churchill does not advocate a shift from pacifism (especially if practiced in the purest form) to some kind of ``culture of violence.'' He is merely suggesting that left-wing and/or anti-imperialist movements should feel free to keep all options open, from rallies and petitions to armed self-defence to armed struggle and that this should be accepted by those who are not directly involved but who support the oppressed.
Mike Ryan quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. as saying: ``Whether they read Ghandi or Frantz Fanon, all radicals understand the need for action - direct, self-transforming and structure-transforming action.'' The point is that opposing repression and poverty and dismantling the structures which perpetuate them is more important than keeping ourselves out of harm's way.
As Ed Mead puts it, ``the question is not whether to use violence in the global class struggle to end the rule of international imperialism, but only when to use it.''
By Tom Shelley
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1337474/posts
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