Wandai

121030ttextract - Victory for Justice and Freedom of Speech - Zapiro and Mondli Makhanya (ex Editor of the Sunday Times) celebrate

2012-11-01T01:02:00.001-07:00

121030ttextract - Victory for Justice and Freedom of Speech - Zapiro and Mondli Makhanya (ex Editor of the Sunday Times) celebrate

This infographic, courtesy of #PeremendeMovement, draws a very clear picture. #KOTAgainstMPsBonus

2012-10-09T05:29:00.001-07:00

This infographic, courtesy of #PeremendeMovement, draws a very clear picture. #KOTAgainstMPsBonus: This infographic, courtesy of #PeremendeMovement, draws a very clear picture. #KOTAgainstMPsBonus

Letter from Karl to his Father

2012-09-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

Early Works of Karl Marx

First published: in Die Neue Zeit No. 1, 1897 [2];
Source: MECW, Volume 1;
Transcribed: in 1998 for MEIA by slr@marx.org

Berlin, November 10

Dear Father,

There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction.

At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself likes to look back in this way and take stock, which often gives it the appearance of retrogression or stagnation, whereas it is merely, as it were, sitting back in an armchair in order to understand itself and mentally grasp its own activity, that of the mind.

At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavours to achieve a stable form in brilliant colours that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it has lost in our actions. And where could a more sacred dwelling place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours! What better amends and forgiveness could there be for much that is objectionable and blameworthy than to be seen as the manifestation of an essentially necessary state of things? How, at least, could the often ill-fated play of chance and intellectual error better escape the reproach of being due to a perverse heart?

When, therefore, now at the end of a year spent here I cast a glance back on the course of events during that time, in order, my dear father, to answer your infinitely dear letter from Ems, allow me to review my affairs in the way I regard life in general, as the expression of an intellectual activity which develops in all directions, in science, art and private matters.

When I left you, a new world had come into existence for me, that of love, which in fact at the beginning was a passionately yearning and hopeless love. Even the journey to Berlin, which otherwise would have delighted me in the highest degree, would have inspired me to contemplate nature and fired my zest for life, left me cold. Indeed, it put me strikingly out of humour, for the rocks which I saw were not more rugged, more indomitable, than the emotions of my soul, the big towns not more lively than my blood, the inn meals not more extravagant, more indigestible, than the store of fantasies I carried with me, and, finally, no work of art was as beautiful as Jenny.

After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing connections, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse myself in science and art.

In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry was bound to be my first subject, at least the most pleasant and immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous development it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a world beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines. All the poems of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving for poetic fire. The whole extent of a longing that has no bounds finds expression there in many different forms and makes the poetic "composition" into "diffusion".

Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompaniment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy. The two were so closely linked that, on the one hand, I read through Heineccius, Thibaut and the sources quite uncritically, in a mere schoolboy fashion; thus, for instance, I translated the first two books of the Pandect [3] into German, and, on the other hand, tried to elaborate a philosophy of law covering the whole field of law. I prefaced this with some metaphysical propositions by way of introduction and continued this unhappy opus as far as public law, a work of almost 300 pages. [4]

Here, above all, the same opposition between what is and what ought to be, which is characteristic of idealism, stood out as a serious defect and was the source of the hopelessly incorrect division of the subject-matter. First of all came what I was pleased to call the metaphysics of law, i. e., basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law, as occurs in Fichte, only in my case it was more modern and shallower. From the outset an obstacle to grasping the truth here was the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism, in which the author argues hither and thither, going round and round the subject dealt with, without the latter taking shape as something living and developing in a many-sided way. A triangle gives the mathematician scope for construction and proof, it remains a mere abstract conception in space and does not develop into anything further. It has to be put alongside something else, then it assumes other positions, and this diversity added to it gives it different relationships and truths. On the other hand, in the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, as exemplified by law, the state, nature, and philosophy as a whole, the object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary divisions must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself and find its unity in itself.

Next, as the second part, came the philosophy of law, that is to say, according to my views at the time, an examination of the development of ideas in positive Roman law, as if positive law in its conceptual development (I do not mean in its purely finite provisions) could ever be something different from the formation of the concept of law, which the first part, however, should have dealt with.

Moreover, I had further divided this part into the theory of formal law and the theory of material law, the first being the pure form of the system in its sequence and interconnections, its subdivisions and scope, whereas the second, on the other hand, was intended to describe the content, showing how the form becomes embodied in its content. This was an error I shared with Herr v. Savigny, as I discovered later in his learned work on ownership, the only difference being that he applies the term formal definition of the concept to "finding the place which this or that theory occupies in the (fictitious) Roman system", the material definition being "the theory of positive content which the Romans attributed to a concept defined in this way", [5] whereas I understood by form the necessary architectonics of conceptual formulations, and by matter the necessary quality of these formulations. The mistake lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a real form, but something like a desk with drawers into which I then poured sand.

The concept is indeed the mediating link between form and content. In a philosophical treatment of law, therefore, the one must arise in the other; indeed, the form should only be the continuation of the content. Thus I arrived at a division of the material such as could be devised by its author for at most an easy and shallow classification, but in which the spirit and truth of law disappeared. All law was divided into contractual and non-contractual. In order to make this clearer, I take the liberty to set out the plan up to the division of jus publicum, which is also treated in the formal part.

I
jus privatum

II
jus publicum

I. jus privatum

a) Conditional contractual private law.
b) Unconditional non-contractual private law.

A. Conditional contractual private law

a) Law of persons; b) Law of things; c) Law of persons in relation to property.

a) Law of persons

I. Commercial contracts; II. Warranties; III. Contracts of bailment.

I. Commercial contracts

2. Contracts of legal entities (societas). 3. Contracts of casements (locatio conductio).

3. Locatio conductio

l. Insofar as it relates to operae.
a) locatio conductio proper (excluding Roman letting or leasing);
b) mandatum.

2. Insofar as it relates to usus rei.
a) On land: usus fructus (also not in the purely Roman sense);
b) On houses: habitatio.

II. Warranties

l. Arbitration or conciliation contract; 2. Insurance contract.

III. Contracts of bailment

2. Promissory contract

1. fide jussio; 2. negotiorum gestio.

3. Contract of gift

1. donatio; 2. gratiae promissum

b) Law of things

I. Commercial contracts

2. permutatio stricte sic dicta.

1. permutatio proper; 2. mutuum (usurae), 3. emptio venditio.

II. Warranties

pignus.

III. Contracts of bailment

2. commodatum; 3. depositum.

But why should I go on filling up pages with things I myself have rejected? The whole thing is replete with tripartite divisions, it is written with tedious prolixity, and the Roman concepts are misused in the most barbaric fashion in order to force them into my system. On the other hand, in this way I did gain a general view of the material and a liking for it, at least along certain lines.

At the end of the section on material private law, I saw the falsity of the whole thing, the basic plan of which borders on that of Kant [6], but deviates wholly from it in the execution, and again it became clear to me that there could be no headway without philosophy. So with a good conscience I was able once more to throw myself into her embrace, and I drafted a new system of metaphysical principles, but at the conclusion of it I was once more compelled to recognise that it was wrong, like all my previous efforts.

In the course of this work I adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read, for instance from Lessing's Laokoon, Solger's Erwin, Winckelmann's history of art, Luden's German history, and incidentally scribbled down my reflections. At the same time I translated Tacitus' Germania, and Ovid's Tristia, and began to learn English and Italian by myself, i. e., out of grammars, but I have not yet got anywhere with this. I also read Klein's criminal law and his annals, and all the most recent literature, but this last only by the way.

At the end of the term, I again sought the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs. Already in the last exercise book that I sent you idealism pervades forced humour (Scorpion and Felix) and an unsuccessful, fantastic drama (Oulanem), until it finally undergoes a complete transformation and becomes mere formal art, mostly without objects that inspire it and without any impassioned train of thought.

And yet these last poems are the only ones in which suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight of the glittering realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing.

Busy with these various occupations, during my first term I spent many a sleepless night, fought many a battle, and endured much internal and external excitement. Yet at the end I emerged not much enriched, and moreover I had neglected nature, art and the world, and shut the door on my friends. The above observations seem to have been made by my body. I was advised by a doctor to go to the country, and so it was that for the first time I traversed the whole length of the city to the gate and went to Stralow. I had no inkling that I would mature there from an anaemic weakling into a man of robust bodily strength.

A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.

I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body. My aim was no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy" [7]. Here art and science, which had become completely divorced from each other, were to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set about the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system. And this work, for which I had acquainted myself to some extent with natural science, Schelling, and history, which had caused me to rack my brains endlessly, and which is so written (since it was actually intended to be a new logic) that now even I myself can hardly recapture my thinking about it, this work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy.

For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which "washes souls and dilutes the tea". I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.

Shortly after that I pursued only positive studies: the study of Savigny's Ownership, Feuerbach's and Grolmann's criminal law, Cramer's de verborum significatione, Wenning-Ingenheim's Pandect system, and Mühlenbruch's Doctrina pandectarum, which I am still working through, and finally a few titles from Lauterbach, on civil procedure and above all canon law, the first part of which, Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum, I have almost entirely read through in the corpus and made extracts from, as also the supplement, Lancelotti's Institutiones. Then I translated in part Aristotle's Rhetoric, read de augmentis scientiarum of the famous Bacon of Verulam, spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight, and also tackled German law, but chiefly only to the extent of going through the capitularies of the Franconian kings and the letters of the Popes to them.

Owing to being upset over Jenny's illness and my vain, fruitless intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as I have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I burnt all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I could give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have not given any proofs to the contrary.

While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples. Through a number of meetings with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club [8], which includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy here, many conflicting views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape, but all rich chords were silenced and I was seized with a veritable fury of irony, as could easily happen after so much had been negated. In addition, there was Jenny's silence, and I could not rest until I had acquired modernity and the outlook of contemporary science through a few bad productions such as The Visit [9], etc.

If perhaps I have here neither clearly described the whole of this last term nor gone into all details, and slurred over all the nuances, excuse me, dear Father, because of my desire to speak of the present time.

Herr v. Chamisso sent me a very insignificant note in which he informed me "he regrets that the Almanac cannot use my contributions because it has already been printed a long time ago" [10]. I swallowed this with vexation. The bookseller Wigand has sent my plan to Dr. Schmidt, publisher of Wunder's firm that trades in good cheese and bad literature. I enclose his letter; Dr. Schmidt has not yet replied. However, I am by no means abandoning this plan, especially since all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian school have promised their collaboration through the help of university lecturer Bauer, who plays a big role among them, and of my colleague Dr. Rutenberg.[11]

Now, as regards the question of a career in cameralistics, my dear father, I recently made the acquaintance of an assessor, Schmidthanner, who advised me after the third law examination to transfer to it as a justiciary, which would be the more to my taste, since I really prefer jurisprudence to all administrative science. This gentleman told me that in three years he himself and many others from the Münster high provincial court in Westphalia had succeeded in reaching the position of assessor, which was not difficult, with hard work of course, since the stages there are not rigidly fixed as they are in Berlin and elsewhere. If later, as an assessor, one is awarded a doctor's degree, there are also much better prospects of obtaining a post as professor extraordinary, as happened in the case of Herr Gärtner in Bonn, who wrote a mediocre work on provincial legislation and is otherwise only known as belonging to the Hegelian school of jurists. But, my dear, very good father, would it not be possible to discuss all this with you personally? Eduard's condition, dear Mama's illness, your own ill health, although I hope it is not serious, all this makes me want to hurry to you, indeed it makes it almost a necessity. I would be there already if I was not definitely in doubt about your permission and consent.

Believe me, my dear, dear father, I am actuated by no selfish intention (although it would be bliss for me to see Jenny again), but there is a thought which moves me, and it is one I have no right to express. In many respects it would even be a hard step for me to take but, as my only sweet Jenny writes, these considerations are all of no account when faced with the fulfilment of duties that are sacred.

I beg you, dear Father, however you may decide, not to show this letter, at least not this page, to my angel of a mother. My sudden arrival could perhaps help this grand and wonderful woman to recover.

My letter to Mama was written long before the arrival of Jenny's dear letter, so perhaps I unwittingly wrote too much about matters which are not quite or even very little suitable. [12]

In the hope that gradually the clouds that have gathered about our family will pass away, that it will be granted to me to suffer and weep with you and, perhaps, when with you to give proof of my profound, heartfelt sympathy and immeasurable love, which often I can only express very badly; in the hope that you also, dear, ever beloved Father, taking into account my much agitated state of mind, will forgive me where often my heart seems to have erred, overwhelmed by my militant spirit, and that you will soon be wholly restored to health so that I can clasp you to my heart and tell you all my thoughts,

Your ever loving son,

Karl

Please, dear Father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad style; it is almost 4 o'clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my eyes are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not be able to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are dear to me.

Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the most beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.

Desmond Tutu should not have snubbed Tony Blair

2012-09-05T02:36:00.004-07:00

The archbishop taught that to sit with one's enemies was a key aspect of reconciliation – yet he offered Blair only an empty chair

Giles Fraser

guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 September 2012 12.30 BST

'Desmond Tutu’s decision smacks too much of the sort of thinking that he has, in other contexts, done so much to dismantle.' Photograph: Zak Hussein/PA

I marched against the war in Iraq. It was unjustified and wrong: no ifs, no buts, no qualifications.
I feel the need to say this because in questioning Desmond Tutu's decision to empty-chair Tony Blair at a South African seminar, some will assume it is some sort of apologia for the war. It is not. But not being a lawyer, I suspend judgment on whether a crime was committed. Was there a mens rea – legal speak for a "guilty mind"? I don't know. The difference between Blair lying and Blair being mistaken about the presence of weapons of mass destruction does not seem to me to be straightforward. The psychology of self-delusion and group-think and confirmation bias makes this a question with many parts.
Nonetheless, I do suspect there may well be some sort of legal case to answer. Surely, UN resolution 1441 was not sufficient legal justification for full-scale war. And while it is indeed troubling that the International Criminal Court mostly seems to call to account dictators with brown skin, Tony Blair is not in the same moral category as Charles Taylor. The war in Iraq was not a systematic genocide or ethnic cleansing. All of this may well be tested in court one day. And that would be fine with me.
My problem is with the empty-chairing. One of the things that many of us most admired about South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission was that it brought former enemies together in the same room. The idea that there is some sort of moral contamination that comes from frequenting with those who have done wrong is not a Christian one.
Mandela sat down with De Klerk, Blair sat down with the IRA, and one day the US will have to properly sit down with Taliban. Indeed, Jesus was often attacked for sitting down with those that morally respectable people had decided were beyond the pale. Those who cry out that this offends against decency are often more concerned with protecting their own innocence than they are with finding a way forward. Yes, reconciliation is about truth-telling (and Tutu could have done that to Blair's face) but it is also about being in the same room.
The reason I recoil at Tutu's decision is that it smacks too much of the sort of thinking that he has, in other contexts, done so much to dismantle – the idea that it is the purpose of morality to make one feel better about oneself, to feel that one is on the right side, that one is with the angels. But morality is not about having clean hands. When it comes to Iraq, the fact that most of us have lifestyles dripping with oil cannot be insignificant. Oil and blood are mixed together in the unholy eucharist of modern life. This is the cup from which we all drink. How can we ostracise those presiding at this feast if we are also drinking from the same cup?
Blair did much that was good – not least his work in Northern Ireland – though he must own his shadow side like the rest of us. And, as a Christian, he knows that there will be no immunity from prosecution in the larger scheme of things. But this is no reason not to sit with him. Justice is about truth and reconciliation and not just the intoxicating serotonin of retribution. The reason I find this whole affair unsettling is that Tutu was the person who did most to teach us that.

Why I had no choice but to spurn Tony Blair

2012-09-05T02:31:00.002-07:00

I couldn't sit with someone who justified the invasion of Iraq with a lie

Desmond Tutu

The Observer, Sunday 2 September 2012

Desmond Tutu: pulled out of a seminar which Tony Blair was scheduled to attend. Photograph: Str/REUTERS

The immorality of the United States and Great Britain's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.
Instead of recognising that the world we lived in, with increasingly sophisticated communications, transportations and weapons systems necessitated sophisticated leadership that would bring the global family together, the then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.
If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth? Days before George W Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, I called the White House and spoke to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, to urge that United Nations weapons inspectors be given more time to confirm or deny the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Should they be able to confirm finding such weapons, I argued, dismantling the threat would have the support of virtually the entire world. Ms Rice demurred, saying there was too much risk and the president would not postpone any longer.
On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers' circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush's chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?
The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.
On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.
But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world.
Has the potential for terrorist attacks decreased? To what extent have we succeeded in bringing the so-called Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds closer together, in sowing the seeds of understanding and hope?
Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.
If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?
My appeal to Mr Blair is not to talk about leadership, but to demonstrate it. You are a member of our family, God's family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the US, in Syria, in Israel and Iran.
I did not deem it appropriate to have this discussion at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg last week. As the date drew nearer, I felt an increasingly profound sense of discomfort about attending a summit on "leadership" with Mr Blair. I extend my humblest and sincerest apologies to Discovery, the summit organisers, the speakers and delegates for the lateness of my decision not to attend.

All work for Mankind

2012-09-05T02:13:00.003-07:00

If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

Marx, Letter to His Father (1837)

Religion

2012-09-05T02:01:00.001-07:00

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.

Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)

BRYAN ROSTRON: Look north for the true hearts of darkness

2012-07-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

At the high court in London, three elderly Kenyans are seeking redress for their torture at the hands of British troops during the Mau Mau rebellion

BRYAN ROSTRON

Published: 2012/07/25 07:37:47 AM

IMAGINE that an ageing Nazi who is wanted for war crimes is found living quietly in a Sussex village but the German government objects that it is too long after the event for a fair trial to be possible. There would be international outrage. Yet this, essentially, is a defence that the British government now claims.

At the high court in London, three elderly Kenyans are seeking redress for their torture at the hands of British troops during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Last week, the British government made it clear to the court that it does not dispute the truth of their claims: among other abominations, one of the men was publicly castrated with pliers; the woman, then 15, was raped with a bottle.

These abuses, however, took place from 1952 to 1960. There is also a bureaucratic paper trail. Researchers recently unearthed 8000 secret files (17000 pages), which lay bare the extent of the violence inflicted on Mau Mau insurgents. A number of suspects were tortured to death. Some were burned alive. Sexual violence was rampant. Documents show that the British cabinet was made aware of at least some of these atrocities but chose to do nothing.

Here are the statistics of that 1952-60 struggle compiled by the late historian Basil Davidson: "11503 Mau Mau killed, 1035 captured wounded, 1550 captured in action, 26625 arrested and 2714 surrendered, indicating a gruesome relationship between killed and captured. Against this, British and colonial forces lost 167 troops, while 1819 ‘loyal civilians’ were killed — this last category included Africans and Asians. The total number of European civilians killed was 32."

More recent historians say the total number of Mau Mau dead may be double the 11000 estimate. Even so, for many, the term Mau Mau remains shorthand for barbaric terror. This is an indication of European myopia regarding the crimes committed in the name of colonialism.

In German South West Africa, which is today Namibia, there was a concerted attempt between 1904 and 1908 to exterminate the Herero people. As I previously noted in Business Day, this is a rare case in which the intent to commit genocide was actually documented, both by Gen Lothar von Trotha and the German general staff.

In the Congo, once the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium, the sadistic brutality and depravity is laid bare in Adam Hochschild’s harrowing King Leopold’s Ghost. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1920, about 10-million Congolese died from the colonists’ depredations. In 1908, when Leopold was forced to hand his private colony over to the Belgian state, all the archives were incinerated. Ash and smoke covered the sky over Brussels for eight days.

"I will give them my Congo," declared Leopold defiantly, "but they have no right to know what I did there."

Yet every time there is conflict in Africa, some lazy subeditor will write a headline to include the unthinking phrase, "heart of darkness". In fact, in 1898, as Joseph Conrad sat down to write his great novella of the same name, a French expedition set out from Senegal to conquer the Chad basin and unify all the French territories in west Africa. It became a homicidal odyssey of rape, torture and massacre.

The leaders, Capt Paul Voulet and Lt Julien Chanoine, left behind them a trail of slaughter and burned settlements. When a villager killed two of his men, Voulet ordered 150 women and children executed in retaliation.

Guides who displeased Voulet were strung up alive so their feet could be gnawed by hyenas and the rest devoured by vultures. As word filtered back to Paris, the governor of Timbuktu, Lt-Col Klobb, was sent after them. He followed an "infernal trail" of devastation and charred bodies.

When Klobb caught up, Voulet ordered his men to shoot him.

Voulet and Chanoine were then shot by Klobb’s troops.

In 1902, after an inquiry, the French ministry of colonies ruled that the two psychopaths "had been driven mad by the dreadful heat".

Once again, it was Africa’s fault.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness appeared in 1902. Seafarer Charles Marlow, aboard the yawl Nellie on the Thames, begins to tell his companions about his bizarre quest for the crazed Kurtz in Africa. And Marlow remarks of London: "This also has been one of the dark places on earth."

It still is, it seems.

• Rostron is an author and a freelance journalist

Asbel Kiprop - Athletics - Olympic Athlete | London 2012

2012-07-25T03:18:00.001-07:00

Asbel Kiprop - Athletics - Olympic Athlete | London 2012

Policy Change: "Terrorists" Are Now "Insurgents

2012-07-25T02:09:00.002-07:00

This is the biggest Orwellian rewrite I have ever experienced.

For years the label "AlQaeda" and "terrorists" were practically used as synonyms. But, following the Obama administrations lead, the New York Times has now rewritten its stylebook and relabeled "AlQaeda" from "terrorists group" to a somewhat neutral "insurgency".

Iraq Insurgents Kill Nearly 100 After Declaring New Offensive

BAGHDAD — In a coordinated display intended to show they remain a viable force, Iraqi insurgents launched at least 37 separate attacks throughout the country on Monday morning, setting off car bombs, storming a military base, attacking policemen in their homes and ambushing checkpoints, Iraqi authorities said....

So there are now "insurgents" in Iraq? Should we support them?

Further into the piece it becomes clear who these "insurgents" are:

The attacks, coming in the early days of Ramadan, the monthlong Muslim religious rite, were predicted Sunday in an audio message attributed to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Bakir Al Baghdadi, and posted on the group’s Web site. Mr. Baghdada vowed that a new offensive, which he called Breaking Down Walls, would begin soon.

Hmm - Al Qaeda now "predicts" such atrocities? Would not "announce" be a more factual word? Are we supposed to doubt that AlQaeda in Iraq committed these killings today after it only "predicted" them? Why?

On Twitter Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen asked: Why is the NYT calling al-Qaeda in Iraq "Iraqi insurgents"

My short answer was: b/c AlQaeda in Syria are "rebels"

The longer answer is that the Oceania no longer at war with Eurasia. It is now allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia. The New York Times, as the paper of record, is just documenting that shift though without acknowledging it.

The U.S. and its assorted poodles are now allied with those radical Sunni AlQaeda fighters. But as the U.S. would never support "terrorists" they now have to be renamed and rather suddenly become "insurgents" (in Iraq) or "rebels" (in Syria).

This is a bit ominous for the Iraqi premier Maliki. This relabeling after the devastating attacks today makes clear that he is now on the same regime change targeting list that Syria's Bashar is on.

Al Qaeda associated groups have for quite some time been running terrorist campaigns against the governments of Syria and Iraq. Support for them from the U.S. and its Saudi allies has been more or less open for quite some time. Relabeling them as "insurgents" and "rebels" is the official declaration of this cooperation as a new U.S. policy.

Source: Moon of Alabama

Poverty, inequality in America reaches record proportions

2012-07-25T01:39:00.003-07:00

By Cyrus Safdari

The domestic context: a nice war with Iran would do much to distract people from this reality: The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net Here's a fun fact: The top 10% of the population in the US owns 75% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% of the people own only about 1% percent of the nation's wealth. Yes, that's not a typo: Half of the US population, all together, own only ONE PERCENT of the nation's wealth. And this has been goingon for a while so its not a temporary Democrat vs. Republican thing: The study found that the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of households grew from 1989 to 2010. In every other segment of the remaining 90 percent of households -- i.e. the middle and lower class -- that share went down. It should be noted that while poverty levels are reaching 1962 levels, the income disparity in the US has exceeded the robber-baron days of the turn of the last century. In fact, today in America, the average CEO earns in a single day what an average worker earns in more than a year (the top CEOs earn more in a year than workers earn in 3,489 years) and this trend in disparity continues to grow. According to a Columbia University Nobel prize winner, the American Dream is dead: In the last 30 years the share of national income held by the top 1% of Americans has doubled; for to the top 0.1%, their share has tripled...Because the children of those at the top of society tend to do better than those at the bottom — thanks, in part, to better education, health care and nutrition — the income inequality that's slowly emerged over the past 30 years will only widen in the next 10 to 20 years. Internationally, Brand America already took a massive beating with the Iraq/Afghan wars, what with Bush's lies about WMDs and the legalization of torture etc. and now it turns out that America is having a hardtime feeding its own people: In 2010 48.8 million Americans lived in food insecure households, meaning they were hungry or faced food insecurity at some point during the year. That’s 12 million more people than faced hunger in 2007, before the recession, and represents 16.1 percent of the U.S. population...nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food. More than a third reported having to choose between their medical bills and food. Apart from the specific case of Iran, the bigger question is how will this affect American "soft power" projection in the world...or do we not care about that anymore since the US military budget has continued to expand* despite efforts to reduce it? (*Note that in the past, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were largely funded through supplementary spending bills outside the Federal Budget, so they are not included in the military budget figures from past years.)

Download- Miguna miguna- Peeling Back the mask PDF- 5 MB

2012-07-16T06:13:00.001-07:00

Download- Miguna miguna- Peeling Back the mask PDF- 5 MB

In corrupt systems, decent people have two options: conform or be crushed'

2012-07-10T23:58:00.003-07:00

In corrupt systems, decent people have two options: conform or be crushed'

According to Vince Cable, the emergence of a new breed of 'decent' bankers will guard against further financial outrages. But until we recognise that the system itself is flawed, banks will go on turning ordinary workers into shameless shysters and get-rich-quick merchants

- Fintan O'Toole
- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 June 2012 21.00 BST

Allied Irish Bank, where whistle-blowers were either dismissed or marginalised. Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP

Spivs! Wideboys! Riverboat gamblers! Snakeoil salesmen! Calling the shysters by their proper names is satisfying – and it may be the only satisfaction the public will get. But it is also, oddly enough, rather naive. For it assumes that better, more decent people wouldn't end up manipulating interest rates or mis-selling financial products.

All the evidence from the many scandals of recent years is that it is not sociopaths who create rotten cultures. It is closed, arrogant, unaccountable cultures that turn ordinary people into sociopaths. Put a young Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela or Saint Francis of Assisi on the trading floor of Barclays and you can bet (at carefully manipulated odds) on how long it will be before they're up to their necks in scams and spivvery.

And yet a Hollywood-style myth of personal redemption clings on. The well-meaningVince Cable told Channel 4 News on Friday evening that "greed and corruption pervades substantial parts of the banking system" and that institutions such as Barclays Capital are "rotten to the core".

Both phrases rightly suggest that the problems are fundamental and institutional. But the business secretary then concluded with an optimistic appeal to personal moral revival as the key to reform: "There are enough decent people now coming through the banking system… who are not part of this [rotten culture] to make this kind of long-term change possible."

This is the grand illusion: that "decent people" will make all the difference. We know that in corrupt systems, decent people end up with two options: conform or be crushed. Happily for human nature, there are always good, moral people who look at what's happening around them and decide that they can't live with themselves if they go along with it. Unhappily for human society, such people are almost always bullied, marginalised and destroyed. In bad systems, the decent person is the freak, the oddball, the awkward crank who is not a team player, not one of us.

In one of the banks that brought down the Irish economy, Allied Irish Bank, for example, three successive chief internal auditors went to the board with deep and precise concerns over corrupt practices they had uncovered. Each in turn was dismissed or marginalised. In one case, the bank even managed to blame the whistleblower for the corrupt practices he had uncovered.

This is what bad systems do: they reward the compliant with tribal approbation ("Done, for you big boy") and recast conscience as negativity. They invert altruism, using the instincts of decency – working co-operatively, being "in this together", upholding a communal ethic – to normalise sociopathic behaviour and make decency despicable.

Even good intentions are useless in such a world. Consider, for example, the Catholic bishops who ended up colluding with predatory paedophiles by shifting them from parish to parish. These are all men trained for many years in moral thinking. All of them, perhaps, dreamed of being saints in the same way that other boys dreamed of being footballers. Most of them are individually decent, compassionate and well-intentioned men. Yet they ended up enabling and covering up the most horrific crimes against children.

Why? Because they had too much power. Because they had to account to no one outside of their own institution. Because they had a fierce loyalty to their colleagues. Because they didn't want to be the one who betrayed the tribe. Because what might have seemed outrageous the first time you did it gradually became normal. And because they could convince themselves that, really, it was all in the service of a higher moral purpose.

Bankers are no different – in fact, the parallels are striking. They, too, deal in arcane mysteries whose meaning is denied to the uninitiated. They, too, have a hotline to the Supreme Being or as we now call him, the Market. They, too, operate within closed worlds which generate their own norms and a feverish tribal loyalty. They, too, have their acolytes and true believers – in this case, economists and politicians – to reassure them that their most appallingly self-serving behaviour is in fact for the greater good. An entire ideology tells them that vicious greed on the personal level translates miraculously into a collective social and economic good.

There is another parallel between bankers and churchmen, too. Each has been above the law. Or rather, each has its own internal system of laws: canon law for the clergy, financial regulations for the bankers. These systems become, in reality, substitutes for the basic common understanding of criminality. Assist a paedophile in ordinary society, and you can expect, if caught, to have your collar felt. Steal a million quid from a small business and you're going down. But do these things within the bounds of your own internal codes, and crimes become technical offences. Shame is minimised; consequences are softened.

What can be done about this? Everyone talks of the need, in Mervyn King's expression, for "a real change in the culture of the industry". But "culture" has a fluffy feel. It suggests that we are dealing with the strange practices of exotic tribes who stick bones through their noses or paint themselves blue. It implies that we should call in the anthropologists rather than the police.

There is nothing at all exotic about the culture of sophisticated scam merchants. Political philosophers have long known that when people have the power to get away with anything, they will try to get away with everything. Two and a half thousand years ago, Plato told the story of Gyges, who finds a ring that makes him invisible. Within weeks, he has turned from innocent shepherd into corrupt monster.

Bankers have Gyges's ring of invisibility. Most of society can't see what they're doing. They enjoy virtual impunity for acts that harm other people and society as a whole.

But there's an added twist: not alone can they not be fully seen, but they themselves cannot see. The bonus culture and the grotesque inequality it sustains create a disconnection from everyday society. Nothing out there is real: clients are just more inputs for the profit machine; interest rates are just numbers to feed bonuses.

Decent people will always be eaten up by such an indecent system. The real challenge is to recognise that its indecency is not accidental but inherent. These institutions are too big, too justifiably arrogant, too often fawned over by intellectual and political lackeys and too detached from democratic and social values. They brought the world to the brink of economic collapse and survived with little real change. Unless democracies force them to do otherwise, they will rightly expect to ride out these smaller scandals.

Malcolm X Speech: After the Firebombing (Feb. 14, 1965)

2012-07-10T07:30:00.004-07:00

Distinguished guests, brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, friends and enemies:

I want to point out first that I am very happy to be here this evening and I'm thankful for the invitation to come here to Detroit this evening. I was in a house last night that was bombed, my own. It didn't destroy all my clothes, not all, but you know what happens when fire dashes through -- they get smoky. The only thing I could get my hands on before leaving was what I have on now.

It isn't something that made me lose confidence in what I am doing, because my wife understands and I have children from this size on down, and even in their young age they understand. I think they would rather have a father or brother or whatever the situation may be who will take a stand in the face of any kind of reaction from narrow-minded people rather than to compromise and later on have to grow up in shame and in disgrace.

So I just ask you to excuse my appearance. I don't normally come out in front of people without a shirt and a tie. I guess that's somewhat a holdover from the 'Black Muslim' movement, which I was in. That's one of the good aspects of that movement. It teaches you to be very careful and conscious of how you look, which is a positive contribution on their part. But that positive contribution on their part is greatly offset by too many other liabilities.

Tonight we want to discuss -- and by the way, also, when I came here today I was a bit -- last night, the temperature was about twenty above and when this explosion took place, I was caught in what I had on, some pajamas. And in trying to get my family out of the house, none of us stopped for any clothes at that point -- twenty-degree cold. I myself was -- I had gotten them into the house of the neighbor next door. So I thought perhaps being in that condition for so long I would get pneumonia or a cold or something like that, so a doctor came today -- a nice doctor too -- and he shot something in my arm that naturally put me to sleep. I've been back there asleep ever since the program started in order to get back in shape. So if I have a tendency to stutter or slow down, it's still the effects of that drug. I don't know what kind it was, but it was good; it makes you sleep, and there's nothing like sleeping through a whole lot of excitement.

Tonight one of the things that has to be stressed is that which has not only the United States very much worried but which also has France, Great Britain, and most of the powers, who formerly were known as colonial powers, worried also, and that primarily is the African revolution. They are more concerned with the revolution that's taking place on the African continent than they are with the revolution in Asia and in Latin America. And this is because there are so many people of African ancestry within the domestic confines or jurisdiction of these various governments.

There are four different types of people in the Western Hemisphere, all of whom have Africa as a common heritage, common origin, and that's the -- those of our people in Latin America, who are Black, but who are in the Spanish-speaking areas. Many of them ofttimes migrate back to Spain, the only difference being Spain has such bad economic conditions until many of the people from Latin America don't think it's worthwhile to migrate back there. And then the British and the French had a great deal of control in the Caribbean, in the West Indies. And so now you have many people from the West Indies migrating to both London -- rather both England and France. The people from the British West Indies go to London, and those from the French West Indies go to Paris. And it has put France and England since World War II in the precarious position of having a sort of a commonwealth structure that makes it easy for all of the people in the commonwealth territories to come into their country with no restrictions. So there's an increasing number of dark-skinned people in England and also in France.

When I was in Africa in May, I noticed a tendency on the part of the Afro-Americans to, what I call lollygag. Everybody else who was over there had something on the ball, something they were doing, something constructive. For instance, in Ghana, just to take Ghana as an example. There would be many refugees in Ghana from South Africa. But those who were in Ghana were organized and were serving as pressure groups, some were training for military -- some were being trained in how to be soldiers, but others were involved as a pressure group or lobby group to let the people of Ghana never forget what's happening to the brother in South Africa. Also you'd have brothers there from Angola and Mozambique. But all of the Africans who were exiles from their particular country and would be in a place like Ghana or Tanganyika, now Tanzania, they would be training. Their every move would still be designed to offset what was happening to their people back home where they had left.

The only difference on the continent was the American Negro. Those who were over there weren't even thinking about these over here. This was the basic difference. The Africans, when they escaped from their respective countries that were still colonized, they didn't try and run away from the problem. But as soon as they got where they were going, they then began to organize into pressure groups to get governmental support at the international level against the injustices they were experiencing back home.

And as I said, the American Negro, or the Afro-American, who was in these various countries, some working for this government, some working for that government, some just in business -- they were just socializing, they had turned their back on the cause over here, they were partying, you know.

And when I went through one country in particular, I heard a lot of their complaints and I didn't make any move on them.

But when I got to another country, I found the Afro-Americans there were making the same complaints. So we sat down and talked and we organized a branch in this particular country, a branch of the OAAU, Organization of Afro-American Unity. That one was the only one in existence at that time. Then during the summer, when I went back to Africa, I was able in each country that I visited, to get the Afro-American community together and organize them and make them aware of their responsibility to those of us who are still here in the lion's den.

They began to do this quite well, and when I got to Paris and London -- there are many Afro-Americans in Paris, and many in London. And in December -- no, November -- we organized a group in Paris and just within a very short time they had grown into a well-organized unit. And they, in conjunction with the African community, invited me to Paris, Tuesday, to address a large gathering of Parisians and Afro-Americans and people from the Caribbean and also from Africa who were interested in our struggle in this country and the rate of progress that we have been making.

But since the French government and the British government and this government here, the United States, know that I have been almost fanatically stressing the importance of the Afro-American uniting with the African and working as a coalition, especially in areas which are of mutual benefit to all of us. And the governments in these different places were frightened because they know that the Black revolution that's taking place on the outside of their house --

And I might point out right here that colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. But the interests in this country are in cahoots with the interests in France and the interests in Britain. It's one huge complex or combine, and it creates what's known as not the American power structure or the French power structure, but it's an international power structure. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

So that the era in which you and I have been living during the past ten years most specifically has witnessed the upsurge on the part of the Black man in Africa against the power structure.
He wants his freedom.

Now, mind you, the power structure is international, and as such, its own domestic base is in London, in Paris, in Washington, D.C., and so forth. And the outside or external phase of the revolution, which is manifest in the attitude and action of the Africans today is troublesome enough. The revolution on the outside of the house, or the outside of the structure, is troublesome enough. But now the powers that be are beginning to see that this struggle on the outside by the Black man is affecting, infecting the Black man who is on the inside of that structure. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.

The newly awakened people all over the world pose a problem for what's known as Western interests, which is imperialism, colonialism, racism, and all these other negative isms or vulturistic isms. Just as the external forces pose a grave threat, they can now see that the internal forces pose an even greater threat. But the internal forces pose an even greater threat only when they have properly analyzed the situation and know what the stakes really are.

Just by advocating a coalition of Africans, Afro-Americans, Arabs, and Asians who live within the structure, it automatically has upset France, which is supposed to be one of the most liberal -- heh! -- countries on earth, and it made them expose their hand. England the same way. And I don't have to tell you about this country that we are living in now.

So when you count the number of dark-skinned people in the Western Hemisphere you can see that there are probably over 100 million. When you consider Brazil has two-thirds what we call colored, or nonwhite, and Venezuela, Honduras and other Central American countries, Cuba and Jamaica, and the United States and even Canada -- when you total all these people up, you have probably over 100 million. And this 100 million on the inside of the power structure today is what is causing a great deal of concern for the power structure itself.

Not a great deal of concern for all white people, but a great deal of concern for most white people. See, if I said "all white people" then they would call me a racist for giving a blanket condemnation of things.

And this is true; this is how they do it. They take one little word out of what you say, ignore all the rest, and then begin to magnify it all over the world to make you look like what you actually aren't. And I'm very used to that.

So we saw that the first thing to do was to unite our people, not only unite us internally, but we have to be united with our brothers and sisters abroad. It was for that purpose that I spent five months in the Middle East and Africa during the summer. The trip was very enlightening, inspiring, and fruitful. I didn't go into any African country, or any country in the Middle East for that matter, and run into any closed door, closed mind, or closed heart. I found a warm reception and an amazingly deep interest and sympathy for the Black man in this country in regards to our struggle for human rights.

While I was traveling, I had a chance to speak in Cairo, or rather Alexandria, with President [Gamal Abdel-]Nasser for about an hour and a half. He's a very brilliant man. And I can see why they're so afraid of him, and they are afraid of him -- they know he can cut off their oil. And actually the only thing power respects is power. Whenever you find a man who's in a position to show power against power then that man is respected. But you can take a man who has power and love him all the rest of your life, nonviolently and forgivingly and all the rest of those ofttime things, and you won't get anything out of it.

So I also had a chance to speak to President [Julius K.] Nyerere in Tanganyika, which is now Tanzania, and also [President Jomo] Kenyata -- I know that all of you know him. He was the head of the Mau Mau, which really brought freedom to many of the African countries. This is true. The Mau Mau played a major role in bringing about freedom for Kenya, and not only for Kenya but other African countries. Because what the Mau Mau did frightened the white man so much in other countries until he said, "Well I better get this thing straight before some of them pop up here." This is good to study because you see what makes him react: Nothing loving makes him react, nothing forgiving makes him react. The only time he reacts is when he knows you can hurt him, and when you let him know you can hurt him he has to think two or three times before he tries to hurt you. But if you're not going to do nothing but return that hurt with love -- why good night! He knows you're out of your mind.

And also I had an opportunity to speak with President [Nnamdi] Azikiwe in Nigeria, President [Kwame] Nkrumah in Ghana, and President Sekou Toure in Guinea. And in all of these people I found nothing but warmth, friendship, sympathy, and a desire to help the Black man in this country in fighting our problem. And we have a very complex problem.

Now I hope you'll forgive me for just speaking so informally tonight, but I frankly think it's always better to be informal. As far as I am concerned, I can speak to people better in an informal way than I can with all of this stiff formality that ends up meaning nothing. Plus, when people are informal, they're relaxed. When they're relaxed, their mind is more open, and they can weigh things more objectively. Whenever you and I are discussing our problems we need to be very objective, very cool, calm, collected. But that doesn't mean we should always be. There's a time to be cool and a time to be hot. See, you got messed up into thinking that there's only one time for everything. There's a time to love and a time to hate. Even Solomon said that, and he was in that Book too. You're just taking something out of the Book that fits your cowardly nature. And when you don't want to fight, you say, "Well, Jesus said don't fight." But I don't even believe Jesus said that.

Also I am very pleased to see so many who have come out to always see for yourself, where you can hear for yourself, and then think for yourself. Then you'll be in a better position to make an intelligent judgment for yourself. But if you form the habit of listening to what others say about something or some one or reading what someone else has written about someone, somebody can confuse you and misuse you. So as Afro-Americans or Black people here in the Western Hemisphere, you and I have to learn to weigh things for ourselves. No matter what the [white] man says, you better look into it.

And a good example of why it's so important to look into things for yourself: I was on a plane between Algiers and Geneva and it just happened that two other Americans were sitting in the two seats next to me. None of us knew each other and the other two were white, one a male, the other a female. And after we had been flying along for about forty minutes, the lady, she says, "Could I ask you a personal question?"

I said, '"Yes." She said, "Well--" she had been looking at my briefcase, and she said, "Well, what does that X--" she says, "What kind of last name could you have that begins with X?" So I said, "That's it -- X." And she said, "Well, what does the 'M' stand for?" I said, "Malcolm." So she was quiet for about ten minutes, and she turned to me and she says, "You're not Malcolm X?"

You see, we had been riding along in a nice conversation like three human beings, you know, no hostility, no animosity, just human. And she couldn't take this, she said, "Well you're not who I was looking for," you know. And she ended up telling me that she was looking for horns and all that, and for someone who was out to kill all white people, as if all white people could be killed. This was her general attitude, and this attitude had been given her -- this image had been given [to] her by the press.

So before I get involved in anything nowadays, I have to straighten out my own position, which is clear. I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don't believe in any form of racism. I don't believe in any form of discrimination or segregation. I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim. And there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim, nothing wrong with the religion of Islam. It just teaches us to believe in Allah as the God. Those of you who are Christians probably believe in the same God, because I think you believe in the God who created the universe. That's the One we believe in, the one who created the universe, the only difference being you call Him God and I -- we call Him Allah. The Jews call him Jehovah. If you could understand Hebrew, you'd probably call him Jehovah too. If you could understand Arabic, you'd probably call him Allah.

But since the white man, your "friend," took your language away from you during slavery, the only language you know is his language. You know, your friend's language. So you call for the same God he calls for. When he's putting a rope around your neck, you call for God and he calls for God. [Laughter and applause.] And you wonder why the one you call on never answers you.

So that once you realize that I believe in the Supreme Being who created the universe, and believe in him as being one -- I also have been taught in Islam that one God only has one religion, and that religion is called Islam, and all of the prophets who came forth taught that religion -- Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, all of them. And by believing in one God and one religion and all of the prophets, it creates unity. There's no room for argument, no need for us to be arguing with each other.

And also in that religion, of the real religion of Islam -- when I was in the Black Muslim movement, I wasn't -- they didn't have the real religion of Islam in that movement. It was something else. And the real religion of Islam doesn't teach anyone to judge another human being by the color of his skin. The yardstick that is used by the Muslim to measure another man is not the man's color but the man's deeds, the man's conscious behavior, the man's intentions. And when you use that as a standard of measurement or judgment, you never go wrong.

But when you just judge a man because of the color of his skin, then you're committing a crime, because that's the worst kind of judgment. If you judged him just because he was a Jew, that's not as bad as judging him because he's Black. Because a Jew can hide his religion. He can say he's something else -- and which a lot of them do that, they say they're something else. But the Black man can't hide. When they start indicting us because of our color that means we're indicted before we're born, which is the worst kind of crime that can be committed. The Muslim religion has eliminated all tendencies to judge a man according to the color of his skin, but rather the judgment is based upon his deeds.

And when, prior to going into the Muslim world, I didn't have any -- Elijah Muhammad had taught us that the white man could not enter into Makkah in Arabia, and all of us who followed him, we believed it. And he said the reason he couldn't enter was because he's white and inherently evil, it's impossible to change him. And the only thing that would change him is Islam, and he can't accept Islam because by nature he's evil. And therefore by not being able to accept Islam and become a Muslim, he could never enter Makkah. This is how he taught us, you know.

So when I got over there and went to Makkah and saw these people who were blond and blue-eyed and pale-skinned and all those things, I said, "Well!" But I watched them closely. And I noticed that though they were white, and they would call themselves white, there was a difference between them and the white one over here. And that basic difference was this: in Asia or the Arab world or in Africa, where the Muslims are, if you find one who says he's white, all he's doing is using an adjective to describe something that's incidental about him, one of his incidental characteristics; so there's nothing else to it, he's just white.

But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he's white, he means something else. You can listen to the sound of his voice -- when he says he's white, he means he's a boss. That's right. That's what "white" means in this language. You know the expression, "free, white, and twenty-one." He made that up. He's letting you know all of them mean the same. "White" means free, boss. He's up there. So that when he says he's white he has a little different sound in his voice. I know you know what I'm talking about.

This was what I saw was missing in the Muslim world. If they said they were white, it was incidental. White, black, brown, red, yellow, doesn't make any difference what color you are. So this was the religion that I had accepted and had gone there to get a better knowledge of it.

But despite the fact that I saw that Islam was a religion of brotherhood, I also had to face reality. And when I got back into this American society, I'm not in a society that practices brotherhood. I'm in a society that might preach it on Sunday, but they don't practice it on no day -- on any day. And so, since I could see that America itself is a society where there is no brotherhood and that this society is controlled primarily by racists and segregationists -- and it is -- who are in Washington, D.C., in positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba, or in any other place on this earth where they're trying to exploit and oppress. This is a society whose government doesn't hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over the world.

To wit, right now what's going on in and around Saigon and Hanoi and in the Congo and elsewhere. They are violent when their interests are at stake. But all of that violence that they display at the international level, when you and I want just a little bit of freedom, we're supposed to be nonviolent. They're violent. They're violent in Korea, they're violent in Germany, they're violent in the South Pacific, they're violent in Cuba, they're violent wherever they go. But when it comes time for you and me to protect ourselves against lynchings, they tell us to be nonviolent.

That's a shame. Because we get tricked into being nonviolent, and when somebody stands up and talks like I just did, they say, "Why, he's advocating violence!" Isn't that what they say? Every time you pick up your newspaper, you see where one of these things has written into it that I'm advocating violence. I have never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizens' Council, and many other forms, we should defend ourselves. And when I say that we should defend ourselves against the violence of others, they use their press skillfully to make the world think that I'm calling on violence, period. I wouldn't call on anybody to be violent without a cause. But I think the Black man in this country, above and beyond people all over the world, will be more justified when he stands up and starts to protect himself, no matter how many necks he has to break and heads he has to crack.

I saw in the paper where they -- on the television where they took this Black woman down in Selma, Alabama, and knocked her right down on the ground, dragging her down the street. You saw it, you're trying to pretend like you didn't see it 'cause you knew you should've done something about it and didn't. It showed the sheriff and his henchmen throwing this Black woman on the ground -- on the ground.

And Negro men standing around doing nothing about it saying, "Well, let's overcome them with our capacity to love." What kind of phrase is that? "Overcome them with our capacity to love." And then it disgraces the rest of us, because all over the world the picture is splashed showing a Black woman a with some white brutes, with their knees on her holding her down, and full-grown Black men standing around watching it. Why, you are lucky they let you stay on earth, much less stay in the country.

When I saw it I dispatched a wire to Rockwell; Rockwell was one of the agitators down there, Rockwell, this [George] Lincoln Rockwell [leader of the American Nazi Party].

And the wire said in essence that this is to warn him that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist 'Black Muslim' movement. And that if Rockwell's presence in Alabama causes harm to come to Dr. King or any other Black person in Alabama who's doing nothing other than trying to enjoy their rights, then Rockwell and his Ku Klux Klan friends would be met with maximum retaliation from those of us who are not handcuffed by this nonviolent philosophy. And I haven't heard from Rockwell since.

Brothers and sisters, if you and I would just realize that once we learn to talk the language that they understand, they will then get the point. You can't ever reach a man if you don't speak his language. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can't come to him with peace. Why, good night! He'll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can't speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can't communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out what does this man speak. And once you know his language, learn how to speak his language, and he'll get the point. There'll be some dialogue, some communication, and some understanding will be developed.

You've been in this country long enough to know the language the Klan speaks. They only know one language. And what you and I have to start doing in 1965 -- I mean that's what you have to do, because most of us already been doing it -- is start learning a new language. Learn the language that they understand. And then when they come up on our doorstep to talk, we can talk. And they will get the point. There'll be a dialogue, there'll be some communication, and I'm quite certain there will then be some understanding. Why? Because the Klan is a cowardly outfit. They have perfected the art of making Negroes be afraid. As long as the Negro's afraid, the Klan is safe. But the Klan itself is cowardly. One of them will never come after one of you. They all come together. Sure, and they're scared of you.

And you sit there when they're putting the rope around your neck saying, "Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do." As long as they've been doing it, they're experts at it, they know what they're doing!

No, since they federal government has shown that it isn't going to do anything about it but talk, it is a duty, it's your and my duty as men, as human beings, it is our duty to our people, to organize ourselves and let the government know that if they don't stop that Klan, we'll stop it ourselves. And then you'll see the government start doing something about it. But don't ever think that they're going to do it just on some kind of morality basis, no. So I don't believe in violence -- that's why I want to stop it. And you can't stop it with love, not love of those things down there, no. So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defense, and that vigorous action we feel we're justified in initiating by any means necessary.

Now, the press, behind something like that, they call us racist and people who are "violent in reverse." This is how they psycho you. They make you think that if you try to stop the Klan from lynching you, you're practicing "violence in reverse." Pick up on this, I hear a lot of you all parrot what the [white] man says. You say, "I don't want to be a Ku Klux Klan in reverse." Well, you - heh! -- if a criminal comes around your house with his gun, brother, just because he's got a gun and he's robbing your house, brother, and he's a robber, it doesn't make you a robber because you grab your gun and run him out. No, see, the man is using some tricky logic on you. And he has absolutely got a Ku Klux Klan outfit that goes through the country frightening black people. Now, I say it is time for black people to put together the type of action, the unity, that is necessary to pull the sheet off of them so they won't be frightening black people any longer. That's all. And when we say this, the press calls us "racist in reverse."

"Don't struggle -- only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down." Why, this is insane. But it shows you how they can do it. With skillful manipulating of the press, they're able to make the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim.

Right now in New York we had a couple cases where police grabbed the brother and beat him unmercifully -- and then charged him with assaulting them. They used the press to make it look like he's the criminal and they're the victim. This is how they do it, and if you study how they do it [t]here, then you'll know how they do it over here. It's the same game going all the time, and if you and I don't awaken and see what this man is doing to us, then it'll be too late. They may have the gas ovens already built before you realize that they're hot.

One of the shrewd ways that they use the press to project us in the eye or image of a criminal: they take statistics. And with the press they feed these statistics to the public, primarily the white public. Because there are some well-meaning persons in the white public as well as bad-meaning persons in the white public. And whatever the government is going to do, it always wants the public on its side, whether it's the local government, state government, federal government. So they use the press to create images. And at the local level, they'll create an image by feeding statistics to the press -- through the press showing the high crime rate in the Negro community. As soon as this high crime rate is emphasized through the press, then people begin to look upon the Negro community as a community of criminals.

And then any Negro in the community can be stopped in the street. "Put your hands up," and they pat you down. You might be a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher, or some other kind of Uncle Tom. But despite your professional standing, you'll find that you're the same victim as the man who's in the alley. Just because you're Black and you live in a Black community, which has been projected as a community of criminals. This is done. And once the public accepts this image also, it paves the way for a police-state type of activity in the Negro community. They can use any kind of brutal methods to suppress Blacks because "they're criminals anyway." And what has given this image? The press again, by letting the power structure or the racist element in the power structure use them in that way.

A very good example was the riots that took place here during the summer: I was in Africa, I read about them over there. If you'll notice, they referred to the rioters as vandals, hoodlums, thieves. They tried to make it appear that this wasn't -- they tried to make it -- and they did this. They skillfully took the burden off the society for its failure to correct these negative conditions in the Black community. It took the burden completely off the society and put it right on the community by using the press to make it appear that the looting and all of this was proof that the whole act was nothing but vandals and robbers and thieves, who weren't really interested in anything other than that which was negative. And I hear many old, dumb, brainwashed Negroes who parrot the same old party line that the man handed down in his paper.

It was not the case that they were just knocking out store windows ignorantly. In Harlem, for instance, all of the stores are owned by white people, all of the buildings are owned by white people. Black people are just there, paying rent, buying the groceries. But they don't own the stores, clothing stores, food stores, any kind of stores; don't even own the homes that they live in. This is all owned by outsiders. And then these run down apartment dwellings, the Black man in Harlem pays more money for it than the man down in the rich Park Avenue section. It costs us more money to live in the slum, than it costs them to live down on Park Avenue. Black people in Harlem know this. And the white merchants charge us more money for food in Harlem -- and it's the cheap food, it's the worst food; and we have to pay more money for it than the man has to pay for it downtown. So Black people know that they're being exploited and that their blood is being sucked and they see no way out of it.

So finally, when the thing is sparked, the white man is not there; he's gone. The merchant is not there, the landlord is not there; the one he considers to be the enemy isn't there. So, they knock at his property. This is what makes them knock down the store windows and set fire to things, and things of that sort.

It's not that they're thieves. But they try and project the image to the public that this is being done by thieves, and thieves alone. And they ignore the fact that no, it is not thievery alone. It's a corrupt, vicious, hypocritical system that has castrated the Black man; and the only way the Black man can get back at it is to strike it in the only way he knows how.

They use the press. That doesn't mean that all reporters are bad. Some of them are good… I suppose. But you can take their collective approach to any problem and see that they can always agree when it gets to you and me. They knew that [the Afro-American Broadcasting Company was giving] this affair -- which is designed to honor outstanding Black Americans, is it not? You'd find nothing in the newspapers to give the slightest hint that this affair was going to take place. Not one hint.

Why? You see, you have many sources of news. If you don't think that they're in cahoots, watch! They're all interested, or none of them are interested. It's not a staggering thing. They're not going to say anything in advance [about an event] that's being given by any Black people who believe in functioning beyond the scope of the ground rules that are laid down by the "liberal" element of the power structure.

When you begin to start thinking for yourself, you frighten them, and they try and block your getting to the public, for fear that if the public listens to you, then the public won't listen to them anymore. And they've got certain Negroes whom they have to keep blowing up in the papers to make them look like leaders. So that the people will keep on following them, no matter how many knocks they get on their heads following him. This is how the man does it, and if you don't wake up and find out how he does it, I tell you, they'll be building gas chambers and gas ovens pretty soon -- I don't mean those kind you've got at home in your kitchen.

Another example at the international level of how skillfully they use this trickery was in the Congo. In the Congo, airplanes were dropping bombs on African villages. African villages don't have a defense against bombs. And the pilot can't tell who the bomb is being dropped upon. When a bomb hits a village, everything goes. And these pilots, flying planes filled with bombs, dropping these bombs on African villages, were destroying women, were destroying children, were destroying babies. You never heard any outcry over here about that.

And it had started way back in June. They would drop bombs on African villages that would blow that village apart and everything in it -- man, woman, child, and baby. No outcry, no sympathy, no support, no concern, because the press didn't project it in such a way that it would be designed to get your sympathy. They know how to put something so that you'll sympathize with it, and they know how to put it so you'll be against it. I'm telling you, they are masters at it. And if you don't develop the analytical ability to read between the lines in what they're saying, I'm telling you again -- they'll be building gas ovens, and before you wake up you'll be in one of them, just like the Jews ended up in gas ovens over there in Germany. You're in a society that's just as capable of building gas ovens for Black people as Hitler's society was.

This was mass murder in the Congo, of women and children and babies. But there was no outcry even from the white liberals, even from your "friends." Why? Because they made it appear that it was a humanitarian project. They said that the planes were being flown by "American-trained anti-Castro Cuban pilots." This is propaganda, too. Soon as you hear that it's American-trained, you say, "Oh that's all right, that's us." And the anti-Castro Cubans, "Oh that's all right too, 'cause if they're against Castro, whoever else they're against that's good, 'cause Castro is a monster." But you see how step-by-step they grab your mind?

And these pilots are hired, their salaries are paid by the United States government. They're called mercenaries, these pilots are. And a mercenary is not someone who kills you because he's patriotic. He kills you for blood money, he's a hired killer. This is what a mercenary means. And they're able to take these hired killers, put them in American planes, with American bombs, and drop them on African villages, blowing to bits Black men, Black women, Black children, Black babies, and you Black people sitting over here cool like it doesn't even involve you. You're a fool. They'll do it to them today, and do it to you tomorrow. Because you and I and they are all the same.

They call it a humanitarian project and that they're doing it in the name of freedom. And all of this, these glorious terms, are used to pave the way in your mind for what they're going to do.

Then they take Tshombe. You've heard of Tshombe. He's the worst African that was ever born. The lowest type that was ever born. He's a murderer himself. He's the murderer of Lumumba, the former prime minister of -- the first and only rightful prime minister of the Congo. He's an international -- he's a murderer with an international stature as a murderer. Yet the United States government went and got Tshombe in Spain, and put him as the head of the Congolese government. This is criminal! Here's a man who's a murderer, so the United States takes him, puts him over the Congo, and supports his government with your tax dollars. Now -- they hired him to occupy the position as head of state over the Congo -- a killer! He is a hired killer himself! His salary's paid by the United States government. And he turns -- his first move is to bring in South Africans, who hate everything in sight. He hires those South Africans to come and kill his own Congolese people. And the United States, again, pays their salary.

You know, it's something to think about. How do you think you would feel right now if some Congolese brothers walked up to you -- and they look just like you, don't think you don't look Congolese. You look as much Congolese as a Congolese does. They got all kinds of Congolese over there. How would you feel if one of them walked up to you and asked you about what your government is doing in the Congo. I was asked that when I was over there. But they don't have to come to me like that, 'cause they know where I stand automatically. And for one time I'm thankful to the press, for letting everybody know where I stand. They -- but you have no explanation. Your tongue stays in your mouth. And then you have to become -- you have to go to the extreme to convince them that you don't go along with what the United States government is doing in the Congo.

And they justify the usage of Tshombe as the present head of state by saying that he's the only African who can unite -- or bring unity to the Congo. Has he brought unity to the Congo? But, see, this is their game! And their real reason for wanting Tshombe there was so that Tshombe could invite them to come in. Now, what African head of state would have dared to invite outside powers? So they put Tshombe there, and as soon as Tshombe got there he invited them to bring paratroopers from Belgium in the United States' transport planes to try and recapture Congo.

This is all a cold-blooded act on the part of your Western powers, namely the Western powers here in the United States -- interests in the United States, in England, and France, and Belgium and so forth. They want the wealth of the Congo, plus its strategic geographic position.

The step-by-step process that was used by the press: First they fanned the flame in such a manner to create hysteria in the mind of the public. And then they shift gears and fan the flame in a manner designed to get the sympathy of the public. And once they go from hysteria to sympathy, their next step is to get the public to support them in whatever act they're getting ready to go down with. You're dealing with a cold calculating international machine, that's so criminal in its objectives and motives that it has the seeds of its own destruction, right within. They use the press to emphasize that white hostages are being held by [inaudible] -- imagine that -- or white priests, white missionaries, white nuns -- they don't say nuns: white nuns. You know what the paper said right here in Detroit: white missionaries, not just a missionary; a white nun -- as if there's a difference between a white nun and a black nun; or a white priest and a black priest; or if the light that's in a white skin is more valuable than a light within a black skin. This is what they're implying! And the press -- look at the press when this thing was going on -- and you will see what I'm talking about. They're vicious in their whiteness.

But still, I wouldn't judge them just 'cause they're white, or they'd call me a racist. [I'm] judging by their deeds, by their conscious behavior -- and you know how they've been consciously behaving in the Congo, and how they consciously behave in Vietnam, and how they consciously behave right now in Alabama and Mississippi. So you and I got to get conscious, and start behaving in a way that we can offset this thing before it's too late -- and this is what they don't want to hear.

One more thing concerning Tshombe, if you notice -- and I must -- while we were over there on the African continent, in order to give you a better understanding of what is going on right here. The next thing that is good to know about Tshombe: no Congolese troops have ever won any victories, whatsoever, for the present Congolese government. Congolese soldiers won't even fight unless they're forced to.

But the fighters in the Congo, or the freedom fighters -- the rebels from the Oriental, eastern province -- they fought with stones, and sticks, and rocks, spears, and arrows. And the only time they had a gun was when they got some soldier who had it, and they'd kill him and take his gun. But they were winning, they took over two-thirds of the Congo. [I'm] showing you, they were fighting from their hearts.

The other people, their heart wasn't in it. And because of the fighting spirit of these people, it will be impossible for Tshombe to remain as head of state over the Congo without additional troops -- white troops -- being constantly brought in from South Africa or elsewhere. But sooner or later, these troops are going to give out, and then America's going to have to increase her troops like she did in South Vietnam. She's not at war with Vietnam yet, she's only there "advising." They have 20,000 "advisors," you know, on the front lines. But it's not a war. Just -- they're in "advisory capacity." Why, they insult the intelligence of their own public!

And they're going to have to end up doing the same thing in the Congo, they'll be trapped. They'll have to eventually send American troops to occupy the Congo. 'Cause the African freedom fighters are going to fight -- they're not going to give up one inch without fighting back. And there's something that you should know! That they realize now on the African continent what's at stake, and how much -- what these Western powers have in common and what they're doing in cahoots with each other behind the closed doors.

So on the African continent they are training Africans -- these soldiers -- so they can invade one of these countries, and take it over, and give it [back] to the rightful people.

One of the last things I must say concerning the Congo: not only do they not intend for the Congo to fall into African hands because of its mineral wealth -- and it has the greatest deposits of some of the richest elements, or minerals, of any other area on this earth. They don't intend to give it up because of its wealth; another reason they don't intend to give it up is if you look at the map you'll see that it is so strategically located geographically.

Wherein, if a real genuine African government were to come in power over the Congo, then it would be possible for African troops from all countries to invade Angola -- which is a Portuguese possession. And if Angola fell, and it would fall, then it would only be a matter of time before South-West Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Butuanoland also would fall. And it would put African troops right on the border of South Africa. And that's where they really want to get, that man down there in South Africa.

And the United States' interests are involved in blocking this, yes! Some of these liberals who grin in your face like they're your best friends, they have money tied up in the Congo. Some of the most powerful political figures in this country, come up and governors over states, [have] got interests in the Congo, and got interests in South Africa, and got interests all over the African continent, and go there! And as the Africans awaken and realize, they -- it makes them full of the incentive to never rest until that exploiter is driven out.

So, now what effect does this have on us? Why should the Black man in America concern himself -- since he's been away from the African continent for three or four hundred years -- why should we concern ourselves? What impact does what happens to them have upon us? Number one, first you have to realize that up until 1959 Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light: jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. Why then naturally it was so negative [that] it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn't want anybody telling us anything about Africa, much less calling us Africans. In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.

You show me one of these people over here who have been thoroughly brainwashed, who has a negative attitude toward Africa, and I'll show you one that has a negative attitude toward himself. You can't have a positive attitude toward yourself and a negative attitude toward Africa at the same time. To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude toward Africa becomes positive, you'll find that your understanding of and your attitude toward yourself will also become positive. And this is what the white man knows. So they very skillfully made you and me hate our African identity, our African characteristics.

You know yourself -- and we have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our hair, we hated the shape of our nose -- we wanted one of those long, dog-like noses, you know. Yeah. We hated the color of our skin, hated the blood of Africa that was in our veins. And in hating our features and our skin and our blood, why, we had to end up hating ourselves.

And we hated ourselves. Our color became to us a chain. We felt that it was holding us back. Our color became to us like a prison, which we felt was keeping us confined, not letting us go this way or that way. We felt that all of these restrictions were based solely upon our color. And the psychological reaction to that would have to be that as long as we felt imprisoned or chained or trapped by Black skin, Black features, and Black blood, that skin and those features and that blood that was holding us back automatically had to become hateful to us. And it became hateful to us. It made us feel inferior; it made us feel inadequate; it made us feel helpless.

And when we fell victims to this feeling of inadequacy or inferiority or helplessness, we turned to somebody else to show us the way. We didn't have confidence in another Black man to show us the way, or Black people to show us the way. In those days we didn't. We didn't think a Black man could do anything but play some horn -- you know, some sounds and make you happy with some songs and in that way. But in serious things, where our food, clothing, and shelter was concerned and our education was concerned, we turned to the man. We never thought in terms of bringing these things into existence for ourselves, we never thought in terms of doing things for our selves. Because we felt helpless. What made us feel helpless was our hatred for ourselves. And our hatred for ourselves stemmed from our hatred of things African.

Along about 1955 they had the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. And at that time the Africans, the Asians, the Arabs, all of the nonwhite people got together and agreed to de-emphasize their differences and emphasize what they had in common, and form a working unity. And it was the working unity -- the spirit of Bandung created a working unity that made it possible for the Asians, who were oppressed, the Africans, who were oppressed, and others who were oppressed to work together toward gaining independence for these other people. And it was the spirit of Bandung that brought into existence this working unity that made it possible for nations that didn't have a chance to become independent to come into their independence. And most of this began along in 1959.

After 1959 the spirit of African nationalism was fanned to a high flame, and we then began to witness the complete collapse of colonialism. France began to get out of French West Africa; Belgium began to make moves to get out of the Congo; Britain began to make moves to get out of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Nigeria, and some of these other places. And although it looked like they were getting out, they pulled a trick that was colossal.

In that -- when you're playing basketball and they get you trapped, you don't throw the ball away, you throw it to one of your teammates who's in the clear. And this is what the European powers did. They were trapped on the African continent, they couldn't stay there; they were looked upon as colonial, imperialist. So they had to pass the ball to someone whose image was different, and they passed the ball to Uncle Sam. And he picked it up and has been running it for a touchdown ever since. He was in the clear, he was not looked upon as one who had colonized the African continent. But at that time, the Africans couldn't see that though the United States hadn't colonized the African continent, he had colonized twenty-two million Blacks here on this continent. Because we are just as thoroughly colonized as anybody else.

When the ball was passed to the United States, it was passed at the time when John Kennedy came into power. He picked it up and helped to run it. He was one of the shrewdest backfield runners that history has ever recorded. He surrounded himself with intellectuals -- highly educated, learned, and well-informed people. And their analysis told him that the government of America was confronted with a new problem. And this new problem stemmed from the fact that Africans were now awakened, they were enlightened, and they were fearless, they would fight. So this meant that the Western powers couldn't stay there by force. And since their own economies, the European economy and the American economy, was based upon their continued influence over the African continent, they had to find some means of staying there. So they used the "friendly" approach. They switched from the old, open colonial, imperialistic approach to the benevolent approach. They came up with some benevolent colonialism, philanthropic colonialism, humanitarianism, or dollarism. Immediately everything was Peace Corps, Crossroads, "We've got to help our African brothers." Pick up on that. Can't help us in Mississippi. Can't help us in Alabama, or Detroit, out here in Dearborn where some real Ku Klux Klan live.

They're going to send all the way to Africa to help. I know Dearborn; you know, I'm from Detroit, I used to live out here in Inkster. And you had to go through Dearborn to get to Inkster. Just like driving through Mississippi when you go to Dearborn. Is it still that way? [From the audience: "Yes."] Well, you should straighten it out.

So, realizing that it was necessary to come up with these new approaches, Kennedy did it. He won -- he created an image of him self that was skillfully designed to make the people on the African continent think that he was Jesus, the great white father, come to make things right. I'm telling you, some of these Negroes cried harder when he died than they cried for Jesus when he was crucified.

From 1954 to 1964 was the era in which we witnessed the emerging of Africa. The impact that this had upon the civil rights struggle in America has never been told, fully told.

For one reason -- for one thing, one of the primary ingredients in the complete civil rights struggle was the 'Black Muslim' movement. The 'Black Muslim' movement, though it took no part in things political, civic -- it didn't take too much part in anything other than stopping people from doing this drinking, smoking, and so on. Moral reform it had, but beyond that it did nothing. But it talked such a strong talk until it put the other Negro organizations on the spot. Before the 'Black Muslim' movement came along, the NAACP was looked upon as radical; they were getting ready to investigate it. And then along came the 'Muslim' movement and frightened the white man so much he began to say, "Thank God for old Uncle Roy and Uncle Whitney and Uncle A. Philip and Uncle... -- you've got a whole lot of uncles in there. I can't remember their names, they're all older than I, so I call them "uncle." Plus, if you use the word "Uncle Tom" nowadays, I heard they'll sue you for libel, you know. So I don't call any of them Uncle Tom anymore. I call them Uncle Roy.

One of the things that made the 'Black Muslim' movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the 'Black Muslim' movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you'd be surprised, we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the Black man in this country, he's still more African than he is American. He thinks that he's more American than African, because the man is jiving him, the man is brainwashing him every day. He's telling him, "You're an American, you're an American." Man, how could you think you're an American and you haven't ever had any kind of American treat over here? You have never, never!

Ten men can be sitting at a table eating, you know, dining, and I can come and sit down where they're dining. They're dining; I've got a plate in front of me, but nothing is on it. Because all of us are sitting at the same table, are all of us diners? I'm not a diner until you let me dine. Then I become a diner. Just being at the table with others who are dining doesn't make me a diner, and this is what you've got to get in your head here in this country.

Just because you're in this country doesn't make you an American. No, you've got to go farther than that before you can become an American. You've got to enjoy the fruits of Americanism. You haven't enjoyed those fruits. You've enjoyed the thorns. You've enjoyed the thistles. But you have not enjoyed the fruits, no sir. You have fought harder for the fruits than the white man has. You have worked harder for the fruits than the white man has, but you've enjoyed less. When the man put the uniform on you and sent you abroad, you fought harder than they did. Yeah, I know you -- when you're fighting for them, you can fight.

The 'Black Muslim' movement did make that contribution. They made the whole civil rights movement become more militant, and more acceptable to the white power structure. He would rather have them than us. In fact, I think we forced many of the civil rights leaders to be even more militant than they intended. I know some of them who get out there and "boom, boom, boom" and don't mean it. Because they're right on back in their corner as soon as the action comes.

John F. Kennedy also saw that it was necessary for a new approach among the American Negroes. And during his entire term in office, he specialized in how to psycho the American Negro. Now, a lot of you all don't like my saying that, but I wouldn't ever take a stand on that if I didn't know what I was talking about. And I don't -- by living in this kind of society, pretty much around them -- and you know what I mean when I say "them" -- I learned to study them. You can think that they mean you some good ofttimes, but if you look at it a little closer you'll see that they don't mean you any good. That doesn't mean there aren't some of them who mean good. But it does mean that most of them don't mean good.

Kennedy's new approach was pretending to go along with us in our struggle for civil rights and different other forms of rights. But I remember the expose that Look magazine did on Meredith's situation in Mississippi. Look magazine did an expose showing that Robert Kennedy and Governor Wallace -- not Governor Wallace, Governor Barnett -- had made a deal, wherein the attorney general was going to come down and try and force Meredith into school, and Barnett was going to stand at the door, you know, and say, "No, you can't come in." He was going to get in anyway. But it was all arranged in advance. And then Barnett was supposed to keep the support of the white racists, because that's who he was holding up, and Kennedy would keep the support of the Negroes, because that's who he'd be holding up. That's -- it was a cut-and-dried deal. And it's not a secret; it was written, they write about it. But if that's a deal and that's a deal, how many other deals do you think go down? What you think is on the level is crookeder, brothers and sisters, than a pretzel, which is most crooked.

So in my conclusion I would like to point out that the approach that was used by the administration right on up until today -- see, even the present generation -- was designed skillfully to make it appear that they were trying to solve the problem when they actually weren't. They would deal with the conditions, but never the cause. They only gave us tokenism. Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses, and the masses are the ones who have the problem, not the few. That one who benefits from tokenism, he doesn't want to be around us anyway -- that's why he picks up on the token.

You ever notice how some Negroes will brag, "I'm the only one out there, I'm the only one on my job." Don't you hear them say that? Yes, you ought to punch him in hi -- no he's your brother, you shouldn't punch your brother. But you should really get him -- you can punch him with some words.

Whenever you see a Negro bragging about "he's the only one in his neighborhood," he's bragging. He's telling you in essence, "I'm surrounded by white folks," you know. "I love them, and they love me." Oh yes. And on his job "I'm the only one on my job." I've been listening to that stuff all my life, and the generation that's coming up, they're not going to be saying that. The generation that's coming up, everybody is going to look like an Uncle Tom to them. And you and I have to learn that in time, so that we don't pose that image when our people, when our young generation come up and begin to look at us.

The masses of our people still have bad housing, bad schooling, and inferior jobs, jobs that don't compensate with sufficient salary for them to carry on their life in this world. So that the problem for the masses has gone absolutely unsolved. The only ones for whom it has been solved are people like Whitney Young, who's supposed to be placed in the cabinet, so the rumors say. He'll be one of the first Black cabinet men. And that answers where he's at. And others who have been given jobs -- Carl Rowan, who was put over the USIA, who is very skillfully trying to make Africans think that the problem of Black men in this country is all solved.

And this is the worst thing the white man can do to himself is to take one of these kind of Negroes and ask him, "How do your people feel, boy?" He's going to tell that man that we are satisfied. That's what they do, brothers and sisters. They get behind the door and tell the white man we're satisfied. "Just keep on -- keep me up here in front of them, boss, and I'll keep 'em behind you." That's what they talk when they're behind closed doors. 'Cause, see, the white man doesn't go along with anybody who's not for him. He doesn't care whether you're for right or wrong, he wants to know, are you for him. And if you're for him, he doesn't care what else you're for. As long as you're for him, then he puts you up over the Negro community. You become the spokesman.

In your struggle it's like standing on a revolving wheel: you're running, but you're not going anywhere. You run faster and faster and the wheel just goes faster and faster. You don't ever leave the spot that you're standing in. So, it is very important for you and me to see that the only way that our problem is going to be solved, it has to be with a solution that will benefit the masses, not the upper class -- so-called "upper class."

Actually, there's no such thing as an upper-class Negro, because he catches the same hell as the other class Negro. All of them catch the same hell, which is one of the things that's good about this racist system -- it makes us all one.

Quickly, if you'll notice in 1963, everyone was talking about the "centennial of progress!" I think that's what they called it. A hundred years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and everyone is celebrating how much white and Black people have learned to love each other in America. You probably remember how they were talking in January of 1963. Well, if you had stood up in January at the same time that they were talking all this talk about a good year ahead, good things ahead, and told them that by May, Birmingham would have exploded, and Bull Connor would be known as an international thug for the brutality that he heaped upon Black people; if you would tell the people in January of '63 that John F. Kennedy would be killed for his role in everything; if you had told them in January that Medgar Evers would be murdered and nobody able to bring his killer to justice; or if you were to have told them in January of 1963 that a church would be bombed in Birmingham, with four little Black girls blown to bits while they were praying and serving Jesus -- why, they would say you're crazy.

In 1963, everyone was talking about the "centennial of progress!" I think that's what they called it. A hundred years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and everyone is celebrating how much white and Black people have learned to love each other in America. You probably remember how they were talking in January of 1963. Well, if you had stood up in January at the same time that they were talking all this talk about a good year ahead, good things ahead, and told them that by May, Birmingham would have exploded, and Bull Connor would be known as an international thug for the brutality that he heaped upon Black people; if you would tell the people in January of '63 that John F. Kennedy would be killed for his role in everything; if you had told them in January that Medgar Evers would be murdered and nobody able to bring his killer to justice; or if you were to have told them in January of 1963 that a church would be bombed in Birmingham, with four little Black girls blown to bits while they were praying and serving Jesus -- why, they would say you're crazy.

In 1964 they started out the same way. That was the year of promise. If you were to have told them while they were talking about this great year of promise ahead, you know, civil rights and all of that, what was coming, that before long three civil rights workers would be brutally murdered and the government unable to do anything about it. A Negro educator in Georgia brutally murdered in broad daylight and the men who did it be known, and the government not able to do anything about it. If you had said this in January of '64, they'd say you were nuts. Now they are starting out 1965 the same way. Talking about the "Great Society,'' you know, "antipoverty."

If you tell them right now what is in store for 1965, they'll think you're crazy for sure. But 1965 will be the longest and hottest and bloodiest year of them all. It has to be, not because you want it to be, or I want it to be, or we want it to be, but because the conditions that created these explosions in 1963 are still here; the conditions that created explosions in '64 are still here. You can't say that you're not going to have an explosion and you leave the condition, the ingredients, still here. As long as those ingredients, explosive ingredients, remain, then you're going to have the potential for explosion on your hands.

Brothers and sisters, let me tell you, I spend my time out there in the street with people, all kind of people, listening to what they have to say. And they're dissatisfied, they're disillusioned, they're fed up, they're getting to the point of frustration where they are beginning to feel: What do they have to lose? And when you get to that point you're the type of person who can create a very dangerously explosive atmosphere. This is what's happening in our neighborhood, to our people. I read in a poll taken by Newsweek magazine this week, saying that Negroes are satisfied. Oh yes, poll you know, in Newsweek, supposed to be a top magazine with a top pollster, talking about how satisfied Negroes are. Maybe I haven't met the Negroes he met. Because I know he hasn't met the ones that I've met.

But this is dangerous. This is where the white man does himself the most harm. He invents statistics to create an image, thinking that that image is going to hold things in check. You know why they always say Negroes are lazy? 'Cause they want Negroes to be lazy. They always say Negroes can't unite because they don't want Negroes to unite. And once they put this thing in the mind, they feel that the Negro gets that into him and he tries to fulfill their image. If you say you can't unite him, and then you come to him to unite him, he won't unite because it's been said that he's not supposed to unite. It's a psycho that they work, and it's the same way with these statistics.

When they think that an explosive era is coming up, then they grab their press again and begin to shower the Negro public, to make it appear that all Negroes are satisfied. Because if you know that you're dissatisfied all by yourself and ten others aren't, you play it cool; but you know if all ten of you are dissatisfied, you get with it. Well, this is what the man knows. The man knows that if these Negroes find out how dissatisfied they really are -- and all of them, even Uncle Tom is dissatisfied, he's just playing his part for now -- this is what makes them frightened. It frightens them in France, it frightens them in England, and it frightens them in the United States.

And it is for this reason that it is so important for you and me to start organizing among ourselves, intelligently, and try to find out: What are we going to do if this happens, that happens, or the next thing happens? Don't think that you're going to run to the man and say, "Look, boss, this is me." Why, when the deal goes down, you'll look just like me in his eyesight; I'll make it tough for you. Yes, when the deal goes down, he doesn't look at you in any better light than he looks at me.

I was on a television program in New York last week. One of the liberals did a take-off on James Farmer. Now here's James Farmer teaching Negroes to be nonviolent and loving and all of that -- why they should be patting him on the back. And instead of them patting him on the back they want to knock at him. And it put me in a position of having to defend him, which I did; I was glad to because I wanted to crack this man's neck anyway -- mentally, rather I should say intellectually.

I point these things out, brothers and sisters, so that you and I will know the importance in 1963 of being in complete unity with each other, in harmony with each other, and not letting the man maneuver us into fighting one another. The situation I have been maneuvered into right now between me and the 'Black Muslim' movement, is something that I really deeply regret, because I don't think anything is more destructive than two groups of Black people fighting each other. But it's something that can't be avoided because it goes deep down beneath the surface, and these things wiIl come up in the very near future.

I might say this before I sit down. If you recall, when I left the 'Black Muslim' movement, I stated clearly that it wasn't my intention to even continue to be aware that they existed; but that I was going to spend my time working in the non-Muslim community. But they were fearful that if they didn't do something that perhaps many of those who were in the mosque would leave it and follow a different direction. So they had to start doing a take-off on me, plus, they had to try and silence me because of what they know that I know.

I should think that they should know me well enough to know that they certainly can't frighten me. But when it does come to the light -- excuse me for keep coughing like that, but I got some of that smoke last night -- there are some things involving the 'Black Muslim' movement which, when they come to light, you will be shocked. The thing that you have to understand where those of us in the Black Muslim movement were concerned: all of us believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. We believed in him. We actually believed that God had taught him -- right here in Detroit by the way -- that God had taught him and all of that. I always thought that he believed it himself. And I was shocked when I found out that he himself didn't believe it. And when that shock reached me, then I began to look everywhere else and try to get a better understanding of the things that confront all of us, so that we can get together in some kind of way to offset them.

I want to thank you for coming out this afternoon -- this evening. I think it's wonderful that as many of you came out, considering the blackout on the meeting that took place. Also, [Milton Henry] and the brothers who are here in Detroit are very progressive young men, and I would advise all of you to get with them in every way that you can to try and create some kind of united effort toward common goals, common objectives. Don't let the power structure maneuver you into a time wasting battle with others when you could be involved in something that's constructive and getting a real job done. Probably, one thing I should've pointed out to you, that once we formed our new organization, once we became identified with the orthodox Muslim world, we also formed a group known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which is designed to fight all the negative political, economic, and social conditions that exist in our neighborhood. It's a nonreligious organization to which anyone can belong who's interested in direct action.

And one of our first programs is to take our problem out of the civil rights context and place it at the international level, of human rights, so that the entire world can have a voice in our struggle. If we keep it at civil rights, then the only place we can turn for allies is within the domestic confines of America. But when you make it a human rights struggle, it becomes international, and then you can open the door for all types of advice and support from our brothers in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. So it's very, very important -- that's our international aim, that's our external aim.

Our internal aim is to become immediately involved in a mass voter registration drive. But we don't believe in voter registration without voter education. We believe that our people should be educated into the science of politics, so that they will know what a vote is for, and what a vote is supposed to produce, and also how to utilize this united voting power so that you can control the politics of your own community, and the politicians that represent that community. We're for that.

And in that line we will work with all others, even civil rights groups, who are dedicated to increase the number of Black registered voters in the South. The only area in which we differ with them is this: we don't believe that young students should be sent into Mississippi, Alabama, and these other places without some kind of protection. So we will join in with them in their voter registration [Applause] and help to train brothers in the arts that are necessary in this day and age to enable one to continue his existence upon this earth.

I say again that I'm not a racist, I don't believe in any form of segregation or anything like that. I'm for the brotherhood of everybody, but I don't believe in forcing brotherhood upon people who don't want it. Long as we practice brotherhood among ourselves, and then others who want to practice brotherhood with us, we practice it with them also, we're for that. But I don't think that we should run around trying to love somebody who doesn't love us.

Thank you.

How Imperialism Works

2012-06-21T05:08:00.003-07:00

Incredibly offensive but honest essay on information warfare by US intelligence officer

2012-06-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

Below are excerpts from a seminal essay on the future significance of information warfare written by the now retired Lieutenant Colonel, Ralph Peters formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence for the US Army War College journal, Parameters. Though the article was originally published in 1997, it was recently re-published in light of its continued relevance, and has since been quoted by Pepe Escobar in his article “”War Porn: the New Safe Sex”, with direct reference to the media war on Syria. Though unabashedly racist and classist in content and offensively triumphalist and jingoistic in tone, Peters’ essay provides a devastatingly honest account of the central role information warfare will continue to have in US military strategy. As if anticipating the current informational onslaught against the resistance axis, the article serves to confirm how the US media has become the most potent tool in its wider war on its “rejectionist” enemies. Excerpts from the 9 page article are below, with particularly interesting/offensive parts highlighted in upper-case.

“ONE OF THE DEFINING BIFURCATIONS OF THE FUTURE WILL BE THE CONFLICT BETWEEN INFORMATION MASTERS AND INFORMATION VICTIMS.

How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). …. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them.

THE LAID-OFF BLUE-COLLAR WORKER IN AMERICA AND THE TALIBAN MILITIAMAN IN AFGHANISTAN ARE BROTHERS IN SUFFERING.

These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives….

Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one’s own impoverished group or country or region. ….

This discarded foreigner’s desire may be to attack the “Great Satan America,” but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture “doesn’t work.” The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. ..The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses. WE ARE KARL MARX’S DREAM, AND HIS NIGHTMARE.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted—men and women everywhere—clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason.

THE DE FACTO ROLE OF THE US ARMED FORCES WILL BE TO KEEP THE WORLD SAFE FOR OUR ECONOMY AND OPEN TO OUR CULTURAL ASSAULT. TO THOSE ENDS, WE WILL DO A FAIR AMOUNT OF KILLING. WE ARE BUILDING AN INFORMATION-BASED MILITARY TO DO THAT KILLING. THERE WILL STILL BE PLENTY OF MUSCLE POWER REQUIRED, BUT MUCH OF OUR MILITARY ART WILL CONSIST IN KNOWING MORE ABOUT THE ENEMY THAN HE KNOWS ABOUT HIMSELF, MANIPULATING DATA FOR EFFECTIVENESS AND EFFICIENCY, AND DENYING SIMILAR ADVANTAGES TO OUR OPPONENTS. ..

Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy’s heart. We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. .. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will

not be competitive. THEY MIGHT MASTER THE TECHNOLOGICAL WHEREWITHAL TO WATCH THE VIDEOS, BUT WE WILL BE WRITING THE SCRIPTS, PRODUCING THEM, AND COLLECTING THE ROYALTIES. OUR CREATIVITY IS DEVASTATING.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. BUT HOLLYWOOD IS “PREPARING THE BATTLEFIELD,” and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans “saw” Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey’s tanks. OUR UNCONSCIOUS ALLIANCE OF CULTURE WITH KILLING POWER IS A COMBAT MULTIPLIER NO GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING OUR OWN, COULD DESIGN OR AFFORD. WE ARE MAGIC. AND WE’RE GOING TO KEEP IT THAT WAY.”

Source: Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, Winter 2010-11. pp. 126-134.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/Articles/2010winter/Peters.pdf

The Counter Revolution Disguised as Democracy in Egypt and All Over The World!

2012-06-06T01:22:00.001-07:00

Post Categories: Africa
Shamus Cooke | Saturday, June 2, 2012, 9:39 Beijing

In a country where the embers of revolution are still glowing, you would assume that a presidential election would produce a revolutionary-appearing government. Not so in Egypt. The revolutionaries who toppled the hated dictator Mubarak will have zero representation in the upcoming runoff election for president.

Those who opposed the revolution, however, are well represented. The runoff election features Ahmed Shafiq, the dictator’s former Prime Minister who remains a military strongmen. Shafiq’s presence in the election is a stark reminder that the revolution’s goals have yet to be accomplished.

The other non-revolutionary presidential contender is Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood stayed quiet during the initial phase of the revolution until their youth wing dragged them into the fray. The leadership has since pretended to be an ally of the revolution, but their fake revolutionary credentials have been exposed several times since winning a large chunk of parliamentary seats, steadily eroding their popularity.

For example, Egypt’s executive power still consists of a cabinet handpicked by the military, a fact that began to fan the revolution’s hot coals, re-igniting mass protests. The Muslim Brotherhood stayed silent — as before — until the heat once again forced them into action: the Brotherhood shut down parliament, demanding that the army’s cabinet step down.

But the military responded with inaction and threatened to shutdown parliament permanently. The Brotherhood responded by compelling the re-opening of parliament, and the cabinet remained in place.

The Brotherhood is now correctly viewed by many as being somewhat subservient to the military, a role their leadership played pre-revolution. This exposure accounts for the drop in their popularity that resulted in their earning only 25 percent of first round Presidential votes, after winning 47 percent of the Parliamentary seats in November/December.

Regardless of which candidate wins the election, the military could very well remain the real power in the country. This is because Egypt still lacks a constitution; the new president will literally have zero power until one is created. If the military’s candidate loses they will fight to limit the president’s power. Many of the more honest contenders for president have already boycotted the election for this reason.

A Constituent Assembly had been bureaucratically set up by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament to write a constitution, but other parties boycotted it because of the Brotherhood’s overwhelming power over the proceedings. Then Egypt’s military-dominated courts dissolved the Assembly , probably to keep the Brotherhood’s power in check (the military and the Brotherhood have a love-hate relationship, relying on each other as props while simultaneously vying for power).

The pathetic state of Egypt’s democracy led the spokesman for the military’s candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, to declare “the revolution has ended.” But he has spoken too soon. When stripped down to its essentials, a revolution is the majority of working people actively engaged in politics. And because the coming election will not allow this majority an avenue to be engaged in politics, they will likely continue their political engagement in the streets.

Inevitably, however, the revolutionaries will learn that it’s not enough to oust Mubarak; a positive vision must replace the dictator, lest representatives of the old regime attempt to replace the dictator with his clone.

Hopefully, the revolutionaries will create a vision that unites them against their opponents, while organizing themselves as a cohesive, powerful social force that can withstand the organized power of the past, complete with inspiring ideas capable of mobilizing working people and truly transforming society, as opposed to a mere shuffling at the top.

The Egyptian ruling class is consciously using these elections to channel the revolution’s energy into a dead-end. This is a timeless revolution-killing strategy: the ruling class calls for an election before the revolutionaries have had the time to properly organize themselves, leaving the election to be won by those groups — The Muslim Brotherhood and the army in this case — who were organized pre-revolution. The winners of revolutions are the organized or the wealthy, often times both.

Egyptian society will refuse to remain calm after these elections; there are too many economic and social problems that remain unfixed post-revolution, most notably high unemployment within an economy in shambles.

The military government has already asked the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund for a $3.2 billion loan , which will not be finalized until after the elections. The delay was intentional, since the conditions of the debt deal will inevitably include austerity — cuts to basic social programs, elimination of gas and food subsidies, combined with privatizations of the public sector and other anti-worker policies.

Like the revolutionaries in Greece, Egyptians will fight against austerity while fighting for a truly democratic Constituent Assembly; either issue by itself could re-spark the still smoldering revolution.

But democracy will have a new meaning for Egypt’s revolutionaries: the abstract ideal will be tossed aside in favor of a democracy of economic and social equality, requiring that the economic and social power of Egypt’s old rulers be smashed.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com.

Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t Co-Opted Human Rights”

2012-06-06T01:21:00.003-07:00

Prof. Noam Chomsky | Monday, June 4, 2012, 8:19 Beijing

In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James Peck observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.
Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let’s keep to the past few weeks.
On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic Committee expressing the “profound concerns of the Government and people of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical Company as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement.”
Dow provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to destroy crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with Agent Orange.
These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most lethal carcinogens known, affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S. soldiers. To this day in Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants are very likely the effects of these crimes – though, in light of Washington’s refusal to investigate, we have only the studies of Vietnamese scientists and independent analysts.
Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which killed thousands and injured more than half a million.
Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February, Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and prosecution of those responsible.
Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.
Women and children were permitted to escape if they could. After several weeks of bombing, the attack opened with a carefully planned war crime: invasion of the Fallujah General Hospital, where patients and staff were ordered to the floor, their hands tied. Soon the bonds were loosened; the compound was secure.
The official justification was that the hospital was reporting civilian casualties, and therefore was considered a propaganda weapon.
Much of the city was left in “smoking ruins,” the press reported while the Marines sought out insurgents in their “warrens.” The invaders barred entry to the Red Crescent relief organization. Absent an official inquiry, the scale of the crimes is unknown.
If the Fallujah events are reminiscent of the events that took place in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, now again in the news with the genocide trial of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, there’s a good reason. An honest comparison would be instructive, but there’s no fear of that: One is an atrocity, the other not, by definition.
As in Vietnam, independent investigators are reporting long-term effects of the Fallujah assault.
Medical researchers have found dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukemia, even higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium levels in hair and soil samples are far beyond comparable cases.
One of the rare investigators from the invading countries is Dr. Kypros Nicolaides, director of the fetal-medicine research center at London’s King’s College Hospital. “I’m sure the Americans used weapons that caused these deformities,” Nicolaides says.
The lingering effects of a vastly greater nonatrocity were reported last month by U.S. law professor James Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.
Anaya dared to tread on forbidden territory by investigating the shocking conditions among the remnants of the Native American population in the U.S. – “poverty, poor health conditions, lack of attainment of formal education (and) social ills at rates that far exceed those of other segments of the American population,” Anaya reported. No member of Congress was willing to meet him. Press coverage was minimal.
Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.
“The international commotion,” Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times last month, “aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of another age who first made ‘international human rights’ a rallying cry for activists across the globe and a high-profile item on Western governments’ agendas.”
Moyn is the author of “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,” released in 2010. In The New York Times Book Review, Belinda Cooper questioned Moyn’s tracing the contemporary prominence of these ideals to “(President Jimmy) Carter’s abortive steps to inject human rights into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union,” focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere. She finds Moyn’s thesis unpersuasive because “an alternative history to his own is far too easy to construct.”
True enough: The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck provides, which the mainstream can hardly consider, though the relevant facts are strikingly clear and known at least to scholarship.
Thus in the “Cambridge History of the Cold War,” John Coatsworth recalls that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” But being nonatrocities, these crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn’t inspire a human-rights crusade.
Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller writes that “Dissidents are heroic,” but they can be “irritants to American diplomats who have important business to transact with countries that don’t share our values.” Keller criticizes Washington for sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when others commit crimes.
There is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S. influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in prison from a long hunger strike.
And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, the elderly Korean priest who was severely injured while holding mass as part of the protest against the construction of a U.S. naval base on Jeju Island, named an Island of Peace, now occupied by security forces for the first time since the 1948 massacres by the U.S.-imposed South Korean government.
And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci, facing trial again for defending the rights of Kurds. He already has spent much of his life in prison on the same charge, including the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was providing Turkey with huge quantities of military aid – at a time when the Turkish military perpetrated some of the period’s worst atrocities.
But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along with others too numerous to mention.

Prof. Noam Chomsky

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Africans In Israel Attacked by Zionist Government and Racist Mobs.

2012-06-06T01:20:00.004-07:00

Migrants from Sudan and Eritrea beaten, robbed and threatened with deportation.

By Abayomi Azikiwe.Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Since late May the rising animosity toward African migrants in Israel has reached a boiling point. After months of anti-African speeches in the Knesset and the cabinet of Binyamin Netanyahu, mobs of racist gangs began to attack Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans in south Tel Aviv.

People were beaten on the streets, their business were looted amid calls for the banning and deportations of Africans. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians have likened migrant workers and small business people from Africa to a “cancer” within society.

On June 4, four people were taken to a hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation after their home was firebombed in Jerusalem. The arson attack took place in a two-story building in a poor neighborhood close to the Mahane Yehuda market at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. (Alarabiya.net, June 4)

It was reported that some 18 people lived in the building where the fire was started in a narrow entrance corridor. Outside the building racists had painted “Get out of the neighborhood.”

Violence Given Official Support

These attacks against African migrants are by no means spontaneous but are taking place within a broader political context. The State of Israel, founded on the racist and imperialist notions of entitlement to the land of Palestine, has for decades engaged in massacres, imprisonment and forced removals of the Arab population.

On May 23 a rally in Tel Aviv of 1,000 people was addressed by several leading Israeli politicians, many of whom are members of the ruling Likud Party of Netanyahu. Accusations of criminal activity and taking employment opportunities away from Israelis worked the crowd into an agitated state.

Likud Member of Parliament Miri Regev told the crowd that “The infiltrators are a cancer in our body. The infiltrators must be expelled from Israel! Expulsion now!” (Press TV, May 29)

Later mobs carrying sticks and stones began to rampage through areas populated by African migrants. The crowds shouted “Blacks Out!” and “Infiltrators get out of our homes.”
In addition to the vandalism and looting of shops operated and frequented by Africans, two men who were sitting in a vehicle were assaulted while the car was smashed up. The mobs claim that Africans have disrupted their lives and neighborhoods by stealing and threatening Israeli women with sexual assaults.

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai told the army radio station in an interview that “We must put all these infiltrators behind bars in detention and holding centers, then send them home because they come and take work from Israelis.

It has been estimated that up to 60,000 African migrants have entered the State of Israel from Egypt since the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime 15 months ago. The migrants say they are fleeing the unstable political situations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa where drought, food deficits and western-backed internal conflicts have created massive dislocation of civilian populations.

The Israeli government on June 3 put into effect a law passed by the Knesset in January that allows for the detention of African migrants for up to three years. Israeli officials say the new law will both discourage migration as well as provide a legal mechanism for the detention and mass deportation of Africans.

After the mob attacks on May 23, Netanyahu stressed that “The problem of the infiltrators must be solved and we will solve it.” Interior Minister Yishai, who is a member of another right-wing party, the ultra-orthodox Shas, said that the Africans are a threat to the character of Israeli society.

“The infiltrators along with the Palestinians will quickly bring us to the end of the Zionist dream. We don’t need to import more problems from Africa,” Yishai said in reference to the burgeoning economic problems in Israel which have sparked demonstrations over the last year by the settler population.

Feeling the impact of the world economic crisis, the Israeli state is based upon the maintenance of a settler population through government subsidies for housing and social welfare needs. With the overall decline in the manufacturing and service sectors, unemployment and the lack of housing has created tensions between the settler population and their government based in Tel Aviv.

Yishai also said of the Africans that “Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man.” Another right-wing politician, Aryeh Eldad, encouraged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to shoot on sight Africans attempting to cross the border into the Zionist state. (Reuters, June 3)

There are already detention facilities for migrants on the border with Egypt that are overflowing with inmates. Reports indicate that these prisons where migrants are held prior to deportation can house up to 5,000 people.

Nonetheless, the Israeli government approved the construction of another prison for migrants last year. This was done at the same time that plans were made for the building of a $167 million fence on the border with Sinai to ostensibly keep out African immigrants as well as revolutionaries who may be engaging in attacks against the Israeli state.

Continuing the Legacy of Racism and Forced Removals

Many longtime observers of the State of Israel are not surprised at the latest outbreak of racist violence against African migrants. Although the rationale for such attacks are supposedly based on the lack of “legal immigration documents” by Africans from Sudan and Eritrea, similar acts of discrimination are carried out against Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted into the settler state during the 1980s.

During the period of the Ethiopian Revolution, a drought and famine struck the country in 1984-85. The Soviet Union supplied planes to relocate people to areas where relief could be provided while the Israeli government targeted the Ethiopian Jewish population for immigration to occupied Palestine.

However, these Ethiopians have suffered discrimination since arriving in Israel. Evidence of such racism occurred during the mob violence in Tel Aviv on May 23 when Hananya Vanda, a Jewish Israeli of Ethiopian origin was attacked by the racists who later said they “did not know he was Jewish.” (Gulf Today, June 4)

Millions of Palestinians remain in refugee camps in and outside of their national homeland nearly sixty-five years after the establishment of the Zionist state. The United States government and ruling class subsidizes the Israeli rulers to the tune of billions of dollars every year and the transferal of sophisticated military and intelligence equipment and technologies.

The State of Israel serves as the most important outpost for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Last year at the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama in his address urged the Palestinian Authority not to seek recognition as a legitimate state and to return to the negotiating table with Israel where no progress has been made in nearly two decades since the failed Oslo Agreements.

The Palestinian enclave of Gaza remains the largest open-air prison in the world. The IDF periodically engages in aerial strikes on the people of Gaza killing civilians almost on a daily basis.

The elimination of racism and discrimination in Israel will not take place until the territory is liberated from U.S.-backed Zionist rule. The entire political and economic fabric of the state is based on oppression and exploitation and the recent events of racist violence directed against African migrants provides an even greater opportunity for unity between the Arab and African populations throughout the region.

120520st - Painting of Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed creates an uproar

2012-06-04T06:41:00.001-07:00

120520st - Painting of Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed creates an uproar

Middle Class Laziness

2012-05-28T00:06:00.001-07:00

Franz Fanon’s strikingly prescient words which so aptly describe today’s political and intellectual fallout from the “Arab Spring”:
“History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps…….This traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Asia in my life: NGUGI WA THIONG'O

2012-05-24T02:21:00.002-07:00

It is time to make the invisible visible in order to create a more interesting – and ultimately more meaningful – free flow of ideas in the world.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

WRITER NGUGI wa Thiong'o, whose name is pronounced "Googy" and means "work", writes novels, plays, essays and children's literature. Among his most acclaimed works is the 2006 novel "Wizard of the Crow", a sweeping satire on globalisation that he originally wrote in his native Gikuyu language.

THE links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present, but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse. We live under what Satya Mohanty in his interview in Frontline (April 6, 2012) aptly calls the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire.

In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe. I graduated from Makerere College in Uganda in 1964, with a degree in English, then went to the University of Leeds, England, for further studies, in English. Leeds was a meeting point of students from the Commonwealth: India, Pakistan, Australia, and the Caribbean. We saw each other through our experience of England. Our relationship to England, in admiration, resentment or both, was what established a shared space.

After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life. I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life, but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after.

I did not grow up in a Christian home, but we celebrated Christmas, everybody did; it was a time of carnival, with children, in their very best, trooping from house to house to indulge their fancy in terms of food. We were vegetarians throughout the year, though not out of choice, and to many Christmas day was the first time they would taste meat. For me Christmas meant the occasion for eating gitoero, a curried broth of potatoes, peas, beans, and occasionally a piece of lamb or chicken, but the centrepiece of the dishes was cabaci, sometimes called mborota. Even today, Christmas and feasts in Kenya mean plentiful of cabaci, thambutha and mandath i, our version of the Indian chapati, paratha, samosa. The spices, curry, hot pepper and all, so very Indian, had become so central a part of Kenyan African cuisine that I could have sworn that these dishes were truly indigenous.

It was not just Christmas: daily hospitality in every Kenyan home means being treated to a mug of tea, literally a brew of tea leaves, tangawizi, and milk and sugar, made together, really a masala tea. Not to offer a passing guest or neighbour a cup of tea is the height of stinginess or poverty, and for the guest to decline the offer, the ultimate insult. So African it all seemed to me that when I saw Indians drinking tea or making curry, I thought it the result of African influence. Where the Indian impact on African food culture was all pervasive, there was hardly any equivalence from the English presence; baked white bread is the only contribution that readily comes to mind. This is not surprising. Imported Indian skilled labour built the railway line from the Coast to the Great Lake, opening the interior for English settlement. Every railroad station, from Mombasa to Kisumu, initially depots for the building material, mushroomed into a town mainly because of the Indian traders who provided much needed services to the workers initially, and, in time, to the community around. If European settlers opened the land for large-scale farming for export, the Indian opened the towns and cities for retail and wholesale commerce.

Limuru, where I come from, had a thriving Indian shopping centre built on land carved from that of my maternal grandfather's clan. The funeral pyres to burn the bodies of the Indian dead were held in a small forest that was also under my maternal grandfather's care. Cremation is central to Hindu culture: it asks Agni, the fire god, to release the spirit from the earthily body to be re-embodied in heaven into a different form of being. The departed soul travelled from pretaloka to pitraloka unless there were impurities holding it back. My mother did not practise Hinduism, but to her dying day, she believed and swore that on some nights, she would see disembodied Indian spirits, like lit candles in the dark, wandering in the forest around the cremation place. She talked about it as a matter of regular material fact, and she would become visibly upset when we doubted her.

It was not all harmony all the time. The Indian community kept to itself, there was hardly any social interaction between us, except across the counters at the shopping centre. Fights between African and Indian kids broke out, initiated by either side. The Indian dukanwalla, an employer of Africans for domestic work and around the shops, was, more often than not, likely to hurl racially charged insults at his workers. Some of the insults entered African languages. One of the most insulting words in Gikuyu was njangiri. A njangiri of a man meant one who was useless, rootless, like a stray dog. Njangiri came to Gikuyu from Junglee, the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wild: it would have been what the Indian employer was likely to call his domestic help. In colonial times, in my area at least, I do not recall the tensions ever exploding into inter-communal violence.

The postcolonial scene presents a different picture. Time and again Indians and Indian-owned stores have been targets of violence, especially in times of crisis, mostly victims of looting. I am not sure if it is the fact of their Indianness, or the fact of their being a most visible part of the affluent middle class. In such a case the line between the racial and class resentment is thin. Different in that sense is the case of Idi Amin's Uganda, where hundreds of Asians were expelled from a country that had been their home for almost a century. In both the colonial and postcolonial era, social segregation, forced in the case of the colonial era, or a consequence of habit and history, has exacerbated tensions.

The colonial school system segregated Asian, European and African from each other and it was not until Makerere College that I had social interaction with Indians. Makerere was an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda, where, until the advent of Idi Amin, racial relations were benign. Before its college status, Makerere used to be a place of post-secondary schooling for African students from British East Africa, but as Independence approached, the college opened its doors to a sizeable Indian student presence. That is when we started learning about each other's different ways of life at a more personal basis. We shared dorms, classes, and the struggles for student leadership in college politics and sports. Leadership emerged from any of the multi-ethnic and multiracial mix. Doing things together is the best teacher of race relations: one can see and appreciate the real human person behind the racial and ethnic stereotypes.

The lead role of an African woman in my drama, The Black Hermit, the first major play ever in English by an East African black native, was an Indian. No make-up, just a headscarf and a kanga shawl on her long dress, but Suzie Wooman played the African mother to perfection, her act generating a standing ovation lasting into minutes. I dedicated my first novel, Weep Not Child, to my Indian classmate Jasbir Kalsi, probably as homage to our friendly but fierce intellectual rivalry in our English studies. Ghulsa Nensi led a multi-ethnic team that made the costumes for the play, while Bahadur Tejani led the team that raised money for the production.

It was not simply at the personal realm. Commerce, arts, crafts, medical and legal professions in Kenya have the marks of the Indian genius all over them. Politics too, and it should never be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi started and honed his political and organising skills in South Africa, where he spent 21 years of his life from 1893, leaving for India in 1914. The South African scholar Masilela Ntongela places Gandhi squarely as one of the founding intellectuals of what Masilela calls the New African Movement. The honorific Mahatma, the great soul, was first applied to him in South Africa for by the time he left for India, he had already developed his Satyagraha and Ahimsa ready for use in his anti-colonial struggles that eventually led to Indian Independence in 1947, an event that had a big impact on anti-colonial struggles in Africa. What India achieved could be realised in Africa! Gandhi kept in touch with politics in Africa, Kenya in particular, and wrote a letter of protest when the British imprisoned one of the early Kenyan nationalists, Harry Thuku, in the 1920s. Gandhi created the tradition of South African Asians at the front line of struggle in South Africa. Ahmed Kathrada was one of the 10 defendants in the famous Rivonia trial that would lead him to Robben Island where he spent 18 years alongside Nelson Mandela and others. What Gandhi started Mandela completed. When I met Mandela in Johannesburg soon after his release and becoming president of the African National Congress (ANC) party, I came out from the hour-long one-on-one conversation struck by the charisma of his simplicity, reminiscent of what people say about Gandhi.

MAKHAN SINGH ADDRESSING workers in Nairobi in 1961, following his release after more than 11 years, during which he had been held without trial in remote and isolated parts of Kenya. Makhan Singh, along with Gamal Pinto, started the trade union movement in Kenya.

The birth of the Trade Union Movement in Kenya was largely the work of Gamal Pinto and Makhan Singh. Imprisoned by the Kenya colonial authorities repeatedly, Makhan Singh would never give up the task of bringing Indian and African workers together. He was the first prominent political leader to stand in a court of law and tell the British colonial state that Africans were ready to govern themselves, a heresy that earned him imprisonment and internal exile. Kapenguria is usually associated with the trial and imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta, but Makhan Singh preceded him. There have been some Indian political martyrs, the first being the Indian workers executed for treason by the authorities in the very early days of colonial occupation. Gamal Pinto, a hero of the anti-colonial resistance, would be a prominent victim of the postcolonial negative turn in Kenyan politics. Though under a fictional name, Gamal Pinto has been immortalised in Peter Nazareth's novel In a Brown Mantle, one of the best literary articulations of the political drama of the transformation of African politics from the colonial to the neocolonial.

The recent explosion of Chinese interest in Africa might obscure the fact that there has always been a small but significant migrant Chinese presence, in South Africa mostly, but also in Zimbabwe. Fay Chung, whose grandparents migrated to Rhodesia in the 1920s, became an active participant in the anti-colonial struggle, at one time running for her life into exile in Tanzania, and was a big player in the founding of Zimbabwe. She founded Zimfep, which invited Kamirithu theatre to Zimbabwe. (A visit was scuttled by the Daniel arap Moi regime by simply banning the theatre group and forcing one of its leaders, the late Ngugi wa Mirii, to flee to Zimbabwe.) Under Zimfep, she launched the Zimbabwe Community Theatre Movement, ensuring the continuity and expansion of the Kamirithu spirit.

Mao Zedong never visited Africa, but his thought has been part of the intellectual debate in the postcolonial era. His class analysis of Chinese society was seen as providing a more relevant model for analysing African postcolonial social realities than the European Marxist model, and Kwame Nkrumah's book Class Struggle in Africa has Mao's marks all over it. The notion of the Comprador bourgeoisie dependent on and serving foreign capital and hence contrastable from the national bourgeoisie with its primary reliance on national capital has become an analytic model in political theory and development studies.

The intellectual history of the continent would be the poorer without the journal Transition, now based in Harvard, but founded by Rajat Neogy way back in 1962. Neogy, a brilliant and creative editor, was Uganda born and educated: he believed in the multicultural and multifaceted character of ideas, and he wanted to provide a space where different ideas could meet, clash, and mutually illuminate. Transition became the intellectual forum of the New East Africa, and indeed Africa, the first publisher of some of the leading intellectuals in the continent, including Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui and Peter Nazareth. Transition published my short story The Return, a turning point in my literary life. The story, which captured what would later become so central a part of my aesthetic explorations in my novels, principally A Grain of Wheat et al, was the sole basis of my inclusion in the 1962 conference of African writers of English expression.

Peter Nazareth and Bahadur Tejani, early contributors to Transition, would later set the tradition of Afro-Indian writing with their novels, a tradition taken to new heights by Moyez G. Vassanji. More than even black African writers, these three have been among those who have explored extensively and intensively the often problematic African-Indian relations. My own work, Wizard of the Crow, published in 2006, in which I tried to bring in Eastern philosophies into imaginative discourse with African realities was following in the footprints already made by these writers on the sands of the cultural scene in Africa.

It may be argued that in the specific cases of East and South Africa, where there has always been a sizeable Asian immigrant presence, Afro-Asian dialogue was inevitable. But, in general, Africa and Asia have met through political entities such as the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation; and at intellectual practice, the long years of the Afro-Asian writers' movement which staged conferences in various capitals of Asia and Africa.

I have always felt the need for Africa, Asia and South America to learn from each other. This south-to-south intellectual and literary exchange was at the centre of the Nairobi Literature debate in the early 1960s, and is the centrepiece of my recent theoretical explorations, in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. The debate brought about a literature syllabus that centred the study of Indian/Asian, Caribbean, African-American and South American writers alongside those of the European tradition. The result was not to the liking of the neocolonial regime in Kenya, who accused me and my colleagues of replacing Shakespeare with Marxist revolutionaries from Asia, the Caribbean, Afro-America and Latin America, among them Lu Xun, Kim Chi Ha, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R. James, Alejo Carpentier, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Shakespeare was of course safe, but we had committed the crime of placing him among other writers and changing the name of the department from English to Literature, which we thought was the more appropriate designation of the study of literature without borders.

As the editor of the Gikuyu language journal Mutiiri, I have published the Gikuyu translations of some of the poetry of Ariel Dorfman and Otto Rene Castillo. Professor Gitahi, who did the translations directly from Spanish into Gikuyu, did his doctoral work on Latin American literature. Gitahi was a product of the literature syllabus of the reorganised literature department of Nairobi University. His translation has facilitated direct Spanish-Gikuyu language conversation.

I would like to publish numerous translations from the languages of Asia and South America and you can call this a challenge to African, South American and Asian translators. More important, I would like to see similar efforts at enabling conversations between African, Asian and South American languages. This also calls for a new category of literary scholars who have studied a combination of languages from Asia, Africa and South America.

It is time to make the invisible visible in order to create a more interesting – and ultimately more creative and meaningful – free flow of ideas in the world. Satya Mohanty is quite right when he says: “One of the many advantages of the present moment is that the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire seems to be receding a bit, and we have remarkable opportunities to work across cultures to learn from one another.”

Mohanty's call for the cultural interaction and interchange across borders – beyond the Eurocentric campus and our current notions of Comparative Literature – echoes in a forceful way and fresh manner the vision assumed and contained in the call for the abolition of the English Department made in Nairobi in 1969, the first steps in what would later become postcolonial theories and studies. Mohanty's call for cross-regional comparative literary studies is a necessary and timely intervention on the path towards a genuine world literature.

Plight of the poor in kenya

2012-05-24T01:42:00.001-07:00

Tragedies among the poor are so frequent that hardly merit a headline. Our Media outlets have neither a conscience nor care for social justice as they are preoccupied with politics, celebrities and fashion. When they discuss they discuss the plight of the marginalized it is always judgmental, pitiful and patronizing. Fr. Gabriel Dolan

Ethnicity and class relations in kenya

2012-05-24T00:44:00.003-07:00

When you look at the ethnic nationality of a politician and disregard his class we start making mistakes. Ethnic nationality of a politician has not made any difference to how they treat the working class kenyan. A kikuyu politician will unite any day any time with a kalenjin, luo,luhya politician if their class demands even if they have previously sponsored the massacre of the working class and peasantry of each others ethnic nationality.

Marx at 193

2012-05-16T04:05:00.002-07:00

John Lanchester

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.

Consider these passages from The Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with Engels in 1848, after being kicked out of both France and Germany for his political writings:

Capitalism has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.

Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.

Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.

Commercial crises put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire capitalist society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.

It’s hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism. Three aspects which particularly stand out here are the tribute he pays to the productive capacity of capitalism, which far exceeds that of any other political-economic system we’ve ever seen; the remaking of social order which accompanies that; and capitalism’s inherent tendency for crisis, for cycles of boom and bust.

I should, however, admit that I haven’t quoted these sentences exactly as Marx wrote them: where I wrote ‘capitalism’, Marx had ‘the bourgeoisie’. He was talking about a class and the system which served its interest, and I made it sound as if he was talking only about a system. Marx doesn’t use the word ‘capitalism’. The term never occurs in the finished first part of Das Kapital. (I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals – in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.) Since he is widely, and accurately, seen as capitalism’s greatest critic, this is quite an omission. The terms he preferred were ‘political economy’ and ‘bourgeois political economy’, which he saw as encompassing everything from property rights to our contemporary idea of human rights to the very conception of the independent autonomous individual. I think he didn’t use the word ‘capitalism’ because that would have implied that capitalism was one of a number of competing possible systems – and Marx didn’t believe that. He didn’t think it was possible to move past capitalism without a fundamental overturning of the existing social, political and philosophical order.

He was right: no alternative has developed. Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject. If there were ever going to be a serious and sustained theoretical challenge to the hegemony of capitalism inside economics – a serious and sustained challenge subsequent to the one provided by what used to be called ‘actually existing socialisms’ – you’d have thought one would have come along since the near terminal meltdown of the global economic system in 2008. But all we’ve seen are suggestions for ameliorative tweaking of the existing system to make it a little less risky. We have at the moment this monstrous hybrid, state capitalism – a term which used to be a favourite of the Socialist Workers Party in describing the Soviet Union, and which only a few weeks ago was on the cover of the Economist to describe the current economic condition of most of the world. This is a parody of economic order, in which the general public bears all the risks and the financial sector takes all the rewards – an extraordinarily pure form of what used to be called ‘socialism for the rich’. But ‘socialism for the rich’ was supposed to be a joke. The truth is that it is now genuinely the way the global economy is working.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t address any fundamentals of the economic order. So it looks very much as if Marx’s omission of the word ‘capitalism’, because he foresaw no alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution.

Marx puts great pressure on the question of where value comes from, how commodities are exchanged and what money is. It’s a very simple question but not one that had been asked with such clarity before; it’s also the kind of question no longer asked at a professional or institutional level because the current order of things is taken so much for granted. But it is a very basic and important question, or two questions: what is money and where does its value come from?

There are many hundreds of pages on this subject in Marx, and many tens of thousands in commentaries and analyses of his work, so my summary of his views is of necessity cartoonishly compressed and simple. Marx’s model works like this: competition pressures will always force down the cost of labour, so that workers are employed for the minimum price, always paid just enough to keep themselves going, and no more. The employer then sells the commodity not for what it cost to make, but for the best price he can get: a price which in turn is subject to competition pressures, and therefore will always tend over time to go down. In the meantime, however, there is a gap between what the labourer sells his labour for, and the price the employer gets for the commodity, and that difference is the money which accumulates to the employer and which Marx called surplus value. In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing; as Marx put it, ‘price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.’ And in examining that question he creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.

The theory of surplus value also explains, for Marx, why capitalism has an inherent tendency towards crisis. The employer, just like the employee, has competition pressures, and the price of the things he’s selling will always tend to be forced down by new entrants to the market. His way of getting round this will usually be to employ machines to make the workers more productive. He’ll try to get more out of them by employing fewer of them to make more stuff. But in trying to increase the efficiency of production, he might well destroy value, often by making too many goods at not enough profit, which leads to a surplus of competing goods which leads to a crash in the market which leads to massive destruction of capital which leads to the start of another cycle. It’s an elegant aspect of Marx’s thinking that the surplus theory of value leads directly and explicitly to the prediction that capitalism will always have cycles of crisis, of boom and bust.

There are obvious difficulties with Marx’s arguments. One of them is that so many of the contemporary world’s goods and commodities are now virtual (in the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much more quickly by reading than by listening – the surplus value you’re adding to is mainly your own.

This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. Take Facebook. Part of its success comes from the fact that people feel that they and their children are safe spending time there, that it is a place you go to interact with other people but is not fundamentally risky or sleazy in the way new technologies are often perceived to be – that VHS, for instance, was when it was launched on the market. But the perception that Facebook is, maybe the best word would be ‘hygienic’, is sustained by tens of thousands of hours of badly paid labour on the part of the people in the developing world who work for companies hired to scan for offensive images and who are, according to the one Moroccan man who went on the record to complain about it, paid a dollar an hour for doing so. That’s a perfect example of surplus value: huge amounts of poorly paid menial work creating the hygienic image of a company which, when it launches on the stock market later this year, hopes to be worth $100 billion.

When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag drop at airports, for example. Online check-in is a process which should genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport experience, thereby costing you less time: time you can spend doing other things, some of them economically useful to you. But what the airlines do is employ so few people to supervise the bag drop-off that there’s no time-saving at all for the customer. When you look, you see that because airlines have to employ more people to supervise the non-online-checked-in customers – otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on time – the non-checked-in queues move far more quickly. They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.

Last year the National Geographic ran a feature on ‘the world’s most typical human being’ to commemorate the birth of the world’s seven billionth person. The single uncontentious point about this person is the fact of right-handedness. (Actually, though handedness isn’t contentious, it is quite interesting, since the average rate of left-handedness runs at about 10 per cent, but seems to be higher in societies that have a higher level of violence. Nobody knows why, but that isn’t surprising since the reason some people are born left-handed isn’t understood.) That he is a he is a relatively recent development. More male children are born than female ones, in the ratio of 103-106 to 100, because male children have a higher rate of infant mortality and to balance the gender ratio of the species you need more male babies. But modern medicine has in most parts of the world sharply decreased infant mortality and now the difference in birth rates is feeding through into other demographic distributions, which have historically had more women than men because women live longer, again for reasons which aren’t understood. In addition, and much much more darkly, rising prosperity and technological abilities have led to huge disparities in birth rates, which can only be to do with the selective abortion of female children. The sex ratio in many parts of Asia in particular has risen way past biologically possible levels. In China and India, census data indicate that the level is nationally around 120 to 100. By 2020, China will have between thirty and forty million more men than women under the age of 19. To put that figure in perspective, forty million is the total number of American men in that demographic bracket. So, within eight years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America permanently single. One of the dark things about this is that ‘son preference’, as it’s dryly called in the literature, rises with income and with modernisation – which means it’s been rising sharply. That amounts to many tens of millions of missing girls.

So he’s a he. He earns less than £8000 a year. He has a mobile phone but not a bank account. That fits Marx’s model of how capitalism would play out: he doesn’t have a bank account because the typical worker is a proletarian who’s got nothing to deposit in a bank; he doesn’t have any capital; he has to sell his labour for the best price he can get. He is 28 – that’s the median age of the world population, the guy in the middle. And if you say the world’s most typical person belongs to the world’s most numerous ethnic group, it follows that he is a Han Chinese. So this representative human in 2012 is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man, no bank account but a mobile, earning on average less than £8000 a year. Guess how many people fit those exact criteria today? Nine million. We can even guess his name: Lee, or Li, the most common surname in the world. There are as many people called Lee as there are people in the UK and in France added together.

I don’t think Marx would have seen anything in that picture to disprove his model, to use a word he would have disliked. He foresaw the development of a proletariat who did most of the world’s work and a bourgeoisie who in effect owned the fruits of their labour. The fact of the proletariat being in the developing world, in effect shoved out of sight of the Western bourgeoisie, does nothing to disprove that picture – an ‘external proletariat’, it’s sometimes called. Take as a case study of this process the world’s most valuable company, which at the moment is Apple. Apple’s last quarter was the most profitable of any company in history: it made $13 billion in profits on $46 billion in sales. Its bestselling products are made at factories owned by the Chinese company Foxconn. (Foxconn makes the Amazon Kindle, the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PS3, and hundreds of other products with other companies’ names on the front – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it makes every electronic device in the world.) The company’s starting pay is $2 an hour, the workers live in dormitories of six or eight beds for which they are charged rent of $16 a month, their factory in Chengdu, where the iPad is made, runs 24 hours a day, employs 120,000 people – think about that, a factory the size of Exeter – and isn’t even Foxconn’s biggest plant: that’s in Shenzhen and employs 230,000 people, who work 12 hours a day, six days a week. The company’s answer to a recent scandal about suicide rates was to point out that the suicide rate among Foxconn employees is actually lower than the Chinese average, and that it turns away thousands of applicants for jobs every day, and both of those facts are true. That’s what’s really shocking. These conditions are equal to or better than most of the equivalent manufacturing jobs in China, where most of the world’s goods are made, and that life is widely seen among Chinese workers as preferable to the remaining alternatives of rural life. And all this, in an irony so large there is almost no word to encompass it, in the world’s biggest and most powerful notionally Communist state. I don’t think you can describe these as 19th-century labour conditions, but they come very close to fulfilling Marx’s model of an alienated proletariat whose labour is sucked away from it and turned into other people’s profits. Our 28-year-old Mr Lee can easily be imagined as working at one of those plants.

The challenges to Marx’s account of where we would be now come when you look in closer detail. If you look at a large picture of the world, much of what he predicted has come true. We have an affluent bourgeoisie which is international but which in the Western world forms the majority of the population, and a proletarian workforce largely in Asia. Add to that the regularity of economic crises, the growing concentration of wealth among the already wealthy and the increased pressures that are everywhere apparent on the international bourgeoisie – the squeezedness we read so much about. There’s a general sense that there are no longer any safe havens, that there’s no escaping economic change, that capitalism moves at a pace faster than humans themselves can move. If you are a welder but your daughter has to be trained as a software engineer in order to get work, that’s probably something you and your society can adapt to; if you are a welder and you have to retrain as a software engineer halfway through your productive career, that just isn’t so easy. And yet changes of this scale are what is implied by developments in modern labour markets. This is exactly what Marx meant when he foresaw a world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ It is therefore not too hard to convince yourself that Marx’s predictions were right at a certain level of broad-brush impressionism.

The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it would prove so dangerous to capitalism. By creating the conditions in which labour would be sure to organise and assemble collectively capitalism was arranging its own downfall. But there is no organised global conflict between the classes; there is no organised global proletariat. There’s nothing even close. The proletariat is queuing to get into Foxconn, not to organise strikes there, and the great danger facing China, which is in a sense where the world’s proletariat now is, is the inequality caused by fractures within the new urban proletariat and the rural poverty they’re leaving behind. China also has tensions between the coast and the centre, and increasing problems with corruption and maladministration that erupt regularly in what are known as Mass Group Incidents, MGI – basically anti-authority riots which occur regularly all over China and seem never to be reported in the Western mainstream media. But none of these phenomena is to do with class, and given the emphasis put on organised class struggle in Marx’s work you have to file this under predictions which haven’t proved true.

Why not? I think for two main reasons. The first is that Marx did not foresee, as no one else did and I don’t think anyone could, the variety of different forms of capitalism which would evolve. We talk of capitalism as one thing, but it comes in many different flavours, involving different models. The contemporary welfare state – housing and educating and feeding and providing healthcare for its citizens, from birth to death – is a development which challenges the basis of Marx’s analysis of what capitalism is: I think he would have looked hard at the welfare state and wondered whether it fundamentally undermined his analysis, just because it is so different from the capitalism Marx saw operating in his day, and from which he extrapolated. Perhaps he would argue that what has happened is that British society in its entirety has become part of a global bourgeoisie, and the proletariat is now in other countries; that’s a possible argument, but not one that’s easy to sustain in the face of the inequalities which exist and are growing in our society. But Scandinavian welfare capitalism is very different from the state-controlled capitalism of China, which is in turn almost wholly different from the free-market, sauve-qui-peut capitalism of the United States, which is again different from the nationalistic and heavily socialised capitalism of France, which again is not at all like the curious hybrid we have in the UK, in which our governments are wholly devoted to the free market and yet we have areas of welfare and provision they haven’t dared address. Singapore is one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets, and yet the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world capital of free markets and also of council flats. There are lots of different capitalisms and it’s not clear that a single analysis which embraces all of them as if they were a single phenomenon can be valid.

One of the ways this plays out is in the variety and complexity of our interests in this system. In February all the workers in Foxconn had their basic pay increased by 25 per cent overnight. That wasn’t because of a feat of organisation and protest on the part of the workforce: it was because of an article about working conditions there in the New York Times. Ethical pressures from the West are one of the most potent forces for improving factory conditions in Shenzhen. Another example, well known in the medical world but not much outside it, concerns Mectizan, a drug developed to treat river blindness by the American company Merck. (The initial samples that contained the chemical used to make the drug came from a golf course in Japan.) The drug was developed at considerable cost in 1987, and then given away, free, in perpetuity, with the effect of saving many hundreds of thousands of people from blindness, and also saving many more from starvation because it allowed 25 million hectares of previously uncultivatable land to be turned over to agriculture. You can just about squeeze that into a Marxist model by describing it as a publicity stunt, but I don’t think that analysis works, not least because hardly anybody in the Western world has ever heard of it.

That’s something Marx didn’t predict and it touches on something else that couldn’t have been foreseen. That’s the diversity of our interests and roles in contemporary capitalism. Marx talked about people, indeed classes, as being divided into workers and owners of the means of production, and he made some allowance for the fact that we are ‘bearers’ of these roles, different aspects of which might be in play at different times, with the result that a proletarian may find himself competing against other proletarians even though their class interests are aligned. The fact is that in the modern world our selves are far more fragmented and contradictory than that. Many workers have pensions invested in companies whose route to profit lies in cutting to a minimum the number of workers they employ; one of the things that led to the credit crunch was pension funds’ search for higher stable returns to pay the pension liabilities of future generations of retiring workers, so that in very many cases we had a situation in which people lost their jobs because of losses incurred in the attempt to provide future security for the same workers. Most of us are wage slaves, beneficiaries of the welfare state, funders of that state, at the same time as being current or future pensioners who, in that capacity if in no other, are textbook bourgeois owners of the means of production. It’s complicated; and the intense ethical pressures which can intermittently be brought to bear on companies are a symptom of that complexity and multiplicity of interests. It’s very striking how seldom companies defend themselves using the simplest – and under classic capitalism most truthful – answer to criticism of their behaviour: our ethical role is to make a profit for our shareholders, provide employment and pay our taxes. That’s it. The other stuff is for government. But they never say that, perhaps sensing that we all intuit the fact that our interweaving and internally conflicting interests make the world more complicated than that.

Complicated though Marx’s model of the world is, the modern world is more complicated still. This exerts great pressure in one more area, one Marx would have recognised through a favourite saying that comes from Hegel: quantity changes quality. What this means is that you can have an explanatory system which accounts for certain phenomena – in this case, the way capitalism produces things which run against its own main current of accumulation and exploitation – while the broad direction of travel remains the same. But a point comes when the phenomena mount up, and stop seeming like isolated contradictory examples and look instead like a basic challenge to the central ideas. Something like this has happened with the countercurrents that run inside capitalism.

Take the most basic statistical measures of life, infant mortality and life expectancy. Life expectancy in Britain in 1850, the year The Communist Manifesto was first published in English, was 43 years; that’s lower than today’s life expectancy in Afghanistan, which is in turn lower than in any country that hasn’t been hit by the Aids epidemic. UK life expectancy is now over eighty and rising so sharply that buried in the statistics is a truly strange fact: a woman who is eighty today has a 9.2 per cent chance of living to be a hundred, whereas a woman of twenty has a 26.6 per cent chance. It may seem weird that the person sixty years younger has a three times better chance of making it to a century, but what it shows is just how fast progress is being made. Infant mortality, which is often taken as a proxy for a whole set of things (level of medical and technological development, strength of social ties, degree of access to care for the poor, a society’s acknowledgment of the needs of strangers), is something in which Marx would have taken a keen interest. In Victorian Britain it was at the rate of 150 deaths per thousand births. Today, UK infant mortality is 4.7 per thousand. That’s an improvement of 3191 per cent. (Many countries have done better than us and have lower rates; we’re only 31st in the world – the lowest of all being in the place where everyone lives in council flats, at 1.92 per thousand.) The global infant mortality rate is 42.09 per thousand, a third of the British rate in Marx’s day. Aids has a terrible effect on these figures: Botswana, for instance, has a life expectancy of 31.6 years, but according to UN data, if you remove the impact of Aids that goes up to 70.7 years.

At what point do data of this sort represent a challenge to Marx’s ideas? These data mask significant inequalities – the notorious example in London is that if you take the Jubilee Line from Westminster towards the east, male life expectancy goes down a year every stop for the next eight stops – but leaving that aside, the very broad picture is that pretty much everyone lives longer and enjoys better health. If that is true, can it be true that capitalism consistently and reliably immiserates? Can it be true that the system is destructive, if people who live under it quite simply live longer? Take the Millennium Development goals, announced at the turn of the new century, and setting targets to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015 from a starting point of 1990 (the books slightly cooked by setting the starting point ten years in the past), halving the number of people who live in absolute poverty, doubling the percentage of children getting at least a primary education. Can an achievement on that scale be ignored? If a system does that, can you say that it produces nothing but immiseration? Marx himself said that there were moments when the capitalist mode of production could transcend itself, as in the invention of the joint stock company. Further evidence of this possibility for self-transcendence would have exerted great pressure on his intellectual models.

A final challenge to Marx’s model, and also to his picture of the future, comes from something he did see very clearly and prophetically, the extraordinary productive power of capitalism. He saw how capitalism would transform the surface of the planet and impact on the life of every single person alive. There is, however, a crack or flaw close to the heart of his analysis. Marx saw the two fundamental poles of economic, and social and political, life as labour and nature. He didn’t see these two things as static; he used the metaphor of a metabolism to describe the way our labour shapes the world and we in turn are shaped by the world we have made. So the two poles of labour and nature don’t stay fixed. But what Marx doesn’t allow for is the fact that nature’s resources are finite. He knows that there is no such thing as nature unshaped by our assumptions, but he doesn’t share our contemporary awareness that nature can run out. This is the kind of thing which is sometimes called ironic, but is closer to tragedy, and at its heart is the fact that the productive, expansionist, resource-consuming power of capitalism is so great that it is not sustainable at a planetary level. The whole world wants to have a First World bourgeois lifestyle, and the whole world can see what that looks like by glancing at a television set, but the world can’t have it, because we will burn through its resources before we get there. Capitalism’s greatest crisis is upon us, and it is predicated on the unavoidable fact that nature is finite.

This is a point that Marxists for the most part have been reluctant to address, and for a very good reason: the problem of resources in the world today, whether food or water or power, power in all senses, are to do with inequitable distribution and not with the total supply. There is more than enough of all those things for all of us. Writers and activists in the Marxist tradition have tended to stress that point, and they’re right to do so, but we need also to face the fact that the world is heading towards ever greater consumption of and demand for resources on the part of everybody. Everybody simultaneously. That fact is capitalism’s most deadly opponent. To give just one example in relation to one resource only, the American average consumption of water is one hundred gallons per person per day. There isn’t enough fresh water on the planet for everyone to live like that.

So the question is whether capitalism can evolve new forms, in the way it has so far managed to do, and come up with property and market-based mechanisms which deflect the seemingly inevitable crisis that will ensue, or whether we need some entirely different social and economic order. The irony is that this order might in many respects be like the one Marx imagined, even if he saw a different route to getting there. When Marx said that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction he wasn’t talking about climate change or resource wars. If we feel a natural gloom and despondency at the prospect of the difficulties ahead, we should also take comfort in the fact of our imaginative adaptability and the ingenuity which has brought us so far so fast – so far, so fast, that we now need to slow down, and don’t quite know how. As Marx wrote, towards the end of the first volume of Capital, ‘man is distinguished from all other animals by the limitless and flexible nature of his needs.’ Limitless needs we see all around us and they’ve brought us to where we are, but we’re going to have to work on the flexible part.

Wandai

121030ttextract - Victory for Justice and Freedom of Speech - Zapiro and Mondli Makhanya (ex Editor of the Sunday Times) celebrate

This infographic, courtesy of #PeremendeMovement, draws a very clear picture. #KOTAgainstMPsBonus

Letter from Karl to his Father

Berlin, November 10

Ijus privatum

II jus publicum

I. jus privatum

A. Conditional contractual private law

a) Law of persons

I. Commercial contracts

3. Locatio conductio

II. Warranties

III. Contracts of bailment

3. Contract of gift

b) Law of things

I. Commercial contracts

II. Warranties

III. Contracts of bailment

Desmond Tutu should not have snubbed Tony Blair

The archbishop taught that to sit with one's enemies was a key aspect of reconciliation – yet he offered Blair only an empty chair

Why I had no choice but to spurn Tony Blair

All work for Mankind

Religion

BRYAN ROSTRON: Look north for the true hearts of darkness

Asbel Kiprop - Athletics - Olympic Athlete | London 2012

Policy Change: "Terrorists" Are Now "Insurgents

This is the biggest Orwellian rewrite I have ever experienced.

Poverty, inequality in America reaches record proportions

Download- Miguna miguna- Peeling Back the mask PDF- 5 MB

In corrupt systems, decent people have two options: conform or be crushed'

In corrupt systems, decent people have two options: conform or be crushed'

Malcolm X Speech: After the Firebombing (Feb. 14, 1965)

How Imperialism Works

Incredibly offensive but honest essay on information warfare by US intelligence officer

The Counter Revolution Disguised as Democracy in Egypt and All Over The World!

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com.

Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t Co-Opted Human Rights”

Africans In Israel Attacked by Zionist Government and Racist Mobs.

Migrants from Sudan and Eritrea beaten, robbed and threatened with deportation.

120520st - Painting of Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed creates an uproar

Middle Class Laziness

Asia in my life: NGUGI WA THIONG'O

Plight of the poor in kenya

Ethnicity and class relations in kenya

Marx at 193

John Lanchester

I
jus privatum

II
jus publicum