Showing posts with label Kupapatanga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kupapatanga. Show all posts
1/10/11
Te Kauhanganui Report
Support Tania Martin Chairperson of Te Kauhangaui meeting Hopuhopu 22 Jan 2011
essential reading for misguided people that defend crooks like Tuku Bent Morgan
Tainui - Te - Kauhanganui - Report
3/11/10
Corporate Iwi: Doing business with human rights abusers
G4S, another private prison operator, was criticised by the W.A. Deaths in Custody Watch Committee over the death of prominent Aboriginal elder, Mr Ward. Mr Ward died in January 2008 after being transferred across the West Australian outback, from Laverton to Kalgoorlie, in a private prison van in temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
The Coronial Inquest was told temperatures in the back of the van would have been 47 degrees. Mr Ward had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. The Coronial Inquest was told the van’s air conditioning was not working and staff in charge of the 46-year-old did not check on him during the four-hour journey.
In their special report of the findings, the W.A. Deaths in Custody Watch Committee condemned the actions of those responsible for Mr Ward’s death. The report stated:
“Mr Ward’s death…cumulatively demonstrate the institutional failure and incapacity of the State and successive Ministers for Corrections to discharge their non-delegable duties of care and to ensure that the State’s contractor GSL/G4S complied with its contractual, statutory and human rights obligations and the failure to have procedures and practices in place to ensure that this occurred.
The findings of the State Coroner that the State and GSL/G4S contributed to Mr Ward’s death are the most serious findings a coroner is empowered to make. These findings further emphasise that the contracting out of prisoner transportation as practised in Western Australia in unsustainable.”
GSL/G4S has in Australia alone been found by coroners to have contributed to the death of at least six people in custody, including Mr Ward in less than nine years. It has also been subject to severely critical findings in relation to its operational compliance and duty of care capacity and for violations of the human rights of people in its care and custody. The demonstrated unfitness of GSL/G4S is further evidenced by the following events:
• 15 February 1994 – The findings of a North Humberside Coroners Jury inquiring into the death of Mr Ernest Hogg who died due to “lack of care” while being transported by Group 4 (now G4S) in May 1993.
• 26 April 2000 – State Coroner of Victoria finds Group 4 (G4S) contributed the hanging deaths of four men at their Port Phillip Prison through the failure to provide a safe environment.
• 2005 – Serious adverse duty of care and operational findings made by Knowledge Consulting Report into the transportation of five immigration detainees by GSL from the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre to the Baxter Immigration Detention Centre on 17/18 September 2004.
• July 2006 – the Victorian Ombudsman and Office of Police Integrity issued a joint report, entitled Conditions for Persons in Custody, which included a review of prisoner transportation provided by GSL. The Report relevantly concluded that insufficient attention is given to the conditions under which prisoners are transported, often without basic amenities for long trips.
The report also referred to the findings of a 2005 report by the Victorian Corrections Inspectorate which had previously outlined deficiencies in prisoner transport provided by GSL in the areas of:
Incomplete staff refresher training, poor record keeping, no regular reviews or updating of emergency management procedures, little adherence to servicing and maintenance requirements for the vehicle fleet, high breakdown levels of electronic surveillance equipment in the vans compounded by poor quality vision, broken lights and “blind spots”, inoperative communications equipment which prevent prisoners from speaking with the driver and an inadequate emergency duress monitoring system.
• 4 December 2007 – The President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission brought down serious and adverse findings of human rights violations against GSL in relation to the infliction of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and treatment that violates basic human dignity of detainees transported by GSL from the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre to the Baxter Immigration Detention Centre on 17/18 September 2004.
• On 9 July 2007 Victorian Coroner Audrey Jamieson’s report on the inquest into the death in GSL custody of Ian Thomas Westcott found that the failure of GSL to maintain and comply with procedures to ensure the operability of intercom systems in place to ensure the safety and survival of prisoners effectively contributed to Mr Westcott’s death and that his death was preventable.
The West Australian Coroner’s report of Mr Ward’s death was damning and it recommended that there is an imperative public interest in the State to terminate the contract of GSL/G4S as soon as possible and not wait until the contract period ends in 2011.
The report concluded: “GSL/G4S has shown through its own conduct and especially in relation to prisoner and detainee transportation that it is incapable of discharging its most basic statutory, contractual, procedural, duty of care and human rights obligations owed to people in its care and custody as well as to the WA and broader public.”
The West Australian Attorney-General Christian Porter ruled out terminating the contract of G4S.
GEO Group which will be in charge of Parklea prison is the second largest prison company in the USA and listed on the New York stock exchange. GEO Group also operates a migrant detention centre under contract to the USA government alongside the notorious Guantanamo Bay military facility in Cuba.
In Australia GEO Group runs the Junee Correctional Centre, the Fulham Correctional Centre in Victoria, and the Arthur Gorrie Remand and Reception Centre in Queensland.
GEO has been involved in a number of controversial incidents in American prisons. In 2001, a prison inmate at a GEO facility in New Mexico, Gregorio de la Rosa, was killed in dubious circumstances. In 2006 a civil jury found GEO liable for the death, and ordered the company to pay compensation of $47.5 million to the Mr de la Rosa’s family. Last year a grand jury indicted GEO Group to stand trial for the murder of de la Rosa, accusing guards of beating the prisoner to death with padlocks stuffed into socks.
GEO Group is also being sued in regard to an incident were seven prisoners were kept locked in a cold shower room for five hours wearing little or no clothing. In 2007, GEO Group also settled a lawsuit with the family of a woman who was allegedly raped and beaten after being locked in the same cellblock as male inmates. The woman committed suicide shortly after the incident.
GEO Group had its contract to house prisoners from Idaho at its Bill Clayton Detention Centre terminated in November 2008. The Idaho Department of Correction stated that GEO Group’s chronic understaffing of the facility put offenders safety at risk. An audit of the facility had also found that guards routinely falsified reports that they were checking on offenders, despite being away from their posts for hours at a time.
The Minister for Corrective Services stated that Parklea would have oversight from ICAC, the ombudsman, and a whole range of other organisations including the NSW Government’s official visitor program. Minister, we hold you to keep your word.
References: WA Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, The Ward Case and Lessons for the WA Government, September 2009; Public Service Association, Privatisation of Parklea, July 2009.
2/19/09
Critical Resistance Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, Part 1 Visions of Freedom
Visions of Freedom by Neal Morrison and Luana Plunkett and the Critical Resistance Production Collective.This program is an emotional and inspiring look at a growing movement of activists, artists and intellectuals who are mobilizing against the against the prison industrial complex. This tape highlights scenes from the historical Critical Resistance Conference held in Berkeley, California in September, 1998. With Angela Davis, Fred Ho, and others. Filled with music, art, poetry and words from today's leading critical minds, this tape reveals the passion and conviction of those who wish to end the lockdown. This movie is part of the collection: Deep Dish TV
8/7/08
Australia Bully of the Pacific
Radio Stray Alia reports,
Which means is that you sign up to our regional and bi-lateral deals, or else no slave labour for you.
and yes he got to hear strong dissent to this agenda in our region.
As the Pacific forum nears, its use as a vehicle for neo liberalism in the Pacific becomes clear, kinda like our Pacific version of apec/g20 etc, meetings of political elites, and bureaucrats & tnc's. Meetings with security over kill, making decisions that effect hundreds of thousands with NO input from the peoples that they purport to represent.
With Feleti Teo , Neroni Slade, and Cook Islands foreign minister, Wilkie Rassmussen are all vying for the General Secretary role within the South Pacific forum. Rassmussen is strongly pro Pacific and has been critical the onslaught of globalisation in our region, but more than likely the role will go the a puppet, again.
Duncan Kerr has indicated his government would expect some commitment, to Australia's development aims in the region.
"Labour mobility in the Pacific cannot be considered in isolation from other initiatives being taken bilaterally and through the Pacific Island Forum," he said.
Which means is that you sign up to our regional and bi-lateral deals, or else no slave labour for you.
and yes he got to hear strong dissent to this agenda in our region.
Speaking in Melbourne, the Secretary of the Pacific Council of Churches, Fei' Tevi has called on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government not to force small island nations to sign up to the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations, or PACER Plus, as a condition for being included in an unskilled worker scheme.
As the Pacific forum nears, its use as a vehicle for neo liberalism in the Pacific becomes clear, kinda like our Pacific version of apec/g20 etc, meetings of political elites, and bureaucrats & tnc's. Meetings with security over kill, making decisions that effect hundreds of thousands with NO input from the peoples that they purport to represent.
With Feleti Teo , Neroni Slade, and Cook Islands foreign minister, Wilkie Rassmussen are all vying for the General Secretary role within the South Pacific forum. Rassmussen is strongly pro Pacific and has been critical the onslaught of globalisation in our region, but more than likely the role will go the a puppet, again.
6/25/08
How much do Maori love justice?
Thanks to Papa Tuanuku for this commentry
If you divide the forest money among the members of the iwi involved, it comes to $4000 each for the loss of their lands in the 1800s and 1900s. Compare that to Alan Titford who got well over $1m for compensation for a farm in the 1990s.
Ironically, the plane money some iwi are spending to get to the signing will eat into each person's entitlement. Imagine getting $4000 compo and spending a grand of it flying to a hotel to perform at the compo ceremony in Wgtn!
Where is all the justice money going?
The Maori news this week is all about crime in South Auckland and forest claims. Ironically, the roots of the South Auckland 'crime wave' are in the land grabs of the last 200 years.
But will the mokopuna of the lands grab lands get social and economic equality now that their $4000 compo is being given to a new corporate iwi structure? Are they even represented in the tribal mandating processes?
Meanwhile, the mokopuna of the 1800s land grabbers are spending $2 building new prisons for every $1 they spend on 'land' justice. Well, we have 4 brand new prisons and a zillion dollars maintaining and staffing them, and paying for the cops to gather up the mokopuna of the lands in question.
So who is (still) getting rich off Maori misery?
Speed
Two arms of justice have sped up in the last 10 years. Prisons have been fast tracked, who would have thought ten years ago that Ngawha, Manurewa and Meremere would have their own prisons?
The other 'sped up' justice is in the lands. It coincides with the rise of the Maori Party. Suddenly, Micheal Cullen wants to settle 30 year old land claims. Hence the forest stuff going on. Don't believe the hype about this whole thing being sped up, like he's doing a favour returning a portion of the stolen goods.
We've waited a long time for these crumbs, and they government has spent $30 million on negotiations thus far. In my book, spending $30 million on discussions when our people are hungry is immoral. What do you think?
If the government successfully uses this forest deal as a means to undermine the Maori Party, and by extension an independent Maori voice, then we have been complicit in the demise of our ability to advocate staunchly for the mokopuna who do not yet have a voice.
Where does Tane fit into this?
We are the mokopuna of Tane Mahuta. Who the hell came up with the name Treelords, turning the relationship with the tree god back to front? It's this sort of thinking that has got the world on an environmental edge, thinking that we have domain over the lands. The name is offensive, so we need to challenge those that use it.
What shall we do?
We need to stand on issues this:
- discuss and think honestly about what is on offer here? What is the motivation for the 'leadership' to be coming on masse to Wgtn? Whose agendas is this? How cheap ARE the Maori seats?
- Help in the contribution to honest, forthright, staunch nation building korero.
- Tautoko the Maori that challenge this whole thing. If there are Maori opposed to this, at least someone is being staunch to the legacy of the tupuna.Think about the opportunity costs - if it means that our 'leaders' should spend their time undermining other Maori like Shane Jones and Api Mahuika have been doing, what is the psychological cost of these deals?
-
5/17/08
Uncle Tom Goes to Washington
The Dark Underside of Barack Obama’s run for the American Presidency
The Angryindian
05.14.2008
“It is no exaggeration to say that the majority of South Africans feel an almost physical revulsion against anything that puts a native or person of colour on their level…”
R.P. Oswin, “L’homme de couleur”
Barack Obama despite vociferous arguments to the contrary is a man of diminishing dimensions. Whatever “hope and promise” his presidential campaign offered in its early days have long since faded into the predictable political abyss of enthusiastic double-talk, keyword-specific speeches and right-wing media pundit arse-kissing. Mr. Obama, while highly guilty on all these counts is not out of pocket per se for being a politician and acting as one. He is instead blameworthy for committing the greatest sin known to U.S. political principles as it applies to African representatives; he is allowing the Europocentric power structure to tear him, his wife and the hard-earned self respect of his people to shreds without a single word of significant protest in favour of American Empire.
In a world where lynching nooses are again on display in the 21st century and young, innocent and unarmed African men can be shot to death by municipal police troops to public and political approval, Mr. Obama is a mainstream closeted White racist imperialist’s dream come true.[i] He visibly absolves White racist terror publicly, gleefully and unashamedly with a sheepishly becoming “Vote for Me” smile. Shuffling dutifully with all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show, America’s newest “Favourite Negro” Barack Obama is letting “America” and the global community know in no uncertain terms that he accepts their racism, their denials of their xenophobia and that he is more than willing to keep this White supremacist gravy train rolling at home and abroad.
To deny this reality is foolish. And it is even more imprudent and more to the point embarrassing when the American African intelligentsia commissars not only give him their earnest endorsements but defend him from those within the African community that have the temerity to question his lack of dignity and personal and political integrity in the face of overwhelming racist and anti-Islamic attacks. It is proper that when forced by circumstance to confront such a situation, the African must look towards him and herself for clarification. I can find no better an analytical example than the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon when he observed:
The pragmatism of this statement is beyond reproach and it unfailingly deconstructs the storm of Euro-American angst surrounding the Obama presidential campaign and what it means for the United States and the world. As this writer has mentioned previously in other articles on the subject, Barack Obama, the half-White and therefore half-human politico wunderkind deeply critical of his pro-African religious mentor and brave hard-hitting apologist for White racism, represents a Get-out-of-Jail-Free playing card for those within the White power structure willing to vote for him. His candidacy is based entirely on the explicitly revisionist premise that by “allowing” him to get as far as he has in the race for the democratic party nomination, the nagging questions of xenophobia, White privilege and pro-Europocentric institutional bias have been effectively and honourably dealt with. In reality, the Obama rhetoric of “hope” and “change” only have relevance to Euro-American desires for alteration provided that White privilege and socio-political power remain concentrated within their traditional hierarchal configurations. And to date, he has not given any of us soberly conscious of who controls what, how and why any logical reason to be convinced otherwise that his presidency would be one of White power with a Brown face.
He is without debate the “Dream Candidate” that promises change without actually disturbing the European socio-political or economic status quo. His Black face with a White mask tap dance is designed to appeal emotively to slave and master alike, little more. This is possible because both are so thoroughly psychologically steeped within the historical American paradigms of acceptable class boundaries, race and the dignified acceptance of racialised power disparities that the very suggestion that a “Black” man could actually become the head-of-state of Pax Americana supposedly nullifies the historical and political realities of what makes the United States an empire in the first place.
It is something of an intellectual puzzlement to this writer that after five centuries of unceasing Aboriginal genocide and five recent years of unending and merciless violence against an innocent people already tenaciously clinging to existence because of a series of lies emanating from the Bush White House that the U.S. voting public is still willing to “stay the course.” And further, I find it an astoundingly hypocritical that a nation that shrieks peace while waging eternal war can still argue its goldenness while mothers, children, the crippled and the intrepid journalists documenting the carnage continue to litter the charnel grounds of the American consciousness. The untested perception that Mr. Obama will alter this vicious current of American imperialism after numerous media appearances and press statements affirming his determination to maintain and extend American economic and military muscle is childish as best. At its worst, it is practical confirmation of the existential fallacies that serve to illustrate the moral insincerities of American democracy, foreign policy and reactionary military engagement.
To say that I find Barack Obama troubling is to minimise the dangers I perceive in making a rush to find positivism within a decidedly restricted field of choice. Ralph Nader aside, it must be said that his call for the broadening of the American political landscape is more than laudable, it is vitally necessary if a real democracy is ever to emerge in the United States. The fact that large throngs of the U.S. public have historically never had direct access to the political process makes this abundantly clear as does the highly visible indications that a great deal of propagandistic effort and indoctrination goes into “proving” that these privileges do indeed exist. Mr. Barack Obama, for all his promising oratory of progressive Americanism, is the new poster-boy for why America “works.” He has officially added his voice to the fib that all Americans matter when one glance at the U.S. without rose coloured glasses shows a very different story. So to trust him on the basis of his skin tone alone under the assumption that he will enact a nicer, more democratic imperialism at home and abroad is dim-witted political thinking of the highest order. Especially since his reputation on these issues can only be termed as pathetically compliant to Europocentric capitalism in its most aggressive and virulent form. He differs little from his other presidential hopeful predecessors in that he talks one game and plays yet another in full view of a hopelessly gullible American public eager for some sort of change that will put more hard currency in their pockets, lower fuel and food prices and allow working people to purchase more material goods that offer an illusory upwardly mobile social advantage.
Obama and his team of sincere kingmakers are more than happy to put on a stern yet objective demeanour when discussing bombing Iran back into U.S. corporate control or how proud he is to give the Apartheid State of Israel more money, more weapons and more moral support in their zeal to effectively eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from their ancestral territories.[iii] How this position can be reconciled with “progressivism” escapes me. He’s only willing to negotiate with Arabs suffering from western Orientalism provided they are willing to continue their function as defenceless walking targets of Arab genocide and following their inability to resist any longer, readily become captive consumer fodder for American manufactured commodities. Respect for their lives and lands are beside the point. Empires have never entertained provisions for commonsensical and justifiable resistance to their rule. Only contempt, vilification and death are accorded to those who dare speak of freedom be they intellectuals, partisans or parents simply and heroically struggling to keep their children alive in times of quarrel.
On the issue of murderous anti-African police brutality at home in light of the unconscionable acquittal of the officers that executed Sean Bell on his wedding day in yet another case of police claims of inadvertent “contagious shooting,” Mr. Obama who claims to never have suffered from American racism has offered no acknowledgement of this all too often occurring injustice.[iv] This alone says volumes about how he and his prospective administration would address ethical as well as lawful justice in the United States. As a conscious person of colour I cannot reconcile his support for empire with his promises of “change,” especially since he has yet to clearly define what that change would look like.
Admittedly, I reside outside of the political mainstream not so much by choice as much as it is a matter of personal integrity in the face of continual genocide. I stand opposed to the position of most American African intelligentsia in that I reject the choices imposed on us and actively seek actual, rather than theoretical representation from those that make claim to leadership positions within the communities to which I belong. For many of my contemporaries however, the illusion of personal and political power is sufficient primarily because such avenues are the paths of least resistance and in the short term offer an immediate return in the form of acceptance from the Europocentric power structure.
This self-defeating position is shared and promulgated by many within the American African petit-bourgeoisie who have long since adopted as their creed “Assimilation with Honour.” Sadly, the register is long of those who have cast their lot with the power structure despite the reality that the authority is on a variety of levels, classist, sexist, xenophobic and just plain wrong. Historically Madame C.J. Walker must head off this list, (she became the first female self-made millionaire in the U.S. for developing a process for “straightening” African hair) followed by Booker T. Washington who strongly argued that Africans should simply accept White racism with nobility as a fact of life while existing in self-segregated social and political “dignity.” In the modern era, former Secretary of State Colin Powell of My Lai fame ranks high on this inventory as does current secretary Condi Rice, media personality Oprah Winfrey, Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence “Uncle” Thomas, paid Bush administration propagandist Armstrong Williams and White privilege warrior Ward Anthony Connerly.
A logical extension of this dreadful paradigm can also be accorded to hypothetical counter-cultural icons such as “gangsta” rapper Snoop Dogg, ex-pimps like Don “Magic” Juan and shock-comedians such as Paul Mooney whose long term and loose usage of the racial epithet Nigger is principally responsible for its mainstreaming into the national, now international, vernacular. It wasn’t until the very public nervous breakdown of fellow actor-comedian Michael Richards wherein he responded to a group of American African hecklers by shouting the insult several times
(including threats of lynching) did Mooney finally realise his role in substantiating and justifying anti-African racism in the American consciousness.[v] He eventually came to the conclusion that the word does indeed carry the weight of 400 plus years of anti-African bias and now works against its use. One can only speculate, if Mr. Mooney were still a highly sought after mainstream performer/writer earning inflated fees for demeaning his own people along traditional White racist plotlines, would he have reversed his opinion? I ask this since he made it a point to say he would not use the epithet and then later on reneged during a show at the world famous Apollo Theatre. So much for acknowledgment of past misdeeds and his unique responsibility towards those of us highly offended by the word and are now required by popular demand to accept its use towards our people and our person as a matter of perverted political correctness. Are Kike, Chink and Spic soon to follow?[vi]
At this juncture I wish to point out that I am not in any way seeking to lay exclusive responsibility upon those I have briefly mentioned here. But it bears serious examination that the examples I listed above are defended as mainstays within American popular and political culture while the individuals and organisations actively and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of humble servility to White racialist paradigms of defamation are demonised as reverse-racist and “counter-productive.” Hence, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is honoured while the memory, teachings and the works of Malcolm X are commandingly despised. The former believed in the American system, the latter called for separation of the slave from the slave master. I ask the reader to inquire within his or her own being to decide which example appears more threatening to a nationalistic system of capitalist exploitation, Europocentric hegemony and celebrated via Manifest Destiny.
This is where Barack Obama and the rest of the Negritude assimilationist cadre enter the picture. While they all to an individual profess ethical abhorrence toward racism, exploitation and violence in any form and from any quarter, their actions and words demonstrate something else entirely. In order to accept this or any other social scheme one must also to a great degree accept and internalise its inherent values, good and bad. To accept “Americanism” one would also have to acknowledge how the country was founded and who and how many were harmed and where to make it all possible as well as the excuses and mythologies created to explain why these measures were indispensable, inevitable and honourable. Every immigrant to the U.S. that smugly adopts the designation of “American citizen” instantaneously becomes a part of a system of colonial, genocidal and racist chauvinism. It is morally inescapable to claim otherwise without slipping off a high cliff of eugenicist revisionism worthy of the Third Reich. Feigned innocence to the national disgrace of genocide and lebenstraumpolitik whilst Aboriginals and Africans still pay a heavy price for European power in the Americas at the expense of our blood, soil and misplaced labour is far from excusable. It is indisputably morally reprehensible and most deserving of any choice of levels in the Christian conception of Dante’s Hell.
From here many other unpleasant yet accurate points fall into place and do much to explain how we all arrived to this point in time. Fundamentally, this mind-set stems from a pessimistic yet much-admired hypothesis that pro-Europocentric racial discrimination is a politically embedded and morally indispensable principle of American life and social stability. It goes without saying that those of non-European heritages who have “thrived” in spite of their “barbarism” are intrinsically valuable to such a system precisely because they can be utilized as living examples of the “rightness” intrinsic within European socio-theological paradigms of living, expression and social justice. The detail that ethnic, sexual and intellectual sub-populations in the U.S. have had to resist and continue to struggle for parity are reconfigured as obvious exceptions that ultimately prove the rule that White power over non-Europeans is a “noble” power. So therefore all opposition to said power is akin to “wickedness” and rightly subject to corporal punishment at the behest of the prevailing power composition. Or to paraphrase Romans Chapter 13: “There is no government anywhere that God has not placed in power.”
Like a dedicated cohors praetoria of a long bygone European imperial era, these non-European but ideological advocates for the state have repeatedly proved that they will engage in warfare with the victimised sectors of the society the “system,” by its own baroque rhetoric, is designed to protect and serve.[vii] Despite the certainty that their own power is exceedingly limited by the very same authorities and conventions they steadfastly and obediently serve.
Unsurprisingly, this cadre of professional propagandists and legislative attack dogs has extended itself to condemning legitimate demands that Mr. Obama answer to his “base.” Even American African pop artists who have gained a certain level of approval if not the silent classification as “acceptable darkies” by the Europocentric elite appear more willing to assail their own rather than the establishment power entities overtly and covertly spearheading attacks aimed not just at Mr. Obama but the African, Aboriginal, Latino, Arab, Homosexual and religious communities in the U.S. as a whole.
The much lauded “Hip-Hop Generation” isn’t much better in this regard either. Music performer 50 Cent, an accurate example of everything Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not want for American Africans, tells the mainstream media, "I'm not sure America is ready to have a black president…I think they might kill him."[viii] So much for White fears of African solidarity in the face of historical anti-African bias and genocide. While we can send each other to the graveyard over trivial matters, we cannot seem to apply similar determination to alter the reality that makes ethnic cannibalism possible in the first place.
Acquiescence to White power for the rather dubious and defeating privilege of “livin’ large” has it would appear broadly and thoroughly replaced the humanistic and egalitarian ambitions of the Civil Rights movement. Further, this attitude should come as no surprise when one considers that this age bracket merrily rationalises their use of the anti-African epithet “Nigger” simply because they decided to spell it as “Nigga” to peddle their product.[ix] Indeed, the slave has grown quite accustomed to his chains, even if they are made of diamond encrusted gold mined under the inhuman conditions imposed on fellow Africans labouring and dying in the commodity mines of “new” South Africa. To put things in an Indigenist perspective, the murders of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse by fellow Aboriginals proud to don the badges and uniforms of the invader illustrates that this convention of traitorous servitude to European authority is nothing new. For American Africans the stabbing of Dr. King and the assassination of Malcolm X in Harlem provide a similar alarming clarity. In many cases and for a sinister variety of reasons liberation activists are often in more direct physical danger from reactionary elements of their own populace than they are from the opposing entities they stand against. What would make a victim turn against his or her champions is often a psychological confusion as to where and what is of importance, civil and ethical justice or the material gain promised by the oppressor for treason against logical common sense. Many of these Vichy reactionaries are entirely convinced that the moral rewards for subjugating themselves and their own far outweigh the pitiful and paternalistic pats on the proverbial back earned by such betrayals. So in essence, their ill-gotten gains are no greater now than they were in the past.
It’s not that there are no significant voices of opposition to the presence of an immaculate Jim Crow in the world of political machinations, far from it. But one would be hard pressed to find it presented on major mainstream corporative news media. Differing sharply from his ethnically Jewish political contemporaries who shamelessly defend their people against any and all forms of Judeophobia real or imagined including the genocidal actions of the Israeli state, Mr. Obama shows absolutely no such allegiance or empathy for his own brothers and sisters stateside or otherwise. As one of the most powerful Africans in the world, Barack Obama has never, ever used his incredible influence to address American racism as the ferociously black hearted anti-human process it really is. Instead, he has presented an olive branch to the colonial Euro-American population and his fellow lackeys by proclaiming that he “understands” their fear of non-Europeans and confirms their suspicions that they are indeed under siege by a relentless and mindless rabble.[x]
This unrelenting and self-serving drive by the Obama for President Campaign to achieve “legitimacy” along the prescribed lines of “reasonable leadership” is telling in its very simplicity. By disregarding and discouraging any and all valid disillusionment with his lack of reliability on issues that effect African people, the medically uninsured and those devastated by American imperial controls become clearer when one considers that his very public denunciation of just such an advocate.
The Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Wright, a seasoned veteran of the Black American Church tradition and a Marine who served his hitch honourably, unlike the current commander-in-chief, (including serving a term in the United States Navy as a medical technician who served on the team caring for then President Lyndon B. Johnson) has as of late been harassed to no end by reactionary and fascistic elements of the Euro-American media for his outspoken criticism of the United States in regards to its revisionist stance towards its own dark history of colonialism, violence and genocide. The questions raised by the minister are cardinal questions for the entire society but Mr. Obama and his supporters are blaming the messenger for daring to speak the truth, nor a truth as it is promoted, but the reality about the United States and its own internal and external polices of exclusion and domination of the poor, the weak and different.
While Mr. Obama alone stands to blame the most for allowing this situation to spiral out of control, (primarily because Rev. Wright was his long time personal and theological mentor) the broad condemnation lodged against the minister for being honest says more about the African in the United States than it does about the turmoil created by his sermons. Given the scope and depth of the indoctrination people of colour endure in the U.S. it stands to reason that a White backlash to his observations could be expected. But the fact that other Africans, chiefly those whose livelihoods are wholly dependent upon access to White favours are so swift to jump on the anti-Rev. Wright bandwagon in the face of continual historical racism displays how broken the African really is when faced with the reality of his and her condition. Rev. Wright’s crime is that he is an African man intelligent enough to articulate his own position and the deplorable condition of the African man and woman in America. In other words, he is what the last generation of Whites used to call a “Smart Nigger,” code words for a Black man who isn’t stupid, shiftless and willing to allow the overseer to beat him to death without an equally reciprocal rejoinder. In other words, Rev. Wright is not Uncle Tom.[xi]
Spike Lee immediately comes to mind in this regard but he is not the only one. Housewife’s choice superstar Oprah Winfrey has also come out against Mr. Obama’s critics by denouncing his former pastor, the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Wright via proxy spokespersons on the right-wing dominated media circuit. Apparently she does not have the courage to denounce the good minister for telling the truth in person. If she did, her mostly Euro-American studio audience and ego-Oprah Magazine subscriptions would recede quicker than a spilff passed amongst the crowd of an Amsterdam coffee shop. This is hardly a original circumstance and without debate it is as depressingly deep-rooted and as old as the empire itself. As my Gullah-Indio father told me long ago, divide and conquer is a game played by White people all over the world and without that curious principle, Europeans could never have gained control of the third world nor ever have had the opportunity to construct empirical outposts wherever they decide to drop their anchors.
This reliance on psychological ju-jutsu can almost never be acknowledged by those targeted for such intrigues or expressed as anything other than frustration and self-directed angst. Its victims are by keen deception fooled into believing that their painful state of being is a natural one and that submission to external authority is the moral and intellectual equivalent of sanity and virtuosity. To state that the African is compelled to exist within two parallel states of being to survive says much about the world in which he lives. This shameful dichotomy exists whether the European in the Americas or his moral lapdogs of any ethnicity wishes to acknowledge it or not. It must also be said aloud that this duality is immediately subjective for the African and other Aboriginals residing at the bottom of the U.S. human totem pole.
No Ashkenazi Jew in the 21st century would be expected or obligated to defer to Judeophobia in any form in any nation on Earth on the basis of a moralistic purity imposed by Gentiles. The very existence and belligerently xenophobic quasi-theological narration of the modern State of Israel is empirical proof of this. Yet, the African and the Aboriginal in the Americas is expected as well as obligated to accept and defend European cultural power as the unchallenged rule of the universe as dictated the protestant version of the ancient Semitic deity. The process by which we are duty-bound to articulate this peculiar state of affairs is described as “civilisation” and it differs little in direct comparison with the pretentious Europocentric rhetoric of 1930’s NSDAP propaganda.[xii]
For as long as North America has been occupied by Europeans, the approaches to positive maintenance of Europocentric hegemony have flowed and ebbed in response to its ever-changing derma-graphic, an unwanted but unavoidable consequence of multi-national colonialism. White power defined as White power by mainstream White people is no longer ethically feasible in the 21st century. In the main, such vulgar displays of unearned privilege, despite the wordage, have been officially consigned to the lower economic-classes of White Americans the social order has authoritatively designated as “White Trash.” In today’s polite society, code terms such as “crime,” “welfare” and “immigration” have replaced the use of “Black ghettoes,” “lazy Niggers” and “Wetbacks” with the more elucidating language reserved for poor Whites who misguidedly lodge their discontent against the equally powerless rather than the actual elite capitalistic sources of their disenfranchisement.
Barack Obama, product of multi-cultural imperialism has internalised these “values” and has sworn to uphold them come Hell or high water. The “change” he offers is only cosmetic, as he has not by way of personal or political example presented anything even remotely resembling a restructuring of the existing state of affairs. As an excellent case in point, he has recently gone so far as to support the Cherokee Vichy government based in occupied Oklahoma against the Freedmen who were unceremoniously and legally dis-enrolled by its White Indian majority by standing against the Congressional Black Caucus who want to withhold funding from the tribe for its racist purge of their African members due to the Chad Smith administration’s lucid violation of the U.S. Constitution.[xiii]
In spite of the fact that many of the Freedmen are if not all, including this writer, of verifiable Aniyvwiya blood, the Cherokee Nation excuses their expulsion on the dubious grounds of tribal sovereignty. A rather questionable claim since the Cherokee fly American flags in their territories, willingly accept U.S. federal funds and law enforcement jurisdiction, aggressively describe themselves “American” and proudly serve in the U.S. colonial military forces knowingly helping those who stole our lands and dignity appropriate someone else’s. Mr. Obama’s stance on this issue should give all Aboriginals and other people of colour around the world pause. With this sort of leadership coming from an educated person of colour running for the CEO seat of the United States, why wouldn’t White folks too cowardly to join the John Birch Society or David Duke’s EURO movement not love this guy?[xiv]
But there’s much more. Like the rest of the African “leadership” in Washington D.C., he avoids questions surrounding the abuse, torture and forced labour of Aboriginals, Africans and other non-Europeans incarcerated in the United States. The rationale behind why so many are serving extensive prison terms due to non-violent drug offences in which people of colour are accorded more jail time than their White counterparts also goes unanswered as does racial profiling. The problem of disparity in home mortgages also goes unchecked in light of the rash of official findings that prove rampant racism against African and Latinos in receiving home loans including their choices on where to purchase still exists as a matter of capitalist and White racist self-indulgence. Institutional racism in employment? It’s another non-issue to the house Negro elitists who have managed to bypass the ill-mannered biases of many Euro-American human resources personnel that really believe that they are doing the White world a favour by rejecting certain applications as if we also do not need to provide for our families. I could go on but limitations of space constrain how much a can list here in a single article and I promise the reader this is far from a complete inventory of oversights by the Obama team and his legions of liberal ditto-heads.
This ‘Paradigm of neglect’ does however have its highlights. He has not to any appreciable extent called the Bush White House or White collective America to task for its willing negligence towards Hurricane Katrina’s African victims. Like his soul-sister Condoleeza Rice who was observed buying shoes and attending a Broadway musical in New York City while people drowned in New Orleans,[xv] he has given Bush and Co. a pass no politician in any other western democratic nation would have received under similar conditions. Mr. Obama has said nothing concerning the illegal purging of American African men from the Florida voting rolls in either 2000 or 2004 and we would all be idiots of the highest order to assume that the next round will be any different.
For those among us who are dismayed concerning American African inequalities but are more concerned about “all” of us as “Americans”, consider the following: Mr. Obama has yet to have a word on the horrible treatment American military personnel and their families are receiving from the current administration and even less about the homicidal rampage U.S. taxpayer mercenaries are waging on behalf of American multinationals in Iraq against its civilian Arab population.[xvi] If Barack Obama wants to be the next Commander-in-Chief of Pax Americana these questions need to be addressed seriously and without reservation. So far nothing is forthcoming and as far as I am many other astute observers can distinguish, nothing of any pragmatic substance is likely to come from him that is not preferential to the business community that really runs the United States and the mainstream Euro-American public that runs the streets.
Nor has he at any time been willing to address the level of abject racism employed by the Clinton’s in their fervour to re-take the Oval Office. From purposefully darkening his features in campaign advertising[xvii] to suggestions that he would have a hard time getting up in the morning to go to work, Hillary and Bill have pulled every racially negative code-word and tactic they can conceivably use short of calling him a Nigger in public spaces. Just this week Hillary made it a point to state that Obama simply cannot win based on the fact that she is virtually guaranteed the ‘White’ vote providing these Whites go to the polls and stick with the Democratic Party. Even if Mr. Obama were the radical Islamic African “Manchurian Candidate” the neo-conservative propagandists are so ferociously painting him as, he and his advisors would not be so stupid as to say something so blatantly racist towards Euro-Americans. The only redeeming value, if there are any to found in her remarks, is that what she said a painful, for Africans anyway, political truth. Many self-defined Whites, even liberals with lifelong subscriptions to The Nation, are not across the racial chessboard willing to vote for a Black man. Even if he is a contemporary and literal interpretation of Booker T. Washington and all that variety of obsequiousness to White supremacy entails.[xviii]
What Barack Obama truly represents is a return to the normal America but in a form and fashion that maintains hegemony in costume. Not change, but a superficial alteration to how the U.S. looks rather than how it actually functions. Talk of “change” is just that, incessant chatter repeated long enough to convince the observer that something truly different is happening when in actuality nothing has changed at all but the packaging.
What liberal Euro-Americans are unconsciously seeking is a reincarnation of Septimius Severus, the African emperor who managed to hold the Roman Empire together in wake of the chaos produced by Emperor Marcus Aurelius' ne’er do well offspring Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus.[xix] Emerging victorious at the end the Year of the Five Emperors, Severus brought needed stability to the entire empire and that included the use of military force to keep his fellow Africans and other non-European nations in line. His predecessor the boy Emperor Commodus, much like Bush the Younger, ran the imperial government into the ground via a series of erratic courses of action and questionable personal behaviour in which his massive ego held sway over sensible leadership. For many Romans fully cognisant of their leader’s acute spinelessness, Commodus’ insistence on donning gladiator garb, his slaughter of the helpless and crippled in the coliseum, economic favours to those loyal to him and his own egotistical comparisons to the legend of Hercules was just too much to bear. Following his assassination by those closest to him, various political personalities attempted to rule to no avail until Severus, supported by the military commissars claimed the imperial throne in 193 CE. He swiftly crushed resistance to his reign by killing his most prominent rival Clodius Albinus in the Battle of Lugdunum, (present day Lyon, France) and solidified his position as emperor of the Roman republic.
He is most famous for the restoration of Hadrian's Wall, the reduction of administrative and military corruption at home and successfully established a lasting calm in Roman Britannia which at the time was being severely despoiled by marauding Gaullist barbarians and warring tribes from greater Germania. An self-admitted dictator, Serverus, after eighteen years of often shrewdly brutal but logical administration passed away in Eburacum (present day York, England) on February 4th 211 CE at the age of 64 of pneumonia.
The similarities between the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the rule of Septimius Severus, the socio-political environments in which they rose to prominence and the deep desire of the colonialist Euro-American population to maintain the global status quo are much too analogous to ignore. Both men were of mixed African parentage and believed wholeheartedly in the role and authority of the prevailing empirical power. Both men came to prominence at a point in time when the empire was on the brink of disintegration due in large part to an unrestrained egotistical leadership bordering on self-defined idolatry and unchecked colossal elitist greed at the expense of the general working population. Like Severus, Mr. Obama has clearly stated his intentions to use intimidating if not belligerent force to subdue Arabian resistance to European imperialism in Western Asia and again like Severus, he promises to expand the war making capabilities of the military at the expense of projects that should serve the general public.
Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Obama just like the Emperor Severus has made it clear to friend and foe alike that he is consciously willing to subjugate the victims of the Empire, (fellow Africans in the case of Severus and the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds in regards to Mr. Obama) expressly for the benefit of the Empire and those that claim ownership of it.[xx] So it stands to reason that the change Mr. Obama speaks of is actually no change at all if one is to move beyond the aesthetics of his rhetoric or the passions of his supporters.
True change must involve a serious and committed reconfiguration of the europocentrically dominated status quo and nothing less. Barack Obama sadly does not characterize that transformation. He instead symbolises like the Roman Emperor Severus the Europeanised African, a direct product of White power and domination rather than inter-cultural communication and respect as equal members of the human family. And no different to Severus, he has thrown his lot with the enemies of humanity and justice. I too was an Uncle Tom for most of my life. I learned and it is possible for him to come to grips with reality too. He needs only be brave enough to wish redemption not from a mystery God but from himself as a human being.
We need real change. We demand real change. All of us, without regard to ethnicity, national origin or theological delusion must be a part of the process, not an aspect in the landscape. Euro-Americans know this and this is why so many fight so hard to keep things as they always have been. This pointless fear of the loss of unearned entitlement chokes the mind, heart and spirit of the White public and it is ultimately their responsibility to address it. If the White American population is at all serious about change, they internally and individually must actualise that change, not just demand that the rest of us alter our reality to suit their insecurities. Our responsibility as persons of colour given this opportunity is to continue that endeavour through self-education, self-evaluation and reliance upon our own innate sense of justice and survival as recognised by Malcolm, Martin, Mumia, Leonard Peltier and a million nameless and faceless others lost in the struggle to the midst of time.
If at that point the European in the Americas still cannot accept the fact that this is the world he alone has made and is willing to reconcile himself with the negatives of his own making, then nothing is stopping him from returning to the lands of his roots. For nothing is or has prevented him from building exactly the sort of xenophobic bubble they have been griping about on his own subcontinent. He needs only to have the courage to pack his bags and go home leaving behind a more humanistic and all-encompassing vision of what may have become had he acted and lived differently when afforded the occasion.
And contrary to conventional belief, offering us Barack Obama as a substitute for justice in Pax Americana more than a day late and a dollar short of the genuine debt owed to so many by so few. It is an insult to the memories of all who have given their all just to breathe in free air on a planet that belongs to all of us.
The Angryindian
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Footnotes:
[i] NYT: “In Bell Case, Black New Yorkers See Nuances That Temper Rage” Manny Fernandez, Published: April 27, 2008
[ii] Franz Fanon: “Black Skin, White Masks” 1967
[iii] Jerusalem Post: “Obama reaffirms support for Israel,” May 13th 2008
[iv] New York Post: “Sean Bell Detectives Found not Guilty,” April 25, 2008
[v] Associated Content: “Paul Mooney on Michael Richards: He Cured Me of Using the N-Word” published Nov 28, 2006
[vi] Ward Churchill: “Let's Spread the fun Around” (http://www.coloradoaim.org/Wardchurchillspreadthefunaround.htm)
[vii] Larry Elder: “Is Racism America's Greatest Problem?” (http://www.larryelder.com/racial/racism.html)
[viii] MTV News: “50 Cent Flip-Flops: From Hillary To Obama To 'Don't Know'” Mar 28 2008
[ix] R. Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Vintage, 2003
[x] Excised from Barack Obama’s “Race Speech” transcript: The Huffington Post, March 18, 2008:
“In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”
[xi] Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology Ferris State University Dec., 2000 “The Tom Caricature” (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/tom/)
[xii] Imbleau, Martin. "Der Stürmer." Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Dinah Shelton. Vol. 1. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005
[xiii] "Cherokee leader wants to overturn freedmen decision" published from AP story on KTEN.com, 2006
[xiv] Paul Gorksy: “Language of Closet Racism: An Illustration” (http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/langofracism2.html)
[xv] Talkleft: “Condi Rice Shops for Shoes, works on backhand” Sep 01, 2005 (http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/09/01/615/28014)
[xvi] ABC News/Brian Ross Blog: “Despite Investigations, Blackwater to Keep Working In Iraq” April 4, 2008
[xvii] AOL News/David Knowles: “Darkness Visible” March 6th 2008
[xviii] Tim Wise: “Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness ” March 6, 2008
[xix] Carlisle, Edward E., and Josephine E. Carlisle. "Septimius Severus (Negro Emperor of Rome)" Chapter in Historical Sketches of the Ancient Negro: A Compilation. 1920
[xx] John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
The Angryindian
05.14.2008
“It is no exaggeration to say that the majority of South Africans feel an almost physical revulsion against anything that puts a native or person of colour on their level…”
R.P. Oswin, “L’homme de couleur”
Barack Obama despite vociferous arguments to the contrary is a man of diminishing dimensions. Whatever “hope and promise” his presidential campaign offered in its early days have long since faded into the predictable political abyss of enthusiastic double-talk, keyword-specific speeches and right-wing media pundit arse-kissing. Mr. Obama, while highly guilty on all these counts is not out of pocket per se for being a politician and acting as one. He is instead blameworthy for committing the greatest sin known to U.S. political principles as it applies to African representatives; he is allowing the Europocentric power structure to tear him, his wife and the hard-earned self respect of his people to shreds without a single word of significant protest in favour of American Empire.
In a world where lynching nooses are again on display in the 21st century and young, innocent and unarmed African men can be shot to death by municipal police troops to public and political approval, Mr. Obama is a mainstream closeted White racist imperialist’s dream come true.[i] He visibly absolves White racist terror publicly, gleefully and unashamedly with a sheepishly becoming “Vote for Me” smile. Shuffling dutifully with all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show, America’s newest “Favourite Negro” Barack Obama is letting “America” and the global community know in no uncertain terms that he accepts their racism, their denials of their xenophobia and that he is more than willing to keep this White supremacist gravy train rolling at home and abroad.
To deny this reality is foolish. And it is even more imprudent and more to the point embarrassing when the American African intelligentsia commissars not only give him their earnest endorsements but defend him from those within the African community that have the temerity to question his lack of dignity and personal and political integrity in the face of overwhelming racist and anti-Islamic attacks. It is proper that when forced by circumstance to confront such a situation, the African must look towards him and herself for clarification. I can find no better an analytical example than the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon when he observed:
“In every country of the world there are climbers, “The ones who forget who they are,” and in contrast to them, “the ones who remember where they came from.”[ii]
The pragmatism of this statement is beyond reproach and it unfailingly deconstructs the storm of Euro-American angst surrounding the Obama presidential campaign and what it means for the United States and the world. As this writer has mentioned previously in other articles on the subject, Barack Obama, the half-White and therefore half-human politico wunderkind deeply critical of his pro-African religious mentor and brave hard-hitting apologist for White racism, represents a Get-out-of-Jail-Free playing card for those within the White power structure willing to vote for him. His candidacy is based entirely on the explicitly revisionist premise that by “allowing” him to get as far as he has in the race for the democratic party nomination, the nagging questions of xenophobia, White privilege and pro-Europocentric institutional bias have been effectively and honourably dealt with. In reality, the Obama rhetoric of “hope” and “change” only have relevance to Euro-American desires for alteration provided that White privilege and socio-political power remain concentrated within their traditional hierarchal configurations. And to date, he has not given any of us soberly conscious of who controls what, how and why any logical reason to be convinced otherwise that his presidency would be one of White power with a Brown face.
He is without debate the “Dream Candidate” that promises change without actually disturbing the European socio-political or economic status quo. His Black face with a White mask tap dance is designed to appeal emotively to slave and master alike, little more. This is possible because both are so thoroughly psychologically steeped within the historical American paradigms of acceptable class boundaries, race and the dignified acceptance of racialised power disparities that the very suggestion that a “Black” man could actually become the head-of-state of Pax Americana supposedly nullifies the historical and political realities of what makes the United States an empire in the first place.
It is something of an intellectual puzzlement to this writer that after five centuries of unceasing Aboriginal genocide and five recent years of unending and merciless violence against an innocent people already tenaciously clinging to existence because of a series of lies emanating from the Bush White House that the U.S. voting public is still willing to “stay the course.” And further, I find it an astoundingly hypocritical that a nation that shrieks peace while waging eternal war can still argue its goldenness while mothers, children, the crippled and the intrepid journalists documenting the carnage continue to litter the charnel grounds of the American consciousness. The untested perception that Mr. Obama will alter this vicious current of American imperialism after numerous media appearances and press statements affirming his determination to maintain and extend American economic and military muscle is childish as best. At its worst, it is practical confirmation of the existential fallacies that serve to illustrate the moral insincerities of American democracy, foreign policy and reactionary military engagement.
To say that I find Barack Obama troubling is to minimise the dangers I perceive in making a rush to find positivism within a decidedly restricted field of choice. Ralph Nader aside, it must be said that his call for the broadening of the American political landscape is more than laudable, it is vitally necessary if a real democracy is ever to emerge in the United States. The fact that large throngs of the U.S. public have historically never had direct access to the political process makes this abundantly clear as does the highly visible indications that a great deal of propagandistic effort and indoctrination goes into “proving” that these privileges do indeed exist. Mr. Barack Obama, for all his promising oratory of progressive Americanism, is the new poster-boy for why America “works.” He has officially added his voice to the fib that all Americans matter when one glance at the U.S. without rose coloured glasses shows a very different story. So to trust him on the basis of his skin tone alone under the assumption that he will enact a nicer, more democratic imperialism at home and abroad is dim-witted political thinking of the highest order. Especially since his reputation on these issues can only be termed as pathetically compliant to Europocentric capitalism in its most aggressive and virulent form. He differs little from his other presidential hopeful predecessors in that he talks one game and plays yet another in full view of a hopelessly gullible American public eager for some sort of change that will put more hard currency in their pockets, lower fuel and food prices and allow working people to purchase more material goods that offer an illusory upwardly mobile social advantage.
Obama and his team of sincere kingmakers are more than happy to put on a stern yet objective demeanour when discussing bombing Iran back into U.S. corporate control or how proud he is to give the Apartheid State of Israel more money, more weapons and more moral support in their zeal to effectively eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from their ancestral territories.[iii] How this position can be reconciled with “progressivism” escapes me. He’s only willing to negotiate with Arabs suffering from western Orientalism provided they are willing to continue their function as defenceless walking targets of Arab genocide and following their inability to resist any longer, readily become captive consumer fodder for American manufactured commodities. Respect for their lives and lands are beside the point. Empires have never entertained provisions for commonsensical and justifiable resistance to their rule. Only contempt, vilification and death are accorded to those who dare speak of freedom be they intellectuals, partisans or parents simply and heroically struggling to keep their children alive in times of quarrel.
On the issue of murderous anti-African police brutality at home in light of the unconscionable acquittal of the officers that executed Sean Bell on his wedding day in yet another case of police claims of inadvertent “contagious shooting,” Mr. Obama who claims to never have suffered from American racism has offered no acknowledgement of this all too often occurring injustice.[iv] This alone says volumes about how he and his prospective administration would address ethical as well as lawful justice in the United States. As a conscious person of colour I cannot reconcile his support for empire with his promises of “change,” especially since he has yet to clearly define what that change would look like.
Admittedly, I reside outside of the political mainstream not so much by choice as much as it is a matter of personal integrity in the face of continual genocide. I stand opposed to the position of most American African intelligentsia in that I reject the choices imposed on us and actively seek actual, rather than theoretical representation from those that make claim to leadership positions within the communities to which I belong. For many of my contemporaries however, the illusion of personal and political power is sufficient primarily because such avenues are the paths of least resistance and in the short term offer an immediate return in the form of acceptance from the Europocentric power structure.
This self-defeating position is shared and promulgated by many within the American African petit-bourgeoisie who have long since adopted as their creed “Assimilation with Honour.” Sadly, the register is long of those who have cast their lot with the power structure despite the reality that the authority is on a variety of levels, classist, sexist, xenophobic and just plain wrong. Historically Madame C.J. Walker must head off this list, (she became the first female self-made millionaire in the U.S. for developing a process for “straightening” African hair) followed by Booker T. Washington who strongly argued that Africans should simply accept White racism with nobility as a fact of life while existing in self-segregated social and political “dignity.” In the modern era, former Secretary of State Colin Powell of My Lai fame ranks high on this inventory as does current secretary Condi Rice, media personality Oprah Winfrey, Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence “Uncle” Thomas, paid Bush administration propagandist Armstrong Williams and White privilege warrior Ward Anthony Connerly.
A logical extension of this dreadful paradigm can also be accorded to hypothetical counter-cultural icons such as “gangsta” rapper Snoop Dogg, ex-pimps like Don “Magic” Juan and shock-comedians such as Paul Mooney whose long term and loose usage of the racial epithet Nigger is principally responsible for its mainstreaming into the national, now international, vernacular. It wasn’t until the very public nervous breakdown of fellow actor-comedian Michael Richards wherein he responded to a group of American African hecklers by shouting the insult several times
(including threats of lynching) did Mooney finally realise his role in substantiating and justifying anti-African racism in the American consciousness.[v] He eventually came to the conclusion that the word does indeed carry the weight of 400 plus years of anti-African bias and now works against its use. One can only speculate, if Mr. Mooney were still a highly sought after mainstream performer/writer earning inflated fees for demeaning his own people along traditional White racist plotlines, would he have reversed his opinion? I ask this since he made it a point to say he would not use the epithet and then later on reneged during a show at the world famous Apollo Theatre. So much for acknowledgment of past misdeeds and his unique responsibility towards those of us highly offended by the word and are now required by popular demand to accept its use towards our people and our person as a matter of perverted political correctness. Are Kike, Chink and Spic soon to follow?[vi]
At this juncture I wish to point out that I am not in any way seeking to lay exclusive responsibility upon those I have briefly mentioned here. But it bears serious examination that the examples I listed above are defended as mainstays within American popular and political culture while the individuals and organisations actively and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of humble servility to White racialist paradigms of defamation are demonised as reverse-racist and “counter-productive.” Hence, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is honoured while the memory, teachings and the works of Malcolm X are commandingly despised. The former believed in the American system, the latter called for separation of the slave from the slave master. I ask the reader to inquire within his or her own being to decide which example appears more threatening to a nationalistic system of capitalist exploitation, Europocentric hegemony and celebrated via Manifest Destiny.
This is where Barack Obama and the rest of the Negritude assimilationist cadre enter the picture. While they all to an individual profess ethical abhorrence toward racism, exploitation and violence in any form and from any quarter, their actions and words demonstrate something else entirely. In order to accept this or any other social scheme one must also to a great degree accept and internalise its inherent values, good and bad. To accept “Americanism” one would also have to acknowledge how the country was founded and who and how many were harmed and where to make it all possible as well as the excuses and mythologies created to explain why these measures were indispensable, inevitable and honourable. Every immigrant to the U.S. that smugly adopts the designation of “American citizen” instantaneously becomes a part of a system of colonial, genocidal and racist chauvinism. It is morally inescapable to claim otherwise without slipping off a high cliff of eugenicist revisionism worthy of the Third Reich. Feigned innocence to the national disgrace of genocide and lebenstraumpolitik whilst Aboriginals and Africans still pay a heavy price for European power in the Americas at the expense of our blood, soil and misplaced labour is far from excusable. It is indisputably morally reprehensible and most deserving of any choice of levels in the Christian conception of Dante’s Hell.
From here many other unpleasant yet accurate points fall into place and do much to explain how we all arrived to this point in time. Fundamentally, this mind-set stems from a pessimistic yet much-admired hypothesis that pro-Europocentric racial discrimination is a politically embedded and morally indispensable principle of American life and social stability. It goes without saying that those of non-European heritages who have “thrived” in spite of their “barbarism” are intrinsically valuable to such a system precisely because they can be utilized as living examples of the “rightness” intrinsic within European socio-theological paradigms of living, expression and social justice. The detail that ethnic, sexual and intellectual sub-populations in the U.S. have had to resist and continue to struggle for parity are reconfigured as obvious exceptions that ultimately prove the rule that White power over non-Europeans is a “noble” power. So therefore all opposition to said power is akin to “wickedness” and rightly subject to corporal punishment at the behest of the prevailing power composition. Or to paraphrase Romans Chapter 13: “There is no government anywhere that God has not placed in power.”
Like a dedicated cohors praetoria of a long bygone European imperial era, these non-European but ideological advocates for the state have repeatedly proved that they will engage in warfare with the victimised sectors of the society the “system,” by its own baroque rhetoric, is designed to protect and serve.[vii] Despite the certainty that their own power is exceedingly limited by the very same authorities and conventions they steadfastly and obediently serve.
Unsurprisingly, this cadre of professional propagandists and legislative attack dogs has extended itself to condemning legitimate demands that Mr. Obama answer to his “base.” Even American African pop artists who have gained a certain level of approval if not the silent classification as “acceptable darkies” by the Europocentric elite appear more willing to assail their own rather than the establishment power entities overtly and covertly spearheading attacks aimed not just at Mr. Obama but the African, Aboriginal, Latino, Arab, Homosexual and religious communities in the U.S. as a whole.
The much lauded “Hip-Hop Generation” isn’t much better in this regard either. Music performer 50 Cent, an accurate example of everything Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not want for American Africans, tells the mainstream media, "I'm not sure America is ready to have a black president…I think they might kill him."[viii] So much for White fears of African solidarity in the face of historical anti-African bias and genocide. While we can send each other to the graveyard over trivial matters, we cannot seem to apply similar determination to alter the reality that makes ethnic cannibalism possible in the first place.
Acquiescence to White power for the rather dubious and defeating privilege of “livin’ large” has it would appear broadly and thoroughly replaced the humanistic and egalitarian ambitions of the Civil Rights movement. Further, this attitude should come as no surprise when one considers that this age bracket merrily rationalises their use of the anti-African epithet “Nigger” simply because they decided to spell it as “Nigga” to peddle their product.[ix] Indeed, the slave has grown quite accustomed to his chains, even if they are made of diamond encrusted gold mined under the inhuman conditions imposed on fellow Africans labouring and dying in the commodity mines of “new” South Africa. To put things in an Indigenist perspective, the murders of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse by fellow Aboriginals proud to don the badges and uniforms of the invader illustrates that this convention of traitorous servitude to European authority is nothing new. For American Africans the stabbing of Dr. King and the assassination of Malcolm X in Harlem provide a similar alarming clarity. In many cases and for a sinister variety of reasons liberation activists are often in more direct physical danger from reactionary elements of their own populace than they are from the opposing entities they stand against. What would make a victim turn against his or her champions is often a psychological confusion as to where and what is of importance, civil and ethical justice or the material gain promised by the oppressor for treason against logical common sense. Many of these Vichy reactionaries are entirely convinced that the moral rewards for subjugating themselves and their own far outweigh the pitiful and paternalistic pats on the proverbial back earned by such betrayals. So in essence, their ill-gotten gains are no greater now than they were in the past.
It’s not that there are no significant voices of opposition to the presence of an immaculate Jim Crow in the world of political machinations, far from it. But one would be hard pressed to find it presented on major mainstream corporative news media. Differing sharply from his ethnically Jewish political contemporaries who shamelessly defend their people against any and all forms of Judeophobia real or imagined including the genocidal actions of the Israeli state, Mr. Obama shows absolutely no such allegiance or empathy for his own brothers and sisters stateside or otherwise. As one of the most powerful Africans in the world, Barack Obama has never, ever used his incredible influence to address American racism as the ferociously black hearted anti-human process it really is. Instead, he has presented an olive branch to the colonial Euro-American population and his fellow lackeys by proclaiming that he “understands” their fear of non-Europeans and confirms their suspicions that they are indeed under siege by a relentless and mindless rabble.[x]
This unrelenting and self-serving drive by the Obama for President Campaign to achieve “legitimacy” along the prescribed lines of “reasonable leadership” is telling in its very simplicity. By disregarding and discouraging any and all valid disillusionment with his lack of reliability on issues that effect African people, the medically uninsured and those devastated by American imperial controls become clearer when one considers that his very public denunciation of just such an advocate.
The Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Wright, a seasoned veteran of the Black American Church tradition and a Marine who served his hitch honourably, unlike the current commander-in-chief, (including serving a term in the United States Navy as a medical technician who served on the team caring for then President Lyndon B. Johnson) has as of late been harassed to no end by reactionary and fascistic elements of the Euro-American media for his outspoken criticism of the United States in regards to its revisionist stance towards its own dark history of colonialism, violence and genocide. The questions raised by the minister are cardinal questions for the entire society but Mr. Obama and his supporters are blaming the messenger for daring to speak the truth, nor a truth as it is promoted, but the reality about the United States and its own internal and external polices of exclusion and domination of the poor, the weak and different.
While Mr. Obama alone stands to blame the most for allowing this situation to spiral out of control, (primarily because Rev. Wright was his long time personal and theological mentor) the broad condemnation lodged against the minister for being honest says more about the African in the United States than it does about the turmoil created by his sermons. Given the scope and depth of the indoctrination people of colour endure in the U.S. it stands to reason that a White backlash to his observations could be expected. But the fact that other Africans, chiefly those whose livelihoods are wholly dependent upon access to White favours are so swift to jump on the anti-Rev. Wright bandwagon in the face of continual historical racism displays how broken the African really is when faced with the reality of his and her condition. Rev. Wright’s crime is that he is an African man intelligent enough to articulate his own position and the deplorable condition of the African man and woman in America. In other words, he is what the last generation of Whites used to call a “Smart Nigger,” code words for a Black man who isn’t stupid, shiftless and willing to allow the overseer to beat him to death without an equally reciprocal rejoinder. In other words, Rev. Wright is not Uncle Tom.[xi]
Spike Lee immediately comes to mind in this regard but he is not the only one. Housewife’s choice superstar Oprah Winfrey has also come out against Mr. Obama’s critics by denouncing his former pastor, the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Wright via proxy spokespersons on the right-wing dominated media circuit. Apparently she does not have the courage to denounce the good minister for telling the truth in person. If she did, her mostly Euro-American studio audience and ego-Oprah Magazine subscriptions would recede quicker than a spilff passed amongst the crowd of an Amsterdam coffee shop. This is hardly a original circumstance and without debate it is as depressingly deep-rooted and as old as the empire itself. As my Gullah-Indio father told me long ago, divide and conquer is a game played by White people all over the world and without that curious principle, Europeans could never have gained control of the third world nor ever have had the opportunity to construct empirical outposts wherever they decide to drop their anchors.
This reliance on psychological ju-jutsu can almost never be acknowledged by those targeted for such intrigues or expressed as anything other than frustration and self-directed angst. Its victims are by keen deception fooled into believing that their painful state of being is a natural one and that submission to external authority is the moral and intellectual equivalent of sanity and virtuosity. To state that the African is compelled to exist within two parallel states of being to survive says much about the world in which he lives. This shameful dichotomy exists whether the European in the Americas or his moral lapdogs of any ethnicity wishes to acknowledge it or not. It must also be said aloud that this duality is immediately subjective for the African and other Aboriginals residing at the bottom of the U.S. human totem pole.
No Ashkenazi Jew in the 21st century would be expected or obligated to defer to Judeophobia in any form in any nation on Earth on the basis of a moralistic purity imposed by Gentiles. The very existence and belligerently xenophobic quasi-theological narration of the modern State of Israel is empirical proof of this. Yet, the African and the Aboriginal in the Americas is expected as well as obligated to accept and defend European cultural power as the unchallenged rule of the universe as dictated the protestant version of the ancient Semitic deity. The process by which we are duty-bound to articulate this peculiar state of affairs is described as “civilisation” and it differs little in direct comparison with the pretentious Europocentric rhetoric of 1930’s NSDAP propaganda.[xii]
For as long as North America has been occupied by Europeans, the approaches to positive maintenance of Europocentric hegemony have flowed and ebbed in response to its ever-changing derma-graphic, an unwanted but unavoidable consequence of multi-national colonialism. White power defined as White power by mainstream White people is no longer ethically feasible in the 21st century. In the main, such vulgar displays of unearned privilege, despite the wordage, have been officially consigned to the lower economic-classes of White Americans the social order has authoritatively designated as “White Trash.” In today’s polite society, code terms such as “crime,” “welfare” and “immigration” have replaced the use of “Black ghettoes,” “lazy Niggers” and “Wetbacks” with the more elucidating language reserved for poor Whites who misguidedly lodge their discontent against the equally powerless rather than the actual elite capitalistic sources of their disenfranchisement.
Barack Obama, product of multi-cultural imperialism has internalised these “values” and has sworn to uphold them come Hell or high water. The “change” he offers is only cosmetic, as he has not by way of personal or political example presented anything even remotely resembling a restructuring of the existing state of affairs. As an excellent case in point, he has recently gone so far as to support the Cherokee Vichy government based in occupied Oklahoma against the Freedmen who were unceremoniously and legally dis-enrolled by its White Indian majority by standing against the Congressional Black Caucus who want to withhold funding from the tribe for its racist purge of their African members due to the Chad Smith administration’s lucid violation of the U.S. Constitution.[xiii]
In spite of the fact that many of the Freedmen are if not all, including this writer, of verifiable Aniyvwiya blood, the Cherokee Nation excuses their expulsion on the dubious grounds of tribal sovereignty. A rather questionable claim since the Cherokee fly American flags in their territories, willingly accept U.S. federal funds and law enforcement jurisdiction, aggressively describe themselves “American” and proudly serve in the U.S. colonial military forces knowingly helping those who stole our lands and dignity appropriate someone else’s. Mr. Obama’s stance on this issue should give all Aboriginals and other people of colour around the world pause. With this sort of leadership coming from an educated person of colour running for the CEO seat of the United States, why wouldn’t White folks too cowardly to join the John Birch Society or David Duke’s EURO movement not love this guy?[xiv]
But there’s much more. Like the rest of the African “leadership” in Washington D.C., he avoids questions surrounding the abuse, torture and forced labour of Aboriginals, Africans and other non-Europeans incarcerated in the United States. The rationale behind why so many are serving extensive prison terms due to non-violent drug offences in which people of colour are accorded more jail time than their White counterparts also goes unanswered as does racial profiling. The problem of disparity in home mortgages also goes unchecked in light of the rash of official findings that prove rampant racism against African and Latinos in receiving home loans including their choices on where to purchase still exists as a matter of capitalist and White racist self-indulgence. Institutional racism in employment? It’s another non-issue to the house Negro elitists who have managed to bypass the ill-mannered biases of many Euro-American human resources personnel that really believe that they are doing the White world a favour by rejecting certain applications as if we also do not need to provide for our families. I could go on but limitations of space constrain how much a can list here in a single article and I promise the reader this is far from a complete inventory of oversights by the Obama team and his legions of liberal ditto-heads.
This ‘Paradigm of neglect’ does however have its highlights. He has not to any appreciable extent called the Bush White House or White collective America to task for its willing negligence towards Hurricane Katrina’s African victims. Like his soul-sister Condoleeza Rice who was observed buying shoes and attending a Broadway musical in New York City while people drowned in New Orleans,[xv] he has given Bush and Co. a pass no politician in any other western democratic nation would have received under similar conditions. Mr. Obama has said nothing concerning the illegal purging of American African men from the Florida voting rolls in either 2000 or 2004 and we would all be idiots of the highest order to assume that the next round will be any different.
For those among us who are dismayed concerning American African inequalities but are more concerned about “all” of us as “Americans”, consider the following: Mr. Obama has yet to have a word on the horrible treatment American military personnel and their families are receiving from the current administration and even less about the homicidal rampage U.S. taxpayer mercenaries are waging on behalf of American multinationals in Iraq against its civilian Arab population.[xvi] If Barack Obama wants to be the next Commander-in-Chief of Pax Americana these questions need to be addressed seriously and without reservation. So far nothing is forthcoming and as far as I am many other astute observers can distinguish, nothing of any pragmatic substance is likely to come from him that is not preferential to the business community that really runs the United States and the mainstream Euro-American public that runs the streets.
Nor has he at any time been willing to address the level of abject racism employed by the Clinton’s in their fervour to re-take the Oval Office. From purposefully darkening his features in campaign advertising[xvii] to suggestions that he would have a hard time getting up in the morning to go to work, Hillary and Bill have pulled every racially negative code-word and tactic they can conceivably use short of calling him a Nigger in public spaces. Just this week Hillary made it a point to state that Obama simply cannot win based on the fact that she is virtually guaranteed the ‘White’ vote providing these Whites go to the polls and stick with the Democratic Party. Even if Mr. Obama were the radical Islamic African “Manchurian Candidate” the neo-conservative propagandists are so ferociously painting him as, he and his advisors would not be so stupid as to say something so blatantly racist towards Euro-Americans. The only redeeming value, if there are any to found in her remarks, is that what she said a painful, for Africans anyway, political truth. Many self-defined Whites, even liberals with lifelong subscriptions to The Nation, are not across the racial chessboard willing to vote for a Black man. Even if he is a contemporary and literal interpretation of Booker T. Washington and all that variety of obsequiousness to White supremacy entails.[xviii]
What Barack Obama truly represents is a return to the normal America but in a form and fashion that maintains hegemony in costume. Not change, but a superficial alteration to how the U.S. looks rather than how it actually functions. Talk of “change” is just that, incessant chatter repeated long enough to convince the observer that something truly different is happening when in actuality nothing has changed at all but the packaging.
What liberal Euro-Americans are unconsciously seeking is a reincarnation of Septimius Severus, the African emperor who managed to hold the Roman Empire together in wake of the chaos produced by Emperor Marcus Aurelius' ne’er do well offspring Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus.[xix] Emerging victorious at the end the Year of the Five Emperors, Severus brought needed stability to the entire empire and that included the use of military force to keep his fellow Africans and other non-European nations in line. His predecessor the boy Emperor Commodus, much like Bush the Younger, ran the imperial government into the ground via a series of erratic courses of action and questionable personal behaviour in which his massive ego held sway over sensible leadership. For many Romans fully cognisant of their leader’s acute spinelessness, Commodus’ insistence on donning gladiator garb, his slaughter of the helpless and crippled in the coliseum, economic favours to those loyal to him and his own egotistical comparisons to the legend of Hercules was just too much to bear. Following his assassination by those closest to him, various political personalities attempted to rule to no avail until Severus, supported by the military commissars claimed the imperial throne in 193 CE. He swiftly crushed resistance to his reign by killing his most prominent rival Clodius Albinus in the Battle of Lugdunum, (present day Lyon, France) and solidified his position as emperor of the Roman republic.
He is most famous for the restoration of Hadrian's Wall, the reduction of administrative and military corruption at home and successfully established a lasting calm in Roman Britannia which at the time was being severely despoiled by marauding Gaullist barbarians and warring tribes from greater Germania. An self-admitted dictator, Serverus, after eighteen years of often shrewdly brutal but logical administration passed away in Eburacum (present day York, England) on February 4th 211 CE at the age of 64 of pneumonia.
The similarities between the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the rule of Septimius Severus, the socio-political environments in which they rose to prominence and the deep desire of the colonialist Euro-American population to maintain the global status quo are much too analogous to ignore. Both men were of mixed African parentage and believed wholeheartedly in the role and authority of the prevailing empirical power. Both men came to prominence at a point in time when the empire was on the brink of disintegration due in large part to an unrestrained egotistical leadership bordering on self-defined idolatry and unchecked colossal elitist greed at the expense of the general working population. Like Severus, Mr. Obama has clearly stated his intentions to use intimidating if not belligerent force to subdue Arabian resistance to European imperialism in Western Asia and again like Severus, he promises to expand the war making capabilities of the military at the expense of projects that should serve the general public.
Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Obama just like the Emperor Severus has made it clear to friend and foe alike that he is consciously willing to subjugate the victims of the Empire, (fellow Africans in the case of Severus and the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds in regards to Mr. Obama) expressly for the benefit of the Empire and those that claim ownership of it.[xx] So it stands to reason that the change Mr. Obama speaks of is actually no change at all if one is to move beyond the aesthetics of his rhetoric or the passions of his supporters.
True change must involve a serious and committed reconfiguration of the europocentrically dominated status quo and nothing less. Barack Obama sadly does not characterize that transformation. He instead symbolises like the Roman Emperor Severus the Europeanised African, a direct product of White power and domination rather than inter-cultural communication and respect as equal members of the human family. And no different to Severus, he has thrown his lot with the enemies of humanity and justice. I too was an Uncle Tom for most of my life. I learned and it is possible for him to come to grips with reality too. He needs only be brave enough to wish redemption not from a mystery God but from himself as a human being.
We need real change. We demand real change. All of us, without regard to ethnicity, national origin or theological delusion must be a part of the process, not an aspect in the landscape. Euro-Americans know this and this is why so many fight so hard to keep things as they always have been. This pointless fear of the loss of unearned entitlement chokes the mind, heart and spirit of the White public and it is ultimately their responsibility to address it. If the White American population is at all serious about change, they internally and individually must actualise that change, not just demand that the rest of us alter our reality to suit their insecurities. Our responsibility as persons of colour given this opportunity is to continue that endeavour through self-education, self-evaluation and reliance upon our own innate sense of justice and survival as recognised by Malcolm, Martin, Mumia, Leonard Peltier and a million nameless and faceless others lost in the struggle to the midst of time.
If at that point the European in the Americas still cannot accept the fact that this is the world he alone has made and is willing to reconcile himself with the negatives of his own making, then nothing is stopping him from returning to the lands of his roots. For nothing is or has prevented him from building exactly the sort of xenophobic bubble they have been griping about on his own subcontinent. He needs only to have the courage to pack his bags and go home leaving behind a more humanistic and all-encompassing vision of what may have become had he acted and lived differently when afforded the occasion.
And contrary to conventional belief, offering us Barack Obama as a substitute for justice in Pax Americana more than a day late and a dollar short of the genuine debt owed to so many by so few. It is an insult to the memories of all who have given their all just to breathe in free air on a planet that belongs to all of us.
The Angryindian
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Footnotes:
[i] NYT: “In Bell Case, Black New Yorkers See Nuances That Temper Rage” Manny Fernandez, Published: April 27, 2008
[ii] Franz Fanon: “Black Skin, White Masks” 1967
[iii] Jerusalem Post: “Obama reaffirms support for Israel,” May 13th 2008
[iv] New York Post: “Sean Bell Detectives Found not Guilty,” April 25, 2008
[v] Associated Content: “Paul Mooney on Michael Richards: He Cured Me of Using the N-Word” published Nov 28, 2006
[vi] Ward Churchill: “Let's Spread the fun Around” (http://www.coloradoaim.org/Wardchurchillspreadthefunaround.htm)
[vii] Larry Elder: “Is Racism America's Greatest Problem?” (http://www.larryelder.com/racial/racism.html)
[viii] MTV News: “50 Cent Flip-Flops: From Hillary To Obama To 'Don't Know'” Mar 28 2008
[ix] R. Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Vintage, 2003
[x] Excised from Barack Obama’s “Race Speech” transcript: The Huffington Post, March 18, 2008:
“In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”
[xi] Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology Ferris State University Dec., 2000 “The Tom Caricature” (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/tom/)
[xii] Imbleau, Martin. "Der Stürmer." Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Dinah Shelton. Vol. 1. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005
[xiii] "Cherokee leader wants to overturn freedmen decision" published from AP story on KTEN.com, 2006
[xiv] Paul Gorksy: “Language of Closet Racism: An Illustration” (http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/langofracism2.html)
[xv] Talkleft: “Condi Rice Shops for Shoes, works on backhand” Sep 01, 2005 (http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/09/01/615/28014)
[xvi] ABC News/Brian Ross Blog: “Despite Investigations, Blackwater to Keep Working In Iraq” April 4, 2008
[xvii] AOL News/David Knowles: “Darkness Visible” March 6th 2008
[xviii] Tim Wise: “Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness ” March 6, 2008
[xix] Carlisle, Edward E., and Josephine E. Carlisle. "Septimius Severus (Negro Emperor of Rome)" Chapter in Historical Sketches of the Ancient Negro: A Compilation. 1920
[xx] John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
3/9/08
The Emergence of the Contemporary “New Negro”
Barack Obama and the Immaculate-Genocide of the African-American MaleBy The Angryindian
"Whites should not tyrannize over [blacks], for their disease should entitle them to a double portion of humanity. However, by the same token, whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the 'disorder'... attempts must be made to cure the disease."
- Dr. Benjamin Rush, signatory of the Declaration of Independence and abolitionist
Before I get deep into yet another article on the much ballyhooed “promise” of the ‘Barack Obama for President Movement’ sweeping colonial America, I am keenly aware of a pressing need to be candid with the reader, if only to assuage a mild sense of personal guilt. Firstly, regular readers of my newswire Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo should be aware by now that I as an individual I do not vote in American elections. As an Aboriginal human being indigenous to North America and unwillingly subject to colonialist domination under the political entity known as the United States, I choose not to authenticate the Euro-American claim to this landmass nor my person by legitimising their system of power. So I have no particular love nor preference for any political affiliation associated with the narrowness of American politics.
Secondly, for a variety of reasons and chiefly due to an innate sense of solidarity with my fellow blood-brothers in the Diaspora, while I do not support Obama or his candidacy, on principle I had so far stuck to my decision not to write anything that may in any way jeopardize his race for the White man’s house. With a heavy heart recent events have forced me to reconsider my position and my allegiance to someone in which even I, if only fleetingly, could envisage would bring some pause to the madness of the first world as it applies to the rest of the human community.
There are two distinct actions on the part of Barack Obama that I personally find disgraceful coming from an African, especially an African running for president of the United States. Foremost in my mind is his very public rejection of the Honourable Min. Louis Farrakhan for the crime of expressing his support for the ‘Obama for Change’ campaign. This move on his part was as Uncle Tom-ish as one could get without breaking a chorus of "I Wish I Was in Dixie". Barack has gone above and beyond in making the point to Goy and Zionist America and in no uncertain terms that he did not, wished not and sought not any form of endorsement or sustenance from Minister Farrakhan or the rank and file membership of the Nation of Islam.
He even went so far to do the good darkie dance during the televised democratic debate in Cleveland, OH last week with media-whore number one MSNBC moderator Tim Russert getting in his face with questions, accusations really, about the public NOI endorsement. Instead of challenging Mr. Russert on why this question is not asked of the republican John McCain who grandly accepts endorsements from the likes of evangelical hate-monger John Hagee who calls for open warfare between American Christians and Muslims, he allowed Russert to berate him incessantly on the issue:
TIM RUSSERT: On Sunday, the headline in your hometown paper, Chicago Tribune: “Louis Farrakhan Backs Obama for President at Nation of Islam Convention in Chicago.” Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic comments. I think that they are unacceptable and reprehensible. I did not solicit this support. He expressed pride in an African American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can’t censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we’re not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally with Minister Farrakhan.
TIM RUSSERT: Do you reject his support?
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, Tim, you know, I can’t say to somebody that he can’t say that he thinks I’m a good guy. You know, I—you know, I have been very clear in my denunciations of him and his past statements, and I think that indicates to the American people what my stance is on those comments.
TIM RUSSERT: The problem some voters may have is, as you know, Reverend Farrakhan called Judaism “gutter religion.”
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Tim, I think—I am very familiar with his record, as are the American people. That’s why I have consistently denounced it. This is not something new. This is something that—I live in Chicago. He lives in Chicago. I’ve been very clear, in terms of me believing that what he has said is reprehensible and inappropriate. And I have consistently distanced myself from him.
That’s for damn sure. Obama and his people have done everything possible to distance themselves from authentic African social identifiers that unlike the Obama campaign, gallantly articulate a reality White Americans have no idea exists right beneath their proverbial noses. It simply is not allowed in the unwritten rules governing American socio-political discourse or policy. “The immoveable veil of Blackness,” Obama so embarrassingly totes as Eugenically articulated by early colonial American Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Benjamin Rush and the Dred Scott Decision is something to be pitied, not respected, as it falls far short of an authentic humanity. While Europocentric intellectuals were aware of the inherent “humanity” of the African, they only recognized it partially, not unlike how a breeder strives to define a newly recognised species of dog. So to suggest that Barack Obama is subject to right-wing belittlement and the relentless confirmation of his loyalty to White American interests because he is a “Black” candidate is correct and exact. To imply otherwise is simply American revisionism of the highest order.
Not convinced? Any cursory trip through MediaMatters.org will reveal an unending trail of conservative Obama-bashing ranging from doubts about his religious affiliations to his parent’s choice of first and second names. FOX News has stealthily added his image for split-seconds during reports on Osama bin-Forgotten and resident-experts-on-retainer gleefully reinterpret his Indonesian upbringing as clandestine terrorist training. To say that the neo-conservative media brownshirts are painting a picture of a Muslim Manchurian Candidate is putting it mildly. All the while, his choice of questionable pro-war team players and backers such as his silent bond with the Wall Street economic elite however rarely, if ever, face such intense scrutiny. But nothing earns him the ire of the more honestly bigoted in America as does his African blood and hair. These physical markers as referenced by Jefferson and Dr. Rush will forever bind the Negro to a subordinate “otherness” no matter how “White” in action or thought the Negro has struggled to befit or to qualify for entry into colonialist European society.
In other words a Black candidate is just that, a “Black” candidate. And even Black candidates are required to stay in their respective and historical place on the social chessboard. If the reader thinks I’m jesting just go back to Michelle Obama’s statements about her feelings concerning the U.S., comments only a closeted Klansman would have a problem with in a country that kills in order to export “democracy”. When she declared that “…For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change,” the White reactionary backlash was tremendous with the FOX network’s most prominent voice of White Christian male arrogance Bill O’Reilly suggesting that if Michelle Obama, “ - Really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, - ” that a ‘lynching party’ is indeed in order:
“And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.”
Lynching nooses and White terrorist imagery have no place in a nation proclaiming an unbroken history of justice and reason. So when I say that the failure of Mr. Obama and his team to address these blatantly racist smears on his person, his campaign and his family smacks of moral and personal credulity, I mean just that. Barack Obama is a moral coward. Add to this the other distressing fact that unlike Bill Clinton, Mr. Obama has determinedly refused to defend his wife from the likes of Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the sewer-dwelling neo-conservative propaganda cadre, it is clear to everyone except the politically dim-witted that a real Black American voice Barack Obama is definitely not. Partly because he never so such as cites the explicit race-baiting that is being used against him and mostly because like the much respected Booker T. Washington, Barack Obama has allowed White liberal America to check his African pride and his manhood at the door of the Democratic Party platform. Obama has been publicly punked. And White America loves him dearly for it.
What has not been said aloud and begs some consideration is what Obama’s silence really means. What we see before us is a genuine product of the American colonialist system; the ever-grateful, ethnically and masculinity-emasculated “new” Negro. Castrated silently without fuss or defiance by virtue of his willingness to play the game of graceful living under White domination, Obama has taken Booker T’s social prescription to heart. Accept your lot as the White American ugly step-child, follow the rules an’ shuffle on in a hushed, but dignified desperation. This is the reality of Barack Obama. He is the long awaited get-out-of-jail-for-free card White liberal America has been waiting for.
The other portentous reason I have broken my silence has not so much to do with Minister Farrakhan and the highly disrespectful treatment he has received from Mr. Obama as much as the relevance of his endorsement while open genocide is being conducted against the Indigenous people of Palestine by the racialist, theocratic and genocidal state of Israel. On the heels of another wave of death and destruction from on high by the United States supported Europeanised Western Asian client state, Obama had the nerve to release a public statement not only praising the practice of continuous bombardment and extra-legal kidnappings the American state department likes to call “Extraordinary Rendition” in which he flatly accused the legitimate Palestinian liberation political party Hamas of being entirely responsible for the violence killing scores of their own people. In his statement of support for Palestinian genocide, Obama makes it unambiguous and plain, he stands with the Euro-Israeli lobby all the way:
“The violence in Gaza is the result of Hamas’s decision to launch rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, and Israel has a right to defend itself.”
This testimonial for Arab genocide not only whets the appetite of the Arab-hating AIPAC Zionists, but gives implicit material support to the rabidly anti-Jewish evangelic Christian fundamentalists amongst the U.S. economic elites bent on preserving Israel if only to save the European Jewish population from eternal Hellfire for not accepting Jesus. More importantly, it paves a new bloody road to American regional dominance over all of Western Asia under the banner of Christian-inspired liberation with petroleum as its holy sacrament.
For White liberals seeking a middle-ground that encourages Palestinian submission to European-Jewish authority, such sentiments are borne of an ever-expanding empathy for the political “uniqueness” of the European Semitic holocaust, an apparently never-ending reaction to the White world’s apathetic response to the historical European Judeophobia which ran rampant throughout the last century. I too am highly sympathetic, but not to the point of excusing Israeli xenophobia because of the unfortunate existence of anti-Jewish xenophobia. If genocide was wrong against ethnic Jews in Europe during the 1930’s and 40’s, genocide is also equally inappropriate in Arab Palestine. It is telling that one even needs to consider it imperative to make such particulars a point of awareness at the outset of the 21st century. Especially to a Black man who by all visible as well as historical accounts, should in a visceral sense know better.
Rumour has it that the Israeli general public however does know better. According to a Feb 28th 2008 report by the international news service Democracy Now, Israeli opinion polls demonstrate that more than 64 percent of resident Israelis support a military ceasefire with the legal Palestinian government of Hamas, supposedly the largest majority recorded to date. The Hamas government has offered multiple propositions for an armistice with the Zionist state which has routinely rejected these approaches as a “submission to Islamic terrorism.” The empirical evidence that Israel as a notionally independent country was built on the primary principles of abject terrorism against the United States and Britain is selectively written off as a non-issue. Fortunately for them and their supporters, the English and American public maintains a steadfast effort in remaining historically ignorant of the more disturbing and paradoxical episodes of resistance to Western imperialism.
In all sincerity I am taking a great leap of faith by identifying the White world’s apathy to Palestinian genocide as an issue of pure ignorance. My own position is much more candid in that I unequivocally accuse the world community of wilful indifference to Palestine’s plight in favour of White imperialist privilege. Israel’s macho Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai has publicly pledged on Israeli Army Radio to wage a Palestinian "Holocaust" in the Gaza without incident, while at the same time the western imperialist media machine continues to tout the fib that Iran’s leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swore to "wipe Israel off the map." Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad, an eccentric bloke in his own right, was purposefully misquoted in a desperate effort to shore up an excuse, any excuse, to invade and occupy Islamic Iran, Vilnai's outrageous and villainous threat to wipe out the very existence not simply of the Palestinian nationality but the annihilation of the Palestinian people receives virtually no condemnation. Innocence paid to unawareness of Israel’s gnawing yearning to rid itself of its Arab population is spurious at best and a morally ambiguous complicity in racist terrorism and Western imperialism at its worst.
This brings us back to The Honourable Min. Louis Farrakhan’s unwelcome endorsement for Barack Obama’s presidency. Like our other brother-in-arms surviving in the Diaspora and himself a former presidential candidate the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Minister Farrakhan has learned the hard way that in the Zionist world, there is no moral obligation to grant forgiveness.
In the sad case of Rev. Jackson he will forever be remembered for being called to the carpet for remarks he may or may not have made to a Negro Washington Post reporter named Milton Coleman, who without delay dashed to inform a Euro-American journalist working at the same tabloid that he personally witnessed Jesse Jackson refer to N.Y. Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown." According to the article, which appeared the very next morning, the comments were expressed by Jackson during a private conversation with Coleman and several other American African journalists. I for one would like to take for granted that Rev. Jackson, a confidant and partner of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would not and could not say anything so morally callous, and frankly I don’t think all of the possible aspects of that situation were explored for the obvious reasons. The Euro-American reporter that broke the story freely admitted that his only evidence was anecdotal and that other than Coleman, no one else ever corroborated the account. Despite this, the pressure to compel an apology from Rev. Jackson and every other African political leader they could conceivably intimidate into conveying regret and shame for an assumed communally held American African predisposition towards anti-Semitism was gargantuan and Rev. Jackson naturally succumbed to the weight. To this day I have yet to review anything that supports Rev. Jackson’s supposed Judeophobia and I doubt that I ever will. But it matters little any longer. The damage that was intended had been done.
Minister Farrakhan’s principled support for the campaign of Barack Obama is burdened by the very same factors that I mentioned above. The semantic ju-jitsu employed by the White mainstream media is wholly concerned with specific words or phrases, in particular the overt and concentrated attempt to play on the emotive characteristics of any criticism towards the State of Israel. While common sense would demand that disparagement of the Israeli politic is mutually excusive of denunciation of Jews as an ethnic group, things are not as clear-cut as they should be. Jew haters throughout the White world have worked in various ways to blame Semites for everything from lost crops to missing French children rumoured to be slain for use of their blood for Passover bread. To deny the reality of deep-seated Judeophobia in a world where Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad can accuse Jews worldwide of a conspiracy to take over the planet is foolish although many indifferently do make that claim.
Just recently on an American cable-television game show which asks embarrassingly personal questions in order to win cash money, a guest was asked if she ever lied about being Jewish. A touchy subject to be sure, she was empathically permitted to not answer the query due to its explosive characteristics. Everyone it attendance nodded in camaraderie with her personal struggle and the show as they say, carried on unabated.
At first glimpse it seems that this all-encompassing empathy towards the Jewish struggle, provided the Jew in question is of European origin, is for the most part the most vicious form of parody imaginable and conceivably the most egregious. But looking deeper, it is dangerously elucidating to see how utterly racist Zionism really is. It presupposes a pre-eminence in the human suffering pecking order, a hierarchy we people of colour are told repeatedly between offences does not exist. In the rational universe of the third and fourth worlds, where the personal struggle against extinction is a dynamic of everyday life, this hallucinatory view of the universe is insulting to the point of farce.
Chiefly due to space considerations I will not go into specifics here, I choose to assume that the reader is cognizant of Native American genocide as a blueprint for Germany’s Final Solution. If the reader is not aware of this connection, the fault lies in the manner American history has been repackaged and marketed to the national and international public. The United States, Australia, Canada and Mexico as a matter of common practise dismiss Aboriginal genocide as the end result of reluctance on the part of the Indigenous population to extinguish themselves by accepting colonial subjugation and territorial occupation. So much so that in the generations since, to even imply that murder, pillage and other atrocities were and are practised in these nations against Aboriginals invites belligerent repudiation and often, sadistic retaliation. It has even been charged that the justifiable indignation many conscious Aboriginals and Africans maintain for White America and its values is the “real” problem. Our anger it is said prevents meaningful progress because we find it so hard to “let go of the past” and move further forward into the White haze of an exclusively Europocentric paradise of physical as well as psychological crypto-slavery.
Americans of course are accustomed to excusing genocide, perhaps because they have been skilfully doing so for more than 500 years. How else could they harp on about freedom and human rights while conversely redefining American Indigenous genocide and African involuntary servitude as a necessary, progressive and honourable endeavour for all involved? Given the extent and vigour Euro-Americans have toiled to maintain the United States as a predominately “White” nation, such revisionism illustrates the reality that White society does in fact acknowledge its unsavoury history by twisting it into something much more palatable for the colonial, i.e., White mind.
Barack Obama calls himself an American, so it should not be considered off the mark when I propose that he, like other professed “Americans” regardless of ethnicity, accept Aboriginal and African maltreatment and exploitation as inexorably beneficial and favourable because it led to the contemporary excellence of the United States and by extension, the world as we have all been led to understand it.
This is why the photos of torture from Abu Ghraib mean nothing to the American public. This also goes on to explain why half a million child deaths due to American economic sanctions against Iraq between the two Gulf wars can be admitted to without significant public disapproval. Review the cases of White American colonialist involvement in East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, South Africa and North America.
Let’s face it folks, America is a genocidal empire. By the same token it is an empire that does its level best to deny that it is an empire. It excuses its atrocities and the atrocities of its client states by declaring its hostility as part of the necessary back-braking work needed to spread democracy and free trade. America does not kill to dominate, it is merely spreading the “promise” of freedom. It is an oxymoron of such immense wretchedness it is patently worthy of the Nazi government that the current president’s grandfather so proudly served. Nevertheless, it is the authentic state ideal and creed of the U.S. although very few have dared say so openly. To do so is self-incriminating and White America as a whole has never truly been willing to accept their moral responsibility when historical distortion can divert attention from the reality.
When we are forced to look at Palestine and the Palestinian people, Americans liberal and conservative see what they want to see. 1948 is ignored, the British Mandate is long-forgotten and a Jewish-led genocide is applauded as righteous self-defence against Jewish genocide. In other words, the elimination of the Palestinian populace is, as cheerfully articulated by Madeline Albright on America’s 60 Minutes television programme in reference to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi babies, a necessary price to pay for European-Jewish survival. Boiled down, an Arab life means absolutely nothing. Like the razing of a viable and potentially resistant North American Aboriginal presence, the destruction of the Palestinian Arab populace must take place for the existence of a “White” Israel to be secure. The rebuff of the dark reality of Zionism in its purest form as an extremist political movement dedicated to ensuring European Jewish cohesion and interests are made manifest by any means necessary is to be selectively judicious in regards to the usage of aggression. Hence, the sympathy extended to Irgun’s desperate attempts to build an alliance with the German Nazi Party to assist them in battling the British for control of Palestine under the British Mandate. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even when they are Nazis primarily responsible for the systematic eradication of Semitic Europe if the ultimate goal is a Jewish homeland in someone else’s country.
The Jewish translation of Manifest Destiny in Greater Palestine differs little in theory and practise from its Euro-American predecessor. And the vastly escalating support Israel receives from the more radically inclined neo-conservative and theological elements within the United States are vital to its implementation. Without American State Dept. financial and munitions support, Israel would cease to exist. And without near total American domination of the United Nations and the World Court, it is doubtful Israel would elude censure and reprimand for war crimes against that regions native population. All told, it is the disgrace of post-World War Two global society that this decades old slow bleed of the Palestinian Nation has continued unabated while the world defends their oppressors. The disparity of power, the humiliation of colonialism and the malevolence of racism are expressed as the negative effects of challenging European expansion wherever the frontier may be. Barack Obama calls it Jewish self-defence, Palestinians and Human Rights observers call it genocide.
I did not write this piece to defend the Honourable Min. Louis Farrakhan. His record of soulful representation of African America requires no defending from this writer. And I will not play the game of listing the probable offences attributed towards him. I refuse, as I stated at the outset of this article, to stab another person of colour publicly in the back. Divide and conquer will not work in this instance. And at the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, I will make it clear here for the record that I respect Min. Farrakhan and any issues I have with his rhetorical record are between him, me and the rest of the African Diaspora. I will not denounce him because it is fashionable to do so nor will I reject him because we differ on various political issues. I recognise that Min. Farrakhan unlike his detractors has come a very long way in addressing the numerous concerns that have served to diminish and marginalise not just the African liberation movement but the African community as a whole. His tone and tremor have matured over the years and at this period in his life he has sought solidarity more than ever before with people and organisations several years ago many would have said was highly unlikely. His recent embracing and teaching of tolerance for our gay African brothers and sisters was a major step to repairing the Black family and increasing understanding on this very important issue. An optimistic and promising development overlooked by a White establishment that watched two young gay men killed within a week of each other on both coasts. The myth of White American tolerance for humanity in all its forms and its hypocritical record on the Homosexual civil right to protection from violence is glaringly damming. So is its history of legitimizing brutality towards the outsider. An initiative represented in every speech I have ever heard from the minister including the material detested by the American Jewish community.
I understand the context in which his commentary is made and his Jewish cynics understand it as well, thus the basis of their criticism in truth is not so much his choice of words but his intended critique of the Zionist misuse of White Christian guilt for their decidedly Judeophobic non-action as Semitic Europe literally burned alive. An understandable tactic given that new publications of the falsely believed Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are still freely available and fervently referenced by xenophobes everywhere.
If Barack Obama and other Israel supporters were to articulate this issues fairly I would say so, but they do not. Obama is no different than any other American politician when it comes to pledging support for Israeli inhumanity. This, I cannot forgive and still remain human. While I still refuse to harm another POC by publicly quarrelling with them, I do not recognise Barack Obama as a ‘Black’ man. He does not act nor sound in any way shape or form like a Black man. He acts and sounds like what a White man thinks a Black man should act and sound. I was disposed, even eager, to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I also erred this way in regards to Clarence Thomas and General Colin Powell. I never could bring myself to trust the shoe-lady, current ineffectual Secretary of State Condi Rice. Her uninterrupted excursion to NYC during the drowning of hundreds of Africans and other poor people confirmed and justified my hesitation. Only Oprah Winfrey has done more to demonstrate that the American Negro is still seeking entry into the plantation house. Even if he or she has to step over the bodies of their own to reach the doorknob.
Barack Obama is exactly this sort of Negro. His church may be Black, but his heart is where the power structure is, deep within the White man’s fat capitalist backside. Only an Uncle Tom of the highest order could defend the murder of a defenceless, landless and speaking bluntly, beaten people. The hypocrisy of kowtowing to genocidal Zionist terrorism while simultaneously denouncing Minister Farrakhan for remarks made years ago in reference to Palestinian Arabs and African-Jewish relations in the United States says much about the man and his anticipated polices. Endless, racialised slaughters in the third world, genocides in the fourth world and rampant exploitation of the second world until peoples such as the Palestinians cease to exist in sufficient numbers to defend their right to land, cultural identity and political self-determination. So I ask humbly ask Barack Obama and all those who support his presidency, where is the accountability the liberal/democratic folks say Obama personifies? Where is the moral justice in mass murder in the name of American imperialist power? And when will White America admit that what Barack Obama really represents is a brown face that will make the genocide, the exploitation and the racism “legit” in the eyes of its victims?
Don’t pretend that Obama does not fully comprehend his role in this tragic comedy, he is intelligently playing his part with great aplomb and technique. He’s “clean” as the neo-con and liberal punditry like to point out. He has successfully shed the morose vestiges of his dark skin to reveal the psychosomatic White man within all of us cruelly moulded by European indifference to our reality.
Jefferson and Dr. Rush would stand proud. The America they visualized is finally coming to pass.
The Angryindian
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