By Daniel Gray-Kontar

The first time I ever heard Gil Scott-Heron, I had no idea whom I was listening to. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," destined to remain the most popular song of his more than 25-year career, was recorded in 1974. Today, it is still a highly anthologized rare groove classic; with its fusion of percussive jazz and spoken word, it's still in heavy rotation wherever politically conscious Afrocentrics puff on clove cigarettes while sipping coffee (or Long Island iced teas). I was in one of these spots the first time I heard the song and was instantly captivated by Heron's delivery as much as by his message.

"The revolution will not be televised, because the revolution is gon' be live," Heron predicted. And I believed, although it had been twenty years since Heron first recorded those words. Many of us are still waiting for that non-televised revolution. Others put away their black power fist necklaces in exchange for gold ones. Still, during that curious period of my late adolescence, I had internalized Heron's message without asking whom I was listening to. The message in itself was enough of a gift.

A few years later, I was ending my undergraduate study at a university in rural Ohio, and had formed a bond with the man who would become my mentor: a creative writing instructor named Dr. John Scott. A cool, well-dressed, hipster-type in the guise of an academic, Scott was in his 50s while I was figuring my way through my early 20s. Scott took me under his wing, teaching me about more than our shared craft of creative writing, but also, about how to survive in the world once I left my protective academic environment. One day, "Scott" -- as I used to call him -- asked me if I had heard Gil Scott-Heron's latest album Spirits. "No," I answered. "Who is Gil Scott-Heron?" Scott looked me up and down, shook his head and said, "let's go."

Three minutes later, Scott and I were in his Lexus (only the best would do for Scott), when he played the disc for me. As the main streets of our rural college town morphed into Rt. 20, where we were surrounded by corn stalks, Scott turned the volume up to its near peak.

"Now, listen to this," Scott said. "That's who the fuck Gil Scott-Heron is." And immediately, I remembered "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and I made the connection, as I heard the lyrics from the disc's final track "Don't Give Up." "Ain't no way overnight for you to turn your life around/And this ain't the commentary of somebody who hasn't fallen right back down/ But if you're looking for a loser who found strength and success. Remember the spirit of brother, Malcolm X."

With these words, I not only knew who Gil Scott-Heron was, but what he was and will always be to his listeners. Gil Scott-Heron is a culture bearer. A griot in the truest sense of the word, whose message must be transmitted from generation to generation in the same way in which my mentor revealed Heron's work to me. There are few artists who emit this type of importance to their own culture and beyond. Gil Scott-Heron is one of them.

With this much meaning attached to Heron's repertoire of songs traversing 23 albums, it sheds light on why the upcoming re-release of two Scott-Heron discs resonates with such importance. It's Your World, originally released in 1976, is a Gil Scott-Heron live recording. The compilation disc The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron converges his recordings from 1970-1978, and was originally released in 1979. While the live disc captures Heron in all of his improvisational wit, the compilation album restores Heron's blues idiom with perhaps more intent than the other compilations that have come since.

Both discs are necessary reissues, particularly when given the temporal circumstances in which Heron created the bulk of his art: the 1970s, which truly was a "blue" period for many black Americans. Truly, one of the champion artistic spokesmen of the times, Heron's bassy, gravel-voiced blues style awakened underclass blacks to their political landscape, while evoking the challenges facing black men and women as they strove to survive with one another. Scott-Heron told it like it was (and still is) for better or worse, reflecting the collective will of black America through spoken word, song and soul.

"That's who the fuck Gil Scott-Heron is," my mentor said to me. And these re-releases, in less "hipster" terminology, will say the same to you.

By MARIA SAPORTA

Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., has died.

The 78-year-old Mrs. King died at a holistic hospital in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, 16 miles south of San Diego, said her sister, Edythe Scott Bagley.

"I was told that she slept away," said Bagley, 81, of Cheney, Pa. "It's comforting. She's at peace now."

A spokesman at Hospital Santa Monica in Rosarito Beach confirmed Mrs. King had died at the health center. He could not say when she had checked in. The center's website says it treats "chronic degenerative diseases considered incurable by the orthodox medical profession."

"It is very difficult for me right now," said Christine King Farris, the sister-in-law of Coretta Scott King. "She was my sister."

Farris said the family is still sorting out details. Farris confirmed that Mrs. King died on the West Coast.

"We will bring her back here," Farris said.

Former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, a family friend and former King aide, said Mrs. King was found dead by her daughter, Bernice.

"It seemed as though she was resting when she passed away. Bernice thought she had had a rather difficult day yesterday and felt like she needed her rest. It wasn't until early this morning that she [Bernice] went to check on her and saw she had passed away," he said.

"It's just sad to see her gone," said security guard Richard Cheatham. About 7:30 a.m., he had lowered the American flag at the King Center to half-staff.

Last spring, Coretta King was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which causes the heart to quiver instead of beat regularly. The condition led to a major stroke and a minor heart attack on Aug. 16. She was trying to recover from the stroke, which impaired her right side and speech, at the time of her death.

Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered flags on all state buildings and grounds at half-staff in memory of Mrs. King. The flags will remain at half staff until sunset the night of her funeral.

"Coretta Scott King was one of the most influential civil rights leaders of our time," said Perdue. "Mrs. King was a gracious and kind woman whose calm, measured words rose above the din of political rhetoric. For decades, she proudly bore the torch of her husband's legacy. Now she has passed it on to a new generation to keep the dream alive. Mary and I mourn the passing of this dynamic leader."

"It 's so significant that we would lose another giant at the heels of losing Ms. Rosa Parks," said the Rev. Harold Middlebrooks, a Knoxville, Tenn., preacher who lived with members of the King family during the Rev. King's student days at Morehouse College and as a civil rights worker.

"Both of them could not be out there on the front lines," he said. "Somebody had to rear the children. That was her role. She saw that that was her role and she did it. At the same time, she was very supportive of her husband."

"I am very saddened by the suddenness of Mrs. King's death," said Evelyn Lowery, president of SCLC/WOMEN. "I am sure that she is much relieved, where she is now. Her last days were not that pleasant.

Lowery said she had seen Mrs. King over the Christmas holidays. The world saw her for the last time in January, when she made a surprise appearance at the King Salute to Greatness dinner.

"She looked so radiant and beautiful. We just hugged and hugged when we saw each other. She couldn't speak, but we were able to communicate," Lowery said. "She was such a strong person. Such a dignified person committed to the movement. She was a leader in her own right."

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a family friend, called Mrs. King's death a "monumental" loss.

" For those of us that were too young to get to know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. very well, we got to know Coretta Scott King as a compassionate, caring, yet firm matriarch of the movement for justice. She was kind and gentle with impeccable grace and dignity, yet firm and strong and immovable under issues that she and her husband committed their lives to," said Sharpton.

During the battle to desegregate the South, Coretta Scott King walked alongside her husband. After he was assassinated in April 1968, she stepped out of his shadow and became an internationally respected advocate of justice, peace and human rights.

She worked tirelessly to spread her husband's message of fighting for equality through nonviolent struggle.

Owen Lawson, a manager for Cardinal Health Systems, came to the King Center after hearing the news. He stood for a few moments in silent meditation at the reflecting pool.

"It's not a sad day, not really," said Lawson, a 1992 graduate of Morehouse College. "It's a day to remember Mrs. King and Dr. King and all that they accomplished."

Nickeya Weathers, 29, lives around the corner from the King Center on Auburn Avenue. "I was shocked," Weathers said. "Everybody thought she would get better."

Weathers started crying while standing next to the reflection pool at the center.

"I feel like this was everybody's mother in the fact that her family was so important," she said. "It's just sad."

Said John Evans, who was taking a break from his job at the Parkview Manor Nursing and Rehab Center across Auburn Avenue from the King Center: "Boy, it's really a hurting feeling. My joy just went down when I heard about it because she was such a wonderful person for this community."

Four days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was killed in Memphis, Coretta Scott King delivered a speech in which she declared, "We must carry on because this is the way he would have wanted it to have been. ... We are going to continue his work."

She spent the next 37 years doing just that.

Staff writers Add Seymour, Bill Montgomery and Ernie Suggs contributed to this report.

By Louis Reyes Rivera


Always there is need for song. And every human has a poem to write, a compulsion to contemplate out loud, an urge to dig out that ore of confusion locked up inside. But with the contradictions of privilege and caste, of class and gender distinctions regulating access, of those ever present distortions in textbooks with their one-sided measure of human worth, and with the culture of white man still serving as ultimate yardstick to what is acceptable as matter, not everyone is permitted to learn to read, much less to study poetry or hone the art and take the risk of putting one's self on paper.

While wanting to be naturally soothed by self-definition, too many among us learn to rely on commercial lyricists to reflect our joy and pain. At best, we latch onto committed activists who take on as social vocation the work of bridging the human spirit with word made flesh. At worst, we fall prey to professional wordsmiths (politicians and preachers alike) who conjure up another religion that dissuades us from social contention. Somewhere in between these two extremes, we sometimes meet and break a moment's bread with poets.

Today, what was once called poetry is referred to now as Spoken Word Art. Unlike the Rappers who have Hip Hopped twenty-syllable couplets into a steadfast beat, Spoken Word Artists have returned to free verse oration exhilarated by internal rhyme schemes and unfettered metaphors that speak directly to inner city blues. The news of the day, testament and affirmation, current and advanced, informs this form of poetry that outlines the immediate and understudied aspirations of African and Latino Americans caught in the crossfire between skin game caste and an ever shrinking planet of high tech advances.

Desk top publishing, internet websites, tea parties and Open Mic readings, marathon jams and poetry slams have combined to form the latest battlesites between truth and decadence. Inside the range of this contention are the new poets being pulled by and pushing against a state of confusion in search of clarity.

Their names are many and they come from everywhere, like Jamaican Dub Poets in Germany and England, or Nuyorican Poets in Texas and the Bronx. To single out the more notoriously known here in New York as comprising the new heat (like Tony Medina, Asha Bandele, Jessica Care Moore, Nzinga Chavis, Saul Williams, UniVerses, 2nd To Last, Ras Baraka), without qualification, is to commit the same crime as today's textbooks: taking a single droplet or two out of a river and making out like two droplets are the actual river itself. For just as each drop of water helps to form a river, each name dropped is but a metaphor for the many others who came before or right alongside those whose work forms our current popular canon.

Poetry, you see, is as old as breath itself. For when human beings across the planet simultaneously uttered that first initial sound, they gave rise to the same echo heard in the wail of every newborn child. The sound of that cry might be onomatopoeic, but its meaning is quite literal. "I am here, now!" This is the essential affidavit that serves as testament inside every person's compulsion to give voice to the voice, as condition urges vision, vision provokes thought, and thought pronounces the name of God: "I matter, too!"

Thus the birth of the word, the root of every language. Poetry. The strength of the people. The finest manifestation of craft, content and intent in every written and oral expression. The basis upon which all other literary genres have evolved. From poetry, not only the lyric, but as well drama and narrative, the expository and the thematic, the didactic and the ideological as root to all our scripture, sacred and profane.

It began as a blending of sound (the rhythm), sense (the experience), and color (the given image). A voice raised in celebration of itself. Chant and dance, music and tone, mystery and miracle forged into the embodied literature of people passing it on, by speech and sight, to each subsequent generation, asking and answering the fundamental question: How do we live? And is that the same as how we want to live or what we mean when we say there's something we're supposed to do?

The Chinese call it The Way; the Buddhist, Enlightenment; the Hindu, Nirvana; the Muslim, Complete Submission to the Will of Allah; the Egyptian-Judeo-Christian, Seeking the Light; and among many Africans and Amerindians it was once referred to as Being At One With Life. And from the poets among them, it is that inner compulsion to Follow the Muse. They speak to the same cause, challenging the inner voice to maintain balance between flesh, thought, action. Thus, Poet as author of scripture and Griot as Keeper of a Narrative. Each generation, regenerated by its own voices has, since the first word heard, added to that tapestry of affirmation. In Egypt and throughout the Americas, they called it Song; in Israel, Psalms; in West Africa, Nommo; and in Greece, Poetry.

It knows no borders. Unrestricted by or to genre, gender, nation, race, time or class. For in the need to contemplate, inside the compulsion to sing, and as Gylan Kain says, "to give voice to the deeper meaning of ourselves," poets learn to look upon love, life, struggle both as interchangeable terms and as the only limitations self-imposed. This is why poets are never invited to participate in televised forums, roundtable discussions and panels with other writers and speakers, journalists, politicians, social activists, academics, religious leaders. You never know what the poet will say.

This is also why poetry is considered the most dangerous art form, why it is not honestly taught and thoroughly nurtured into our youth in the schools, among our adults in the factories and fields, inside our homes, churches, offices. It cannot be diluted, bought, sold, compromised or traded without treason to its beauty, its necessity, its meaning. The poet learns to care about every word.

What we often view as a national literature is but one of many rivers coursing its way into the ocean of all our knowledge. In the general sense of world literature, we're supposed to bear in mind the ocean into which every river flows; with the particular local canon, however, we are actually cheated from studying all those droplets comprising both rivers and streams (the ethnic and the national), despite the fact that without them, there'd be no water to feed into that ocean.

Sad to say that too many of today's Spoken Word Artists lack an understanding of their own context. So focused on the immediacy of their own moment of breath, they are not as well studied into the history and evolution of this artform for the vocation that it is. In short, they have not really read or been taught to engage the works of those who came before them. And so, this contributive note regarding the river of our poetry.

African American poetry is not restricted to the United States. It is an hemispheric phenomenon as old as the dirge and the moan heard inside those first slave ships bound for the slave-breaking islands of the Caribbean, to Hispaniola and Mexico, long before they landed in Virginia. In the U.S., where drums were outlawed, it manifested as folklore, Spirituals and the Blues; in the Caribbean as Plena (Barbados), Bomba (Puerto Rico), Ska (Jamaica), with conga and steel drums, as with Merengue (Haiti) Mambo (Cuba) Calypso (Trinidad), like Samba (Brazil).

With European influences setting up the parameters over form and acceptability, here or there the poem was separated from music. Thus, slave narratives grew into novels and African poetry in the Americas often took on the semblance of European meter, pace and nuance (a la Phyllis Wheatley).

Today's reading rooms, soirees and poetry jams are hardly a new tradition, as they can be consistently traced back to 1888, the year that marked the end of American chattel slavery and the beginning of Negritude (both in Brazil) --during which period the children and grandchildren of slaves and runaways begin their careers as writers searching for new definition (like Charles Chestnut in fiction, Paul Lawrence Dunbar in poetry, and W.E.B. DuBois as researcher and social critic).

Of course, freedmen were writing long before then. North American (John Russworm, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, William Wells Brown) and Caribbean writers (Placido, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Ramon Emeterio Betances, Lola Rodriguez de Tio, Jose Marti) had been laying out a foundation for a literary African/American thought. But it is after 1888 that a genuine and continuing renaissance begins, as it now included all of the descendants of former slaves learning to define themselves on paper. Thus, Rag and the Blues as immediate metaphor for the thousands of artists in places like Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Santiago de Cuba, Le Cap and Harlem, who helped initiate a composite rebirth of African art spreading across the face of America, sometimes rolling like a teardrop, other times in denial of itself, but always from the spirit of intellect shaping its own voice.

By the 1920s and early '30s, social struggle and a budding aesthetic had converged throughout the colonial world. Political movements (unionism, socialism, communism, anarchism, Pan-Africanism, nationalism, independence) often intersected with a cultural counterpart (Creolism, Diepalism, Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance). Cross-fertilizing. Like the largest number of UNIA chapters during the Garvey years were in Louisiana and Cuba, corresponding to the growth of a U.S. National Negro Renaissance and a Cuban Negrismo movement also taking place. Each in their own way stood against European imperialism while uncovering the parameters of self-definition.

As with the many African and Latino American poets practicing the art today, the list of folks involved back then is endless. In addition to critics, researchers and activists, like Ida B. Wells, William Monroe Trotter, Carter G. Woodson, Richard B. Moore, Alain Locke, J.A. Rogers, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, and with people like Arturo Alfonso Schomburg serving as natural bridge between the English, Spanish, French diasporic communities, the poets themselves comprised a river of personnel: Pablo Neruda, Luis Pales Matos, Jose de Diego, Nicolas Guillen, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Velez, Alfredo Miranda Archilla, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedor Senghor, Leon Damas, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, and so many others who've not been as extensively published or read as these few. But their collective impact ushered in new forms and a continuum of literary stalwarts like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker Alexander, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and John Oliver Killens. Killens, by the way, along with historian John Henrik Clarke, co-founded the Harlem Writers Guild, the one group that definitively bridged the Harlem Renaissance of the '20s/'30s with the 1960s Black Arts Movement and the 1970s Nuyorican Poetry Phenomenon.

Those who workshopped alongside Killens, in or out of the Guild, include at least two generations of dramatists (Lonnie Elder III, Loften Mitchell, Charles Russell, Douglas Turner Ward, Ossie Davis), fiction writers (Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Piri Thomas, Maya Angelou, Louise Merriwhether, Sarah E. Wright, Richard Perry, Doris Jean Austin, Brenda Connor-Bey, Elizabeth Nunez Harrell, Nicholasa Mohr, Brenda Wilkerson, Arthur Flowers), poets and lyricists (Mari Evans, BJ Ashanti, Askia Muhammad Toure, Mervyn Taylor, Thulani Davis, Ntozake Shange, Fatisha, and Irving Burgie --the one who wrote most of the British Caribbean songs that first made Harry Belafonte famous).

With the Black Arts Movement, the proverbial Pushkin spark turned into flame as the 1966 National Black Writers Conference at Fisk University (organized by Killens) gave cognizance to what had already been taking place; thus we have the new poet-theoreticians, like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, Askia Toure, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Henry Dumas, alongside new critics, like Addison Gayle and Hoyt Fuller, new venues, like Umbra, Cannon Reed & Johnson, or the Watts Writers Workshop, through which Jayne Cortez and Quincy Troupe had developed their skills, or like Detroit-based Dudley Randall, through whose publishing efforts began the careers of Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez. Like The Last Poets, many of them were as influenced by Malcolm X as by Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Paul Robeson and DuBois.

By the late 1960s, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Jesus Papoleto Melendez and Felipe Luciano became the latest spanning between African American and Puerto Rican literature that had been previously bridged by the likes of Schomburg, Guillen and Jesus Colon. As the 1970s took off, a Nuyorican mix began its own sidestream fruition to both African American and Puerto Rican orthodoxy. Spanglish took its place beside AfroAmericanese as a new idiom, with poets Miguel Algarin, Lorraine Sutton, Americo Casiano, Miguel Pinero, Sandra Maria Esteves, Julio Marzan, Lucky Cienfuegos, Roberto Marquez, Jose Angel Figueroa, Tato Laviera, Noel Rico, Magdalena Gomez, Susana Cabanas and Pedro Pietri serving as initial progenitors to another poetic sensibility. Its availability and earned place has often been hindered by Anglo arrogance and Hispanophilia, caught, as these poets were, between an evolving aesthetic-in-exile influenced by Ebonics on the mainland and an active insular and extremely cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico that at first refused to even recognize this hybrid created out of U.S. colonialism.

During this same period, from the late 1960s straight into the 1980s, the tradition of small press and self-publishing (traceable to the 1730s, when Europe began allowing colonies to own printing presses) had expanded into roughly 1,000 independent magazines and publishing outlets under the influence or control of African and Latino Americans: Freedomways, Journal of Black Poetry, Hambone, Callaloo, Literati Chicago, The Rican Journal, Third World Press, Third Press, Quinto del Sol, Black Classics Press, Yardbird Reader, Mango Publications, Arte Publico Press, Black World/First World, Poettential Unlimited, Shamal Books, Bola Press, Kitchen Table Press, Single Action Productions, Blind Beggar Press, Drum Voices Revue, Harlem River Press, just to name a few.

Thus, sandwiched between the Black Arts Movement and the rise of Hip Hop is a linking generation of African and Latino American poets, producers and publishers who had come into their own (and many of them by the mid-1970s) to serve as the latest bridge connecting the continuum of an hemispheric African American literary canon. These were the students of Malcolm and Martin and H. Rap Brown, entering the new decade with their own resolve, reading, performing and organizing everywhere: in prisons, community centers, cafes, in homes and on the streets, at Kwanzaa festivals and Malcolm X commemoration programs, at political rallies and in the schools. These sidestream stalwarts, most abundant in places like New York, were the immediate parents of those who would later become Rap and Spoken Word (Chuck D., Reg E. Gaines, Bruce George) Artists.

They had entered the '70s knowing that the major publishing outlets had already slammed its doors on Black Literature. Thus, they became the generation that had proliferated the publishing world with their own gumption, giving rise to, if not solidifying the careers of an Alice Walker, a Toni Morrison and an Ntozake Shange. Poets-publishers-organizers who did the basework while working a 9-to-5, raising a family, studying and performing their craft. In New York City alone, these included Yusef Waliyaya from The East's African Street festivals, John Branch from the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, Rich Bartee of Poettential Unlmtd., Lois Elaine Griffith of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, George Edward Tait of the Afrikan Functional Theatre, Gary Johnston and C.D. Grant of Blind Beggar Press, Layding Kaliba now with African Voices, Barbara Smith of Kitchen Table Press, Abu Muhammad of Nubian Blues magazine, Glen Thompson of Harlem River Press. From them and through them, such poets as Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Akua Lezli Hope, Zizwe Ngafua, Dawad Philip, B.J. Ashanti, Ted Wilson, Malkia M'buzi Moore, A. Wanjiku J. Reynolds, and many others previously mentioned either began or continued finding outlets for their works to appear in print.

Meanwhile, music and poetry never did finalize the divorce Euro-Americans insisted upon. Not only were Hughes and Hurston experimenting with the "jazz poem" and the intonations of northern and southern folklore back in the 1930s, but from the BeBop and Afro-Cuban Jazz era straight through to the present Rap/Spoken Word epoch, musicians and poets have consistently uncovered the African tradition of incorporating sound and sense into a wholistic art form. Literature, music and dance. Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, Charlie Mingus, King Pleasure, Slim (Gailliard) & Slam (Stewart), Alvin Ailey had all eloquently continued that course. Singers Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks, Oscar Brown, Jr., and, of course, Nina Simone, had long ago fused poetry into the jazz voice (Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit was actually a poem someone had given her).

Of equal significance is the immediate link to Rap and Spoken Word. Musicians Weldon Irvine, Ahmed Abdullah and Oliver Lake, like their literary counterparts, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Jayne Cortez, Sekou Sundiata, Tom Mitchelson, Yusef Waliyaya, Cheryl Byron, Atiba Kwabena Wilson, Ngoma Hill, each in their turn, have preceded Sharif Simmons, UniVerses, 2nd To Last, etc., in fusing the poem with the idioms of music and dance.

And so the insistence that music and word are inseparable elements to the voice raising up and rising up comes full circle inside the currents of modern poetics. It's part of an ongoing continuum in constant evolution, an unfinished renaissance establishing its own parameters on its own terms. Like Sterling Brown once posed, "If it took Europe 300 years to unfold its renaissance, what makes you think that we can do it in six?"

And while it is homegrown North American, it is also cross-rooted in an African and Caribbean experience.

By Amin Sharif

What do we want? That is always the first and most pertinent question for the oppressed. During those long hot summers of the 1960s, almost every Black person was asking themselves that question. Then the simmering resentment of an entire race was beginning to be translated itself into a “cause”—into a movement. By the middle of the1960s, thousands of young voices were echoing the answer to that question throughout the southland. What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

By defining what they wanted—African-American youth, then the vanguard and most stout defenders of the African-American community—were able to launch a program of radical activism that led to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. African-American youth were ready to face dangers that many African-American men had previously cowered before in the South.

In the early 1960s, the segregated South was hundreds of times more dangerous than any drug infested urban centers of America today. Any Black man or woman who went against the forces of segregation faced the Ku Klux Klan-an invisible organization of racists whose brutality toward Black people make today’s Bloods and Cripps look like amateurs. And, the Klan was just the public face (mask) of white racism. There were many more thousands of unofficial (maskless) racists throughout Dixie—hell bent on enforcing the idea of white supremacy at any cost.

Despite all this, the Freedom Riders-African—American youth organized by Dr. King and SNCC—went into South armed, not with guns as so many of the youth are today, but with courage. This courage rose from a basic understanding of what it meant to be Black in a white nation. These young people understood that apathy about their future in America was dangerous as a Klansman’s rope—and still is for that matter.

The Freedom Riders rode buses throughout the Southland stopping at cities and towns to desegregate lunch counters and other public facilities. There are compelling black and white images of that time, if you wish to see them. They are most often shown to the public on Dr. King’s birthday. The images show powerful water hoses washing young Black men and women down streets, dogs tearing at their clothes, and redneck policemen beating them down.

Still, in the face of all that brutality, even as these young people were placed in police vans, their voices are never stifled. One could hear them singing as the jail cell door shut behind them about how each and everyone one had “got [their] mind of freedom.” More than the March on Washington, more than King’s eloquent speech of dreams, more than the burning cities of America after King’s death, it is the image of those courageous Black youth that define that time and that moment.

Today, we see youth in France on the rise. They have set a nation ablaze for the same reason that Black youth went to desegregate the American Southland decades ago. Like their Fourth World brothers and sisters in America, the Black and Arab youth of Europe have recognized that if they are apathetic about their future that they too will have none. They are not as prone toward patience with white European racism as the Freedom Riders were with the American version.

They are on a faster learning curve than the children of the American Civil Rights Movement. Yet what is shared by the black youth of the Alabama decades ago and the Arab and African youth of France today is that they have both come to see the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of Western democracy.

They each have presented checks to their respective western societies. They each have had those checks returned to them marked “insufficient funds.” Here, we would like to make an appeal to Europe on the matter of race. If you wish to avoid the amity that exists between the white and African American in the United States today, do not balk at paying the check. Do not procrastinate! Pay up now and the price will be cheap! The dark children of Europe like the Freedom Riders of America will not to be put off.

The old tactic of stalling might have been an acceptable option when the West was dealing with the first generation of emancipated Black slaves or the first generation of African and Arab immigrants. But today things are different. Such tactics have been rendered obsolete by the facts on the ground and your continued pronouncements of the glories of Western democracy.

How can you pay your white European citizens in the currency of freedom and equality and not spend as much as a franc on my freedom and equality, the African and Arab child of the West asks? What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now! How can you spend on wars to defend democracy everywhere else in the world and spend not a single pound to make democracy a reality for me?

Rather than speak to these dark children of Europe in platitudes, it would be better to admit your moral and political bankruptcy and be done with it. Admit that there is and will never be a place for the nigger in America or the Black African or the Muslim Arab in the Europe. We—niggers (Arabs, and Africans)—are willing to admit that this is the present state of affairs, even if you will not. What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

The rebellion of Fourth World youth in Europe is part and parcel of the rebellion started by Fourth World youth in America decades ago. They each have as their enemy a system of xenophobia and economic exploitation fostered by a so-called Western democracy. Just as the Black child in America became conscious long ago of the fact that George Washington, the father of American civilization, was a white man. So the African and Arab child in Europe is now aware that the fathers of their countries are also white men.

And, if white men are, so to speak, the fathers of all of Western civilization, then the darkness of their skin already makes each dark child an outcast. It is only the investment of the labor of their fathers . . . the very flesh and blood of their fathers that makes them American, French, or Belgium.

The West, of course, will answer that flesh and blood are not sufficient payment for citizenship in the West. You must speak perfect English or French. You must dress as men and women do in the West. And then there is the whole history of Western civilization to consider—a history of a time when there were no noisy, pushy Africans or Arabs among Europeans.

The answer of the dark child is always the same when these things are suggested: Our fathers tried to do all those things and what good did it do them? Could they drink from the same water fountain as the children of George Washington? Or get a decent job or find a place to stay as could the children of de Gaulle’s Grand Design? What do we want? Freedom! Could they even speak the name of the God they worshipped out loud? When do we want it? Now! And, as for your history, the dark child laughs, we hear you boast about it all too much!

Already Europe has started taking up tactics learned from the racist American south. It (France) has begun filling its prisons with Black and Arab youth just as was done with the Freedom Riders. Persecution . . . then prosecution—that is always the way of the oppressor. You will soon find that you may snuff out a fire here and there but the flame will remain. What flame do we speak of? Not the one by which the Molotov cocktail is lit by the Arab child on Parisian streets; you have nothing to fear from that flame.

That is simply the flame of spontaneity. You can always put that flame out with a club or a bullet. The flame of which we speak is the one that your very fathers and grandfathers once held high when the darkness of tyranny spread across your land. We speak of the flame of your own democratic revolution. The flame that burned into your fathers’ hearts the words: Brotherhood! Equality . . . Do you remember that flame? Or has Algeria and Vietnam clouded your memory?

No, we are passed all that, the European replies. These dark vagabond children have nothing to do with the Kasbah or the hut. If what you say is true, why have you banished them to the far borders of your city? Is it because out there you can not hear them shout: Freedom! When do we want it? Now! Do you remember Fanon? Do you remember what he said about these places of exile for the nigger and the Arab?

They are places “starved of bread, of meat, of clothes, of shoes . . . of light.” Yet you claim that the dark children among you have nothing to do with Algeria or Vietnam. In the mind of the dark child, the difference between the native town and the outskirts of Paris is unappreciable.

“Once you came to our country to rape us,” the dark child claims. “Now, we have come to your country to be raped. There is no difference between us and the niggers of America, now. That is why we scream as they once did—We want freedom!”

Let us be reasonable, Europe says. Do you expect us to give up our culture and our history just to appease these others? Even now the dark child looks at Europe and laughs when he hears this. Then he reaches for the gas can, the bottle, and the match. “Do they expect us to give up our history, our culture, our religion, and our very souls just to pick up their trash,” he asks a friend. “Better to rot away in a French prison than to give up what we are.” Be careful, Europe.

It was you who first spoke of your superiority over the native and then you not only lost a war, but your way. Now, you speak of your superiority over the son and the grandchild of the native. Is that Sartre in the corner smiling, clapping, and holding the dark child’s hand when you spout such nonsense? What is it that Jean-Paul is whispering into the child’s ear? Something about Jefferson and Chirac being the same white man who is wont to give up his slaves.

“Yes, they talk a good game,” Sartre says, “but in the end. The devil is the devil.”

The dark child of the Fourth World is most attentive when white men speak of being reasonable. What white men mean when they talk of what is reasonable in these situations is what is reasonable for them. If the white man’s reasonability means that the dark child must wait hat in hand for Europe to embrace him, his sisters and brothers, then we have the beginning of a nasty problem.

“You must have forgotten already what happens when you make dark children wait,” he explains. “Lumumba was a dark child who waited in ambush for your fathers. Mao, Che, Castro, Nkrumah, and Malcolm X—all were dark children. No Europe, your call for reasonableness will never do. The jig is up. You must put up or shut up! When you speak of the Rights of Man, you must let me know now if these words apply to me.”

What we have here, of course, is a case of unintended consequences regarding the racial and political policy of the West. What we mean by this is that it was never the intention or policy of the West to have the African or the Arab hear such slogans as "All men are created equal" or "Liberty, Fraternity," and the like. These words were given by God to white men. For centuries, it was believed that the African and the Arab—who said to possess no God or Logos—was incapable of pondering the complexities of such slogans.

But then, things changed. Like a parrot mimicking its owner, the Black African spoke the words of his master, “Liberty. Fraternity, Equality.” Then the Arab miraculously followed the Black man’s lead. For awhile there was hope that this mimicry could be turned into real social progress for the Black African and the Arab, at least in the eyes of Europe. In the United States, no such hope was held out for their niggers.

The nigger would always remain more ape than human down in Dixie. Those were the heady days for both native and master. “We can teach them to worship our whiteness,” Europe, the master, cried. “If that does not work, we can teach them to fear our power.” On native side, there were more than enough Blacks and Arabs ready to serve whiteness and fear power. So you can see it was the beginning of an equitable arrangement: One man readily giving whiteness and the other readily receiving it.

So it was for a time. In France, Portugal, and Belgium, the policy was to have the African and the Arab brought to Europe and learn to mimic all things European. Then return these human parrots to their native lands. But when the African parrot spoke to Africans and the Arab parrot spoke to Arabs suspicion among the natives grew. There was talk in the village of white Black men possessed by evil spirits and strange Arabs possessed by the jinn.

These human parrots came to be known among the natives as “enemy brothers.” What grew up in the hearts of the black Black man and the true Arab was resistance against the entire arrangement. For what the African and Arab feared most was the power of whiteness to turn them into unnatural beings—zombies and demons and enemy brothers.

When the native African and Arab refuse to become Europe’s parrots, worship whiteness and fear power, fearful words appeared in their mouths: Revolution! Self-determination! Independence! Things had, as they often do between the oppressor and the oppressed, gone strangely wrong.

Do you remember any of this, great Europe? Do you remember the cost in flesh and blood? If you failed with the father what makes you think that you will fare any better with the son or grandson. Do not be fooled by those among you who say that it is possible to make the children dance to music where their fathers’ would not. Can’t you see that your cry for secularism is just another attempt to have white Black men and strange Arabs produce enemy brothers within your midst?

Secularism is what you cry. But worship whiteness and fear power is all that your words convey to the dark children of Europe. You may beat, imprison, and make these children outcasts in your land. But, in the end, their mouths will be filled with words as fearful as those uttered by their fathers at Dien Bien Phu and Algiers: Democracy! Equality! Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

Here is the crux of the matter. If the West was what it claimed to be, it would never have gotten itself into this situation. For, if the greatness of Western democracy has to be defended with clubs, bullets, police dogs and other such weapons against the dark children of the world, then all that it has already said about itself is nothing more than “false advertisement.”

What the dark children of America call “hype.” It is not enough in the post-modern age to talk of democratic rights for white men or the rich and the powerful in Europe or America. The democratic slogans of the West must now be translated into rights for all persons who live and work on her soil. If the West fails to recognize this responsibility then those who are denied their democratic rights have a revolutionary responsibility to acquire them through any and every means.

We know that the West will say that this is not how things are done in a democracy. There is the rule of law, etc. To this, we answer that the King of England spoke of the rule of law to the colonies. The King of France spoke of the rule of law to the peasant. The rule of law then was based upon the false divinity of the king. Today, the rule of law in regard to the Black African and the Arab in Europe is based upon the false divinity of “whiteness.”

It is precisely the latter rule of law that the Black African, the Arab, and the Asian—the entire Fourth World oppressed in the West—wishes to dispense with today. Whenever the Rights of Men are abridged or abrogated, the rule of law is evoked by the ruling class or the oppressor. When Dred Scott, a runaway slave in America, appealed to the very system that was charged with protecting the rule of law, he was told that the Black man has no rights that white men need respect.

Indeed, there has never been a single significant right taken from the oppressor by the oppressed by rule of law! The rule of law is fashioned by men and it is men who make it an equalitarian tool or a ruse for oppression.

If all that has been stated above is the crux of the matter, the only question that remains to be answered is what will the West do about Fourth World people within its midst. In the United States which has had the longest experience with dealing with African Americans, the first Fourth World people of the Western Hemisphere, the prospects for the resolution of the problem of race are grim.

America is in the grip of a wave of conservatism that is, if not covertly racist, at least overtly indifferent to all matters of race. What is worst is that the forces of opposition to American conservatism—the Democratic Party and other such liberals, both Black and white—have become spineless imitations of the very forces that would render the problem of racism invisible within America. Until Hurricane Katrina, these combined forces gave the world no reason to think that, other than in the vaguest of terms, American racism was nothing more than a vestige of the past.

But Katrina exposed America’s ugly under belly—those people who live “beneath the underdog” in the most economically advanced sector of the West—and the world was shocked. The fault line between whiteness, wealth, and power and blackness, poverty, and powerlessness was fully exposed. Once again, questions of race and poverty became credible issues for discussion in the political arena—at least for the moment.

Europe has a long standing history of racism that it would also like to render invisible. Anti-Semitism is but another form of racism. The Jews of Europe can recount their own history of oppression better than anyone else. But, even before Hitler spoke of a “final solution, there were a thousand pogroms carried out all over Europe against them. The world has not forgotten from where the term “wandering Jew” originated. When Europe was not demonizing the Jew, it was speaking of the “enemy” Moor from whose hands the Holy Land must be liberated. Shortly, after the Muslims were purged from Europe, there began the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Fanon points out that nearly “four-fifths” of the dark people of the world were under some form of colonialism during Europe’s imperialist period.

We can easily see that the legacy of racism in the West is both deep and abiding. Yet the West has failed to successfully face and resolve its racist tendencies. This is not to say that it has not attempted to wrestle with these problems. In America, Slavery, the Civil War, the Civil Rights movements were all periods when she attempted to tackle her greatest internal problem in the United States. But America grew weary of the race problem. She will undoubtedly pay for her neglect of the race issue sooner or later. America should not be fooled by the current lack of activism among the African American. The racial front has been quiet before and then suddenly America has been rocked by some form of Black militancy.

Now, in France, the internal problem of race and economic oppression has made itself evident in form of urban riots. Already she is responding with a knee jerk reaction to the problem. France has already made the mistake of demonizing the rioters—Black and Arab. They are “thugs” on our streets the French Minister of Interior claims. They are “looters” on our streets the American media says of the Black and poor victims of New Orleans.

Has racism no other strategy at its disposal? The cry of barbarians at the gate is always thrown up in these situations as fodder for the white masses. It is only when the fodder of prejudice has been thoroughly digested, passed through the intestines, and out through their bowels that the white masses are made ready for the truth. It is only then that France or America is ready to admit that it has a “race problem.”

But, the Black American, the Afro-European, and the Arab-European know this. “What do you intend to do about it?” is what they want to know. There is always a rush of wind and then silence when this question is asked in Washington or Paris. For the oppressed of the Fourth World, the rushing wind is no more than the collective passing of gas from the white masses and the silence is their complicity with institutional racism.

In the end, it may not matter what the West intends to do about the problem of Fourth World people within her midst. It may be that the resolution of this internal problem is wholly in the hands of Fourth World people in the West—just as the resolution of the external problem of colonialism rested solely in the hands of Third World people.

Still, whenever the oppressed confront their oppressor, there exists for some reason a psychological necessity to lay their compliant at their feet—to give fair warning as Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed of the shit storm on the horizon. That is all that the riots in France signify at this time. “Do something about our problems,” that is always the first cry of the oppressed masses to the oppressor.

But almost always their appeals go unheard and a period of intense activism follows. It is then that the complaints are converted in to shouts for action. “What do we want! Freedom! When do we want it! Now! All this, history informs us, is prelude to revolutionary action. Perhaps that is what is needed in the West—revolutionary action to shake it to its foundations.

By Amin Sharif

What do we want? That is always the first and most pertinent question for the oppressed. During those long hot summers of the 1960s, almost every Black person was asking themselves that question. Then the simmering resentment of an entire race was beginning to be translated itself into a “cause”—into a movement. By the middle of the1960s, thousands of young voices were echoing the answer to that question throughout the southland. What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

By defining what they wanted—African-American youth, then the vanguard and most stout defenders of the African-American community—were able to launch a program of radical activism that led to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. African-American youth were ready to face dangers that many African-American men had previously cowered before in the South.

In the early 1960s, the segregated South was hundreds of times more dangerous than any drug infested urban centers of America today. Any Black man or woman who went against the forces of segregation faced the Ku Klux Klan-an invisible organization of racists whose brutality toward Black people make today’s Bloods and Cripps look like amateurs. And, the Klan was just the public face (mask) of white racism. There were many more thousands of unofficial (maskless) racists throughout Dixie—hell bent on enforcing the idea of white supremacy at any cost.

Despite all this, the Freedom Riders-African—American youth organized by Dr. King and SNCC—went into South armed, not with guns as so many of the youth are today, but with courage. This courage rose from a basic understanding of what it meant to be Black in a white nation. These young people understood that apathy about their future in America was dangerous as a Klansman’s rope—and still is for that matter.

The Freedom Riders rode buses throughout the Southland stopping at cities and towns to desegregate lunch counters and other public facilities. There are compelling black and white images of that time, if you wish to see them. They are most often shown to the public on Dr. King’s birthday. The images show powerful water hoses washing young Black men and women down streets, dogs tearing at their clothes, and redneck policemen beating them down.

Still, in the face of all that brutality, even as these young people were placed in police vans, their voices are never stifled. One could hear them singing as the jail cell door shut behind them about how each and everyone one had “got [their] mind of freedom.” More than the March on Washington, more than King’s eloquent speech of dreams, more than the burning cities of America after King’s death, it is the image of those courageous Black youth that define that time and that moment.

Today, we see youth in France on the rise. They have set a nation ablaze for the same reason that Black youth went to desegregate the American Southland decades ago. Like their Fourth World brothers and sisters in America, the Black and Arab youth of Europe have recognized that if they are apathetic about their future that they too will have none. They are not as prone toward patience with white European racism as the Freedom Riders were with the American version.

They are on a faster learning curve than the children of the American Civil Rights Movement. Yet what is shared by the black youth of the Alabama decades ago and the Arab and African youth of France today is that they have both come to see the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of Western democracy.

They each have presented checks to their respective western societies. They each have had those checks returned to them marked “insufficient funds.” Here, we would like to make an appeal to Europe on the matter of race. If you wish to avoid the amity that exists between the white and African American in the United States today, do not balk at paying the check. Do not procrastinate! Pay up now and the price will be cheap! The dark children of Europe like the Freedom Riders of America will not to be put off.

The old tactic of stalling might have been an acceptable option when the West was dealing with the first generation of emancipated Black slaves or the first generation of African and Arab immigrants. But today things are different. Such tactics have been rendered obsolete by the facts on the ground and your continued pronouncements of the glories of Western democracy.

How can you pay your white European citizens in the currency of freedom and equality and not spend as much as a franc on my freedom and equality, the African and Arab child of the West asks? What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now! How can you spend on wars to defend democracy everywhere else in the world and spend not a single pound to make democracy a reality for me?

Rather than speak to these dark children of Europe in platitudes, it would be better to admit your moral and political bankruptcy and be done with it. Admit that there is and will never be a place for the nigger in America or the Black African or the Muslim Arab in the Europe. We—niggers (Arabs, and Africans)—are willing to admit that this is the present state of affairs, even if you will not. What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

The rebellion of Fourth World youth in Europe is part and parcel of the rebellion started by Fourth World youth in America decades ago. They each have as their enemy a system of xenophobia and economic exploitation fostered by a so-called Western democracy. Just as the Black child in America became conscious long ago of the fact that George Washington, the father of American civilization, was a white man. So the African and Arab child in Europe is now aware that the fathers of their countries are also white men.

And, if white men are, so to speak, the fathers of all of Western civilization, then the darkness of their skin already makes each dark child an outcast. It is only the investment of the labor of their fathers . . . the very flesh and blood of their fathers that makes them American, French, or Belgium.

The West, of course, will answer that flesh and blood are not sufficient payment for citizenship in the West. You must speak perfect English or French. You must dress as men and women do in the West. And then there is the whole history of Western civilization to consider—a history of a time when there were no noisy, pushy Africans or Arabs among Europeans.

The answer of the dark child is always the same when these things are suggested: Our fathers tried to do all those things and what good did it do them? Could they drink from the same water fountain as the children of George Washington? Or get a decent job or find a place to stay as could the children of de Gaulle’s Grand Design? What do we want? Freedom! Could they even speak the name of the God they worshipped out loud? When do we want it? Now! And, as for your history, the dark child laughs, we hear you boast about it all too much!

Already Europe has started taking up tactics learned from the racist American south. It (France) has begun filling its prisons with Black and Arab youth just as was done with the Freedom Riders. Persecution . . . then prosecution—that is always the way of the oppressor. You will soon find that you may snuff out a fire here and there but the flame will remain. What flame do we speak of? Not the one by which the Molotov cocktail is lit by the Arab child on Parisian streets; you have nothing to fear from that flame.

That is simply the flame of spontaneity. You can always put that flame out with a club or a bullet. The flame of which we speak is the one that your very fathers and grandfathers once held high when the darkness of tyranny spread across your land. We speak of the flame of your own democratic revolution. The flame that burned into your fathers’ hearts the words: Brotherhood! Equality . . . Do you remember that flame? Or has Algeria and Vietnam clouded your memory?

No, we are passed all that, the European replies. These dark vagabond children have nothing to do with the Kasbah or the hut. If what you say is true, why have you banished them to the far borders of your city? Is it because out there you can not hear them shout: Freedom! When do we want it? Now! Do you remember Fanon? Do you remember what he said about these places of exile for the nigger and the Arab?

They are places “starved of bread, of meat, of clothes, of shoes . . . of light.” Yet you claim that the dark children among you have nothing to do with Algeria or Vietnam. In the mind of the dark child, the difference between the native town and the outskirts of Paris is unappreciable.

“Once you came to our country to rape us,” the dark child claims. “Now, we have come to your country to be raped. There is no difference between us and the niggers of America, now. That is why we scream as they once did—We want freedom!”

Let us be reasonable, Europe says. Do you expect us to give up our culture and our history just to appease these others? Even now the dark child looks at Europe and laughs when he hears this. Then he reaches for the gas can, the bottle, and the match. “Do they expect us to give up our history, our culture, our religion, and our very souls just to pick up their trash,” he asks a friend. “Better to rot away in a French prison than to give up what we are.” Be careful, Europe.

It was you who first spoke of your superiority over the native and then you not only lost a war, but your way. Now, you speak of your superiority over the son and the grandchild of the native. Is that Sartre in the corner smiling, clapping, and holding the dark child’s hand when you spout such nonsense? What is it that Jean-Paul is whispering into the child’s ear? Something about Jefferson and Chirac being the same white man who is wont to give up his slaves.

“Yes, they talk a good game,” Sartre says, “but in the end. The devil is the devil.”

The dark child of the Fourth World is most attentive when white men speak of being reasonable. What white men mean when they talk of what is reasonable in these situations is what is reasonable for them. If the white man’s reasonability means that the dark child must wait hat in hand for Europe to embrace him, his sisters and brothers, then we have the beginning of a nasty problem.

“You must have forgotten already what happens when you make dark children wait,” he explains. “Lumumba was a dark child who waited in ambush for your fathers. Mao, Che, Castro, Nkrumah, and Malcolm X—all were dark children. No Europe, your call for reasonableness will never do. The jig is up. You must put up or shut up! When you speak of the Rights of Man, you must let me know now if these words apply to me.”

What we have here, of course, is a case of unintended consequences regarding the racial and political policy of the West. What we mean by this is that it was never the intention or policy of the West to have the African or the Arab hear such slogans as "All men are created equal" or "Liberty, Fraternity," and the like. These words were given by God to white men. For centuries, it was believed that the African and the Arab—who said to possess no God or Logos—was incapable of pondering the complexities of such slogans.

But then, things changed. Like a parrot mimicking its owner, the Black African spoke the words of his master, “Liberty. Fraternity, Equality.” Then the Arab miraculously followed the Black man’s lead. For awhile there was hope that this mimicry could be turned into real social progress for the Black African and the Arab, at least in the eyes of Europe. In the United States, no such hope was held out for their niggers.

The nigger would always remain more ape than human down in Dixie. Those were the heady days for both native and master. “We can teach them to worship our whiteness,” Europe, the master, cried. “If that does not work, we can teach them to fear our power.” On native side, there were more than enough Blacks and Arabs ready to serve whiteness and fear power. So you can see it was the beginning of an equitable arrangement: One man readily giving whiteness and the other readily receiving it.

So it was for a time. In France, Portugal, and Belgium, the policy was to have the African and the Arab brought to Europe and learn to mimic all things European. Then return these human parrots to their native lands. But when the African parrot spoke to Africans and the Arab parrot spoke to Arabs suspicion among the natives grew. There was talk in the village of white Black men possessed by evil spirits and strange Arabs possessed by the jinn.

These human parrots came to be known among the natives as “enemy brothers.” What grew up in the hearts of the black Black man and the true Arab was resistance against the entire arrangement. For what the African and Arab feared most was the power of whiteness to turn them into unnatural beings—zombies and demons and enemy brothers.

When the native African and Arab refuse to become Europe’s parrots, worship whiteness and fear power, fearful words appeared in their mouths: Revolution! Self-determination! Independence! Things had, as they often do between the oppressor and the oppressed, gone strangely wrong.

Do you remember any of this, great Europe? Do you remember the cost in flesh and blood? If you failed with the father what makes you think that you will fare any better with the son or grandson. Do not be fooled by those among you who say that it is possible to make the children dance to music where their fathers’ would not. Can’t you see that your cry for secularism is just another attempt to have white Black men and strange Arabs produce enemy brothers within your midst?

Secularism is what you cry. But worship whiteness and fear power is all that your words convey to the dark children of Europe. You may beat, imprison, and make these children outcasts in your land. But, in the end, their mouths will be filled with words as fearful as those uttered by their fathers at Dien Bien Phu and Algiers: Democracy! Equality! Freedom! When do we want it? Now!

Here is the crux of the matter. If the West was what it claimed to be, it would never have gotten itself into this situation. For, if the greatness of Western democracy has to be defended with clubs, bullets, police dogs and other such weapons against the dark children of the world, then all that it has already said about itself is nothing more than “false advertisement.”

What the dark children of America call “hype.” It is not enough in the post-modern age to talk of democratic rights for white men or the rich and the powerful in Europe or America. The democratic slogans of the West must now be translated into rights for all persons who live and work on her soil. If the West fails to recognize this responsibility then those who are denied their democratic rights have a revolutionary responsibility to acquire them through any and every means.

We know that the West will say that this is not how things are done in a democracy. There is the rule of law, etc. To this, we answer that the King of England spoke of the rule of law to the colonies. The King of France spoke of the rule of law to the peasant. The rule of law then was based upon the false divinity of the king. Today, the rule of law in regard to the Black African and the Arab in Europe is based upon the false divinity of “whiteness.”

It is precisely the latter rule of law that the Black African, the Arab, and the Asian—the entire Fourth World oppressed in the West—wishes to dispense with today. Whenever the Rights of Men are abridged or abrogated, the rule of law is evoked by the ruling class or the oppressor. When Dred Scott, a runaway slave in America, appealed to the very system that was charged with protecting the rule of law, he was told that the Black man has no rights that white men need respect.

Indeed, there has never been a single significant right taken from the oppressor by the oppressed by rule of law! The rule of law is fashioned by men and it is men who make it an equalitarian tool or a ruse for oppression.

If all that has been stated above is the crux of the matter, the only question that remains to be answered is what will the West do about Fourth World people within its midst. In the United States which has had the longest experience with dealing with African Americans, the first Fourth World people of the Western Hemisphere, the prospects for the resolution of the problem of race are grim.

America is in the grip of a wave of conservatism that is, if not covertly racist, at least overtly indifferent to all matters of race. What is worst is that the forces of opposition to American conservatism—the Democratic Party and other such liberals, both Black and white—have become spineless imitations of the very forces that would render the problem of racism invisible within America. Until Hurricane Katrina, these combined forces gave the world no reason to think that, other than in the vaguest of terms, American racism was nothing more than a vestige of the past.

But Katrina exposed America’s ugly under belly—those people who live “beneath the underdog” in the most economically advanced sector of the West—and the world was shocked. The fault line between whiteness, wealth, and power and blackness, poverty, and powerlessness was fully exposed. Once again, questions of race and poverty became credible issues for discussion in the political arena—at least for the moment.

Europe has a long standing history of racism that it would also like to render invisible. Anti-Semitism is but another form of racism. The Jews of Europe can recount their own history of oppression better than anyone else. But, even before Hitler spoke of a “final solution, there were a thousand pogroms carried out all over Europe against them. The world has not forgotten from where the term “wandering Jew” originated. When Europe was not demonizing the Jew, it was speaking of the “enemy” Moor from whose hands the Holy Land must be liberated. Shortly, after the Muslims were purged from Europe, there began the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Fanon points out that nearly “four-fifths” of the dark people of the world were under some form of colonialism during Europe’s imperialist period.

We can easily see that the legacy of racism in the West is both deep and abiding. Yet the West has failed to successfully face and resolve its racist tendencies. This is not to say that it has not attempted to wrestle with these problems. In America, Slavery, the Civil War, the Civil Rights movements were all periods when she attempted to tackle her greatest internal problem in the United States. But America grew weary of the race problem. She will undoubtedly pay for her neglect of the race issue sooner or later. America should not be fooled by the current lack of activism among the African American. The racial front has been quiet before and then suddenly America has been rocked by some form of Black militancy.

Now, in France, the internal problem of race and economic oppression has made itself evident in form of urban riots. Already she is responding with a knee jerk reaction to the problem. France has already made the mistake of demonizing the rioters—Black and Arab. They are “thugs” on our streets the French Minister of Interior claims. They are “looters” on our streets the American media says of the Black and poor victims of New Orleans.

Has racism no other strategy at its disposal? The cry of barbarians at the gate is always thrown up in these situations as fodder for the white masses. It is only when the fodder of prejudice has been thoroughly digested, passed through the intestines, and out through their bowels that the white masses are made ready for the truth. It is only then that France or America is ready to admit that it has a “race problem.”

But, the Black American, the Afro-European, and the Arab-European know this. “What do you intend to do about it?” is what they want to know. There is always a rush of wind and then silence when this question is asked in Washington or Paris. For the oppressed of the Fourth World, the rushing wind is no more than the collective passing of gas from the white masses and the silence is their complicity with institutional racism.

In the end, it may not matter what the West intends to do about the problem of Fourth World people within her midst. It may be that the resolution of this internal problem is wholly in the hands of Fourth World people in the West—just as the resolution of the external problem of colonialism rested solely in the hands of Third World people.

Still, whenever the oppressed confront their oppressor, there exists for some reason a psychological necessity to lay their compliant at their feet—to give fair warning as Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed of the shit storm on the horizon. That is all that the riots in France signify at this time. “Do something about our problems,” that is always the first cry of the oppressed masses to the oppressor.

But almost always their appeals go unheard and a period of intense activism follows. It is then that the complaints are converted in to shouts for action. “What do we want! Freedom! When do we want it! Now! All this, history informs us, is prelude to revolutionary action. Perhaps that is what is needed in the West—revolutionary action to shake it to its foundations.

By Sonia Shah

“To critics who would the say , well then, how does it make sense to talk about Asian American women at all? I would respond: It makes as much sense as it does to talk about white people or black people or Latinos. These racial groups admit just as much, if not more, diversity within their ranks than they have similarities.

In the end, they are historical constructs, kept in place by social and political institutions, in service of hierarchical, racially biased society. White people include poor Irish Catholic immigrants, rich WASPS, and Jewish intellectual.

They are at least as different as they are similar. But it makes sense to talk about them as a group because they all share the same rung on the racial hierarchy, which, in many areas of life, is the most significant determinant of their social status in the United States.

More than their shared language, ethnic heritage, or class, their Whiteness determines who they live with, who they go to school with, what kind or jobs they get, how much money they make, and whom they start their families.”

Along with that here is a reliable breakdown of why the old school social engineers organizations no longer work

by William Wei

It has been castigated for catering to middle-class women who are mainly interested in enhancing their employment oppurtunities....[the organization believes that] it will be the professional, rather then the workers, who will be the vanguard of social change in the United States. Besides, its leaders claim, when it organizes activities that focus mainly on middle-class women, it is merely responding to the wishes of the majority of its members

by ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN

Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.

I can still remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach during those proceedings, when it became clear that the President had so systematically abused the powers of the presidency and so threatened the rule of law that he had to be removed from office. As a Democrat who opposed many of President Nixon's policies, I still found voting for his impeachment to be one of the most sobering and unpleasant tasks I ever had to undertake. None of the members of the committee took pleasure in voting for impeachment; after all, Democrat or Republican, Nixon was still our President.

At the time, I hoped that our committee's work would send a strong signal to future Presidents that they had to obey the rule of law. I was wrong.

Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail, something I have written about in these pages [see Holtzman, "Torture and Accountability," July 18/25, 2005]. These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq. But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.

As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.

The framers of our Constitution feared executive power run amok and provided the remedy of impeachment to protect against it. While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity.

But impeachment and removal from office will not happen unless the American people are convinced of its necessity after a full and fair inquiry into the facts and law is conducted. That inquiry must commence now.

Warrantless Wiretaps

On December 17 President Bush acknowledged that he repeatedly authorized wiretaps, without obtaining a warrant, of American citizens engaged in international calls. On the face of it, these warrantless wiretaps violate FISA, which requires court approval for national security wiretaps and sets up a special procedure for obtaining it. Violation of the law is a felony.

While many facts about these wiretaps are unknown, it now appears that thousands of calls were monitored and that the information obtained may have been widely circulated among federal agencies. It also appears that a number of government officials considered the warrantless wiretaps of dubious legality. Reportedly, several people in the National Security Agency refused to participate in them, and a deputy attorney general even declined to sign off on some aspects of these wiretaps. The special FISA court has raised concerns as well, and a judge on that court has resigned, apparently in protest.

FISA was enacted in 1978, against the backdrop of Watergate, to prevent the widespread abuses in domestic surveillance that were disclosed in Congressional hearings. Among his other abuses of power, President Nixon ordered the FBI to conduct warrantless wiretaps of seventeen journalists and White House staffers. Although Nixon claimed the wiretaps were done for national security purposes, they were undertaken for political purposes and were illegal. Just as Bush's warrantless wiretaps grew out of the 9/11 attacks, Nixon's illegal wiretaps grew out of the Vietnam War and the opposition to it. In fact, the first illegal Nixon wiretap was of a reporter who, in 1969, revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a program that President Nixon wanted to hide from the American people and Congress. Nixon's illegal wiretaps formed one of the many grounds for the articles of impeachment voted against him by a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee.

Congress explicitly intended FISA to strike a balance between the legitimate requirements of national security on the one hand and the need both to protect against presidential abuses and to safeguard personal privacy on the other. From Watergate, Congress knew that a President was fully capable of wiretapping under a false claim of national security. That is why the law requires court review of national security wiretaps. Congress understood that because of the huge invasion of privacy involved in wiretaps, there should be checks in place on the executive branch to protect against overzealous and unnecessary wiretapping. At the same time, Congress created special procedures to facilitate obtaining these warrants when justified. Congress also recognized the need for emergency action: The President was given the power to start a wiretap without a warrant as long as court permission was obtained within three days.

FISA can scarcely be claimed to create any obstacle to justified national security wiretaps. Since 1978, when the law was enacted, more than 10,000 national security warrants have been approved by the FISA court; only four have been turned down.

Two legal arguments have been offered for the President's right to violate the law, both of which have been seriously questioned by members of Congress of both parties and by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in a recent analysis. The first--highly dangerous in its sweep and implications--is that the President has the constitutional right as Commander in Chief to break any US law on the grounds of national security. As the CRS analysis points out, the Supreme Court has never upheld the President's right to do this in the area of wiretapping, nor has it ever granted the President a "monopoly over war-powers" or recognized him as "Commander in Chief of the country" as opposed to Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. If the President is permitted to break the law on wiretapping on his own say-so, then a President can break any other law on his own say-so--a formula for dictatorship. This is not a theoretical danger: President Bush has recently claimed the right as Commander in Chief to violate the McCain amendment banning torture and degrading treatment of detainees. Nor is the requirement that national security be at stake any safeguard. We saw in Watergate how President Nixon falsely and cynically used that argument to cover up ordinary crimes and political misdeeds.

Ours is a government of limited power. We learn in elementary school the concept of checks and balances. Those checks do not vanish in wartime; the President's role as Commander in Chief does not swallow up Congress's powers or the Bill of Rights. Given the framers' skepticism about executive power and warmaking--there was no functional standing army at the beginning of the nation, so the President's powers as Commander in Chief depended on Congress's willingness to create and expand an army--it is impossible to find in the Constitution unilateral presidential authority to act against US citizens in a way that violates US laws, even in wartime. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently wrote, "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

The second legal argument in defense of Bush's warrantless wiretaps rests on an erroneous statutory interpretation. According to this argument, Congress authorized the Administration to place wiretaps without court approval when it adopted the 2001 resolution authorizing military force against the Taliban and Al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks. In the first place, the force resolution doesn't mention wiretaps. And given that Congress has traditionally placed so many restrictions on wiretapping because of its extremely intrusive qualities, there would undoubtedly have been vigorous debate if anyone thought the force resolution would roll back FISA. In fact, the legislative history of the force resolution shows that Congress had no intention of broadening the scope of presidential warmaking powers to cover activity in the United States. According to Senator Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who negotiated the resolution with the White House, the Administration wanted to include language explicitly enlarging the President's warmaking powers to include domestic activity. That language was rejected. Obviously, if the Administration felt it already had the power, it would not have tried to insert the language into the resolution.

What then was the reason for avoiding the FISA court? President Bush suggested that there was no time to get the warrants. But this cannot be true, because FISA permits wiretaps without warrants in emergencies as long as court approval is obtained within three days. Moreover, there is evidence that the President knew the warrantless wiretapping was illegal. In 2004, when the violations had been going on for some time, President Bush told a Buffalo, New York, audience that "a wiretap requires a court order." He went on to say that "when we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

Indeed, the claim that to protect Americans the President needs to be able to avoid court review of his wiretap applications rings hollow. It is unclear why or in what way the existing law, requiring court approval, is not satisfactory. And, if the law is too cumbersome or inapplicable to modern technology, then it is unclear why the President did not seek to revise it instead of disregarding it and thus jeopardizing many otherwise legitimate anti-terrorism prosecutions. His defenders' claim that changing the law would have given away secrets is unacceptable. There are procedures for considering classified information in Congress. Since no good reason has been given for avoiding the FISA court, it is reasonable to suspect that the real reason may have been that the wiretaps, like those President Nixon ordered in Watergate, involved journalists or anti-Bush activists or were improper in other ways and would not have been approved.

It is also curious that President Bush seems so concerned with the imaginary dangers to Americans posed by US courts but remains so apparently unconcerned about fixing some of the real holes in our security. For example, FBI computers--which were unable to search two words at once, like "flight schools," a defect that impaired the Bureau's ability to identify the 9/11 attackers beforehand--still haven't been brought into the twenty-first century. Given Vice President Cheney's longstanding ambition to throw off the constraints on executive power imposed in response to Watergate and the Vietnam War, it may well be that the warrantless wiretap program has had much more to do with restoring the trappings of the Nixon imperial presidency than it ever had to do with protecting national security.

Subverting Our Democracy

A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war. It is not just that it is cowardly and abhorrent to trick others into giving their lives for a nonexistent threat, or even that making false statements might in some circumstances be a crime. It is that the decision to go to war is the gravest decision a nation can make, and in a democracy the people and their elected representatives, when there is no imminent attack on the United States to repel, have the right to make it. Given that the consequences can be death for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people--as well as the diversion of vast sums of money to the war effort--the fraud cannot be tolerated. That both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of misleading the nation into military action and neither was impeached for it makes it more, not less, important to hold Bush accountable.

Once it was clear that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, President Bush tried to blame "bad intelligence" for the decision to go to war, apparently to show that the WMD claim was not a deliberate deception. But bad intelligence had little or nothing to do with the main arguments used to win popular support for the invasion of Iraq.

First, there was no serious intelligence--good or bad--to support the Administration's suggestion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots. Nonetheless, the Administration repeatedly tried to claim the connection to show that the invasion was a justified response to 9/11 (like the declaration of war against Japan for Pearl Harbor). The claim was a sheer fabrication.

Second, there was no reliable intelligence to support the Administration's claim that Saddam was about to acquire nuclear weapons capability. The specter of the "mushroom cloud," which frightened many Americans into believing that the invasion of Iraq was necessary for our self-defense, was made up out of whole cloth. As for the biological and chemical weapons, even if, as reported, the CIA director told the President that these existed in Iraq, the Administration still had plenty of information suggesting the contrary.

The deliberateness of the deception has also been confirmed by a British source: the Downing Street memo, the official record of Prime Minister Tony Blair's July 2002 meeting with his top Cabinet officials. At the meeting the chief of British intelligence, who had just returned from the United States, reported that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, the Bush Administration was reported to be in the process of cooking up fake intelligence and facts to justify going to war in Iraq.

During the Nixon impeachment proceedings, I drafted the resolution of impeachment to hold President Nixon accountable for concealing from Congress the bombing of Cambodia he initiated. But the committee did not approve it, probably because it might appear political--in other words, stemming from opposition to the war instead of to the President's abuse of his warmaking powers.

With respect to President Bush and the Iraq War, there is not likely to be any such confusion. Most Americans know that his rationale for the war turned out to be untrue; for them the question is whether the President lied, and if so, what the remedies are for his misconduct.

The Failure to Take Care

Upon assuming the presidency, Bush took an oath of office in which he swore to take care that the laws would be faithfully executed. Impeachment cannot be used to remove a President for maladministration, as the debates on ratifying the Constitution show. But President Bush has been guilty of such gross incompetence or reckless indifference to his obligation to execute the laws faithfully as to call into question whether he takes his oath seriously or is capable of doing so.

The most egregious example is the conduct of the war in Iraq. Unconscionably and unaccountably, the Administration failed to provide US soldiers with bulletproof vests or appropriately armored vehicles. A recent Pentagon study disclosed that proper bulletproof vests would have saved hundreds of lives. Why wasn't the commencement of hostilities postponed until the troops were properly outfitted? There are numerous suggestions that the timing was prompted by political, not military, concerns. The United States was under no imminent threat of attack by Saddam Hussein, and the Administration knew it. They delayed the marketing of the war until Americans finished their summer vacations because "you don't introduce new products in August." As the Downing Street memo revealed, the timeline for the war was set to start thirty days before the 2002 Congressional elections.

And there was no serious plan for the aftermath of the war, a fact also noted in the Downing Street memo. The President's failure as Commander in Chief to protect the troops by arming them properly, and his failure to plan for the occupation, cost dearly in lives and taxpayer dollars. This was not mere negligence or oversight--in other words, maladministration--but reflected a reckless and grotesque disregard for the welfare of the troops and an utter indifference to the need for proper governance of a country after occupation. As such, these failures violated the requirements of the President's oath of office. If they are proven to be the product of political objectives, they could constitute impeachable offenses on those grounds alone.

Torture and Other Abuses of Power

President Bush recently proclaimed, "We do not torture." In view of the revelations of the CIA's secret jails and practice of rendition, not to mention the Abu Ghraib scandal, the statement borders on the absurd, recalling Nixon's famous claim, "I am not a crook." It has been well documented that abuse (including torture) of detainees by US personnel in connection with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been systemic and widespread. Under the War Crimes Act of 1996 it is a crime for any US national to order or engage in the murder, torture or inhuman treatment of a detainee. (When a detainee death results, the act imposes the death penalty.) In addition, anyone in the chain of command who condones the abuse rather than stopping it could also be in violation of the act. The act simply implements the Geneva Conventions, which are the law of the land.

The evidence before us now suggests that the President himself may have authorized detainee abuse. In January 2002, after the Afghanistan war had begun, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush in writing that US mistreatment of detainees might be criminally prosecutable under the War Crimes Act. Rather than order the possibly criminal behavior to stop, which under the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act the President was obligated to do, Bush authorized an "opt-out" of the Geneva Conventions to try to shield the Americans who were abusing detainees from prosecution. In other words, the President's response to reports of detainee abuse was to prevent prosecution of the abusers, thereby implicitly condoning the abuse and authorizing its continuation. If torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners took place as a result of the President's conduct, then he himself may have violated the War Crimes Act, along with those who actually inflicted the abuse.

There are many other indications that the President has knowingly condoned detainee abuse. For example, he never removed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld from office or disciplined him, even though Rumsfeld accepted responsibility for the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, admitted hiding a detainee from the Red Cross--a violation of the Geneva Conventions and possibly the War Crimes Act, if the detainee was being abused--and issued orders (later withdrawn) for Guantánamo interrogations that violated the Geneva Conventions and possibly the War Crimes Act.

More recently, the President opposed the McCain Amendment barring torture when it was first proposed, and he tacitly supported Vice President Cheney's efforts to get language into the bill that would allow the CIA to torture or degrade detainees. Now, in his signing statement, the President announced that he has the right to violate the new law, claiming once again the right as Commander in Chief to break laws when it suits him.

Furthermore, despite the horrors of the Abu Ghraib scandal, no higher-ups have been held accountable. Only one officer of any significant rank has been punished. It is as though the Watergate inquiry stopped with the burglars, as the Nixon coverup tried and failed to accomplish. President Bush has made no serious effort to insure that the full scope of the scandal is uncovered or to hold any higher-ups responsible, perhaps because responsibility goes right to the White House.

It is imperative that a full investigation be undertaken of Bush's role in the systemic torture and abuse of detainees. Violating his oath of office, the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act would constitute impeachable offenses.

Next Steps

Mobilizing the nation and Congress in support of investigations and the impeachment of President Bush is a critical task that has already begun, but it must intensify and grow. The American people stopped the Vietnam War--against the wishes of the President--and forced a reluctant Congress to act on the impeachment of President Nixon. And they can do the same with President Bush. The task has three elements: building public and Congressional support, getting Congress to undertake investigations into various aspects of presidential misconduct and changing the party makeup of Congress in the 2006 elections.

Drumming up public support means organizing rallies, spearheading letter-writing campaigns to newspapers, organizing petition drives, door-knocking in neighborhoods, handing out leaflets and deploying the full range of mobilizing tactics. Organizations like AfterDowningStreet.org and ImpeachPac.org, actively working on a campaign for impeachment, are able to draw on a remarkably solid base of public support. A Zogby poll taken in November--before the wiretap scandal--showed more than 50 percent of those questioned favored impeachment of President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq.

An energized public must in turn bear down on Congress. Constituents should request meetings with their Senators and Representatives to educate them on impeachment. They can also make their case through e-mail, letters and phone calls. Representatives and Senators should be asked specifically to support hearings on and investigations into the deceptions that led to the Iraq War and President Bush's role in the torture scandals. Senators should also be asked to insure that the hearings already planned by the Senate Judiciary Committee into warrantless wiretaps are comprehensive. The hearings should evaluate whether the wiretaps were genuinely used for national security purposes and why the President chose to violate the law when it was so easy to comply with it. Representatives should specifically be asked to co-sponsor Congressman John Conyers's resolution calling for a full inquiry into presidential abuses.

Finally, if this pressure fails to produce results, attention must be focused on changing the political composition of the House and Senate in the upcoming 2006 elections. If a Republican Congress is unwilling to investigate and take appropriate action against a Republican President, then a Democratic Congress should replace it.

As awful as Watergate was, after the vote on impeachment and the resignation of President Nixon, the nation felt a huge sense of relief. Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy.

By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005


WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.


“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.


“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.


One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

The New York Times
Published Sunday, December 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, current and former government officials said.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks without court-approved warrants is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the NSA has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government’s collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the NSA’s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," said officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Department of Justice official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, how do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to al-Qaida.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that NSA technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the NSA’s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the NSA is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program’s operational details as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the NSA has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details such as who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the NSA since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

By Amin Sharif

The term “Third World” is a common euphuism for the people and governments of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The terms origin derives from an historical analysis of the world’s social, economic, and political development and from the Introduction of Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth by Jean-Paul Sartre. The First World according to this analysis is composed of the countries of “Old World” Europe—the capitalist West. The Second World was the Soviet Union and its satellites—a non-capitalist or socialistic East. The Third World was made up of the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was in the Third World that anti-colonial and anti-imperialist national liberation struggles were waged against the First World Powers of Europe during the 1950s and ‘60s.

When, the Soviet Bloc began to crumble, many saw the same mechanism of national liberation at work in Poland and Czechoslovakia that had been before evidenced in the struggle of Third World countries such as Algeria to extricate itself from France or Ghana’s breaking away from the British. The “theory of convergence” had predicted decades ago that the capitalism and socialism would begin to resemble one another in the political and economic sphere. But many Leftists refused to accept the premise of social imperialism and were sent spiraling off course when the Soviet Bloc disintegrated. As a result of the dismantling of the Soviet Republics, it may be inaccurate to even speak of a viable socialistic Second World today.

Today, the term “Third World” is as passé as the political vernacular that once brought it into existence. Regionalism emerging from economic cooperation has rapidly led to fragmentation in the solidarity once professed by leaders of the Third World national liberation struggles. Now, we speak not of the Third World as a whole but of fragmented Free Trade Zones, Pacific Rim alliances, and the like. There is no Mao, no Nkrumah speaking of the exploited Asian peasant or African. Castro, alone, continues to hold up the banner of international Third World solidarity. And, Castro is the last of the old style Third World revolutionaries who holds power.

Some on the Left may look upon the end of the era of national liberation struggles with nostalgia. But it is high time that progressive thinkers moved beyond the dead rhetoric of those days. This statement in no way devalues the accomplishments of the peoples and leaders who waged the anti-colonial struggle within the Third World. It acknowledges that most, if not all, of that work has been accomplished.

What is called for is a new analysis on the Left that will allow us to determine how best to advance the struggle for peace and justice in the world. Fortunately, enough time has now passed to make the advancement of a new analysis possible. The current events in Paris and New Orleans have given rise to an appropriate occasion to begin the discussion.

As this article is being written, Paris has experienced nearly twelve days of riots by an economic and cultural underclass of African and Arab youth. These youth are the sons and daughters of immigrants who have been in Europe for two, perhaps, three generations and have found it an inhospitable home. Europe is their home for it is highly unlikely that any of these Black and Arab children will ever return to their mother countries—unless of course they are expelled by their host countries. Like the African-American of the United States, most are permanently exiled in Europe for better or worse.

Today, we find that it is Paris burning. But the working class cities of England and Germany have also had problems with immigrant populations. The key question at the center of this social upheaval is can non-European populations “integrate” into Western European countries? Is it at all possible to accomplish this? The answer to this question is central not only to the Arab and African youth of France. It is also central to the entire European Union. For, it is estimated that the integrated economy of Europe will require millions of cheap non-European labor in order to maintain itself.

The United States has for years wrestled with how to integrate African-Americans—non whites—into a greater white American culture. There can be little doubt that it has failed to accomplish its task. The condition of the Black working class and Black poor were revealed in graphic detail when Katrina hit New Orleans. The American Constitution means nothing if you are Black and can not purchase a bottle of water when you need it. It is my suspicion that the Black and Arab youth of Paris have found that all the rhetoric about Brotherhood espoused by French revolutionaries also means nothing when set against the virulent racism and religious bigotry of the day.

The Black and Arab youth of Paris are part of a new phenomenon that has not been given proper analysis by the Left—the introduction of non-Western peoples into the very heart of the post-modern West. Although these persons are Third World in origin, they constitute an entirely new species of mankind within the European countries they reside. They constitute a Fourth World—the second and third generation of Africans and Arabs who know well what Western democracy and modernity is and is not. They are not wholly of their Mother Country nor are they full citizens of the post-modern West.

Their struggle is not anti-colonial or anti-imperialistic. It is far more fundamental than that. It is a struggle to maintain cultural and economic equilibrium within a society that devalues their very culture and yet hold dear their cheap labor. Their struggle, and that of all Fourth World peoples, is to obtain full citizenship while maintaining their cultural and racial identity within the West.

The question for the Arab and the African in Europe, as it has been for Blacks in America, is whether their integration into the West means abandoning their identity. Can I live in Europe as a full citizen and still be Asian, Arab, or African, they ask?

There, is of course, a glaring reason why the Left has not turned an eye on the plight of the Fourth World. First, the suffering still endured in the Third World characterized by famine and disease is much easier to mobilize against. The bloated belly of a Somalian child will always evoke more sympathy than the Arab who takes away your trash. Restoration of a village a thousand miles away in Sri Lanka is much easier to cope with than extending a good job and a living wage to a black-skinned Nigerian. Yes, it is always easier to recognize the devil at work in our neighbor’s house than our own.

The source of the oppression of Fourth World peoples is, for the most part, plain and simple racism. It is a racism that screams in the most sophisticated languages of Europe or the drawl of an Alabama bigot, “You are not worthy to be among us. Your touch contaminates all that is pure in our world.” This racism also insists, “Some of you can become worthy if you will dress, speak, and think like us.”

But what is silent on the tongue of racism is that whatever concessions are made by the American nigger or the swarthy Arab or the black-skinned African, the great majority—nigger, Arab or African—will never be allowed to integrate fully into American or European—dare I say—white society. The contamination rate is too high a price to pay for every Asian, Arab, or African to become a full citizen of the post-modern West.

The Left of Europe and America who are drawn from white society have never been able to cope with racism. Racism is a cancer drawn from their existence. The bourgeois principles of American and European democracies were built on the back of colonialism. An inverse relationship exists between the white European and American and their non-white counterparts. The constitutions that promise so much for them are the very barriers that deny dignity to other men.

But for whites to give up all that is bourgeois is to give themselves up to an existence without references. Whiteness, an entirely article construct, exists in opposition to Blackness. If the European and American cease to be white then what will he become? The greatest test of the coming century will be whether the whites of America and Europe can meet the challenge of their own racism and transform that racism into a front for tolerance. Understand one thing clearly, if they fail to confront their own bigotry, it will not be the Kasbah of Algeria or the Ho Chi Min Trail set ablaze this time, it will be their own house.

What is more pertinent to this discussion in not simply that there is a Fourth World that exists within the belly of the beast—America and Europe. The question is how the Fourth World transforms its rage into meaningful political action and ultimately into liberation. In America, this has been a question that has been at the center of Black progressive and radical activism since the days of Jim Crow. How do we become free? What does freedom mean?

The method and the means have always been in dispute among Black Americans. One of the reasons for this diilemma in America has been the political bias of the political players in the African-American dispute. Some were true integrationists. Some were communists. Some were cultural or revolutionary nationalists. And what they had in common was that none were ever able to think out of their ideological boxes. Political and ideological purity trumped political reality on too many occasions.

Rather than consider the situation in America as unique, the Marxists defined the African-American struggle as just another part of struggle of the worker against capitalism. The Pan-Africanist advocated that the African-American struggle was solely an extension of the anti-colonial struggle of the Third World. The black nationalists saw the plight of an internal colony in search of self-determination. Time has proven the efficacy of these ideologies to be wholly or partly erroneous.

Most important thing here is that these ideologies masked the true condition of the African-American. It has been the pursuit of these ideologies that has led to the political stagnation of our people in the face of unprecedented exploitation and oppression. Why?

The answer is simple. The movement that brought us so much progress was the Civil Rights Movement. It was middle class in leadership and agenda but poor and working class in body. It was almost entirely successful in achieving the middle-class dream of opening the doors of American society for those equipped to go through them. But, for the working class and Black poor, the Civil Rights Revolution was a dismal failure. What the Civil Rights Movement failed to do was to extend the social and economic benefits of the middle class to the Black working and poor classes.

Today, we have the curious phenomenon within our community of a flourishing Black middle class, an impoverished working class, and almost entirely powerless underclass. But, if we are to move forward, we can not attempt to build a new Civil Rights Movement—though we may find some of the Civil Rights Movement tactics useful. What we need is to build something new—a Fourth World Revolution. The Fourth World in America came into existence the minute the second generation of slaves realized that there would be no returning to Africa. And since, the Fourth World emerged in America earliest; it must be Fourth World African-Americans who must take the lead in developing the tactics and strategy that will end their oppression in both Europe and United States.

The first thing that a Fourth World people must understand is the role of its middle class. The middle class has little or no capacity to lead the majority of its Fourth World brothers and sisters in the struggle for economic, cultural, or political progress. It will be the Fourth World middle class who will be the first to compromise, to integrate, and assimilate. They will rally the working masses to a false flag of racial and class solidarity and leave them standing beneath that banner when their goals are accomplished.

Thus, the Fourth World is not only in contradiction with the power structure of the country in which it resides but with its own middle class. Just as at the time of the Civil Rights Movement, the poor and Black working masses stood with the middle class to end segregation. Today, the test will be whether the middle classes will stand with its own working class and poor to end their oppression. The Fourth World would like to stand with its brothers in every class. But it has no fear of standing alone and making its own way in the world. Thus, acting alone or in concert with other forces, Fourth World people must seek and direct their own liberation.

The second thing the Fourth World must have is its own fighting organization that will carry out its agenda. We want nothing less than the restructuring of the entire relationship between Fourth World peoples and Western democracies and capitalism—be it in America or Europe. Here, our message to the West is clear: You must let us be men and women paid in the currency of dignity and decency before you can have our labor. We want nothing less than full citizenship within the Western countries in which we reside. At the leadership of the Fourth World must be men and women from the oppressed classes who are dedicated to the goal of full citizenship within the West.

But it is already conceded that the Fourth World Revolution will not be based on solely working class values. Since many of our problems are rooted in religious and cultural bigotry, we must work to make freedom of religion, the celebration of Third World culture and identity as well as the cultural forms developed from our experience within the West a central goal of the Fourth World Revolution. Here, we depart from the Marxists who would have a Fourth World devoid of its indigenous character. We want whole men and women within our ranks that act as their conscious guides steeped in their own history.

The third thing that the Fourth World must understand is that racism—our primary enemy—is both a political policy and a set of personal behaviors. Neither of these will disappear overnight. Thus, the Fourth World Revolution is on-going until the day that both the political policy of racism and the personal behavior of the racist come to an end. The Fourth World will no longer sanction the West’s incursions into Africa, Asia, and Latin America for economic gains.

We will not allow you to fatten yourselves on the exploitation of our brothers and sisters throughout the world. We will no longer fill the ranks of your armed forces or your jails. We will no longer starve while you eat nor cry while you laugh. We declare ourselves free to be fully Asian, Arab, and African within your midst, to be less would make us subhuman in our own eyes. We will no longer watch as our children are raised without dignity or hope. We will no longer give you our labor without a fair wage. We will no longer give you our allegiance without full citizenship.

We stand ready to throw all your platitudes about democracy, freedom, and brotherhood back in your face whether you rule in America or Europe. We will hound you until you allow us to fulfill our dreams of being fully human as you are fully human. We, the people of the Fourth World, have come of age. And, we want from you only that which you have promised to yourselves. That is the right to live without fear and want in the world. Give us this and you need not fear us. Deny us this and we have no other alternative but to realize our humanity at your expense.

By Struan Douglas

From the coffee plantations of the Gold Coast to the jazz-stung nightspots of Nigeria, from the slow pomp of Uganda's royal ceremonies to the livid frenzy of Kenya's turmoils; in the dreaming hamlets of Zululand; among Cape Town's fun-filled coon life, and Johannesburg's teeming, thrilling thousands - everywhere, every month Drum is read and relished." Henry Nxumalo Jan '56.

Drum was the great African success story. It was popular and prestigious media, that linked and shared ideologies, beliefs and abilities across the country and part of the continent. It was influential and entertaining bringing voice to an at times voiceless people. Drum became synonymous with the fringe city slum Sophiatown. It took the bustle, the culture and the colour; it represented the hopes, the struggles, the dreams of the 'Non-European'; and romanticised the fun, the battle, vibrant frenzy and diversity of a racy and dynamic urban existence. Drum was an icon of courage, beauty and high life - ' the best of times, the worst of times - so full of events,' claimed Can Themba.

But, South Africa of that period was a land of bitter contrast, and ultimately a land of complete tragedy. With the inflexible and immovable rock that was apartheid, the job of the social commentator and cultural historian became impossible and the romanticism of the period turned to heartbreak, frustration, angst and finally despair. Drum slowly faded eventually selling out to the Nationale Pers in the Eighties.

Publisher, Jim Bailey maintains that this offered the regime a stake and a sensitivity to black culture and hence retained peace in the politically fragile South Africa. We will never know how close we came to a crippling revolution, however what this move certainly did achieve was maintaining the longevity of the magazine - an ideal that Drum never wavered from the moment it became the unique and desperately needed vehicle of expression for black culture.

Drum was a perfectly timed literary renaissance which created the opportunity for a disparate cast of young, gifted and courageous black writers to engage and contribute on a higher level than the political dispensation allowed. It was a brief and exuberant moment where their interests and lives touched - feeding off the cultural indestructibility of the period, blossoming in the challenge of the ridiculous political regime, nobly promoting black identity and capturing the excitement of a racy period.

Drum was the greatest role-call of alumni - the initiation of many a distinguished literary career. Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, Bloke Modisane, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi and Es'kia Mphahlele's work have been made permanent between hard covers or as plays on the stage. Photographers, Peter Magubane, Jurgen Schadeberg and Bob Gosanie have turned out major pictorial books. Arthur Maimane was a senior news director at British TV. And of the white editors, Anthony Sampson and Sir Tom Hopkinson are among the great figures in British newspaper history, and this week Sylvester Stein releases his novel, 'Who killed Mr Drum'.

Mr Drum, Henry Nxumalo, was the first journalist for the magazine, and the first to employ the mass of extraordinary material the polar opposites of South African politics offered the non-white world. He risked everything to bear the truth and maintain the integrity of the exploited people. Mr Drum
was the good, fighting courageously and liberally, swallowing tough and dangerous assignments for the cause - to uncover the scoop, provoke change and strengthen the will off the righteous. He was every bit as suave, sassy and heroic as the British Bond, continually at the cutting edge of danger,
controversy, mistreatment and inequity. He knew what was going down, and he supplied the details.

His working stint on the potato farms rocked parliament exposing the poor conditions under which Africans laboured. The clean up the reef campaign identified the great area of lawlessness, 'the square mile of sin' and cried for support from the police. He conspired to get himself into Johannesburg central prison, and created an international scoop with the ward conditions and the belittling naked native search. He arrived barefoot and unshaven to beg employment on a farm where an African labourer was flogged to death with a hose-pipe. And his investigation into church apartheid was fascinating in its juxtaposition of icy prejudice and the will for 'brotherly love'.

Crime and investigative reporting joined the more frivolous and entertaining material - sex (preferably across the colour line) and sport as the content formula for the magazine, whilst explicit and provocative photography was the romantic shine. In every issue, there were sweet and coy picture love stories - girl meets boy, a lonely love song, a sensitive man and Cupids strike. Dolly's heartbreak column appealed to all unrequited, footloose, inexperienced or confused lovers to write in for advice. Todd Matshikiza with his rhythmical infectious jazz writing brought the personal victories of many artists to the public.

Drum illustrated the tragic paradox of apartheid life - the blatant racism and chilling inhumanities juxtaposed against a class-less and culture-less vision of life that aspired to the ideal that all people were inherently good.

Township life was a life of insecurity racked with a violent endemic - and the journalists laughed at it to live with it, creating an enthusiastic, light hearted and romantic vision of a bohemian life where the moment, the now was what mattered. Lofty ideals and political projections were misplaced in this fast talking, fast living, brash kind of race to enjoy life now, while you could. It was "live fast, die young - and have a good-looking corpse" as Mike Nicol described it - a heroic period where gangsters were movie stars, artists were sex-icons and journalists were crusaders. Drum was a brilliant mirror of society, preserving cultural pride and identity, injecting a self confidence into the heart of the people, enabling them to fight with courage. It was popular media for an integrated era that captured all aspects of township life in its drudgery, exhilaration, wildness and sadness.

And with all these emotions the journalists became a huge presence in the community. They brought an effervescence from the variety of cultural hot-spots and an earnestness from the social issues. Their lives were a dedication, a mission, almost a fearless and selfless abandon in evaluating everybody's culture, everybody's concern.

It made compulsive reading. People lived by their Drum magazine, everybody of every age would read it. In the trains, on the streets, in the clubs - it would pass from hand to hand, everyone's monthly diet of controversy, self-acclamation and self-worth. Drum was a symbol of the new African cult, divorced from the tribal stereotypes, but urbanised, eager and proud.

The Drum period had set the standard for urban living - a sensitivity to other African states, a tremendous cultural and linguistic cross-fertilisation and a tradition of pride and respect - all nattily
attired in the American influence. Yet, this culture explosion, the wonderful and romantic life and all the hope and promise was subjected to the tragedy of the fascist divide and rule technique. Apartheid separated the thrilling diversity and variety of stimulus and destroyed the vibrant
cosmopolitanism - and the essence of Drum magazine.

"Tomorrow is yours, tomorrow is soon," said Trevor Huddleston in a pained reflection on his agonising departure from his 'beloved country'. Perhaps tomorrow is now - the occasion that we may see the past and the present coming together. We may see the courage, pride and self-esteem of yesteryear resonating through the present - the African Games, the Arts Alive and One
City Many Cultures festivals. And with this, the Western ideals - the borrowed cultural stereotypes of a disenfranchised nation - may be lost, our pride in African culture and consciousness may be restored, and our dedication to African unity revived.

Frantz Fanon

Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.

Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonising power. The area of culture is then marked off by fences and signposts. These are in fact so many defence mechanisms of the most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the simple instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the oppressor does not manage to convince himself a£ the objective non-existence of the oppressed nation and its culture. Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.

Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisan style solidifies into a formalism which in more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.

The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities. The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and to open up the struggle for freedom.

A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard cor of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty.

By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness.

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.

It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.

On another level, the oral tradition - stories, epics and songs of the people - which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula ' this all happened long ago ' is substituted by that of ' What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow'. The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically.

The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation - highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds - are taken up and remodelled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and epic stories of a colonised country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, towards the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for dramatisation, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress.

Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork, for .example, which formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three or five figures appear. The traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by the rising avalanche of amateurs or of critics. This new vigour in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and faces which are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on the same pedestal, the artist invites participation in an organised movement.

If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colours, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the stylisation of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years' time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.

We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same impatience in this field. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigour and feel the approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose. Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music and of literature and the oral tradition. His world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together.

We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have seen that this movement and these new forms are linked to the state of maturity of the national consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and more to express itself objectively, in institutions. From thence comes the need for a national existence, whatever the cost.

A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable is to try to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonised country the most elementary, most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state.

The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is-the re-establishment of the nation in order to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase.

Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the eve of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There remains one essential question: what are the relations between the struggle - whether political or military - and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of a culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom, however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture, is in itself a negation of culture? In short is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?

We believe that the conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterwards gives validity and vigour to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man.

This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict. A struggle which mobilises all classes of the people and which expresses their aims and their impatience, which is not afraid to count almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph. The value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions necessary for the development and aims of culture. After national freedom has been obtained in these conditions, there is no such painful cultural indecision which is found in certain countries which are newly independent, because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in the terms of its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A nation which is born of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the people while changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture.

The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.

And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture.

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connexion with the African consciousness. The responsibility of the African as regards national culture is also a responsibility with regard to African-Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact of a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills that every independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still entrenched is an encircled nation, a nation which is fragile and in permanent danger.

If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

just a few words from a great American Pan-Africanist

By Amin Sharif

The fall of the Berlin Wall signified both the economic and ideological triumph of capitalism over Soviet-style communism. Since the days of the Communist Manifesto, there had been dire predictions of the end of the world-wide capitalist system and its replacement by Communism, the dictatorship of the working class and its allies.

But then in less than 100 years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [that is, Soviet Union or Russia] collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight and the conflict between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was over. That is to say that in a moment, the conflict that had separated the world into Capitalist, Socialist, or Non-aligned camps resulting in the Berlin Airlift, Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and a thousand other known and as yet unrevealed skirmishes between America and Russia was rendered a relic of the past.

The principle conflict in the world has now shifted from the Cold War to the West’s conflict with China, another communist state, and radical Islam. The nature of the conflict with China is principally economic though that might change in the future. The conflict between the forces of radical Islam and the West is a violent clash of ideologies and spheres of influences that have broken out into conventional (the invasion of Iraq) and unconventional (insurgency and terrorist) warfare.

This seismic shift in world events should have precipitated a whole new line of thinking among the Marxist Left. But, outside of an anemic anti-war movement, much of the Old Left has remained stagnate and locked in the ideological glacier of Marxism-Leninism. And while Marxism may still be a valid tool to analyze class conflict in a general sense, its ability to analyze and adapt to new political situations has been shown to be a weakness.

Nowhere is there a greater example of this weakness as in the position of taken by many Marxist-Leninists on the question of race in America. It has always been the contention of orthodox Marxism-Leninism that class struggle—the contradiction between those who own the means of production (i.e. factories and other industries) and the industrial working class—had to be solved first before issues of race could be addressed. The fact that today the industrial working class in America has been greatly reduced in number and is on the verge of being replaced by a new technological and service sector has not altered the orthodox Marxist line.

Nor have the apparent and long standing racist tendencies of the white worker in America given the Marxists any pause about how class struggle within the United States should be carried out and to what end. It is perhaps the glaring flaws in both Marxist theory and practice that have made Marxist politics a pariah within the black community today.

Yet this was not always the case. It is well known that the Communist Party of America defended the Scottsboro Boys when the NAACP remained on the sidelines. Many black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes visited the Soviet Union. Communist agitation among the white working class resulted in decades of strikes for unionization, higher wages, and the eight-hour day in America.

Indeed, the New Deal politics of the Roosevelt administration emerged in part as a strategy to curtail the influence of socialist forces within the working class. Because the liberal policies of Democratic administrations took hold, the conflict between the American worker, especially the white worker, and capitalism was softened. Unions were recognized, pension plans were established, and the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and WIC—all these programs were interlaced into a loose social safety net that keep poor and working people afloat during many hard economic times.

More importantly laws were put in place that allowed for direct intervention by the government in labor disputes. These laws, by themselves, were usually enough to assure that the conflict between the more radical elements of the labor movement and capitalism did not escalate out of control. It was precisely by controlling the tension between the American worker and the capitalist sector that the United States was able to sideline Marxist forces.

Outmaneuvered by the flexibility of the capitalist tactics, much of the social and political energy of the working class that should have been inherited by the Marxists has been appropriated by Democratic Party liberalism and the American union movement. And even today, these two forces—unions and the Democratic Party—are seen by many American workers as their salvation.. Thus, impotency at home and defeat abroad have rendered the Marxists an irrelevant force in American politics.

As the influence of the Marxist on the white working class was waning, the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to pick up steam. African-Americans who lived in the South had decided to challenge a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation that threatened to lock them and their children into a place of “permanent inferiority.” In the North, African-Americans were not subjected to the intense racism that existed in the South. But they were still denied decent jobs and housing, thus making economic advancement hard to achieve. One would think that the Marxists would have found fertile ground among the discontented African-American.

But it was precisely because Marxist forces were tied up in redeeming a reactionary white working class that they were unable to successfully recruit enough African-American surrogates to make a case for radical action in the South. Subsequently, the Civil Rights Movement under white and Black middle-class leadership emerged primarily reformist in nature and anti-Marxist in outlook. Through the entire Civil Rights era, the Marxists were left on the sidelines consigned to making pronouncements about black self-determination that had little or no impact on the black masses.

By the end of the Civil Rights era, a new radicalism had emerged in the United States. The Black Power Movement spawned the Black Panther Party. SNCC had been radicalized and Black nationalists groups had called for armed revolution. On the Left, white groups like the Weathermen and the Revolutionary Union as well sought to transform society by revolutionary action. There then emerged a period where Marxism-Leninism and the political writings of Mao Tse-Tung were favored among young radicals.

But, with the wholesale destruction of Marxist influenced radical and revolutionary groups within and without the black community, Marxism once again fell out of favor. Today, there are no Marxist-Leninist organizations that can be considered as part of the leadership of the American working class in general or the black community in particular. As long as they hold to their traditional line of class struggle being led by white industrial workers, a diminishing class in America, Marxists will never succeed in accomplishing anything.

When Marx issued the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was addressed almost exclusively to the European working class. The Manifesto begins with this statement:

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All powers of the old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

It was in Europe where the great industrial revolution was taking place that the conflict between labor and capital was the sharpest. Marx and Engel’s described the epoch as a time when:

Society as whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

There can be little argument that Marx and Engel’s description of the historic development of the general conflict between the capitalist class who own industries and the working class who are forced by necessity to sell their labor for a wage is accurate. Even today, this general conflict exists in the post-industrial period. But, as we have mentioned in the case of the New Deal, there has been, until recently, a “legacy” of social programs that have softened the general conflict between labor and capital in the United States. So much so that today one can not speak of the American worker as having any semblance of working class consciousness. Indeed, the American worker’s allegiance, especially that of the white worker, is more likely to be to the American nation and his race than to any other member of the working class.

This lack of working class consciousness is evident domestically by the white working class’s continued support for the Republican Party which has as its goal the disassembling of the very social safety net and unions that so many workers rely on during times of economic crisis. Internationally, it is the lack of working class consciousness among whites that allows them time and time again to be manipulated into supporting wars of aggression around the world, for example, in Vietnam and Iraq. While willing to admit these reactionary characteristics exist among white workers in America, many Marxists still hold out hope that the latent revolutionary character of the white working class can be somehow stimulated.

Because the general conflict between capital and labor in America had been softened, the sharper conflict between the African-American (Fourth World) people and the American political system concerning matters of race and class emerged in the United States. If the general conflict between the American capitalism and the working class as a whole were in play today, there would be, by Marxist analysis, no need for a separate nationalistic movement on the part of African-Americans to resolve their problems of race and class on their own. But, since African-Americans have no class ally in their struggle to end racial and economic oppression, the only strategy left to them is one where they must defend both their class and racial interests by themselves, at least until circumstances dictate otherwise.

This is not to say that all members of the white working class are racist and will never support the struggle of Fourth World African-Americans. There are and will always be individual members of the white working class who will support the cause of justice whether it involves Fourth World Latinos, Hispanics, Asians or African-Americans. However, these are individual allies of the Fourth World Community. But it will take more than individual white support to end racism and economic oppression in America. There must be a general acceptance among the majority of white Americans that a program of social and economic justice must succeed if the problems of the oppressed in America are to be resolved. That this general acceptance must be rooted in the white working class whose general interest are the same as the Black working class is a given.

Progressive thinkers within the Fourth World community have always lamented the blindness that seems to exist among the Marxists to the interplay of race and class in America. They have continued for nearly one hundred years to insist that the general conflict between capital and labor is the most important struggle facing the working class.

In the long run, this might be true. But, in the short term, it is where the conflict between capitalism and labor is sharpest that matters. In the United States, the conflict between capital and labor is sharpest among the Black working class. Indeed, even in the international sphere, the conflict between the working and oppressed people of the world is sharpest in the non-European world. The anti-colonial struggles brought socialist regimes into power in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While in Europe, the working class has brought no such radical change to the West since the Russian revolution. And, although the Marxists profess nothing but disdain for radical Islam, this conflict too is characterized by a sharpness between itself and international capitalist forces that is a hundred times more intense than anything going on between the Western working class and capitalism.

And here we need to make clear by what we mean by “where the conflict between capital and labor is the sharpest.” By this term, we mean where capitalism is the most oppressive and exploitive. In the United States can there be any doubt that the most oppressive and exploitive relationship between capital and labor involves Fourth World people as a whole and African-Americans in particular. In the case of both Third and Fourth World, Marxist analysis from the very beginning was flawed. For, Marx and Engel mistakenly declare that:

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and into the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

This may have been true for the developing industrial countries of Europe in 1848. But, just the reverse was and is true for the darker people of the world. In 1848, the great period of European colonialism was under way. Slavery was still practiced in America. Pseudo-scientific jargon and literary romanticism was converting the African into an animal and the Indian into a “noble savage.” Everywhere in the world the differences between men were breaking out until as Fanon puts it, the white world transformed the darker people into the “quintessence of evil.” It is this transformation of the darker people that is not subject to Marxist analysis. It is a feature of the general conflict between capital and labor that stand both within and outside of class struggle. In the matter of decolonization as cited in the Wretched of the Earth, this transformation necessitates that for anti-colonial movements:

Everything up to and including the very nature pre-capitalist society, so well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again.

Within the advanced societies where racial and ethnic minorities exist, a similar process must take place. It is not enough to talk neither of class struggle and class solidarity-nor of Lenin’s pronouncement about the “Negro.” For as pointed out by Claude McKay in "Soviet Russia and the Negro":

There were no problems of the submerged lower classes and the suppressed national minorities of the old Russia that could bear comparison with the grievous position of millions of Negroes in the United States today.

The Marxists in America resist this need to have Marxism “thought out again.” They resist this rethinking in spite of the fact that the orthodox Marxist line holds nothing or nearly nothing for the Fourth World Community. “On to the Revolution!” these Marxists shout to the working class masses. But, when they turn around, they find that no one is standing with them. Still they shout “Orthodoxy! Orthodoxy!” They must be admired for their persistence if not for their political vision. If the Marxists were honest they would admit that even Marx and Engels had serious problems with “colonial peoples.” Marx considered the people of India to be “oriental despots” and the Chinese to be “stupid.” Engels considered the Mexicans to be “lazy” and the Algerians “dirty.” Is it any wonder that with these insights by the fathers of Marxism that their children have a blind spot when it comes to race?

The world has changed much since 1917 and even more since 1848. Yes, the general conflict between capital and labor still exists. But the character of both the working class and capitalism has changed. There are now sectors of the working class that have become regressive and reactionary. Nowhere more is this apparent than among the last vestiges of the white industrial worker in America. Other sectors of the working class are more vibrant or at least retain the potential for struggle.

Fourth World workers fall into the latter category simple because they are the most oppressed and exploited sector of the American working class. But the struggle of the Fourth World can not be won in America unless a sizable portion of the white working class is won over or at least neutralized. And this is the role of the white Left, Marxist or otherwise. Racism must be fought first and then there will be enough class solidarity to transform the entire American political apparatus. But, if the Marxist Left denies their role as fighters for racial justice and continue to cling to an outdated orthodoxy, they will find themselves like Marx and Lenin artifacts of a by-gone epoch.


posted 26 December 2005

She's famous for wiggling her bum," observed a British tab before excitedly revealing that the Colombian pop goddess Shakira "has a reported IQ of 140" and hires tutors to teach her about the cities she plays. So perhaps it's just as well I've never seen a Shakira video—maybe her bum, or her "humble breasts" (just the way I like 'em), would have gotten in the way of my ears. Because even without the booklet photos, I find her CDs plenty sexy. Her voice, singing, songs, music are so, let's count—so throaty, spunky, eccentric, elastic, humorous, generous, excessive, nasal, embodied, and bent on benevolent world conquest. What a hot little number.
A pro since she was 14 and a Latin American teen idol before the Backstreet Boys hit the Hot 100, 28-year-old Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was only 21 when she conceived a career move more ambitious than Christina Aguilera herself has ever dared: to learn English so she could dye her hair blond and take her art to the next level. But ambition comes cheap. Undeterred by the music business's diminishing returns, all too many young people still strive to achieve prominence in today's vibrant entertainment field, with American Idol the symbol rather than the mechanism and not as bad as it gets—many East Asian hopefuls, for instance, are related to music execs. What Shakira brought to the business plan was a giant helping of the individuality Paula Abdul, who should know, is always discerning in the likes of Bo . . . Derek? Belinsky? Bice!—an individuality so much broader and more accommodating than what any indie mix-and-matcher would recognize as such. Allowing for context, Shakira's as big a weirdo as Devendra Banhart, only more talented and more focused.

Her musical idiosyncrasy announced itself with the bandoneón that kicked off her 2001 English-language debut, Laundry Service, and kept on coming through her surprisingly arena-rock Live & Off the Record and her 2005 doubleheader: June's Fijación Oral Vol. 1 and November's Oral Fixation Vol. 2. Though Shakira leans on song doctors and such for melodies and arrangements, she produced all four of her U.S. albums. The South America–only Pies Descalzos (1996) and Dónde Están los Ladrones? (1998) subject Latin-pop mush to rock-in-español mash for a blend both satiny and grainy, and the U.S. records rock it up some more. Of course, all such embellishments follow what anyone notices first about her: her voice, which a few bad people can't stand. Me, I love its size and its tenderness and the vibrato haters compare to a sheep or Alanis or a bicycle rider on a cobblestone street. I also love the personality she imprints on it—childishness versus physicality, emotional extravagance cut with sardonic self-esteem. And I love the culture with which it is imbued. Her father a Lebanese Catholic, Shakira has belly dancer genes and is willing to use them. Maybe her vibrato rubs fools the wrong way because it comes straight outta the cradle of civilization. She's a South American sexpot, but also the pre-Columbian voice of Spain's Christian-Islamic motherlode—a happenstance she inhabits, accepts, and enjoys.

With a little help from the Internet I can make out the meaning of songs like 1998's mildly political "Octavo Di," which got my attention by mentioning Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton. But as both language and sentiment, her words in the language she went out and learned as an adult (she already knew Italian, Portuguese, and some Arabic curses) are so compelling that I gravitate to Laundry Service and, even more, Oral Fixation. Awkwardly, given how much I made of her Latin blend, the Latinest thing about her new record is her English. No native speaker would have come up with "my humble breasts," or "Don't play the adamant/Don't be so arrogant," which she pronounces as if "arrogant" rhymes with "bent." The floridity of her vocal surges is of a different order of magnitude than, for instance, Marc Anthony's, because her romanticism is rarely soothing. Sure she loves her guy, spiritually and carnally, but she's not a woman who knows her place. And though her tunes, which she always has a hand in, sometimes contour Colombian, this is a pop-rock record—one only Shakira could have made.

Shakira's stock-in-trade is love songs, their tragic side still supposedly fueled by her long-ago breakup with Puerto Rican soap star Osvaldo Ríos, their impassioned-to-feisty details presumably inspired by her life in Miami and the Bahamas with Antonio de la Rúa, the Argentine playboy to whom she got "engaged" in 2000, well before the collapse of his nation's economy cost his dad that president job. Both Oral Fixations thank Antonio for "protecting" and "taking care of" her, which doesn't preclude the gloriously catty "Don't Bother," about a tall rival who cooks and speaks French, with its spoken coda: "For you I'd give up all I own and move to a Communist country—if you came with me of course—and file my nails so they don't hurt you and lose those pounds and learn about football—if it made you stay, if it made you stay, but you won't." Whoever it's about, it's great. But so are "Costume Makes the Clown," where she takes off the makeup she won't leave home without, and "Hey You," where she does the cooking herself. And though it would be obtuse to expect radicalism of a jeweler's daughter with UNESCO connections, concern she experiences aplenty, and it's growing. The opener is a nice generalized indictment of the powermongers. The closer sarcastically links Western complacency to the forgotten of—those tutors, or maybe just that UNESCO tour—East Timor.

"Life has been very benevolent to me," says Shakira the star. "Sometimes I feel like I am a rock artist trapped in the body of a pop artist," says the producer. "Sometimes I feel there's a baby inside of me that hasn't grown up," says the child. "I feel like a horse that hasn't been castrated. That's me—full of strength and very very productive," says the weirdo. "I never met a single terrorist in my whole life," says the Arab. And the former teen idol with the high IQ? "The leaders are lacking love, and love is lacking leaders." She's trying

The promotion of African America as a Fourth World based upon Fanon’s observation that there is little in common between the struggles of the former African colonies and those of Blacks living in the US is a bit presumptuous and may be an extension of the US propagated materialistic myth that national wealth is the same as national power. It takes more than wealth, namely, wealth (natural resources), population, and political will to move nations into the power arena. African-Americans come up short on all three whereas their African Brothers meet the power criterion by possessing two out of the three necessary ingredients.

The history of the land ownership where global Africans reside has nothing to do with their common struggles against imperialism. The exploitation of natural resources (labor is indeed a natural resource!) by the imperialistic powers is the key element in the commonality in the African, Caribbean, and African American struggles and not necessarily related to land ownership or colonial status. Exploitation of labor is more degrading and dehumanizing than the exploitation of the their natural resources and becomes the fuel for any resistance movement.

Therefore, land ownership is simply not enough of an explanation to deny African-Americans colonial status as Carmichael and Hamilton had suggested in Black Power. Would one consider Haiti or Jamaica as part of this Fourth World or should they be given the status as the nexus for a Fifth World? In both cases they were former colonies where the imported slaves gained their freedom and the ownership of the land, as well.

In all of the Caribbean-African experiences, their status as colonies and land ownership was distinctly different from both the African and African-American experiences but we would agree that to relegate the African-Caribbean to a Fifth world would be taking the concept of land ownership too far.

Let us face it, the Native Americans, who were pushed off their land nearly to the point of extinction, originally inhabited the land in the US and then the new occupiers of the land established British, French, and Spanish colonies. Slaves were imported in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the US to work land of which neither the slaves nor their owners were the original owners but all were colonies with dependent exploitive economies of their Mother countries

Land is not the major reasons that people have fought for their independence; however, it does become a monument to freedom. Land ownership is not the necessary and sufficient conditions to define a colony. The items that define a colony is the implementation of conditions that completely control the inhabitants to the point where they are totally dependent upon the imperialistic power for all elements of their subsistence, including their labor.

Ownership of land is a mere detail in the eyes of the imperialists as we are currently witnessing in Iraq. Three years ago, the Iraqis owned their land and oil but one must relegate Iraq to a current colonial status even as they struggle for freedom in the same manner as the Americans did prior to their revolution. We see the Iraqis becoming dependent on the US for their food, water, gasoline (in spite of having the world’s second largest oil reserves) and livelihood with unemployment running at 60%; their entire economy has been ripped apart. Even, their government is in the process of being transformed into a puppet regime that will insure that Iraqi oil flows directly into the US corporate economic stream.

I would defend Carmichael and Hamilton in their comparison of the African American experiences as life within a colony since most African-Americans live in semi-isolated communities (ghettos), surrounded by mainstream America and supply cheap labor to the majority population. The surrounding majority controls their entire economy even down to the drug trade. The entire United States is dotted with these isolated areas in major cities.

With high unemployment, they are forced to compete with one another, which keep their wages well below the wages paid to the majority. Labor in the ghetto for those lucky enough to work is provided at free market prices and is undergoing increasing pressure from the immigration of Latin Americans and the shipping of manufacturing jobs to China.

Control and exploitation are the key parameters that define a colony and Africa, the Caribbean, and the ghettos of the US fit neatly into the imperialistic pattern of domination. The ghettos within the US, the townships of Africa, are all colonies or neo colonies; yet Africans, African-Caribbeans, and African-Americans have the same common enemy and therefore a common struggle, which is to defeat the imperialistic powers that keep them in economic slavery independent of where they reside.

What Fanon missed is the population ratio (minority/majority) differences within the Western hemisphere; which, of necessity, alters the strategies and tactics, employed by African-Americans that are certainly divergent from those employed by Africans and African-Caribbeans. Since African Americans are only 12.5 % of the population, boycotts and armed resistance will not have the same impact in the US and can be easier controlled than in Africa or the Caribbean.

The African-American’s ethnic network comes under attack due to their minority status and they are forced to cater or integrate into the majority communities to survive and/or satisfy most of their quality of life demands. Being at the whims of the majority population forces you to form coalition with the majority to effect societal gains. Much of the successes of the Civil Rights movement were due to coalitions formed with white churches and many of the white liberal organizations that rallied in support of the many injustices faced by American Blacks.

This is a major strategic difference that separates the transatlantic struggles. Due to shifts to the right such coalitions do not exist today, which has limited the effectiveness of the African-American struggle; although the causes for such struggles have not gone away. Katrina brings this point home quite vividly. In spite of the pleas of African American leaders, the rebuilding of New Orleans will be accomplished for the white majority’s benefit since no Black network exists that is strong enough to change the direction of the reconstruction effort. Even Black/White coalitions suggest a colonial atmosphere!

Since the Haitian Revolution, the African-American population has always been kept below 20%. The principal fears of the slave owners were that the population of slaves would become too high as to make an insurrection too difficult or impossible to control. The pursuit of integration and biased immigration policies continue to fray the African-American network and their political will necessary and mandatory for a successful continuance of the struggle for human rights. We are talking about a political will, built upon the self-interests of the Black people, that is strong enough to focus their limited resources and population on the defeat of imperialistic exploitation.

The concept of integration can destroy this political will if the focus remains on the ability to sit at a lunch counter as opposed to providing equal opportunity to all Black people. The integration of the lunch counter is a short-range tactic as opposed to the long-term strategy of equal opportunity. Not to demean lunch counter integration but it became the endpoint as opposed to the beginning phase of a long-term strategy for equality. Sadly, US Blacks must rely on their government to provide the fuel for their pursuit of equal opportunity. The colonial analogy becomes more apparent as we move further into the 21st century.

Another point that Fanon may have overlooked in his comparison is the duration of slavery versus the colonial existence of the African. Imperial exploitation of the African Americans has a 400-year history as opposed to the 100-150 year history of Africans living under colonial domination. European and certainly American colonialism of the African continent roughly began during the mid 1800’s and ended close to the end of the Second World War.

This 250 year longer, duration has had a serious impact on the psychological differences between African Americans and Africans. Whereas Africans concentrate on the struggle for equal opportunity or equal treatment for their goods and services, African Americans concentrate on integrating into the major society. Integration may or may not lead to equal treatment as we have found.

This longer duration has left the African-American with a slave mentality that always limits the full exercising of his political will and thereby his ability to focus his limited resources on the key prize of defeating imperialism. As the Algerians took up arms and defeated their colonial French masters, they certainly were not suffering from a slave mentality when they decided upon armed aggression as the means of expressing their political will.

In this act, two ingredients stand out in their ultimate victory over the French, their superior numbers and their political determination to defeat the French. As the Algerians shared the common struggle with their African-American brothers and sisters, only the tactics of engagement, driven by these two elements of national power, differed.

Slave mentality is the most effective link that weakens the chain of the African-American political will. That is, the slave owner imposed separation of color and work hierarchy that has carried over into current times. Children of the rapes of slave masters were given preferential treatment, which gradually was translated into preferential color treatment.

This treatment also decided working privileges with the most honored positions being given to those slaves who worked closest to and with their slave owners. These positions of favor also implied that reports of uprisings, escapes, and sabotage had to be reported to the slave owners. Such layers of divisions were natural barriers to any formations of network, solidarity, and political will. Most of our African and Caribbean brothers and sisters do not suffer from this slave mentality or many of its sub-elemental themes.

In the pursuit of the Fourth World separation the African-American from his global brothers and sisters, we often hear that African-Americans are more powerful than their African brothers and sisters since they command a GDP of $688 billion whereas, the highest GDP for an African nation is Egypt with GDP of $290 billion followed by Nigeria at $113 billion. In a GDP ranking alone, African-Americans are in the national company of Spain, Indonesia, and Mexico.

To equate wealth with power leads to a false sense of national value since national power can be measured by the product of wealth (GDP and/or natural resources), population, and political will that melds wealth and population into a national force. In the attempts to qualify African Americans as a Fourth World is to ignore their relatively small population (34th on a global scale) and their lack of political will to leverage their relatively high GDP into an international power.

In fact, a closer look at their GDP, we find that the necessities of living such as food, clothing, rent, and transportation consume a huge part of their incomes, which yields them a colonial rather than national status. Very little is left for economic development, which they must look to their former slave masters to provide, and they possess nothing but labor as a natural resource that can be valued and devalued by forces in a controlled market driven economy.

Too much emphasis is placed on the African-American vote in influencing national and local elections. The last two national elections in Florida and Ohio have a sobering effect on the political power wielded by African-Americans. Had the political will of the African Americans been stronger; Al Gore would be in the White House and Iraq would have been a bad political novel. Also, since the 60’s there have been over 400 Black elected officials with only a regression in the economic status of Africa-Americans to show for these political gains. Most elected Black officials find themselves constrained to the point of impotency.

The gains to be made in solidifying our bonds with the Third World far outweigh the benefits, if any, to be had as being a part of this new Fourth World. As stated earlier this Fourth World would be far too weak to be of any national or international significance; however, African-Americans have a lot to bring to the table in the form of wealth, education, management, professional services, etc. that could be leveraged in ways that will bring a much larger benefit to themselves, their heirs, and their African counterparts.

African Americans could help their African brothers and sisters harness the natural resource wealth that the African possess. This would be a win-win for both parties on both sides of the Atlantic and certainly would be a much better deal for both suffering under the yoke of exploitation. The four hundred year struggle of the former slaves in the US has yielded some modest gains but these gains will be miniscule when viewed in the demands for gains in the new competitive global markets.

Viewing the emergence or the entry of China as a world power with its market socialism, places African-Americans at great jeopardy within the US as more and more manufacturing jobs are exported to China. This is further compounded by the increases in immigration of Latin Americans as a source of cheaper labor foretells of higher than twice the levels of unemployment within African-American communities (levels of unemployment for Black youth currently run at 35-46%).

Since labor is the only resource that African-Americans bring to the market place and that labor (a commodity) can be purchased elsewhere at cheaper prices; the African-American will become a drain upon the American economy as his or her future income continues to decline, dragging with it his or her value as a consumer.

The future bodes as an upcoming disaster for the Fourth World and the only hope for the continued existence of African Americans is for them to join and embrace the Third World from whence they came. As China sets the pace, the Third world is on the move in spite of all the negative vibes emanating from the press.

Now is not the time to accelerate the divide and conquer concept that has been utilized by the imperialist powers to subjugate the people of color on both sides of the Atlantic. Now is the time to shed our slave mentality and embrace our future that is aligned with our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic.

The 21st century is the time for the people of color to come together in order to hasten the decline of imperialism which began with the liberation of the African-American after the civil war, continued in the 60s with the civil rights struggle, followed by Viet Nam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.

Due to the much lower birthrates within the imperialist nations, they now have revised their strategies for exploitation by picking on small nations with lightning invasions, kidnapping of the nation’s leaders, and finally administrating the robbery of their natural resources. Recent examples of this strategy can be found in Equatorial Guinea and Iraq.

Larger countries, like Sudan, require a different strategy, since military occupation can lead to disaster as they are now experiencing in Iraq. The question for the authors of “Shock and Awe” is - when is a country small enough to be picked off. It now appears that Iraq may not be small enough after stepping down the smaller nation ladder from Vietnam.

Well-governed populations are a source of strength; that is why China and India will be formidable competition for the West as we move further into the 21st century. Both of these countries are reasonably well governed, i.e. they have a political will that moves both countries’ resources in purposeful directions for the general good of their people.

Both of these countries, when ranked on a national power scale are equal to, in the case of India, and 3 times more powerful than the US, in the case of China. Within that power equation, the African Union will be the most populated entity on the globe by the year 2050. This Union has wealth, albeit in the ground, but lacks the political will and cohesion to harness both its people and it wealth.

From this vantage point, Africa holds a great deal of promise for those African Americans who are deemed as a surplus (unemployment means surplus) here in our eviscerated portion of the US. Again, in the national power equation, Africa has two out of the three necessary ingredients to become a major world power.

The third ingredient that is missing is a big enough to challenge any and all of our college graduates to greatness. For this challenge, we, African Americans, need to cohere rather than to continue to isolate ourselves within the evacuated sphere of a Fourth World.

If we were to look at ourselves, honestly, we would find that we have more in common with our African brothers and sisters than we have been programmed to believe. Whether we reside in a colony, colonette, or neocolonial nation, our struggles are the same, i.e., how to remove the imperial leeches that sap all of our resources, limit our personal and national growth, and kill our heirs. To move to another world is an escape and a denial of our future greatness. We need to make a commitment to seriously join the up and coming Third World and collectively find solutions that will successfully merge our hemispheres.

* * * * *

Responses

Waldron, I am very pleased you have responded to Amin Sharif's Afro-America & The Fourth World . If you have not you should read his other pieces dealing with the Fourth World, including The Fourth World: In the Belly of the Beast and The Fourth World and the Marxists.

I agree with much of the hard content of your essay but the use of it as argument is another matter. I do not think you gave Sharif's argument a fair reading. That is to say, your argument tries unconvincingly to make an argument for a Third World, mostly on the basis of color. To these points I'm sure Sharif will respond.

But let me point out problems I found. First, Sharif does not base his argument on the elements of the "materialist myth," which you sketch out as wealth, population, and political will. The wealth element is only considered in the sense that the middle-classes are problematic in a struggle for justice because of their problematic ties to power.

Sharif, I believe, explores much more effectively the nature of the populations he includes in his concept of Fourth World, than your argument does in what populations constitute the Third World. (I will come back to this point in a moment.) His view of political will is more or less related to its lack among the middle classes and the lack of an international awareness and consciousness. But allow me to deal with a couple of other points before I go headlong into concerns for African potentiality.

The concept of the Third World was stillborn, basically because it undermined the concept of nationalism, which was the direction that these former colonies were headed or had already begun to establish. The Biafran War first exposed the concept as useless. It was shredded to pieces when the Berlin Wall fell. Its funeral was held with the election of Mandela as President of South Africa. The concept was interred with the ethnic slaughter in Rwanda and the aftermath that reverberated throughout Central and West Africa.

Pan Africanism does not exist on the continent of Africa itself, not even in Ghana, where attempts have been made to popularize it. Some samples of this sentiment can be seen in Kalamu's exposition, I titled, African Criticisms of the Diaspora . Much of Africa is in disarray and sinking, surely this is true of West Africa, East Africa, and Central Africa. The problem is not a matter of colonialism, but rather the lack of an effective national spirit, poor governance, and outright corruption and brutality.

You misread the general character of Sharif's argument. His concept of Fourth World is not a racial concept in which he separates U.S. blacks from the rest of the world's population, including Africa. He views black Americans as the most developed element of the Fourth World because of their centuries long struggle against an imperial power that exploits its non-white populations in a more callous manner than its white citizens. In America, he would include not only blacks, but also Latin Americans (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans at home and abroad, and others) and other conscious non-White populations, like Native Americans and those from what which were Third World nations, like the Chinese and other Asians.

You mention Brazil. I do not think Sharif dealt with Brazil. So I think that issue is indeed a good criticism. Brazil as country may indeed be part of the Third World or what is now called the developing world. Its blacks, I think Sharif would argue, are part of the Fourth World. The other larger part of the Fourth World would be all those non-Whites in Europe. But it would include any person in any country who has not been integrated into the national culture and economy because of race and culture or both, especially among the young people who have been influenced by an international youth culture,.

On this basis Haiti and Jamaica and other independent nations of the Caribbean would indeed be considered part of what you call the Third World. However, once its citizens take up residency or citizenship in America or Europe they become part of the Fourth World. Like other Fourth World peoples they do not suffer national or colonial oppression but rather alienation and subordination on the basis of race and culture.

Several more small points and I will be done. One, I do not think that black people in America have a psychological problem. This pathological argument should be interred and allowed to rest. That is, they do not have a "slave mentality," no matter what class you consider among blacks. Contrary to your assertion, Sharif is not pursuing a Fourth World "separation." He seems rather to be identifying those persons that seem to have most in common in relationship to "white power."

Sharif's pragmatism, I know, is astonishing. He sees that our natural allies in struggle are those that are close to our condition or those that have been forced to view the world as we see it. I do not see how India and its people; or China and its people are relevant to this argument at all, except where they appear in Europe or America. When Nehru and Mao died, those countries ceased even to be part of the Third World, politically.

Sharif also sees allies among our fellow Americans who are white, those who will stand for that which is just and right for all. He does not consider that Americans are 100% White Nationalists or even 100% Conservative or 100% racist or 100% imperialists. And he is right. As far as the political struggle we have to wage in America, these potential white allies are more practically beneficial than any group that now exists in any African country. Africans have problems helping themselves. And I am not sure that there are that many heads of states in Africa that I would even want on our side.

Most of what we can do for Africa, I suspect, will not occur on the continent itself but right here in America. Moreover, those wealthy blacks who are billionaires and millionaires can find better investments than in Africa. As we know well enough, few of them are willing to invest even in our American cities where black male unemployment is 50% or more. Neither American inner cities nor Africa hold any attraction for them, except for maybe its textiles or some of its cultural patterns.

Maybe in 50 or 100 years a Pan African spirit may be a feasible thing in Africa at home and abroad, that is, after they have worked out their national questions. Most US blacks have worked out their national question: they are Americans by history, birth, and culture. And it has always been the case that few of us are willing to be African missionaries. For those who choose that way of life, I applaud their adventure.

Outside of politics and economics there is much in which Africans and African Americans can find common ground and interest. We are indeed distant cousins. However, we still do not know each other well and have yet to grow sufficiently a healthy respect. -- Rudy

* * * * *

Rudy your points are well taken and forced me to re-read all three of Sharif's essays on the Fourth World. To that end I will modify some of the positions I have taken about the Fourth World and its future. It cannot be successful without an alliance with the Third world from whence it came. A rough examination on my data base of World power proves this to be the case. it is even more important since Brazil with its 100 Million descendants from Africa have not been included in Sharif's Fourth world. It is an interesting concept, but it needs to be analyzed further to point out the strengths and weaknesses in order to develop the strategies that are required.

Fourth world needs for continued longevity. You are a contribution editor to African Renaissance and this should be a relatively easy matter for you to effect. In any event, I will return, to the topic, that is. -- Waldron

* * * * *

Agreed. I welcome further discussions from you, on whatever the topic. My primary concern is that too many of us are not open to open discussions. Too often we have our set ideological positions and we are only interested in pushing them. So your note, for me, is a hopeful sign.

We need to go beyond the unity of silence in dealing with ideological positions. We are dragging with us from the 19th and 20th centuries too many ideologies unexamined for our present condition and situation. I agree that the situation of Third World countries should not be ignored and that we should be willing to make temporary alliances wherever they present themselves. ChickenBones is open for these kind of discussions. Too many do not make use of this resource for real analysis and discussion

As you may have noted our site is open to African journalists, presently primarily Nigerians Uche Nworah and Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye ; most of their writings, however, are limited to the national politics of Nigeria. Neither had anything to say about the New Orleans tragedy. We also have a few with a Caribbean focus, like Louis Reyes Rivera, a Puerto Rican; and John Maxwell of Jamaica. Maxwell is often commenting about the American scene. he laos ahd considerable to say about the New Orleans tragedy. So we have a Third World interest but the only people I see writing from that perspective are U.S. blacks.

We also have a few Asian Americans making submissions. But they are young college students still developing. So I am not against the Third World concept, but rather as you suggest about the Fourth World concept, we need to point out its strengths and weaknesses pragmatically for us today. As I suggested before, except for Caribbean writers I am not certain that there is a Pan-African or a Third World feeling being extended to us from Third World countries. Too often they see U.S. blacks as competitors or irrelevant.

Just a final point. I'm not sure that the 100 millions of Brazil view themselves as Black. That presents another kind of problem. I suspect that you will have to cut that number by at least 50%. There is indeed a black consciousness movement in its nascent stage and that we should keep an eye on that development -- Rudy


posted 20 January 2005

Reflections of Humanity
A lecture by: Dr. Ali Shariati, 1933 - 1977



Debates on the definitions of culture versus barbarism, or on the question of who is civilized and who is modern are best discussed in the light of Islamic doctrine. Quite significantly, this point must be kept in mind, particularly as a matter of concern to individuals of the educated classes of Islamic societies upon whom lies the burden of responsibility and leadership of the Umma.

Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilised, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilisation at all. Unfortunately modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization.

For the past 150 years, the West has undertaken the task of modernizing men with missionary zeal. All non-European nations were put in close contact with the West and western civilization and were to be changed to 'modern' nations. Under the guise of civilizing nations, acquainting them with culture, they presented us with this modernity, (when I say "us", I mean the non-European and third world nations), which they persisted in calling "ideal civilization". Our intellectuals should have understood years ago and made people realize the difference between civilization and modernity. But they failed to do so. Why did the educated not notice this issue during the 150 years of western modernization of their nations? I will discuss their failure in this paper later.

Before any further discussion I should like to define certain terms on which I intend to concentrate, which, if left ambiguous, should render the discussion vague. After explaining the terms, I shall address myself to the subject.

1. Intellectual: An everyday term frequently heard in Iranian society and in all societies, European or otherwise. What does it really mean? Whom do we name intellectual? Who are the intellectuals, and what is their role and responsibility in their own societies?

An intellectual is one who is conscious of his own "humanistic status" in a specific social and historical time and place. His self-awareness lays upon him the burden of responsibility. He responsibly, self-consciously leads his people in scientific, social and revolutionary action. (See also "From Where Shall We Begin" and "The Intellectual and his Social Responsibilities" by Dr. Shariati for further discussion on this).

2. Assimilation: This is at the root of all the troubles and constraints facing the non-Western and Muslim countries. Applies to the conduct of an individual who, intentionally or unintentionally, starts imitating the mannerisms of someone else. A person exhibiting this weakness forgets his own background, national character and culture or, if he remembers them at all, recalls them with contempt. Obsessively, and with no reservation, he denies himself in order to transform his identity. Hoping to attain the distinctions, and the grandeur, which he sees in another, the assimilator attempts to rid himself of perceived shameful associations with his original society and culture.

3. Alienation: The process of forgetting or becoming unfamiliar with or indifferent to one's self. That is, one loses the self and directs perceptions from within another person or thing. This grave social and spiritual illness manifests itself in many different shapes and forms and depends on many factors. One factor alienating a human being is the tools with which he works. Sociology and psychology report that a man, during his lifetime gradually tends to forget his real, independant identity as he increases his contact with a certain tool or profession more and more every day. He begins perceiving his tools in place of his selfhood.

For instance, in a person who deals with nuts and bolts every day from 8a.m. to 6 p.m. all feelings, thoughts, affections and personality will gradually become suspended. He must perform a certain mechanical task continually. Possibly an assembly belt runs in front of him and he is ordered to skip two nuts and twist the third nut once. This man, who has diverse emotions, aptitudes, thoughts, tastes, tensions, hatred, feeling and talent, becomes a body which skips two nuts and twists the third one once most of his time, during his working hours, which is also the time when he is most active and energetic. He becomes an instrument, simply a piece of equipment for production and his effort is confined to a monotonous job which he must do day after day, and in so doing, suspend all the characteristics which make up his personality.

The best among many examples of such situations was given by Charlie Chaplin in a famous film, "Modern Times", in which he plays a man originally free from any attachment or obligations, with all his desires, emotions, feelings, excitements and needs. He feels love for his sweetheart, respect for his parents and sympathy for his friends. He enjoys sitting and chatting with others, partaking of their normal customs, and exhibits a normal variety of fears, hopes, talents and responses. For instance, when he sees his mother, he displays feelings towards her as if he had not seen her for a long time. When he meets a friend from the past, he wants to spend some moments with him talking about what happened, about life and the good old days. He feels love and affection when he sees his sweetheart; he feels hatred and rancour boil when he sees his enemy. He wants to fight, attack him and gain revenge. He is a human being, with complex needs and expectations. He enjoys a good view and hates seeing a depressing one, just as a normal, free man might be expected to.

Then he goes to work in a huge and complicated factory whose functioning he cannot even conceive. He neither knows what the factory produces nor what synchronizes its many diverse elements. He applies in an office, fills out some forms and then is told to report to Mr so and so. Then, he is taken through a hall and into a room. A man comes along and tells him what to do. And just what is his job? Here is what his job is all about: there is a big hall used as a place for an assembly line where a huge metal belt constantly moves. The belt comes in from one side of the hall and goes out the other to other sections of the assembly line. He does not know where the belt comes from and where it goes and why it does so. Seven or eight workers are standing there beside each other. His job is to skip two nuts on the moving tape and twist a third nut once. And again he is to skip two and twist the third, and this he has to repeat over and over during his 10 hours of work. Then the bell rings and his day of work is over. He goes home without knowing what the nuts were and why he did what he was told to do, where they came from and where they went to and what they were used for. He cannot understand this job at all. Beside him stand the 7 or 8 other workers; they cannot even speak to each other because the belt is moving at such a speed that if he tries to find out about the worker next to him, and neglects the moving belt, he will miss the third nut, the whole factory will stop, and he will be punished or fired.

This man must be all eyes to watch the nuts. The work that he performs, this human being, is to twist the nuts once or twice and that is all. But a human being is a creature with certain characteristics. First of all, he must know the purpose of his work, and secondly, he must do a job in order to achieve a particular goal. He chooses the goal, and then, once chosen, he creates a job as a means toward that goal. He then begins during the job, to touch and feel the essence of his purpose. A certain goal and a chosen outcome limits one's work, and eventually one achieves the goal. Apart from seeking a goal while he works, being aware of the job, the man is a human with diverse feelings and urges.

Charlie Chaplin, in the role of this particular worker, sees his mother, fiancée and friend, who have come to see him in the factory. He is not yet accustomed to the rough and monotonous system of machinery; he is not broken in yet. While he is working, suddenly he sees his mother, fiancée or friend, and putting down his tools, leaves his job behind to go to say "Hello . . .. how are you?" "Where have you been?"" It's been a long time since I've seen you. I missed you . . . sit down, let's have a cup of tea and. . . ."

Suddenly he sees policemen rushing in, red lights on, alarm bells ringing, inspectors coming in. What has happened? The factory control system has reported that one single nut has been skipped without being twisted, and everything has come to a standstill. "What have you done?!"" How could you?!" He is arrested, blamed and punished for his negligence.

A momentary manifestation of a simple and natural human sentiment in him causes the system of machinery to break down. This clearly illustrates that in the present system there is not the slightest room for expression of a human sentiment. However, they train and control this very man who once had feelings and emotions until he becomes like a machine, too, and after 20 years of work the phrases "a human is a rational being," and "a human is a worshipping animal" and "a human is self-conscious and creative animal" and similar phrases normally used to apply to a human, no longer apply to him.

What has this man, after all, become? He is now a "nut twister animal" who skips two and twists the third nut once. On the street when this man sees a policeman with buttons like nuts on his uniform, he immediately takes out his wrenches to tighten them. He sees a woman with decoration on her hat or coat: immediately it comes to his mind to go and twist it once or twice or whatever! For him the whole world is summarized in the phrase, "Skip two and twist the third." That is his philosophy, identity, reality and title to being a human. Why does he twist? In order to eat. Why does he eat? In order to twist! A circular man!

This man no longer perceives himself as the being who once had varied sentiments, desires, needs, weaknesses, sensibilities, memories and virtues. Those have tumbled down and he has become, in the words of Marcuse, a "one-dimensional man." But Shondel calls him a "circular man" who produces for the sake of production.

This man who once was a little world, a microcosm, like God and with the attributes of God, has now been reduced to an extension of a wrench; which is to say that the character of the machine, of the bolts and of the mechanical motion, has penetrated him. He no longer considers himself as such and such, the son of so and so, from such and such a family, such and such a race and background, with such and such peculiarities. Rather he perceives himself and his reality as nothing more than part of a machine.

Alienation may sometimes become a serious mental ailment requiring the attention of a psychoanalyst. At its highest degree of intensity, it may necessitate confinement in an asylum. Alienation, which affects men through mechanical and dehumanized discipline, may be caused by bureaucracy and technology as well. As one of the sociologists put it, either Max Weber or Marcel Moose, in a complicated bureaucracy where there are many booths, all numbered, the man who has been working in, say booth 345, for 20 or 30 years and has been doing the same job for that long, generally considers himself as booth 345, rather than one having any other name or title. People address him as "booth 345" and think of him as "booth 345." And the general feeling that he is not attached to anything except "booth 345" generates in him a feeling that he is "booth 345" not Mr so and so, the son of so and so, with such and such characteristics. Such is the alienation caused by bureaucracy.

Alienated, as a word, means being possessed by a 'spirit', or in Persian, a "Jinn." People believed in such 'spirits' in the past, and when a person became insane, they believed that the 'spirit' had possessed him and affected his brain. They thought that the 'spirit' had ejected his intellect and taken its place, so that the possessed no longer felt himself human but was rather an evil being. The word today means a type of sickness described by psychologists and sociologists.

As men were possessed by 'spirits' in the old days, today a man is reduced to the position of a cog in a strict, monotonous and ruthless bureaucracy due to perpetual contact with a certain mechanical tool. He no longer feels and comprehends his individuality; he has "lost" himself. As they used to believe that a "jinn" possessed man's spirit and made him insane, so today, means of production, tools and his type of work, possess him and control his spirit. They gradually obliterate his true personality and fill it instead with the characteristics of machine tools, job routine, bureaucratic hierarchy, and eventually he begins to identify himself with these.

There is another kind of "control by jinns" which possesses humanity and alienates a person or an entire class from itself. This type of alienation is more real, more frightening, and more damaging, and it is this . . . omnipresent form of alienation which affects us, the Iranians, Muslims, the Asians, and Africans. It is not an alienation caused by technology - we have not been alienated by machines. No machine is involved, nor any bureaucracy. A few administrative departments with a limited personnel are in no position to alienate any one. Nor has the Bourgeoisie reached the stage from which it could alienate us. Rather, what we are at grips withis something extremely unpleasant and dangerous - "cultural alienation."

What does "cultural alienation" mean? As we have already mentioned, alienation, in any shape or form, indicates a condition in which one does not perceive himself as he is, but rather perceives something else in his place. A man in this condition is alienated. What he conceives himself as is not his real self at all, and whether it be as money or as machine or as booth 345, his conception makes no difference at all and depends only on luck or taste.

What is culture? I am not going to quote the differing definitions of culture here. However defined, culture includes a collection of intellectual, non-material artistic, historical, literary, religious and emotional expressions (in the form of signs, traditions, customs, relics, mores) of a nation which have accumulated in the course of its history and acquired unique form. They signify the pains, desires, temperaments, social characteristics, life patterns, social relations and economics structure of a nation.

When I feel my own religion, literature, emotion, needs and pains through my own culture, I feel my own self, the very social and historical self (not the individual self), the source from which this culture has originated. Therefore, culture is the expression and super-structure of the real being of my society, actually the whole history of my society. But certain artificial factors, probably of a dubious nature, creep into a society which has well defined social conditions or social relations, developed through a specific historical framework, and aquaint it with pains, sufferings, emotions and sentiments which have an alien spirit and are a product of a different past, a different society (different both socially and economically). These artificial factors wipe out any real culture and substitute a false culture suitable for different conditions and an altogether different historical stage, a different economy, and a different political and social setup. Then, when I wish to feel my own real self, I find myself conceiving another society's culture instead of my own and bemoaning troubles not mine at all. I groan about cynicism not pertinent to cultural, philosophical and social realities of my society. I then find myself harboring aspirations, ideals and anguishes legitimately belonging to social, economic and political conditions of societies other than mine. None the less, I treat these desires, ideals, and anguish as if they were my own.

Another culture has alienated me. The dark skinned man of Africa, the Berber of North Africa, the Persian and Indian in Asia, each has a particular past and unique present. However, they feel inside particular pain and concern which they regard as their own, but which are actually offshoots of problems of periods following the Middle Ages, the 16th Century renaissance, 17th Century liberalism, the scientific progress of the 18th century, and the ideologies of the 19th century and the capitalist societies that came into being after World Wars 1 and 2.

So, African, Asian people, how does it concern you? Which problem do you have that causes you so much concern regarding its existence, solution, feeling, and reaction? It is as if I had a foot pain and put it down to nerves! Why? Because I associated with people I think more intelligent, polished, respectable and wealthy than myself, and they have "nervous disorders." Rather than admitting that my foot aches, and seeking medication for, let's say, corns; I seek a psychiatrist for the "nervous disorder" to which I attribute my pain.

My conceptions of myself are not as I actually am in reality, but as "they" are; that is, I am alienated. Is it not ridiculous to have, in a society with so much starvation and general feelings, desires and behaviour resembling those of present day Americans, English or French? The latter is surfeited with an excess of delicacies and pleasures and lacks purpose and goals. He wants rest and seeks peace. He is sick of the strict discipline imposed on him by the machine. He groans and complains of the discipline and order which have caused him so much distress. But I, suffering from the lack of technology, am yet groaning and complaining of distresses caused by technology! It's as if we were run over by a car, had broken our arms and a leg, had blood all over our face and head; and yet, we empathize and feel for the person behind the wheel, who is fed up with having to drive and run over people!

In this way non-European societies become alienated by European societies: their intellectuals no longer feel Eastern, groan like an Eastern person or aspire to be Eastern people. The intellectual does not suffer because of his own social problems, rather he conceives of the pain, sufferings, feelings and needs of an European in the final stage of capitalistic and materialistic success and enjoyment. Thus, today the most painful disorder possible sweeps non-European countries, the psychological disorder of non-Europeans who possess a unique character and yet deny it. They hold in mind something alien. They conceive of someone else and imitate him blindly.

These non-European countries in the past were real and genuine. If you had visited these countries, say 200 years ago, they would have lacked today's Western Civilization, but each and every one of them had its own authentic and solid civilization. They were unique: their desires, their delicacies, their forms of worship and all their good and bad behaviour; their action, their beauties, their philosophy, their religion - everything belongs to them. For instance, if I had gone to a country like India or any African country, I would know that they had their own unique tastes and buildings. They composed their own unique poetry, pertinent to their culture, and relevant to their lives. They had their own unique social manner. They had their own unique colors, maladies, desires and religions. All they had was their own. In spite of the fact that they were far below the level of present day civilization and material enjoyment, still, what they had, however trifling, was their own. They were not sick, poor they were, but poverty is something different from sickness.

But today, western societies have been able to impose their philosophy, their way of thinking, their desires, their ideas, their tastes and their manners upon non-Europeans countries to the same extent that they have been able to force their symbols of civilization (technological innovations) into these countries which consume new products and gadgets; countries which can never adjust themselves to European manners, longing, tastes and ways of thinking.

As Alined Yope, one of the greatest black intellectuals, puts it: "societies have come into being outside the European civilization - like our societies - which are "mosaic societies." What does he mean by "mosaic societies"? A mosaic contains hundreds of colored tiles with different shapes and colors, all pressed in a mold. What shape do these tiles make? None! A mosaic has different colors and is composed of different pieces of gravel with different shapes, but in sum has no shape. Some civilizations, too, are mosaic civilizations. That is, civilizations which carry some leftover parts from the past, some deformed parts from Europe, and the combination of the two produces a half-civilized, half-modernized society. It is a mosaic also in that we did not choose the same materials as the Europeans to make a civilization for ourselves, because we did not know what a civilization was and how to form it. It is they who gave us the form, as well.

So without knowing what to make and without having any prior intention of how to form our society according to our own tastes and thoughts, and without knowing how to integrate different parts, or properly taking from here and there according to pre-planning, we started putting together different parts and elements to build a modern but formless society with no aim or goal. In the distorted result we find parts from everywhere, some native, some European, some old-fashioned and some modern - all piled up in shapeless, aimless confusion, and in result, creating a shapeless, aimless society as well. Such societies are non-European societies which, during the last century, have been able to get their construction materials from the West, in the name of civilization.

What is the origin of the emergence of this mosaic civilisation (or what I would call camelopard societies) in non-European countries which have no special shape and no fixed goal? It is not clear what kind of societies they are; their people and intellectuals cannot understand what they live for, what their goal is, what their future holds and what their ideology contains.

The machine emerged and developed during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in Europe in the hands of the capitalists and the rich. The machine has the characteristic of the need for constant increase in production when it is working. This is the machine's coercion. If it does not increase its production with 10 or 11 years, it will die out, it cannot continue to function and cannot compete with other machines. Why? Because if it does not increase its production, other machines, producing the same merchandise on a larger scale, can sell it cheaper. Therefore, the production of the obsolete machine stagnates. The machine must produce more and more to be able to pay more to labor and to put products in the market more cheaply than its competitors. Science and technology have contributed to the development of the machine and improved its efficiency. This development has changed the face of humanity today. We should not consider it as one of the problems emerging in the world today; rather, strictly speaking, there is no other problem but this, which has been before us for the last two centuries. From it grow all the other problems facing the world today.

The machine must increase its production progressively each year. Therefore, to avoid stock-piling, it must also progressively create the necessity of continuous consumption. However people's consumption does not increase at the same rate as does production. A certain society may have 30% increase in its paper consumption in 10 years and 300%, or tripling, of its paper production. Ten years ago machines produced 5 kilometers of paper per hour and today produce 50 kilometers per hour, while paper consumption has not risen and cannot rise to that extent.

So what is to be done about excess production or surplus? What is to be done with the extra piles of paper? New fields of consumption must be provided. Each European country has a special and particular taste and a fixed consumption; their populations do not exceed 40 to 60 million. The frantic production rate, rising constantly, exceeds the desires of people to consume. They can't keep up! Thus since the machine has compulsively produced excess goods, it must step over it's national boundary and push goods into foreign markets. When the capitalists gained control of machinery, technology and science in the 18th century, humanity's destiny was determined. Every single human on the face of the earth would be coerced into becoming a consumer for the produced merchandise. European markets became saturated rapidly; consequently the surplus goods had to go to Asia and Africa. Asians and Africans had to consume the surplus European products.

Can these products actually be taken to the East, whose pattern of life does not require them, and force their consumption? Impossible! When you enter an Asian society you notice that the Asian's clothing is made by his wife or in a native workshop. They wear traditional garments. There is no demand here for the products of factories which make machines, or "high fashion" clothes, or the "modern" fabrics of Europe. In an African society we will notice that their desires, interests and joys are confined to horse-riding and appreciation of the grace of their horses. They lack highways, drivers, ideas of machines, and the need for any of these. In their style of life their production is equal to their consumption, which is consistent with their traditions, tastes and necessities. For them, therefore, an automobile, as any other European product, is entirely redundant.

European factories produced an ever-increasing quantity of luxury goods and sought for them a market in Asian and African countries. It was out of the question to expect Asian and African men and women to use these products in the 18th century or even the 19th even if the products had been furnished free. They had other enjoyments; they had their own special native adornments. An African or Asian woman had no need for European cosmetics and no need for trinkets to beautify herself and dress up. She already had her own cosmetics, her own materials and make-up. She would use them and all would admire her. Nor would she feel any need for a change.

As a result of her attitude, the capitalist's merchandise remained unsold. People with this way of thinking, with unique necessities and tastes, who have their own life style and produce their own necessities, were not the type of people who would consume the products of 18th century European capitalists. So what to do? The problem was to make people in Asia and Africa consumers of European products. Their societies must be structured so they would buy European products. That meant changing a nation literally. They had to change the nation, and they had to transform a man in order to change his clothing, his consumption pattern, his adornment, his abode and his city. What part of him to change first? His morale and his thinking. Who could change the spirit of a society, the morale of a society and the way of thinking of a nation? In this respect, there was little the European capitalist, engineer or producer could do. Rather, it was the business of the enlightened European intellectuals to plan a special method of perverting the mind, the taste and lifestyle of the non-European, not in a way that he himself chooses, - since the change he desires might not necessitate the consumption of European products - rather his desires, his choices, his suffering, his sorrow, his tastes, his ideals, his sense of beauty, his tradition, his social relations, his amusements - all must be changed so that he is coerced into becoming a consumer of European industrial products. So the big producers and big European capitalists of the 18th and 19th centuries let the intellectuals handle this project.

This was the project: all the people of the world must become uniform. They must live alike. They must think alike. Practically, it is impossible for all the nations to think in the same way. What structural elements go into the personality and spirit of a man and nation? Religion, history, culture, past civilization, education and tradition. All of these mentioned are the structural elements of a man's personality and spirit and, in its general term, of a nation. These elements differ from one society to another. They result in one form in Europe, another in Asia and in Africa. They all have to become the same. The differences in thinking and spirits of the nations of the world must be destroyed in order for men to become uniform. They must conform, wherever they are, to a single pattern. What is this pattern? The pattern is provided by Europe: it shows all Easterners, Asians, Africans, how to think, how to dress, how to desire, how to grieve, how to build their houses, how to establish their social relations, how to consume, how to express their view, and finally how to like and what to like. Soon it is realized that a new culture called "modernization" was presented to the whole world.

Modernity was the best method of diverting the non-European world, from whatever form and mould of thinking, from their own mould, thought and personality. It became the sole task of Europeans to place the temptation of "modernization" before the non-European societies of any complexion. The Europeans realized that by tempting the inhabitant of the East with a compulsive desire for "modernization", he would cooperate with them to deny his own past and desecrate and destroy with his own hands the constituents of his own unique culture, religion and personality. So the temptation and longing for "modernization" prevailed all across the Far East, Middle East, Near East and in Islamic and Black countries - and to become modernized was regarded as becoming like the Europeans.

Strictly speaking, "modernized" means modernized in consumption. One who becomes modernized is one whose tastes now desire "modern" items to satisfy his wants. In other words, he imports from Europe new forms of living and modern products, and he does not use new types of products and a lifestyle developed from his own original and national past. Non-Europeans are modernized for the sake of consumption. Westerners, however, could not just tell others they were going to reshape their intellect, mind and personality for fear of awakening resistance. Therefore, the Europeans had to make non-Europeans equate "modernization" with "civilization" to impose the new consumption pattern upon them, since everyone has a desire for civilization. "Modernization" was defined as "civilization" and thus people cooperated with the European plans to modernize. Even more than the bourgeois and capitalist, the non-European intellectual labored mightily to change consumption patterns and lifestyles in their societies. Since the non-Europeans could not produce the new products, they became automatically dependant upon the technology which produces for them and expects them to buy whatever it produces.

While studying in Europe, I heard of an automobile factory that advertised high-paying jobs for sociologists and psychologists. I was looking for a job, and besides I became very interested in knowing why a car factory needed sociologists and psychologists. So I went there for a job interview with the man in the public relations department. He asked me, "Perhaps you are wondering why we are recruiting sociologists while we usually hire mechanical engineers and the like?" I said yes. He brought out a map of all of Asia and Africa and pointed to some cities, telling me that in some there was a great demand for the cars and many customers but that in others there was no demand. He continued: "We can't find out why there is no demand from engineers. It is the sociologists' task to find out what these people like and why they don't buy cars, so we can change the color or design of the cars, if possible, and if not, make them change their taste." Then he gave me an example of European sociologists' success in modernizing a certain tribe.

He showed me a wooded and mountainous area on the bank of the Chad River in Africa where many long-nomadic tribes lived. People there did not wear clothes and kept cattle for a living. He pointed out some areas where a group of people lived around the tribal chief's castle. They had no schools, no roads or highways, no clothes and no houses. They lived in tents. Then he told me that the chief of this semi-wild village had parked two modern Renaults with gold trim in front of his palace.

"These natives were only interested in horses originally. The person who possessed the best horse was the most well-known and envied. Everyone tried to raise the best horse as a means of self-glorification and achieving dominance. As long as this kind of consciousness predominated in the tribe," the car employer told me, "no-one would buy a car. Rather, all of them would continue to buy horses, and we do not produce any horses. So we tried to think of a way to make the natives buy the automobiles we produce in Europe."

"The women of the tribe make themselves up attractively with preparations made of gum and sap from the forest, and everyone likes their style. Happy with their local culture, folk dance and native food, it is obvious that no women in the tribe will buy Christian Dior cosmetics nor would the men buy Renaults. Europeans never even tried to sell them anything. But eventually a development allowed the European sociologists an opportunity to change the taste of the natives. The chief of the tribe used to tie two beautiful horses with his best hunting dog in front of his headquarters, and now we have changed his taste. We have modernized him: instead of tying up his horses in front of his place, now, he takes pride in parking there the two Renaults with golden trim."

I asked him with surprise: " But they don't have any roads?" "They have built a temporary 8 kilometer road," he said.

"When the chief of the tribe first bought the car, every morning he would take a ride and all the people of the tribe would gather and watch the car. He did not know how to drive, so he hired one from here. The driver worked for him eight months and received a handsome salary. There were no gas stations near the tribe, so the gas was bought from far distances by boat."

So the goal of the capitalist was not really to civilize this tribe but to modernize it. The chief who was proud of his horse and was a horse rider is now proud of his car and enjoys driving it. The chief of the tribe, like many other Asians or non-Europeans, has become modernized but one must really be naive to judge superficially that he has become civilised as well.

Modernization is changing traditions, mode of consumption and material life from old to new. People made the old ways; machines produce the new. To make all the non-Europeans modernized, they first had to overcome the influence of religion, since religion causes any society to feel a distinctive individuality. Religion postulates an exalted intellectuality to which everyone relates intellectually. If this intellect is crushed and humiliated, the one who identifies himself with it feels also crushed and humiliated. So native intellectuals began a movement against "fanaticism". As Franz Fanon says: "Europe intended to captivate the non-European by the machine. Can a human or society be enslaved by a machine or certain European product without taking away or depriving him of his personality?" No, it can not. The personality must be wiped out first.

Since religion, history, culture, as a totality of intellect, thought, amassed art and literature give personality to a society, they all have to be destroyed, too. In the 19th century I would feel as an Iranian that I was attached to a great civilization of the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th centuries of Islam which was unparalleled in the world and had the whole world under its influence. I would feel that I was attached to a culture, more than 2000 years old, which in various forms and shapes, had created new intellectualism, new art and literature in the world of humanity. I would feel that I was attached to the Islam that was the newest, the most sublime and the most universal religion, creating all those intellectualities and dissolving all those different civilizations in itself to create a greater civilization. I would feel attached to the Islam which created the most beautiful spirit and the most sublime face of humanity, and I could also feel, as a human, that I had a unique personality in the eyes of the world and every person in it. So how could they convert such an "I" into a gadget whose only function is to consume new products?

They would deprive him of his personality. He must be dispossessed of all the "I's" he feels within. He must be forced to believe himself related to a humbler civilization, a humbler social order, and accept that European civilization, Western civilization and the Western race are superior. Africa must believe that an African is a savage, so that he is tempted to become "civilized" and put himself readily into the hands of the Europeans who will determine his fate. The poor man does not realise that he is being modernized instead of being civilized. That is why we see that all of a sudden in the 18th and 19th centuries the Africans were described as savages and cannibals. Those Africans who had dealt with the Islamic civilisation for centuries were never known as cannibals. Suddenly the Black African becomes a cannibal, has a special smell, has a special race. The grey part of his brain does not work, and the forepart of his brain, like the Asian's, is shorter compared to the Westerner's!

Even their doctors and biologists have 'proven' (!) that the Westerner's brain has an extra gray peel, which Easterners and Blacks lack!! They also have 'proven' that the Westerner's brain has an additional length to the genes in the brain cells which allows him to think better than a non-Westerner! Then we see that a new culture was built on a basis of "Western superiority" and "the superiority of its civilization and its people". They made us and the world believe that the European was exceptionally talented mentally and technically, whereas the Easterner had strange emotional and gnostic talents and the Negro was only good for dancing, singing, painting and sculpture.

Consequently, the world was divided into three distinct races: one which can think, that is, the European(!) (right from the days of ancient Greece up to now!) and the one which can only feel or make poetry, the Easterner, who has only mystical and gnostic feelings, and the Black, who can dance, sing and play good jazz.

Then this very way of thinking, which was introduced to the world to justify the need for modernizing the non-European nations, became the basis of thought for the non-European elites as well. We see how they created a conflict between the "modernized" and the "old-fashioned" in non-European societies for 100 years; a conflict which was, and still is, the most senseless fight one has ever seen.

Modernization in what? In consumption, not in mind. Old fashioned in what? In the form of consumption. It was natural that the fight ended in favor of modernization, and even if it had ended otherwise, it would not have been to the benefit of the masses. In this fight, the fight between the modernized and civilized, the European was the leader. In the name of civilization, the campaign for modernization was carried on, and then for 100 years, for more than 100 years, the non-European societies themselves strove to become modernized under the leadership of their sophisticated intellectuals.

Let us consider the genesis and composition of this class of intellectuals. Jean Paul Sartre in the preface to "The Wretched of the Earth" points out: "We would bring a group of African or Asian youth to Amsterdam, Paris, London......for a few months, take them around, change their clothes and adornments, teach them etiquette and social manners as well as some fragment of language. In short, we would empty them of their own cultural values and then send them back to their own countries. They would no longer be the kind of person to speak their own mind; rather they would be our mouthpieces. We would cry the slogans of humanity and equality and then they would echo our voice in Africa and Asia, "-manity","-quality."

These were the persons who convinced people to lay aside their orthodoxy, discard their religion, get rid of native culture (as these had kept them behind the modern European societies) and become westernized from the tip of the toe to the top of the head!

How is it possible to become Europeanized through export and exchange? Is civilization a product that one can export and import from one place to another? Of course not ; but modernity is the collection of modern products which can be imported by a society within a period of 1,2 or 5 years. A certain society can be completely modernized within a few years. Likewise an individual could also become throughly modernized, even more modernized than the European himself. You can change his mode of consumption and he becomes modernized. That is exactly what the Europeans were expecting.

But it is not so simple to civilise a nation or a society. Civilization and culture are not European-made products whose ownership makes anyone civilized. But they made us believe that all modernization nonsense was a manifestation of civilization! And we eagerly threw away everything we had, even our social prestige, morality and intellect, to become thirsty suckers of what Europe was eager to trickle into our mouths. This is what modernity really means.

Thus a being was created devoid of any background, alienated from his history and religion, and a stranger to whatever his race, his history and his forefathers had built in this world; alienated from his own human characteristics, a second-hand personality whose mode of consumption had been changed, whose mind has been changed, who had lost his old precious thoughts, his glorious past and intellectual qualities and has now become empty within. As Jean Paul Sartre puts it: "In these societies an "assimilae"- meaning a quasi-thinker and quasi-educated person - was created, not a real thinker or intellectual."

A real intellectual is one who knows his society, is aware of it's problems, can determine its fate, is knowledgeable about its past and who can decide for himself. These quasi-intellectuals, however, succeeded in influencing the people. Who were these quasi-intellectuals in non-European societies? They were intermediaries between those who had the products and those who had to consume the products. A mediator who, aquainted both with the Europeans and with his own people, eased the way of colonization and exploitation.

That was why they created native intellectuals who did not dare to choose for themselves, who don't have the courage to maintain their own opinions and who cannot decide for themselves. Such persons came to be deemed mean and inferior to the extent that when asked about the flavor of their food, the music they listen to, the clothes they wear, they do not have the conviction to say whether they like or dislike them. This is because it is no longer they who decide. They have to be told that such and such a dress is worn in Europe, and so they can like it. They are told that a particularly bitter food, which to them tastes like poison, is eaten in Europe and, therefore, they can eat it, even if it does not suit their taste. They eat it anyway because the Europeans eat it; they lack the courage and assurance to say they dislike it.

In Europe and America, when people go to a place where jazz is being played and they don't like it, they just say so bluntly, and loudly. But in Eastern countries no one can be brave enough to say "Jazz is bad and I do not like it." Why? Because they have not left him enough personality and human value to let him choose the color of his dress and the flavor of his food. As Fanon says: "In order for Eastern countries to be the followers of Europe and imitate her like a monkey, they should have proven to the non-Europeans that they do not possess the same quality of human values as the Europeans do. They should have belittled their history, literature, religion and art to make them alienated from all of it. We can see that the Europeans did just that."

They have created a people who do not know their own culture, but still are ready to despise it. They know nothing about Islam but say bad things about it. They cannot understand a simple poem but criticize it with poorly chosen words. They do not understand their history but are ready to condemn it. On the other hand, without reservation they admire all that is imported from Europe. Consequently, a being was created who, first became alienated from his religion, culture, history and background, and then came to despise them. He was convinced he was inferior to the European. And when such a belief took root in him, he tried and wished to refute himself, to sever his connections with all the objects attached to him and somehow make himself like a European, who was not despised and looked down upon, and at least be able to say, "Thank God I am not an Easterner since I modernized myself sufficiently to reach the level of a European."

And while the non-European is happy with the idea that he has been modernized, the European capitalist and bourgeois laugh at their success in converting him into a consumer of their surplus production.

So which products were most name-dropped in the 106 songs that reached the Billboard Top 20 last year?

Acoording to a report by marketing firm Agenda Inc., Mercedes received 100 mentions from rappers in 2005, while Nike came in second with 63 mentions and former No. 1 Cadillac took third with 62. Auto brands dominated the Top 10, with Bentley, Rolls Royce and Chevrolet also among the most-mentioned.

A total of 35 percent of the songs that made the charts in 2005 contained product references, compared to 40 percent of songs in 2004. The top product categories in this year's list were automobiles, fashion labels, beverages and weapons.

The brand which made the biggest gain in ranking this year was the pistol-maker Beretta, which debuted at No. 13 with 24 mentions.

50 Cent was the most brand-dropping rapper of the year, with 17 product mentions in 7 songs, mentioning brands like Bentley, Cristal, Lamborghini, Mercedes and Nike.

It was unclear how many of the product mentions were paid placements -- advertising industry analysts quoted in AdAge said that revealing such a deal would likely undermine both the rapper and the brand's credibility.

Oh and no mention of McDonalds who wanted to pay rappers for mentioning Big Macs...

Top ten brands:

1. Mercedes-Benz
2. Nike
3. Cadillac
4. Bentley
5. Rolls-Royce
6. Hennessy
7. Chevrolet
8. Louis Vuitton/Cristal (tie)
10. AK-47