War by Royal Prerogative or by Any Means Necessary

Tulsi Gabbard is the member of Congress for my district here in Hawaii. She is a Democrat. But she has come out in the clearest terms against the policy of the president and her party for making Syrian president Bashir al-Assad leave office. She is clear that it is not only illegal because the Congress empowered to declare war has not done so, but she has cited the list of failed regime changes perpetrated by the US empire and how those acts have made things far worse in the Middle East region and not made the US safe at all.

This week, British prime minister, David Cameron, has secured the vote of Parliament to bomb Syria.

There's a lot of unfortunate symbolism here which hides the rot at the root of our failed democracies.

The US empire has fought many wars without Congress declaring them. A famous example would be the US war against Vietnam. A less famous one would be the US invasion of Grenada. There was no Congressional approval for regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Argentina.

There was no Congressional approval for regime change and troops invasion of Haiti.

Some might argue that formal declarations of war are reserved for European powers against European powers, as when Congress declared war against NAZI Germany, the last time it made such a declaration. Any other so-called "police action" - their term, not mine, and it does reveal hegemonic posture - is just divvying up pies that naturally belong to the Western world

The UK is a different story altogether.

Cameron going to the floor of Parliament has only one precedent. Tony Blair did as much to invade Iraq - he lied about the evidence, but this is a different story. At that time, the members of Parliament approved the invasion. Blair has since said had he lost the vote he would have resigned. I still wonder why this man is not in a prison for the deaths he caused.

But I digress.

The British constitution, which is unwritten and based mostly on custom, does not give war powers to Parliament. Americans might wonder why it's not written, and I'll get back to that in a moment.

Two years ago, when Cameron's desire to invade Syria was defeated, the first question the Labour Party asked was: would the prime minister use the Royal Prerogative to invade anyway. Cameron said he would not.

If the British constitution does not give war powers to Parliament, who declares war? The answer is the monarch does.

The monarch declares war, concludes peace terms, signs treaties, recognizes other governments [or does not]. Ambassadors are not accredited to Great Britain, as they are to the United States. While there is a French ambassador to the US, there is, in legal terms, no French ambassador to Great Britain.

The French ambassador is accredited to the Court of St James, a royal palace, for receiving and dispatching ambassadors. Like the members of Parliament of the UK, the queen's ambassadors swear their oaths to the monarch and her family.

When Great Britain declared war on Germany, twice, sent troops to Egypt to attempt to reclaim the Suez Canal, invaded and fought with Argentine troops over the Falkland Islands, it was done in the monarch's hand with the advice of the prime minister.

In the British constitution, Parliament has nothing whatsoever to do with it, so their opinion is irrelevant. In the US, the Congressional opinion does matter, but this seems to make little difference.

In 1999, a member of Parliament introduced a bill which would have given authority to declare war on Iraq to Parliament. The Queen, reportedly on the advice of PM Tony Blair, barred debate of the bill in Parliament, and it was effectively killed.

The corrosion that has always been at the heart of our failed states, has only grown more so.

Right in front of our faces, our so-called civilizations have come to depend on constant warfare more than the sustained endorsement of the masses. War is like life-blood itself. The the masses is like acne, to be controlled or eradicated.

While it is fashionable to turn on each other in our communities or at the workplace, our political leadership has gotten out of hand. It makes me recall George Bernard Shaw's scandalous directive during WWI that the troops on both sides needed to turn their guns on their own generals, shoot them, and come home for Christmas.

Britain's establishment is committed to an unwritten constitution, based on convention and habit, because - I suspect - it wants to default to authoritarian rule, whether by a prime minister or a monarch. It does not ever want to codify powers to Parliament and the people. Incidentally, this is why House of Lords reform has become so contentious and at a dead-end: the last thing a British prime minister wants to do is create a second, democratically elected chamber to compete with its powers.

Just as egregious, the US establishment is committed to its written constitution just so long as it is never enforced.

From our workplaces to state and local governments, the United States and its partner the United Kingdom are committed to keeping the people in line - be it with coercion or circuses. And countries, like ours, which hate democracy this much cannot reasonably be believed to import it abroad.

White Refugees and White Settlement: Strategies for Success

I'm clear that the Syrian refugee crisis we are talking about, like the other refugee crises we aren't talking about, is purely man-made. There are man-made refugee crises in Africa, where Western and Chinese capital seek to exploit resources and get the peoples of that land driven off the lands of their ancestors.

Why aren't these peoples being welcomed into Europe? Why isn't German chancellor Angela Merkel speaking on the behalf of Africa?

In the case of Syria, a rapidly escalating bombing campaign by the United States, then Russia, and now escalated by France, are driving the Syrian population from their homes. (Interestingly, coalitions are discussed, NATO considered, but once again the United Nations is sidelined for obvious reasons that the bombing is a war crime)

Africans in the North American diaspora would be justified to be wary of this influx of Syrians into the US, not on religious hysterical grounds or concerns about "terrorism." For good or bad, Islam is as known in the African diaspora as Christianity: unlike Europe, African piety for monotheism or traditional pantheism doesn't extend to Crusades and holocausts. And as far as terrorism, Africans in the diaspora are more likely to be terrorized by domestic white police officers than ISIL. The national police state is our terror.

Our wariness comes from a cursory look at immigration policy in the United States, a white-settler nation-state that basically ceased the acceptance of masses Africans with the end of the slave trade in the mid-1800's until the late 1960's.

Before the Civil War, and especially after, the United States, like much of Latin America and the Caribbean, opened its arms solely to European immigration, some of which, like the Irish, were virtually refugees given the British government's pogrom against them. The goal was to whiten the population.

These newer waves of white immigrants served their purpose. They were always placed quickly in positions above the First Nation and African populations, who arguably have been here for many more generations.

The post-US Civil War white immigrant learned very quickly where their place was in a white settlement. They learned quickly what the white man's Negro fantasy meant and to keep clear of that side of town ... unless you were trying to exploit them with a liquor store or a nail salon.

With few, notable exceptions, these white immigrants did not stand in solidarity with the conditions of First Nations and Africans. They aspired to be Kennedys, Carnegies, Rockefellers.

In the early 1960's, then-US attorney general Robert Kennedy had the audacity to tell writers James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry that he could foresee a Negro US president in fifty years.

Baldwin left this meeting incredulous that a white man who's family had just arrived on these stolen lands, been permitted to exploit the wealth of it, could lecture people who had been here since the early 1600's.

But this is always the pattern. The African and First Nation are kept on the bottom, while the newcomers afforded an opportunity to flourish on our backs.

The Statue of Liberty was never meant for Africans.

Our white friends and their right-wing brothers like to fall back on some version of a narrative that speaks to the newcomer's work ethic. They never realize it but this is as offensive as what Kennedy said. White people rarely speak to basics like how I as an African am perceived applying for a job I never get, let alone a business loan I never qualify for.

They won't talk about the structural racism that lifts some boats and sinks others.

I don't expect anything different with the Syrian refugee. I would not put it passed the racist institutions of this nation that they would welcome these non-African immigrants, whom by the way the US Census Bureau designates as "white" for the same reasons they did for the hundred years after the US Civil War. To keep, goes the motto, the Negro in his place.

This is why I have been clear from the start. End the causes of the refugee crises in all the global South. End the wars. The bombings. The drone-assassinations. The occupations and puppet generals-turned-presidents.That will address the refugee problem.

The United States as a white-settler nation-state with white-settler institutions is a tougher conundrum that history shows requires a more rigorous, militant response.

Innocent Victims

The first telegrams of condolence for the victims and the wounded in Paris should come from the French government itself, not ISIS. France is one of the biggest arms dealers to the roguest elements in Western Asia and Africa. In fact, as Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah illustrates, this market in death is not only to keep pro-Western, anti-labor generals in power, or, to arm "rebels" who will depose pro-nationalist, anti-Western regimes, but it literally is also the main fund for the post-war European welfare state. Nkrumah writes that while the European left had been staunchly anti-imperialist before the end of WWII, they traded that position for the founding of the welfare state.

After WWII, the European Left abandoned its anti-imperialism for generous economic supports at home. These social programs were founded on the backs of neocolonial policies.

I might argue that just as France has some of the most generous social benefits, this is inextricably connected to its promiscuous market in weapons to the global South.

Just so, to the extent we are supposed to think of these victims in France as "innocent" we can only do so in as much as they do not participate in the trade. If I sell a loaded gun to a madman, and he shoots me, am I innocent? If my family are arms dealers and we sell a group of madmen guns, and they slaughter my whole family, are we innocent?

It's a provocative question, but one that must be asked if we are serious about locating the causes of "terrorism".

The question of innocence got Prof Ward Churchill hounded out and fired from his Univ of Colorado tenured post. After 9/11, Churchill, whose subject is mostly and richly First Nations struggles and the crimes committed against them, characterized the workers in the Towers as "Eichmanns." For those who don't recognize that name, Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi bureaucrat in charge of administering the gas chambers. Put on trial at Nuremberg, his defense was "I was just following orders."

We have mostly forgotten that the court ruled that this is not a defense, and indicted him and executed him.

Pulling the former empires and their continued imperial thirsts out of the former colonies is a tall order to those who want their gas cheap, wardrobes affordable and filling every drawer, and all the creature comforts we are used to in the West. Our lifestyles are addictions that indict masses of Black and Brown peoples to a purgatory of dictatorships, torture chambers, sweat shops, and disappearances.

Are we innocent? No. Whether we confront the fact or not, just as those post-WWII European anti-imperialists turncoated their common cause with the workers in the colonies, so have we.

We have in the US built up a different kind of welfare state than Europe's, but it is just as vile at its foundations. We have sold our African brothers and sisters down the river to Hell. We have looked away while our government greenlighted Latin American generals to round up labor activists and drop their living bodies from helicopters into the ocean.

The telegrams of condolence should come first from our own governments, whom we need to send to Nuremberg for trial and execution.

For the Love of Germaine Greer and Fidel and Gadaffi and Assata and All the Rebellious Rogues

Someone I have no reason to disrespect politically just responded to a post I made of feminist Germaine Greer writing "I just learned of her today in the context of her apparent transphobia."

The person who wrote that appears young, but I do not know how young. Whatever his age, he is intelligent. The point is Greer is nearing 80, and is not young, and has indisputably served much of her life as an anti-assimilation, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-industrial feudalism class warrior. Agree with her or not, her record is wide and deep.

So this reflex by rising generations of activists, which seems to have gained steam over the last 20 years only, where we approach our radicals like Mormon missionaries on safari, is disturbing.

Stop it.

What do Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Margaret Sanger, Assata Shakur, Muammar Gadaffi, Robert Mugabe, Mohamed Morsi have in common? I don't know, but they are to some controversial figures, and to others they are heroes.

They have all been important enough to get me unfriended, blocked, cussed at. To be absolutely fair, I have unfriended, blocked, cussed at a few people who've crossed the line of civilized debate with me and resorted to personal attacks in place of argument.

I am a man of ideas. Not of people. Ideas outlive people: they are handed down. People die. I do not quote, share, cite any of these peoples' works to make gods out of them but to nurture the soil of revolution and revolutionary thought. My belief in their contribution to this thought is unequivocal.

To the extent they might be deemed imperfect is arrogance to me. I don't care if they are drunkards, philanderers, starved their children, as Marx is said to have done.

What does this have to do with Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch and many other writings?

Revolutionary thought is done no service by abbreviating two generations of work of someone like Greer to her articulated position on transsexuals, any more than we miss study of a revolutionary movement by reducing Fidel to a "dictator" and those UMAP camps [where gays and dissenters were sent in the early years of the Cuban revolution].

If this is all Fidel is for you, then you will miss his cogent, deep, sometimes colorful analyses of capitalism in general and the Western empire in particular. You will also miss his position on those camps and his own evolution, but I maintain these are irrelevant to his contributions.

Before Hillary and Benghazi, Gadaffi lost me about 10 friends in one day on Facebook, all of whom had their "Christopher Hitchens moment" and supported the overthrow of the Libyan revolutionary. They openly despised me for coming to his defense. They were tone deaf to my counter-argument that while the US was ambivalent about South African apartheid yet arming the white regime, Gadaffi was giving money and weapons to crush that racist regime. This has made Libya a heroic figure in the global South in anticolonial, Pan-African struggle. I urged a broader perspective; they did not want one.

Just a few days ago, I unfriended a young white man, who had only recently requested my friendship. This debacle was over Pres. Mugabe. Before he told me I was full of hate and provoked my pushing the eject button, he had reduced Mugabe to a homophobe who was orchestrating pogroms against lesbian and gay Zimbabweans.

Now, to the first, there is evidence; Mugabe has said some disturbing things; to the pogroms, the record is very thin. Human Rights Watch is interestingly disturbed now about "equal rights" now that white farmers are being kicked off lands. They are silent about pogroms, except for the harassment and arrest of a leader of an unlicensed gay rights NGO. This is regrettable but hardly a pogrom.

What I wanted to impress upon this man and his worldly ways was that for some people on the continent and in the diaspora, Mugabe is a freedom fighter who successfully kicked the British settler government out of what was this colonial Southern Rhodesia. While the British queen and her ministers were fiddling "God Save the Queen" and making all sorts of excuses about the white occupiers of African lands, Mugabe - an aspiring school teacher - was waging a rebellion, a rebellion he is still waging at 90 years old.

I guess I have crossed the rubicon into "older." I understand less and less these young radicals, who are almost entirely millennials, who demand ideological purity to what is currently in style.They don't read anything longer than a Tweet. They have a lingo but no syllabus.

This essay isn't about demanding they share my view of things, but for godsake be a little reticent and more global. Anyone who would reduce Greer to a transphobe  is not doing any reading. This is not to say one way or another what Greer's position is: it is to say it's probably not relevant to the weight of her contribution.

In George Bernard Shaw's writing and stage play, "St. Joan," the maid of Orleans is described as an early feminist and rational stylist when it came to clothes. She was an anti-warrior warrior and military strategist. But the patriarchs of the time could bear none of this, let alone see it. Threatened by these things, they burned her. The last words Shaw puts in Joan's mouth, which end the play, resonate: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to accept thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"

A More Perfect Communism

 

Yesterday I was in a serious motorcycle accident coming down Kaiminani at about 5 AM. My front tire suddenly lost air, handle bars twisted sharply to the left, and over and down, and over I went, followed my the longest skid of my life.

X-rays and Catscans later revealed the worst of my injury was a break in my left leg, the side of the body that took most of the fall.

But I am already getting ahead of myself. This story isn't really about me.

Laying there dazed in the middle of the street, one car drove around and passed me and continued down the hill. Another car heading up the hill, pulled to the side to see if I was alright. I heard him call 911, give his name and number, and he said he'd try to stay but he was late for work.

As I crawled to the side of the street, this good Samaritan picked up my motorcycle - this is when we noted the front tire was airless and flat, and he engaged in some small talk until the paramedics arrived, followed by the police.

Routine questions were asked. I was put in the back of the ambulance. One of the officers was to arrange for a tow with my AAA card. I was off to the Kona Community Hospital.

You may not have noticed in that briefest rendition are examples of communism, and I want you to think about them, appreciate them, and strive to better them. The alternative is at the end of this story.

Communism, you say incredulously? Where are the Reds?

A lot of nonsense still fills the heads of the pioneer West about communism, even though we ask for it everyday in all kinds of subtle but obvious ways.

The good Samaritan. I did not have to hire anyone to stop and help. It was not part of his job: the fact he was anxious about being late for his job tells me he's not even a middle-management type, just a wage-slaving Joe like most of us. So without reward, he reached out.

The paramedics came. They never asked for my insurance or asked for a fee to begin care. I was on the ground. My first thought when I stopped skidding after the crash was who would feed my cat -- but I did not tell them this since they might think I had a head injury. They did their jobs. They followed their training. This is what we call a Public Service.

Public Services are services open to all. Our public schools. Our fire departments. These are also public services. No administrator stops to ask for a fee or to see if your monthly subscription is in good standing before the child is admitted to class or, worse, the fire in your house is put out.

As a nurse later put it to me in the ER "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Period.

Public Services are examples of communism.

The Police. I have to distinguish them from the other services because their function has earned mixed grades over time. The police were started explicitly to deal with poor people and the threat they posed to the Establishment. While much of the role of the police has not changed much over the last few hundred years, as public servants they can and do strive to achieve this end.

But police are a public service and also examples of communism. Armies are examples of communism, too. But they were designed to break things and kill people.

So just because communism is good doesn't mean everything it produces is good.

The Community Hospital, where I was taken by ambulance. Yes, that, too, is communism.

I know this pioneer country is full of myths and people who strive to fulfill those myths, who not only hate communism but also hate "government" - which I am arguing is communism to the extent it organizes public institutions to serve the public broadly or in target communities. These pioneer types want you to believe that all it takes is you and your sturdy bootstraps

But look what happens after a natural disaster. Nothing makes an anticommunist more communist than when a wildfire is about the burn down his precious home and the fire department show up and, without question, "revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Those fire fighters follow their training and extinguish that fire.

We all paid into the pot for the service; we all benefit. That is communism.

When was the last time you heard someone ask how much money the fire department made in the last fiscal quarter? The police? The ambulances? Your schools?

But my story took a rather sour turn. No it wasn't the trauma suffered on my torso or my broken left leg. It was my motorcycle.

AAA would not retrieve my bike, so unbeknownst to me - I was in an ambulance - the police officer called their outside-contracted tow service to collect it.

A friend took me to this dump site where my bike was being held not 8 hours after my initial accident, and I was presented with a bill for over $400 to claim my motorcycle.

Ladies and gentlemen, comrades and co-conspirators: this is an example of capitalism. Unadorned, unromanticized capitalism.

The proponents of capitalism obfuscate it in all kinds of distracting ways: like cowboys on their horses, ranchers, tales of upward class mobility, and lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The bottom line about capitalism is it seeks to maximize its wealth in return for as little loss as possible. Just so, for towing my bike a few miles and housing it for a few hours at most, these people were able to extort $400 from me.

Capitalism extorts as much labor as it can, on or off the books, for as little compensation it can spend. That is why the old economists, the radicals, and even at one time the Republican Party called this wage-slavery.

Capitalism does demand performance, but not "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." No. It demands to know how much more you earned this quarter from last. It asks how did you minimize your costs.

Remember, they are authorized, outside contractors with the Hawaii police. In fact, I did call the police. I felt I was being extorted, and this was a scam. True to their history as defenders of the Establishment against the poor, the police officer arrived sharply dressed, polite, and in total collusion with the impound lot.

"IF I saw some criminal activity here ..." he said to me.

"If? ... Really?"

But that was that.

What it comes down to is which kind of society you want to cultivate for yourselves, your neighbors, your children, and so on.

I have drawn two sharp visions. These are real-life stories. Now our pioneer establishment must exist on the myth that only one story is tenable, the capitalist one. But they rarely show you its brutality and tell you that humans are naturally selfish creatures. This is nonsense.

Clearly, a good Samaritan and public services are as equally possible as that car that left me in the middle of the street to pull myself up by my bootstraps and police-authorized extortionists demanding much from you for little in return.

For my part, I am a communist, and only want to cultivate and perfect such a society for everyone.

The Counter Narrative to the Refugee Crisis

Resist this constant narrative about "refugees." Usually when US media stick to a singular message, I can simply go to the Guardian UK, Le Monde, El Pais, or other European media to get an alternative view. In this case, all the usual suspects - US, UK, Germany, France, and of course NATO - are complicit in perpetrating their customary war crimes - customary in the history of imperialism, that is. So it's not only valuable to question the message but also look outside to Russian, Cuban, and Indian media, or the truly dissident media within the empires, for another angle.

What is being driven into our heads as a refugee crisis, who will take the refugees, how many will they take, the plight of the refugees, the angst of such leaders as British prime minister David Cameron, who is said to be restricted by a British electorate leery of immigration, or of German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is described as facing down the skeptics in her ruling coalition - all this, all this rhetoric, misses some obvious points right in front of us.

One obvious fact is this refugee crisis is the result of a massive arms build up by the imperial powers in Western Asia over oil.

The other has to do with the economic state of Europe.

The West was literally built by its access into the global South via forced labor camps [plantations] and resource theft to fuel the industrial revolution. As these resources diminish, the need to secure access becomes more critical: hence, the massive tonnage of weaponry being used in the region, something almost never talked about, and where these weapons come from; hence in what Western commentators call generations of peacetime since the end of World War II. we have actually seen an almost constant, sustained imperial war on the global South.

The masses of people of the global South have simply gotten in the way of easy access to this shrinking, global oil supply. People are a threat because they pose potential forces of resistance, violent and nonviolent, revolutionary or not revolutionary.

The Cherokee got in the way, so they had to be made into refugees. East African tribes are in the way, so they are made into refugees. And in the closest analogy to our present situation, the Vietnamese peasants got in the way, so defoliants were used to drive masses of potential revolutionaries from the countryside where they were self-sufficient and  into the cities where they would become solely dependent on the US-backed dictatorship.

And then there is Europe itself.

What is puzzling about this refugee narrative is everyone seems to assume, and the refugees are made to assume, there is a home for them in Europe. I don't know what psychotic one must take to believe this: Europe, which has done so poorly in assimilating its colonial Asians, Africans, Arabs is presumed today to have a home for these hundreds of thousands of refugees, when just one Brazilian laborer could be assumed to be an Arab terrorist and chased by plainclothes secret service agents and shot multiple times in the London tube [subway].

Europe, which has deeper problems which connect directly to capitalism, is supposed to have economies to absorb these hundred of thousands of people.

Even without these refugees, with every advancement in Europe and growth in the British FTSE or German banks, comes deeper unemployment among its own peoples. This phenomenon is certainly true of the US and the rest of the industrialized world, guided by a command economy directed by bankers and financiers. Rising markets seem in competition with rising surplus laborers for whom there is no work and moves to lessen social supports.

Europe is in a crisis, and we see this most clearly in the southern regions and Ireland.

What is to be done with several hundred thousand refugees, regardless of their technological skills, when Europe cannot absorb its own into its narrowing economy? This is why the poorer EU countries are loudest in their resistance to accept these people.

Neoliberalism is supposed despite the evidence to the contrary right in front of us to solve every problem and put a chicken in every pot. These are lies. Vicious, imperial lies.

The Campaign of Kim Davis

As incredible as it might seem, it should not surprise you that some circles of so-called radical thinkers - mostly white, as far as I can tell - have made Kim Davis a cause close to their hearts.

We follow our white allies into deeper pits when even elected public servants who refuse to follow the law - particularly in regards to civil rights - are worthy of defense. I'm reading the strangest interpretations of Marxism applied to Davis. I see her given that militant-era right to with hold her labor that our labor force sorely needs to revive. I read that she has free-speech rights and this judge is abridging these rights, that her action in denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples was non-violent, so why feed the prison system with her body.

I have come to suspect their usefulness as allies. Now I wonder about their sanity.

Kim Davis is on a campaign. It is a political campaign. It has very little to do with Christianity since this country is not really a Christian country: she believes she is defending the settler state, and that the settler state is founded on the contrived unit of a nuclear family of heterosexuals. Her campaign is no more religious and no different than that of the Israelis who defend their settler state under the thin guise of Judaism. The Davis campaign is to use her occupation of a political office to stop a decided civil right.

She is not worth my sympathies or my defense. She's certainly not worthy that I draw from my radical anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-police state readings to defend her.
I will never defend the rights of Nazi camp guards over the captive Jews, gypsies, and queers.

If the job for which she was elected no longer meets her standards, and she wants to fuck white Jesus as her fifth husband, she was free to quit her job before being sent to jail.

She refuses to do so because she may not be the last Confederate widow, but she is one of many. Again, she is on a campaign much like any of her peers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Israel, or Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

What Davis is oblivious to is that these same-sex couples clamoring at her office door for marriage licenses are more her allies than her foes. They want their place in the settler state; they don't want to interrogate it, dismantle it, revolt it into the rubbish bin of history. Same-sex marriage is more her ally than knows, and its adherents are more likely to kneel at the tomb of the same white Jesus she claims to hold so close to her bosom.

They will not be interrogating how our national institutions created the so-called Appalachian region, with its abject poverty of white people. The coal mines. The sabotage against union organizing.

What I expect is happening for these fake radicals may seem ripped from the pages of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: it is that these white radicals cannot stomach seeing a white woman punished the way Africans, First Nations, and Arabs are routinely treated without the meandering outcries of these same radicals.

Ali Amin, aged 17, has just been sent to prison for 11 years, and I hear nothing from these tongue-twisters about free speech or needlessly filling our prisons. Nothing.

As far as I'm concerned, if this circle of white radicalism can defend Davis, they can defend the settler state, and they are no ally of mine.

Brief Thoughts on the Imprisonment of Ali Shukri Amin at 17

 

Seventeen year old Ali Shukri Amin has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison, as an adult, for "supporting" ISIS. I listened twice to the news story this morning on NPR. A US Attorney made a point of going in person to the studio to be interviewed, which alerts me that the Feds are intent on making a grand example of this young man. The Feds are making the rounds to massage the reporters.

I listened carefully to the interview. The reporter asked a few times about this "support," and I leaned in. I don't understand how having a Twitter account [with 4,000+ followers] supporting the ISIS mission or helping a friend go to Syria or even encouraging others warrants a terror charge and an 11-year sentence in a white-settler country where the Klan thrives, in the open, in most states, and its former Grand Wizard, David Duke, walks freely and commentates in his reactionary fashion about US politics.

Looking further into this case, it is reported that Amin is an honor student at his high school, described various times as un-assimilated among his peers, which is code to many of us peoples of color. He immersed himself in the internet and online discussions. It is not surprising, however it happened, that such a person in such a country, would begin to look to the lands of his ancestors for the spiritual nourishment denied him by being "un-assimilated."

In any case, Amin's parents, concerned for him, elicited the help of a local imam to counsel the boy.

The imam, it is now reported, is an FBI informant. From there and from that, things went predictably downhill to this then-16 year old kid having the weight of his mosque [headed by the informant], the FBI, and the Federal courts upon him.

Who could take that pressure without folding, which is what Amin did, in exchange for a lighter indictment? He's written a pitiful letter to the court, worthy of a Soviet-era apology.

The case of Ali Amin, and the resources put towards punishing this boy reveals how far, how wide, how deep the US plays its role in the imperial wars on Western Asia (aka, the Middle East). They have plucked a mere child from the soil, who fired no weapons, dropped no cluster munitions.

Since the US has shown itself to be that desperate, I reiterate the hopelessness of its cause. It must know how badly it's losing.

This is not a source of joy but of alarm. Europe and its spawn have shown themselves to be capable of the most brutal genocides to prop up its culture.

Meanwhile, it is not Amin but Kim Davis, the jailed public official in Kentucky, who has become a Cause for a strange circle of white leftist radicals who are disturbed that her "free-speech rights" have been violated; that, recalling the more militant trades-unionism, she has a "right to with hold her labor;" and somehow they allege Marx is spinning in his grave at her ill-treatment and the prison-industrial complex.

Strange things are coming from their mouths.

It is always revealing - as if we need more evidence - what our so-called white allies select as their causes, and those things they pretend not to see at all.

What have you done to Celia?

Coming this Fall 2015. To Telemundo. Hold your breath. Given the clips I've just watched, I already have reservations about "Celia," a multi-episode series of her life. Anyone who knows me well knows I DREAM about Celia Cruz. I have all her recordings. Read about her and read her "autobiography," which must be put in quotations as it has proven to be as reliable as Katharine Hepburn's ME: Stories of My Life - something disseminated from the old PR departments of MGM.

Telemundo's choice of the title role, a Puerto Rican actress of a certain light hue, shows me we've not come far since that Latino comedian made a vile, racist remark about Michelle Obama looking like a monkey. "Latin America," to use that erroneous term for the moment, is more color struck, more obsessed with the brown-bag tests than their counterparts among the Yankees. Ok, they are equally obsessed. They are all cut from the same cultural cloth that is racist Europe.

From the clips, the Cuban revolutionaries look like fanatics; but no hint in the preview that Celia herself was a fellow-traveler of the communists and twice during the 1950's was barred from entering the US with her band for being so [as US State Dept documents released after her death revealed].

I wonder why the long-planned project between Whoopi Goldberg, a feeble mind but decent actress, Cristina Saralegui, and her husband could never be greenlit. Goldberg is not conventionally Latino but she has the coloring and the African body to contrast the actress Telemundo has chosen. Just over 10 years after La Reina's death, it is jarring to see a lighter-skinned, Vogue-bodied woman portray a particular AFRICAN. The light-skinned Puerto Rican plays the younger Celia, while Cuban singer, Aymée Nuviola, another African of Cuban nationality, is reported to play the role of Celia later in life. Nuviola is a force of Nature as a musician in her own right. She would not have had a voice dub her singing parts, and as a sonera - improviser - she is in a league of her own. Yet it will be jarring to see even her play the role of a dark-skinned African in a racist Spanish society.

Haila Mompié, a dark-skinned African singer of Cuban nationality, would have been a wise choice as the young Celia. Haila, as she is known professionally, even produced a tribute CD to Celia in Cuba [that could not attribute itself to Celia]. It is a beautiful rendition of Celia's classics. Like Goldberg, she seems not to have been an obvious choice.

But this is why the term Latin America needs, at minimum, unpacking. In white hands, it pretends to be many things, but never African. It lauds in romantic tones the indigenous communities it continues to exterminate. It holds up Spain or Portugal as Mother Countries, or views a British-German woman as their queen, when its populations are in no way British, German, Spaniard, or Portuguese: its rulers have been.

It is just as if we called Algeria French or Rhodesia British, when 80%-90% of its populations were African in the lands of their ancestors. We really must stop and look at these crimes.

I have been unpacking the Latin American/Caribbean region. Like historian Ali Mazrui, I would consider much of the Caribbean literal extensions of Africa, due solely to Europe intervention in the kidnapping of Africans and the total extermination of the native populations; and the region's whitened minority populations, recent imports to stave off another Haitian revolt and solidify white supremacy, a European counter-measure.

Just as I would look at other parts of the Latin American region as categorical First Nations, indigenous, despite the European governments and landowners in power.

Here I go further: brainwashed and white-washed peoples of the region, including Africans who should know better, might argue they are "all Cuban. Just Cuban," or, "just Mexican," "Brazilian," and so forth and so on, despite what their own racist governments do in practice: and I do include the Cuban revolution here. For a country overwhelmingly African, the absence of African leadership is telling.

Nationality has replaced religion as an opiate of the African masses in the diaspora: false flags and passports, when our condition is predictable and indices common from New York City to the southern tip of Brazil, and then some. Since our services were rendered useless at the end of chattel slavery, our presence has been a constant problem best solved by national campaigns to shoot us, lock us up, malign us at every turn in the popular press. Most attempts to actualize us, show our history, or condition, are silenced. That is why I believe Goldberg's project was vetoed and no one ever seriously considered Haila to play Celia.

Looking at the previews of "Celia," our masters really haven't come far from those times of the 40's, 50's and into the 1960's when African musicians could not be shown on their own record albums nor plays on mainstream - read, white - radio stations. They needed the likes of Pat Boone and Elvis to cover African music, and thus, stars were made and talent erased. "Celia" is on a long continuum of propaganda to erase Africa and its gifts.