Our Permanent Radical Interests Vs Transient White Radical Friends

My head would spin off my shoulders, like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" busying myself with white peoples' demons of the day and compromises of the moment. What did Mandela respond to the US journalist who challenged his friendships with Fidel, Arafat, and Qadaffi?

As if on cue I am supposed to turn on their announced enemies - e.g., Fidel, Qadaffi, Angela Davis, Robert Mugabe, Kwame Ture, the Communist Party, and many more to mention, as if I were white people's archetype of an antebellum slave, who cannot distinguish his master's pain from his own, and who himself has no pain but his master's. I am supposed to assume myself a white man, left or right politically, and view the world from there and from there only.

There are too many white radicals who keep doing this. In 2017.

One white socialist replied of Angela Davis: "she still cant justify her support for Hillary Clinton." To which I let him know whatever the nature of that support, which is debatable, Davis has absolutely not a fucking thing to justify to him.

At the deep, rotten heart of this matter is white exceptionalism. Whatever their politics, they set the standard and stand on the pinnacle. The thought that their history of conquests and socio-political organization has driven the world to a precipice, not a pinnacle, and that the global South might save humanity is negated by their liberal white racism.

Many radical whites who act like their latest brand of radicalism is like the new iPhone will dismiss movements they themselves have no use for, but take care: this does not mean these movements don't serve you.

They love to disparage the Communist Party as being "Democrats." Ok, here I can kind of see their point, but their analysis is lazy, kind of like confusing and conflating Egypt's Mubarak's, the House of Saud's, the Assad family's, and the Hashemite kingdom's Euro-centric view of the Middle East with that of the Arab people of those countries.

This frequent analysis redacts a nearly 100-tear history of the Communist Party in the US, a history that Black people should know.

Black people, in particular Black people in the US, would be wise to look at all the things white society want us to not look at. The Communist Party, for example, was a critical force in what was to become the "civil rights movement," period. I think I can say "what was to become" because this was not the light at the end of the tunnel aspired to by those communists and fellow-travelers, but this is another discussion. The Democratic and Republican Parties were not present.

Official history has handed us Franklin D Roosevelt, as hero of the working class, man of the people, the answer to the Depression: words and redactions provided by white historians who inflated the establishment's role and erased the radical tactics of the communists altogether.

Yes, admittedly even some of those whites in the CP were slow to make bolder moves, but then Stalin pushed them to be bolder and into forming fully integrated trades-unions, like the CIO (which later merged with the non-integrated AFL). So maybe your grandparents should have hung a picture of Joseph Stalin, who pressed for Black liberation, next to FDR, who did nothing to stop lynching and passed a New Deal largely for the white poor and not Blacks. Just saying.

Someone disparaged Kwame Ture for his "friendship with Idi Amin." That came out of nowhere. When then-Stokley Carmichael headed SNCC, he divorced its work from all whites [pretty much for the same reason I'm writing this piece]. I'd have been prepared for someone criticizing that rupture, which I would have defended. Not his association with another African leader. A life of radical, socialist, pan-Africanist struggle reduced to one relationship? More laziness. I don't think the critic here even knows what pan-Africanism is or its history.

Meanwhile, the same whites who make a fetish out of such posturing will, in the same breath, accuse me of immaturity for not being more nuanced in my analyses of a Jill Stein, who supports Israel, or a Bernie Sanders, who also supports Israel and dropping drones on people without due process. These are the white's compromises. They ran to Barack Obama in 2008, to Bill Clinton in 1992, and to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Their reading lists are confined to Europeans, which they excavate again and again as if it were a crime scene, but I notice no Black or brown radical voices ever seem to make their citations. Radical Black voices do not exist.

Yet they expect me to take on their views of the world and accept their criticism when I do not?

This is a "keep your eyes on the prize" public service announcement for 2017. White radicalism often has its limits, so beware. It will go only so far but wants to preserve white civilization at the same time, which is often their first master and a yoke around our necks. White allies set their expectations for you today and, if you rise in stature, will submit you to litmus tests tomorrow - to publicly condemn this person or that movement.

Beware of Black and Brown radicals who are no better than slaves, who have no pain of their own except what white people tell them to have: they can be expected to mimic the script you just heard from the white man. Did you chuckle with me when, in the wake of Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," Democratic Party flunkies and politicians, like Donna Brazille, seemed to discover the word "revolution" in their interviews? Well, laugh no more: no sooner had Bernie disappeared back to his role as DNC cheerleader did these slaves drop the word from their vocabulary.

Rejecting our real heroes, class warriors, and radical movements is exactly the docile position white civilization want us, its Black and Brown underlings. Inoculate yourselves: find the most radical voice you can and do not diverge until one more radical comes along, and do the same. This is how revolutions are imagined. The planning will come naturally.

Don't let the defenders of capitalism and white civilization turn your gaze to their expediency and reject your North Star.

"One of the mistakes political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies. That we can't and we will never do. We have our own struggle, which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting that struggle. But nevertheless we are an independent organization with its own policy. Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country towards our struggle ... " - Nelson Mandela

Abdeslam

"Probably" and "more than likely" will go completely unnoticed by closeted and avowed white racists. If these qualifiers were meant to give balance to the story of this Arab hunt by the imperial powers of Europe, Reuters, the source of this breaking news, makes no other attempt in its reportage of the capture or kidnapping of "Salah Abdeslam, the 26-year-old French suspect".

"French"? That is novel. While the Le Pen family can sell their racism as a political party, an Abdeslam would be spied on, undermined, and locked up. Ask not for whom the bells of liberty, equality, fraternity ring: they ring not for you!

Reuters:

"The Belgian federal prosecutor's office also said an Algerian killed during that earlier operation was probably one of the people French and Belgian investigators were seeking in relation to the Islamic State attacks in Paris on Nov. 13.

"Public broadcaster RTBF said it had information that Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up in Paris, was 'more than likely' one of two men who police have said evaded capture at the scene ... "

The police have never been beyond harassing, detaining, or arresting the extended family members of actual militants, especially our African and First Nation militants. But to their own credit, some extended family members have willingly joined the revolutionary struggle - and I do not mean Bernie Sanders' usage of the word.

Wherever Abdeslam falls, it is the European system and its police forces who remain the guilty ones. The 26-year old is either another Arab with a French passport who was barred from assimilating into the country of his birth, but always seen only as a foreigner coming from the land of his ancestors; because France is a racist country. It solidified its white racism in its 18th century revolution and hardened it in its allegiance to Nazi fascism and the weakest, most symbolic Resistance movements in wartime Europe.

Or Abdelslam is a modern-day freedom fighter trying to correct the 100-year nightmare imposed on Western Asia when Europe began to invent one failed state after another [ending with Israel], and arming the worst sort of people to maintain these failed states. These worst sorts are not only the presidents and sheiks of these Western Asian Bantustans, but they are the best friends of the fascists states of Western Europe and the US.

The peoples of this region have endured a 100-years war and the sabotage of their development - economic and cultural. And the insurgents know it; that is why they escalate their tactics, which Reuters will splash on their news feeds, while the mercenaries from the alien worlds of Europe are hidden from broadcasts, escalating their tactics tenfold with arsenals and royal navies.

The dumb American is left apoplectic about brown people and Allah, believing the world is uncivilized when it is he himself.

It is well passed time to call it as it is. I know this is alien to the aliens - the whites and their apologists. I am supposed to condemn the Paris attacks as if Tangiers never happened. I am supposed to be full of angst and ire about a white thief in North Korea, and to beat my chest that North Korea is the "worst place on earth." I am supposed, in other words, to be an apologist for white civilizatiion You see, these white adventurers who imposed fake sheiks and shahs on Western Asia are no different to me than that white boy who went to North Korea and felt just as entitled to steal something that had great meaning to those people. Silly that the apologists are saying it was just this, or just that. Silly and telling. The aliens do not respect anyone's culture or beliefs. These things and those things are just trash to them waiting to be recycled and refurbished by the white world. These are the guilty people, and even if the justice for them is random - while injustice towards the wretched of the earth is perpetual - I celebrate it.

Fifteen years for the theft, and give him 15 more for the crocodile tear show he put on for the cameras.

Like my Moroccan friend, Chakib, used to say when a European tourist got robbed in Marrakesh: "we're just taking back a little of the lot stolen from us."

Another Direct Shot at Our Dying Unions as the Past is Brought Back

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I'm undone. I don't know who's deserving more of my unbridled wrath right now, the fake right wing, the fake left wing, or the inconsequential group of "organizers" who are forever placarded and parading and chanting bullshit to corral people to vote for the fake left wing.

Rebecca Friedrichs is a 30-year public school teacher in California (Orange County: where else?!) who hates unions. She leads a lawsuit of 10 California teachers who want the California Teachers Association to cease charging them for the services which yielded Friedrichs, etal, their work contracts, benefits, and retirement packages. The services were done by the CTA with the school districts.

By becoming a teacher in California, you can elect not to join the union. I was a member of United Educators of San Francisco. Had I elected not to join, I would have been charged a fee to essentially cover a portion of the costs for the benefits afforded me in the negotiated contract.

She is quoted as saying, “Americans of all political preferences would rise up against such tyranny if their rights were squelched by corporations, yet teachers unions have been legally trampling the free-speech rights of teachers throughout our nation for decades through forced dues used to fund their one-sided political agendas.” [Guardian UK, 1/9/2016]

Tyranny? I smell Ayn Rand! Friedrichs thinks she can negotiate her own contract, benefits, and retirement package. I hope it is not vicious to wish that some crusading investigative journalist looks in to her finances. A trust fund? A rich spouse? Maybe she's German NAZI princess.

Certainly as a school teacher she must know that unions are the main reason for the rise in women's wages, and their death has seen the decline in these wages over the last few generations. If she does not know the tyranny of industrial feudalism, wage slavery, child labor I wonder what she is teaching in these history classes ... ahh, but this IS Orange County.

Her case, Friedrichs vs the California Teachers Association has been catapulted to the US Supreme Court. The issue is: being made to pay this fee to an organization she does not belong to compromises her rights under the First Amendment.

Forty years ago, the high court ruled these fees legal and appropriate, but this was before the war on trades-unions had put public employee unions in its cross-hairs. This was before the court was staffed heavily with neocons and neoliberals. Pensions still had a few years life in them in the late 70's, now they are an extinct species.

Forty years ago was before the pandemic of right-to-work states had reached a fever pitch. With liberal Wisconsin gone now, and the Koch brothers in battled mode, anything is possible. We will all be right-to-work states soon.

I reserve particular ire right now for the crusading left, which keeps playing in to the hands of the Democratic Party. SEIU and its Campaign for $15. Black Lives Matters. Occupy. Et cetera. They mobilize people under leftist Democratic Party goals, then fall in line behind Democratic Party super-stars.

I should be tired of saying they need to fall in line behind the militant trades-unionists, anarchists, communists and start shutting machines down that they do not seize. This is not the 21st century we are headed for but the 19th century.

These fake leftists have given up so much by making their arguments about wages and not who owns the means of production, or why we should be exterminating management altogether.

Improving industrial feudalism is what Democrats do. It is not an improvement. Stop it.

When Margot Honecker was asked to assess the "revolution" that brought the Berlin Wall down and reunified Germany, she recounted what has happened to these capitalist economies and how they they've been worse, not better, for workers: "The past was brought back. No one can name that 'revolution'."

I cite Honecker because the attitude of the neoliberals is that these modifications and innovations, bail-outs and stimulus packages to our economies are seen somehow as groundbreaking things, when really they are things Charles Dickens reported as a journalist and put into his novels.

To call Friedrichs vs CTA a last straw is feeble when there have been 100 years of straws to choose from. The patient, to mix my metaphor, has been on life-support in ICU for a long, long time. Given the reaction of the business unions, I wonder if there is any brain function left.

I am all for pulling the plug. Let this corpse die, and take its riffraff, fake socialists with them, like Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant, not so workers can go off in this libertarian capitalist fantasy world where they can negotiate their own wages and benefits. No. But rather, so the whining from leaders of the business unions that the sky is falling will be silenced - the sky has already fallen, baby!!

If the machines cannot be taken, shut them down. If they cannot be shut down, burn them down. If workers cannot be allowed to own and run their business, burn those down too. If management won't be housebroken, lock them out. If there is a past to be brought back it is the militant past that reacted to the best and worst of industrial capitalism.

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.