Showing posts with label Black Power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Power. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 October 2022
Sunday, 2 October 2022
Trade union strike wave, Part II: The Historic TU Sellout and Chris Kaba Campaign Collapse
- Another wave of strikes after the historic sellout
- Chris Kaba campaign collapse demoralises potential of Black resistance
After the unilateral undemocratic decision of the RMT, ASLEF, CWU leadership to call off strikes in respect to the monarchy and its handover, the trade union strikes have started-up again. The sellout of the strikes for the British monarchy is one of the most glaring sellouts of the left ever in history up there with the support of the 1stWW by Brit 'socialists' and the sellout of the nine-day 1926 General Strike and the year-long 1984 Miners Strike by the Labour Party and TUC (there's a hint as to which forces hold back the workers in collaboration with the ruling classes).
Knowing what happened with the sellout to the monarchy and then the strikes re-starting by the same sellout leadership leaves us in a strange position, we have no actual left in this country who has the capacity or ideological ability to take stock of what happened, popularise it and then act on it to improve the class struggle. Nevertheless, despite all these massive limitations it's a good thing not a bad thing that workers in trade unions are back mobilised in the streets and on picket lines. The problem is that people should clearly now know that they have a very corrupt sellout leadership who don't want a real fight against the tory state but want to protect their big salaries. The RMT sold-out the P&O dispute in front of everyone's faces and hardly anyone has said a thing.
Why do Brit workers accept and cover-up the sellout culture of the TU leadership? Partially it's because they share the racism and brit nationalism and careerist grift of the TU leaders and union structures. Mick Lynch openly argued in favour of prioritising former brit soldiers as RMT members above anyone else in a recent interview (see here). Another reason so many are so accepting is because people are increasingly desperate for hope that something will work for them. So they suspend critical faculties and become a little religiously delusional to some extent. We had the same dynamic played-out so graphically and tragically in the Corbyn years.
Due to the deep internalisation of Brit state racism and colonialism on the left the strike wave brings out the entire white left onto the protests and picket lines. Black and brown people are generally squeezed out of left culture, trade unions and organisations so you have a massive disproportionate presence of white people and an equally disproportionate absence of black and brown people in the strike wave movement.
The black radical grassroots were and still are to a lesser extent ready to mobilise around the police shoot-to-kill of Chris Kaba. However, the state and counter-revolutionary forces mobilised and the campaign for Chris Kaba has basically ground to a halt with no process and strategy of street protests and mobilising the community. To add to that the Chris Kaba spokesperson Jefferson Bosela stated on a 'twitch' session hosted by Michael Morgan on Weds 28 Sept that he had a meeting with London Met Police chief Mark Rowley and that Rowley had asked Bosela to keep that meeting secret, Bosela said on the twitch event that he would respect Rowley's request for secrecy. To meet the chief of racist and misogynistic torturers, rapists and killers which is the London Met Police chief and have the meeting in secret and keep the details from the community is indicative of the current low-point in the campaign.
Black and brown communities have no leadership, organisations and very little voices that can build towards the kind of movements we need to develop the entire working class struggle as only the most oppressed and militant workers can lead and fight and they are the Black and brown working classes. We have the most radical class struggle traditions in this country from William Cuffay and his leadership of the Chartists, through to oppressed Irish people radicalising the working class movement in Britain through to Black and Brown working class youth leading the resistance against the state especially in the uprisings from 1979 to 1981 and of course the Aug 2011 uprising across the country.
Then there is the sorry and pathetic sight of small number of farright forces who use and abuse Hinduism and their mirror-opposites using and abusing Islam mobilised a few youths respectively against each other in Tommy Robinson and the Brit state's dream in Leicester with a similar stupid incident in Birmingham. South Asian communities are largely hostile to this nonsense and a small group of idiots supported by a few leftists especially the reactionary role of Amrit Wilson backing the far-right using and abusing Islam should not be seen to represent anyone but their own sectarian and opportunistic agendas.
The collapse of the Chris Kaba campaign and the sectarian antics which play neatly into the agenda of Tommy Robinson /Brit state in Leicester and the inability of Black and Brown communities to mobilise against and way beyond this into a struggle for Black Power socialist struggle remains a challenge that we cannot yet fulfil. For our part we in the MXM are mobilising public in-person events after a hiatus of two years to discuss exactly these issues on Fri 28th Oct 630pm at the London Irish Centre in Camden with leading grassroots trade unionists and anti-colonial socialist fighters and organisers on the platform.
Friday, 30 September 2022
MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain
*Fri 28th Oct 2022
630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)
London Irish Centre,
50-52 Camden Square,
London NW1 9XB
£5 suggested entry
This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.
Speakers:
Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)
Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)
Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)
Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)
Chair: Malcolm X Movement
*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded
*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room
Tuesday, 20 September 2022
UK State Terrified Chris Kaba-related Black-led Uprising will Destroy its Hyper-Monarchist Narrative
- State attempting to keep Chris Kaba campaign quiet and ineffective
- Importance of employing quick effective strategic grassroots direct-actions around #ChrisKaba justice campaign
- Grassroots Fenians led the way in political resistance to the Monarchy
- British left terrified of street-protest against Monarchy, instead hiding on (anti-)social media
The Queen died and immediately the Brit colonial-capitalist ruling classes sighed in profound relief that their labour lieutenants in the trade union leadership - CWU/Ward, RMT/Lynch/Gordon/Dempsey etc - actually turned out to be more loyal to the Monarchy than even the bourgeoisie! A historic sell-out in the working class trade union movement that exposed the Monarchist loyalty and leanings of those in the case of Lynch and Dempsey like to bandy around their apparent political affiliations with leading Irish republican socialist James Connolly.
However, just as the sell-out was announced on the morning after Elizabeth Windsor's death the police shoot-to-kill of 24yr old Chris Kaba in Lambeth, South London set off again the pattern of state killing of a working class black youth and the resultant outpouring of grief, anger and determination of black and allied working class people seething with a sense of injustice and seeking to get that justice, many would like to in the words of Malcolm X to 'declare their/our right on this earth to for Chris Kaba and the Black community to be treated as a human being, to be respected as a human being, which we/they intend to bring into existence by any means necessary'. As soon as the colonial capitalist state removed one irritation: the strike wave, another wave of humanity asserted itself around the martyrdom of Chris Kaba.
The preparations for the death of Liz Windsor have been years in the making, a weaponisation of her death for the state to deepen its control over the great unwashed domestically and globally. In this context the possible uprising of the Black and poor youth at this time around Chris Kaba is something the state wants to avoid at all costs. The spectre of the 5-day national uprising after the shoot-to-kill of Mark Duggan on Aug 04 2011 haunts the ruling classes.
The August 2011 Uprising haunts the state and lives-on as a glorious folk tale on the council estates across the country. Mark Duggan's 21yr old son Bandokay , a well-known rapper from the Broadwater Farm-based 'Original Farm Boys' crew/music group, often speaks about the uprisings on the many interviews on social media. These interviews and the music of OFB / Bandokay keeps the Uprising alive in the minds and imaginations of our youths beyond that which they hear in conversations amongst their older peers and family. Of course Broadwater Farm council estate itself is a militant symbol of Black working class-led resistance and victories against the British state especially due to the Uprising there on Oct 6 1984.
The state quickly announced a homicide investigation into the police officer who shot dead Chris Kaba. And then quickly announced that the officer was suspended (on full-pay, no doubt), angering his colleagues who threatened to hand in their weapons. Please do, thank you. Now it seems the family are imminently going to receive the body-cam footage. Labour Party MPs were quick to make statements pretending to be in synpathy with the Chris Kaba family while they daily collaborate with the state to deliver torture and death to our people on the council estates. Labour Party MP's were at the Chris Kaba protest in Whitehall where Diane Abbott was booed by Black youths for demanding everyone keeps everything peaceful.
It is globally known that if your loved one is killed you go out with all your peoples and you make as much noise and destruction to show that the injustice will not go without resistance, hence the meaning of the slogan: no justice, no peace. The two-week Black-led uprising following the martyrdom of George Floyd is a case in point. There are alternatively many peaceful means by which the same aims can be met.
The point of tactics is to achieve strategies of rallying further sections of the grassroots, building a broad united front, and to show the powers that be that we can apply direct pressure to ensure that they cannot oppress us without consequences to them. Such peaceful direction actions could be occupations and sit-ins of strategic institutions of the police, council etc; non-violent direct actions could be a on-going rolling hunger strike-tents at Brixton police station or New Scotland Yard; to peacefully block the transport system of the capital which is easily done with quite few people. With the imaginations of the grassroots many other things can be done. Ideally all tactics should be deployed all at once.
The Chris Kaba justice campaign has grassroots backing to do so. The grassroots are ready for action but lack the leadership , determination themselves and organisations necessary for what we need to do for Chris Kaba and for everyone in defending them against further death and injury by the state, Realistically, it is probably unlikely that the grassroots will rise-up but we cannot but point to what decades, generations and centuries of our resistance informs us to do. We stand with our martyrs and ancestors whose sacrifices meant that we live today, there is no alternative to our advocacy.
The Sinn Fein leadership continue the political rationale of the British colonial 'good friday agreement' which means SF members have been strictly instructed to the nutty colonial monarchist sentiments of the unionist community in the occupied 6 counties. So heartbreaking and embarrassing to see SF leaders Alex Maskey and Michell O'Neil schmooze with king charles the turd and try to spin it as something positive for Irish people.
This should not take away from the fact that the real opposition to the uk monarchy at the grassroots has been led by Irish Fenians / Irish Republicans. Be it the slogan against the king on Black Mountain by Belfast, the 'fuck your crown' banner drop by the Green Brigade in the stadium and the only street protest called against the monarchy in Belfast too. This current Brit monarchist hype is being used to further push away any chance of Scottish independence or Irish reunification. The monarchy doesn't just handover the break-up of its union and rule, it only does so when there is an escalating mass pressure from the colonised masses, of which currently there is an absence.
While one might criticise the SF leadership, what SF have done in the past and still today are head and shoulders above the pathetic state of the British (colonial) left who have firmly stayed in their bedrooms looking nervously out of their windows into the real world while writing some posturing nonsense on social media. We say: fight by any means necessary for justice for Chris Kaba, against the racist anti-working class brutality of the brit state. As we go forward the global system of colonial-capitalism is going to deepen even further to terror which it is inflicting on workers and peasants the world over, this increasingly pressure on us including in Britain and Ireland will push all the oppressed to react. How and when, we don't know, but the science of repression and resistance is a universal and permanent one.
Further watching:
What to do when the state kills one of us: 'Ultraviolence': https://vimeo.com/570908985
Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful
- Politics of Brit colonial partition of India alive and kicking in Leicester
- Brit state with people like Tommy Robinson/Yaxley Lennon see strategic successes in Leicester clashes
- Brit state employed and directed TR/Yaxley-Lennon/EDL etc to exactly achieve manipulation of far-right in Hindu community against all Muslims
- Brit state cultivated right-wing/far-right forces in ALL religious/national communities
- Brit state has nurtured the divisions which we now see in the open in Leicester
- Divisions hide growing South Asian exploitative and parasitic landlords and employers
- Ideal optics for the racist & colonial Brit state to see brown youth fighting while Brit govt/NF/EDL etc all laugh at them/us
- Historic failure of secular-oriented radical grassroots communities to develop leadership amongst South Asian youth
[Pictured: Malcolm X talking to Bengalis in England / EDL racist provocations / Leicester police line and South Asian youth]
What a sorry state of affairs that some in the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in Leicester are playing-out in September 2022 the old British colonial policy of encouraging their colonial victims to divide themselves around right-wing/even far-right frameworks of abusing religon to, not fight their common oppressor in the British colonial state, but against the 'other' who lives in the same conditions of poverty and racism. As we see the actual reach of the UK monarchy across the planet this is an that divisive forces in the Hindu and Muslim community are not acting independently of themselves as there is a much bigger and global power at play in all of this which are the ruling classes of the British state.
The collapse into pathetic colonial divisions in the South Asian community is linked to the global balance of forces as manifest in the region with far-right religious movements developing in India with the BJP government and RSS, in Pakistan and other places in South Asia with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, return of the Afghan Taliban and similar movements, in Sri Lanka and Myanmar of right-wing nationalist manipulation of Buddhism, and in the Sikh community of the supremacist right-wing movement of 'Khalistan'.
The forces of unity and socialism have dwindled decade by decade in South Asia and also in their diasporic communities in the 'west' including in England. The need for secular and atheistic movements that respect all religious cultures and faiths and correctly interpret them as a force for unity and solidarity are desperately needed, and we must remind people that only a secular and united movement of all peoples based primarily as working class racialised human beings is the only framework to push-back on these colonially-imposed divisions. In South Asia it is only the secular socialist, anti-caste, pro-tribal peoples, communist and other similar forces who have provided unity in struggle in previous generations and continues to do so. Although including many political forces, the recent victory of Indian Punjabi farmers show the continued ability of communist and socialist forces leading successful social struggles that benefit ALL communities of peasants from all religious backgrounds.
The British state has in recent decades achieved the cultivation of right-wing forces in all these religious communities. The connections between the right-wing sectarians who use and abuse Hinduism in the BJP have high-level relations with the Tories and the Labour Party. The Tories especially see an affinity with the BJP as both are part of a global fascist revolution that facilitates their exploitation of the working classes so as to achieve their pursuit of fascsit power and capitalist exploitation of the masses. Vicious racist and former Tory Home Office minister Priti Patel calls BJP leader Modi "our dear friend" and praises his "dynamic leadership", indicating a joint enterprise and relationship between the senior Brit tories and their junior helpers in the BJP to achieve their common goals of scapegoating oppressed communities in order to pursue power, money and sexual exploitation. October 2017 saw RSS-supporting Tapan Ghosh of the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHT) UK and Tory MP Bob Blackman meet Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and a former BNP leader. Ghosh argued excitedly at the global fascist revolution at an event at the time in Parliament that Modi, Trump and Putin had been "raising hopes amongst people against Islamic aggression".
British authorities have through a long policy of 'collusion' developed a caricature of Islam and Muslims in its open support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh and other similar factions in its policy of recrtuiting and grooming thousands of Muslims to join its foreign policy agendas in fighting in death squads in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc openly exposed in the Arab Sting years. Majid Freeman who is interfering in Leicester at the moment was a well-known recruiter for British interests in encouraging Muslims to join death squads in Syria and today he continues his divide and rule role for the state by inciting religious hatred against "Hindu mobs" similarly to the other oppurtunist - Mohammed Hijab who has advocated along explicitly bigoted lines in Leicester recently: "If they (Hindus) believe in reincarnation, what a humiliation of them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that." Of course Roshan Salih Muhammad, a long-standing promoter of violent sectarian divisions within the Muslim community, decides to positively platform people like Freeman on his sectarian grifting racket which is the '5 pillars' platform, with the Brit intel services no-doubt nodding in satisfaction at these antics. One might have wondered how the British intelligence services were going to again deploy their actors in their collusion racket after the Arab Sting horror, and here we can see the useful role these fools are playing for the British state.
The British state has facilitated and directed the work of Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon since June 2007 in the forming of the English Defence League (EDL) to attempt to manipulate Black and Hindu communities against the Muslim community playing upon many colonially-imposed divisions and tensions between the respective communities. Britain First, UKIP, and many other factions of the far-right play a similar role. The events in Leicester recently with masked-up youth from South Asia allowing themselves to be divided and fighting not the white racists, richest employers, landlords, monarchy and ruling classes that oppress them all, but to engage in fighting each other. When we are going deeper into a cost of living crisis and inflation amongst other capitalist crises the British ruling classes love to see some of us diverting from the real problems and real culprits of our conditions and attacking our neighbours that we have lived amongst for centuries in the homeland. Now in recent years and decades we leave the homeland to come here because the Brit white man stole everything from us and made us poor so we have left our ancestral homes and live in deprived areas on a grey, cold, depressing and unfriendly island. Fighting your neighbour for the benefit of the richest white man is not what our ancestors and our faiths inform us to do, rather they inform us to protect the oppressed and exploited and unite together to fight common oppressors. The racist state and its minions like the EDL are exactly designed to keep us divided and easy pickings for further poverty.
The real terror and oppression impacting BOTH Hindu, Muslim and Sikh working class communities is institutional racist poverty. In a population of 357,394 some 40,000 children in Leicester live in poverty. When you get into areas of high concentrations of Black and Brown people like in the area of Spinney Hill Park where the recent divisive tensions have flared-up child poverty rockets to around 50%. This is in a city which has the highest population of non-white people in the country with self-defined white people being just over half of the population. In a survey a few years ago of hundreds of children and young people in the city one in five said they worried about having enough to eat every single day. Leicester, like so many migrant working class areas, has massive potential in terms of what people could be doing if they were to unite and pool their creativity into grassroots socialist action for the community.
The reason why the grassroots in our community don't get together and deliver unity and happiness to each other is exactly because of the agendas of the British state that through its racist overt and covert actions keep us divided and depressed. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu working classes are all terribly exploited in factories and warehouses in the city, a scandal that made headline news for the manner in which people were terrorised by the employers at work through the covid pandemic. Look to the deprived neglected streets where unemployed young people struggling with mental health and lack of cultural, sports, social facilities take to the streets to numb the pain and hang-out socially, there is nothing but superficial differences between working class youths nominally from different heritages and faith communities.
A massive issue that very few people are talking about is how these abusers of faith and religion to cause division and conflict are a cover for the growing class conflicts within the South Asian community. While we have to keep very clear that the 'greater enemy' who has power in and guide these divisive trends are the British authorities, at the same time there is a growing parasitic exploitative class (of South Asian heritage) who are running slum housing, oppressive employment practices and other forms of exploitation that prey on the poor. There are millions of people in this country who are new migrants and who are 'illegal' being paid down to £1 an hour and who go home to live in squalid overcrowded conditions. Due to their relatively extreme precarious situation they have no political voice and no-one to advocate for them in terms of a joint class struggle to resist these oppressions. The rise of tensions in Leicester are in the interests of the bigger white ruling classes of this country but also the more localised parasitic capitalist class of landlords and employers. These parasites can deflect from their own oppressive role and unjustly and manipulatively point fingers at poor, often young working class members of another faith group.
Look at this historic context of these tensions going back generations to the anti-colonial struggle in undivided India. These communities came from traumatised ones from a land that was recently partitioned in 1947 whose architects also designed and delivered how Punjabis killed, raped and abudcuted 1 million of each other for the agenda of the British, as well as people of Kashmir being partitioned both peoples partitions continue to play into the colonalists aims of divide and rule. Another horrific war conducted by major nato-ally Islamabad/ (west) Pakistan conducting a supremacist genocidal war against those who won the independence of Bangladesh (formerly 'east Pakistan'') in December 1971.
These communities then came over here to England and many of their first and second generation children united with each other and other Black people to fight-back police brutality and poverty from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The Pakistani Workers Association, Kala Tara and Asian Youth Movements, Indian Workers Associations of many factions (especially important was the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi in the IWA), Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) in Brixton and many other grassroots political formations saw South Asian communities unite with other Black people against racism. The challenge remains to develop this unity again on the basis of socialism and secularism that remains supportive of religious faith stripped of the manipulation, use and abuse by right-wing oppressive misogynists who use their corrupted religious opportunism for their own petty pursuit of power, money and often sexual abuse of women, girls and boys.
United grassroots working class self-organisation is desperately needed in poor neglected Black and Brown communities like in Leicester and across the country in the Lancs, Birmingham, Hayes and Southall, Luton, Ilford, Peckham, East Ham, Tower Hamlets, St Pauls & Easton and many other communities. There are always tensions between nefarious operators manipulating religion backed by the Brit government, media, intelligence services and the far-right movements under their direction. Although Pakistan was a major colonial victory of division nonetheless the people of South Asia only became independent by means of relative unity and struggle, of mobilising the masses of poor on the basis of solidarity and collective action and organising which remain the challenges today.
We need to see groups bringing ALL the flags of South Asian nations to fraternise together and celebrate unity, also when there is a big cricket match, or street celebrations for Eid/Vaisakhi/Diwali and independence days of the respective South Asian countries. The amplification of those that conduct racist divide and rule should not mean that we forget that there are many if not more people in our communities who want to see a unifying movement of all working class people to address our common issues. We should remember that there are a lot of young and older grassroots-oriented people who want to see a working class community unity and not this ugly nonsense whereby we become a laughing-stock for the NF/EDL and Tory state.
We encourage young people from South Asia to reject the politics of colonial racist divide and rule, to instead take a socialist interpretation and inspiration from all faiths revolutionary movements and ideologies that unite the oppressed and serve the oppressed towards united resistance against colonial-capitalism and for unity and socialism. We know there are a lot of young people in all oppressed communities who want this. We encourage you to form your own grassroots organisations. We also apologise that the socialist forces able to do this are so small and so many elder activists have failed their historic duties in creating effective projects and initiatives on the ground.
We in the Malcolm X Movement and our friends have tried since 2014/2015 and continue to contribute to fulfilling these urgent challenges and tasks. Probably there are young South Asians on both sides of the clashes in Leicester who might be involved in the trade union 'strike wave' which would show the direct interest in unity-in-struggle that we all have as working class youth. Back in the homeland we have increasingly have everything to unite around and especially on the issues of overcoming right-wing movements of all kinds, the devastating impact of climate change which is increasingly migrant flows internally and to the 'west' (and the pro-migrant challenges that these flows bring), unliveable hot temperatures, floods all in the context of capitalist crises that brings further poverty around the 'cost of living crisis'. Unite and fight our common challenges and oppression, reject those who are using and abusing religion for their own and the British state' narrow and manipulative agendas. Reject TR/Yaxley Lennon's agenda becoming successful in our communities!
Further reading/listening:
Malcolm X - Message to the Grassroots - http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/grassroots.html
Black Panther Party Serve the People programs - https://youtu.be/Yspaulg-tSM + https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hilliard-ed-the-black-panther-party-service-to-the-people-programs.pdf
Shaheed Bhagat Singh - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/index.htm
British state collusion with death squads in the Muslim world - https://danglazebrook.com/2017/05/26/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-part-one-with-sukant-chandan-2/
Southall Asian Youth Movement - https://youtu.be/OGWX233kHPg
Bradford 12: https://youtu.be/iLZ6Lbz6C04
Injustice (police killing of Black people) - https://vimeo.com/34633260
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
MXM public event: Marcus Garvey: Origins of 'Race First' - 630pm Sat 23rd Sept, Housmans N1 9DX
630pm, Sat 23 Sept 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, N1 9DX
£5 suggested entry
Facebook event page
Guest speaker: Brother Omowale (Pan-African Community Society Forum)
We are proud to announce that we are hosting Brother Omowale, a leading Pan-Africanist organiser and researcher in London on the subject of Marcus Garvey and the the origins of 'race first' in Garvey and Garvey's historic movement of the United Negro Improvement Asoociation (UNIA).
Monday, 7 August 2017
MXM public event: Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance
Facebook event page
630pm Fri 25 Aug
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry
Speakers confirmed so far:
Sister Juni - East Oxford Carnival organiser
Arnie Hill - London Black Revs
As Black and Brown and migrant working class communities continue to feel the increasing squeeze of British colonial state oppression and exploitation, in the aftermath of the Grenfell state massacre, as Notting Hill Carnival itself sees pushes to basically annull it by removal out of the historic community of Ladbroke Grove: the Malcolm X Movement brings together this event and conversation exploring the histories of Carnival, its role as resistant cultural expressions of our experiences, and what is the outlook for the Carnival weekend in the and generally.
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Leading Black radical advocate Prof Gus John gives a MXM talk on Brexit
Leading Black radical advocate Prof Gus John gives a MXM talk on Brexit
The Malcolm X Movement are delighted to announce that we will be having a public event whereby this country's leading Black radical advocate against racism in general and in the police and education system - Prof Gus John - will be delivering an important talk on Brexit. Brexit is the concentration of all our growing colonial oppressions in this historical moment and needs serious analysis and grassroots organising to oppose it. Prof Gus John gives a wealth of wisdom, knowledge, analysis and experience that can well equip us for these challenges.
Facebook event page
6pm Thurs 17th November
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
Kings Cross, N1 9DY
Suggested entry - £5
Tuesday, 20 September 2016
200 Black Power Youth in Ldn Celebrate Tupac 20 Years On
Nearly 200 overwhelmingly African and Asian working class youth, including two parties of people flying in especially for the event from mainland Europe, packed into the room in East London at RichMix for the Tupac 20 Years On event organised by the Malcolm X Movement, I am Hip-Hop and Intifada Street. The idea was initiated by Malcolm X Movement with I am Hip-Hop and Intifada Street becoming enthusiastic partners.
The event was historic. 20 years on from the martyrdom of Tupac Amaru Shakur the only commemoration event in the world saw political and cultural activists and artists gather together at an event that showcased people's love and creativity inspired by Tupac’s work and legacy.
Ayishat is a brilliant young fashion designer and also has a very grounded but firm sense of justice and Black Liberation to impart. Apex Zero’s rhymes and political insight is powerful and confident. The panellists and the QnA made for a very informative and inspiring learning process as we heard first hand the stories of the Panthers and Tupac from Jamal Joseph and the reflections and discussions from Ayishat and Apex and many brothers and sisters attending.
The event was hosted brilliantly by I am Hip-Hop’s magazine editor Maya Rattrey, and all the Malcolm X Movement coordinators - Ahmed Kaballo who hosted the panel discussion with great panache, Dr Moustafa Traore, Margaret Atugonza, Sukant Chandan and Richard Sudan - and excellent performances from Big Cakes, Amy True, Ibrahim Sincere and JusWrite.
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Raw live stream footage here, here and here.
Sunday, 4 September 2016
Rest in Power Toussaint L’Ouverture: Saluting Haiti’s triumph against colonialism
C.L.R. James: “Toussaint did not make the revolution, the revolution made Toussaint.”
By Malcolm X Movement coordinator Richard Sudan. This article first appeared on RT.com
April 7th marks the passing of one of the greatest, most revered and most important figures of African and world history, Toussaint L’Ouverture one of the liberators of Haiti.
By 1801 Haiti, an island made up of half a million slaves, two-thirds of whom had been born in Africa, declared independence from European colonialists.
By April 7th 1803, Toussaint L’Ouverture died in a prison cell in the French Alps of cold and hunger, but not before his work had ensured the Haitian revolution would continue after he was gone, and that slavery would never again return to the Island.
From late 1803, after many years of fighting colonial powers the Africans in Haiti led by Jean-Jacque Dessalines freed the island from the clutches of the Europeans.
To this day, Haiti remains the only successful African revolt against slavery in the occupied European controlled colonies, and in doing so also became the first Black republic with its own constitution, adopting ideals espoused by the French revolution with a greater sincerity and vigor than even the French bourgeoisie themselves.
Today, the island remains one of the poorest countries in the world, as is the price often paid when daring to resist colonialism and occupation. Just look at Cuba today, for example.
The Haitian revolution, which is not over, represents a tradition which is both important in historical terms and also in the modern context. The so-called free world, or the same system which was built by free labor and human capital extracted from slavery, still operates today on the same terms, exploiting countries to seize resources, ultimately to control capital.
When there is not a direct war for resources, today, more and more, we see ‘proxy wars’ played out in other people’s countries, with super powers jostling for position albeit with different agendas.
At one point in the 1790s Haiti was also a place which was being fought over by different colonial powers in the Caribbean, themselves at war with each other in Europe. A large chunk of the World’s sugar cane came from Haiti, and so even in a time of war, when hundreds of thousands of Haitians were fighting tens of thousands of European occupiers, Haiti was still among the most lucrative islands in the Caribbean to control.
And therein lies one of the keys to Toussaint’s genius; born a slave, but later able to free himself in his 40s, Toussaint was able to enjoy some of the benefits of the emerging privileged class in Haiti. Toussaint was educated, was an astute political analyst, and also a second to none military commander. It would be fair to say, that under Toussaint’s leadership, Africans in Haiti were able to organize and keep at bay several colonial powers at once for more than a decade. At different points Toussaint both sided with the French to fight other European powers in Haiti-and towards the end fought the French, as Napoleon attempted to force the island back into slavery following partial reforms achieved towards emancipation and freedom.
While there is a long tradition of resistance in the Caribbean of fighting colonialists tooth and nail, both from the slave ships and in the islands themselves, Haiti remains the only successful rebellion, able to rid its shores of those who had enslaved its population. The rebellion did not start in Haiti, but began the moment the first Africans were enslaved by the European merchants and capitalists in West Africa.
Toussaint and the other leading figures of African resistance in Haiti, or San Domingue as it was then known, did not spring up out of obscurity. The conditions which produced both the necessity for revolution, and the individuals and visionaries capable of leading it, were built up over several hundreds of years.
The brutal conditions suffered by slaves, which are unimaginable, built up over time a deep resentment. Writers like C.L.R. James, for example, describe in their works in detail, the sophisticated violence, humiliation, and dehumanization that Africans endured at the hands of Europeans in Haiti. The sick pseudo-science which dominated the day, a bit like the perverse modern form of ‘humanitarian intervention’, suggested that Africans were not human, and that therefore to control them as animals required a level of brutality which would both subdue them both physically and psychologically.
It stands to reason then, scientifically and rationally if nothing else, that it would ultimately take a force at least of equal measure from Africans in Haiti to free themselves from the clutches of slavery forever. And the first stages of emancipation in Haiti were indeed bloody, with Europeans being massacred indiscriminately as payback for years of suffering.
The resistance in a sense traced its roots back to Africa, and even by around 1750, there were literally thousands of Africans who had run away from the sugar plantations and were hiding in the hills and harder to access parts of the island. The Voodoo culture, songs of freedom, and determination to once again be free, had existed among the people for as long as they had been enslaved there.
By the time the French, who controlled Haiti, were preparing to do the unimaginable and behead their own King, and indeed anyone deemed disloyal to the class revolution in France, the conditions in Haiti had reached a point whereby the masses were fully ready to grasp the ideals of liberty and equality-more so than any European who had articulated them.
The call of the masses, including the emerging mixed race population of Haiti, to be given the rights of citizenship had achieved some success. Ironically, France caving in to some reforms, if for no other reason than to ensure Haiti did not fall into the hands of other colonial powers, meant that leading up to the complete expulsion of the remaining Europeans in 1804, Africans in Haiti had in a sense become the true French Republicans on the island fighting for France. When Napoleon set his sights on reversing this, the fear among Africans was that Haiti would revert back to slavery which became a catalyst for fighting the remaining French too.
The final defeat of the French in 1804, after Napoleon had sent thousands to reclaim the island, secured Haiti’s place in history as the first and last fully successful slave revolt. Haiti’s constitution and independence and even leadership, like any other, were not without its problems and contradictions.
But Toussaint, and the victory for Haiti, is an example of what is possible for the human spirit to achieve even in the face of insurmountable odds. It shows what Africans were truly capable of in the face of all of the racist pseudo-science of the day.
The revolution in Haiti has been largely ignored or forgotten by mainstream history - perhaps because as an example of resistance, it reflects what is possible in the face of the powers which rule the world today - this is dangerous for any ruling orthodoxy. When slavery is taught in schools, Haiti is rarely mentioned.
Neither for example is the island of St Thomas, which, according to many historians was liberated under the leadership of three women in 1793, and held for a year, before the Dutch eventually with the help of the other colonial powers restored the island to slavery.
Indeed colonization, occupation, oppression and political subjugation still continues today, and still continues largely for profit.
Toussaint stands as a towering figure of resistance to this, but so too do the women and men who raised him, who taught him his history, so that, even in later life when the African uprising in Haiti began, he would not seek to protect his own privilege and status, but rather, would leave it all in a second to go and fight, lead, and ultimately die for his people.
The revolution in Haiti, stands as a beacon of human triumph but also played a huge role in the eventual abolition of slavery. The revolution was influenced by events in Paris, but Paris and the world were also shaped by events on the tiny island.
There are countless examples of resistance to colonialism throughout the world, but today on April 7th we must remember Toussaint, and also all those who fought and died in the fight for freedom and justice.
Toussaint and the revolution emerged as the inevitable consequence of slavery and repression, but also of the unique circumstances which developed in Haiti. Such circumstances were developed over time by Africans in Haiti, who like the oppressed people all over the world, refused to resign and give themselves up to their fate.
As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass once noted “There is no progress without struggle” and perhaps this is true of Haiti.
But revolution and progress is bigger than one person, and as C.L.R. James once wrote “Toussaint did not make the revolution, the revolution made Toussaint.”
Thursday, 25 August 2016
Black Communities in France against Police Brutality, the Adam Traore Case
The Adama Traore Case: Ten years after the Zyed and Bouna Case
By Dr Moustafa Traore, coordinator at the Malcolm X Movement
Very few people outside the Hexagon really do realise how unequal the so called country of Liberty, equality, and fraternity is. France
July 19th 2016, unfortunately for Adama Traore and for his beloved ones, the 24 years old black man of west African cultural background and his family will have sadly come to the conclusion that little - or nothing- has changed since the death of Zyed and Bouna in 2005.
On Tuesday 19th of July, 2016, in the city of Beaumont-sur-Oise, in the Paris region, some police officers were looking for a man involved in a robbery and extortion affair. The suspect who happens to be Adama’s brother is not to be seen in the neighbourhood. The police officers however meet with Adama who refuses to comply to the police’s stop and search procedure. He flees the scene and will soon be caught up before fleeing again. It is at his parents’ apartment that Adama is finally found. He accepts to surrender and is flattened on the floor by three police officers who use their body weight against him on the floor. Adama is handcuffed and taken into police custody; and this is the last time he will ever be seen alive. A police officer in a clean t-shirt is seen later with the same t-shirt on, but this time stained with blood. Strangely enough, the latter is not bleeding. Many things are not clear.
When the Adama’s mother first comes to the police station, she is told that her son is in custody. She is not allowed to see him. A couple of hours later, she is informed that her son has succumbed to a heart attack. She still has got no clue of where the body of her son is. She is told that he is not at the police station, nor is the corpse of Adama Traore to be found in any of the closest hospitals.
It would take nearly twenty-four hours before the police finally show the body to the family. The explanation given to the many lesions, bruises, and bumps that can be observed on the victim’s face and body is that they resulted from a deadly infection. If the first autopsy already shows that the 24-year-old man probably died from asphyxia, the attorney of Pontoise, the police and the French mass media evoke some sort of severe heart infection or heart attack as Traore's cause of death. It is the family’s new barrister, Yassine Bouzrou, who will -after properly reading the different declarations and official reports-unveil the irregularities, as well as the concealed truths and facts. They contradict the public declaration of the media, and also that of both the Pontoise attorney and the police. Indeed, many things are not clear in the Adama Case, indeed. The absence of declaration or official report from any emergency rescue team is also another source of concern. Besides that, some documents even prove that an attempt was made by the police to file a complaint against Adama Traore for rebellion after he had already passed away.
According to the collective and organisation “Notre Police Assassine” -which fights and denounces police brutality more than 100 people lost their lives after confronting the French police between 2005 and 2015. In other words, approximately 10 people die every year unjustly in the hands of the French police. Research carried out in 2009 by the CNRS also revealed that young people of North African and Black African cultural background (Black Caribbean included) were 6-8 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the French police. In no cases, have the French police ever been sentenced for their committed errors.
The United States have, these last few years, been a good example of what a discriminatory system is. American history including the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s have helped coin the image the world has of North America as being a country where racial inequalities exist and which affect society as a whole. But, the case of France is even worse and untold.
People of Black African and North African Cultural background are too often used as scapegoats either to explain France economic difficulties or simply to hide the inefficiency of the successive French governments.
The numerous debates around French National identity that have been going on for a decade now and the different laws passed on Secularism, are obvious illustrations of a policy put into place in order to maintain the Whiteness and Christian legacy of France’s cultural landscape. Fighting against the cultural expression of Islam and other non-European cultural features is clearly assumed by French politicians and media.
Because of their discriminatory and racist practices, the French government and media have also, on several occasions, in the last five years, been pointed out and identified by European and international organisations fighting against racism and discrimination.
In the Adama Traore Case, every single day has its share of new revelations undermining the version of the authorities.This very case tells us a great deal about French institutions.
And, as history teaches us that ethnocides are always accompanied by attempts to get rid of part of the population carrying the non-accepted cultural particularities, I now ask myself about the objective of all these police officers when assassinating young French Arab and Black people, and disguising their murders.
It is important to remember that numbers are "power”; and, too many North Africans and Black Africans with obvious cultural particularities is undoubtedly what most lovers of the French republic fear, and would like to get rid of, at any price. In other words: “Is the assassination of Adama Traore by the police part of a larger cleansing programme, for the French republic at the expense of Ethnic minorities?” The question has merit and is justifiably asked, and Ethnic Minorities in France must be vigilant. Yes, indeed, our lives DO matter!
Monday, 1 August 2016
[French translation] Immigrant-Oppressing Company Infected with Swarms of Cockroaches
Les London Black Révolutionnaires et le Malcolm X Mouvement ont mené une action commune contre la chaine de Restaurants Byron en réaction à leurs agissements méprisants ces dernières semaines. Cette chaine de restauration a en effet piégé certains de ses employés, dont des serveurs et chefs cuisiniers avec la participation des Services d’immigration. Trente-cinq employés dont plusieurs se sont fait arrêtés et menottés, ont été déportés hors du pays, tandis qu’une centaine d’autres se cachent par crainte de subir le même sort.
Des milliers de cafards, sauterelles et criquets ont été déversésdans ces restaurants.
Nous nous excusons auprès des clients et employés pour tout désagrément. Cependant nous nous devions d’agir car de telles déportations sont inacceptables.
Nous devons défendre ces personnes et leurs familles d’un tel traitement deshumanisant.
Dans le contexte d’un nouveau gouvernement conservateur non-élu, qui de mémoire est le plus vicieux et le plus à droite que nous ayons eu, dans ce contexte de politique à tendance fasciste et de racisme grandissant, encourageant et promouvant un ressentiment, un racisme et une xénophobie de masse à l’encontre des communautés ethniques et immigrantes. Le Malcolm X Mouvement et les London Black Révolutionnaires ont décidé que des actions claires devaient être menées pour rappeler à nos communautés que sous cette répression et exploitation grandissante, nous possédons la capacité de nous défendre de manière stratégique face à l’adversité.
Le ministre britannique David Davis dans sa campagne de déportation de masses des migrants, se bat pour faire appliquer des mesures fascistes que même l’extrême droite et les organisations fascistes ont abandonnées il y a des décennies. Un ministre allemand du gouvernement bavarois, défend également les déportations de masses des migrants. La victoire du Brexit a été un encouragement massif à la haine anti-migrants et au racisme. Trump gagne du terrain aux USA, les partis fascistes sont sur le point de gagner les électionsnationales en France et en Autriche.
Nous en tant que communautés d’immigrés Noirs, Africains, Asiatiques et Latinos devons tous nous unir et vaincre cette menace grandissante, sans quoi notre futur en tant que communautés (minorités) en « occident » est en danger direct.
L’expansion de ces mesures, de ces discussions politiques et atmosphères racistes et fascistes, sont en train de mener tout droit ce système colonialiste et capitaliste dans de profondes crises où les guerres à l’étranger et la répression à domicile ne cesseront de s’étendre, à moins que les communautés alliées ne stoppent cette marche oppressive.
C’est un grand défi qui nous fait face, mais les enjeux sont de taille pour nos familles et communautés ici, ainsi qu’en Afrique, Asie, Amérique Latine et Europe de l’Est.
Les actions trompeuses de Byron, sont en adéquation avec cette répression d’extrême-droite grandissante.
Cette main d’œuvre d’immigrants, qui depuis l’époque médiévale représente une part nécessaire au fonctionnement de nos sociétés. Cette main d’œuvre qui a le plus cuisiné et servi nos repas, qui a le plus nettoyer la nation et bien d’autres encore, mais qui est également la plus ciblée.
Les London Black Révolutionnaires et le Malcolm X Mouvement, soutiennent et considèrent que nos communautés d’immigrés doivent être parmi les premières communautés à défendre et doivent se tenir à la tête d’une classe ouvrière et de peuples opprimés contre le colonialisme et le capitalisme.
Nos intentions à travers cette action sont :
- Faire payer Byron pour leur atroce exploitation et malversation à l’encontre de ces employés.
- D’inspirer d’autres personnes afin de s’assurer que Byron restera fermé jusqu’à leur liquidation. Qu’ils s’excusent auprès de leurs employés et plus particulièrement auprès de ceux qui ont été déportés. Qu’ils les dédommagent ainsi que leurs familles, en accord avec les montants réclamés par les victimes, en plus des salaires et congés dus restants à payer.
- Servir d’avertissement aux autres entreprises dans le domaine de la restauration et de l’hôtellerie. Vous pouvez devenir les cibles de ceux solidaires des migrants si vous piégez vos employés.
- Nous avertissons toutes les communautés d’immigrés et leurs familles, qu’il est temps de se lever, de s’unir et de s’organiser pour faire reculer et vaincre ce regain d’oppression et de racisme anti-immigrants.
Nous nous excusons auprès des clients et employés pour toute perturbation. Cependant, avec ce climat de xénophobie et de racisme grandissant, une limite doit être établie et nous devons dire : trop c’est trop ! Personne n’est « illégal ».
Nous avons agi aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères et sœurs déportés quotidiennement.
Si vous êtes contre cette prise au piège sournoise que Byron a mené contre ses employés, vous devez supporter les actions de défense d’employés refugiés et immigrés.
Saturday, 30 July 2016
Two Byron Restaurants Shut Down with a Swarm of Insects
London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement Shut Down Two Byron Restaurants with a Swarm of Insects
London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement have taken affirmative action against Byron restaurants chain in response to the Byron restaurants chains despicable actions in the past weeks having entrapped waiters, back of house staff and chefs in collaboration with UK Border Agency. Some 35 staff members who, many of whom were led off in handcuffs and have been deported out of the country while hundreds more are hiding in fear.
Many thousands of live cockroaches, locusts and crickets into these restaurants. We apologise to customers and staff for any irritation, however, we had to act as forced deportations such as this and others are unacceptable, we must defend these people and their families from such dehumanised treatment.
In a context of a unelected new Tory government that is the most vicious and right wing government in living memory, and in the context of growing racist and even fascist oriented policies encouraging and fostering mass resentment, racism and xenophobia towards ethnic and migrant communities, the MXM and LBRs decided we had to take some clear action to remind our communities we have the ability to strategically defend ourselves under this growing repression and exploitation in the face of adversity.
UK government minister David Davis is arguing for fascist policies that even far-right and fascist organisations stopped campaigning for decades ago in his advocacy of forced mass deportation of migrants, and a minister in the German Bavarian government is also advocating forced
mass deportation of migrants. The Brexit victory was a massive boost to anti-immigrant hate and racism, Trump is ascendant in the USA, fascist parties are about to win national elections in France and in Austria.
We as immigrant communities, Black, African, Asian, Latin American communities must all unite and defeat this growing menace that is before us, otherwise our very future as communities inside the 'West' is in direct jeopardy.
This growing racist and fascist policies, political discussion and atmosphere is taking this colonial and capitalist system into deeper crises where wars abroad and further repression at home will be increasing unless immigrant and allied communities halt this march of oppression. It's a great challenge before us, but the stakes are increasingly high for our communities and our families and communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and East Europe.
The deceptive actions of Byron is in line with this growing far-right repression of the state. The very immigrant labour that has since the medieval times been a necessary part of our societies to function, the very ones who cook, serve our food, clean up after the nation and much much more and the ones
being targeted the most. LBRs and MXM stand in solidarity with them, and consider our immigrant communities one of the first communities we should be defending and they should be in the lead of a working class and oppressed peoples struggle against colonialism and capitalism.
Our intentions of this action were to:
1. Make Byron pay for their horrifically exploitative misdeeds.
2. To inspire others to ensure Byron is shut down until they either go out of business and, they apologise to those staff impacted especially the deportees, and compensate them and their families according to sums the victims decide including any remaining wages, overtime or holiday pay due.
3. Serve as a warning to other businesses in the hospitality and catering industry that you will be targeted by those who stand in solidarity with immigrants if you entrap migrant workers.
4. We warn all immigrant communities and families that now is the time to stand up, unite, organise and push back and defeat this upsurge of anti-immigrant racism and oppression.
We apologise to customers and staff for any disruption, however, with the growing climate of racism and xenophobia, a line must be drawn and we say: enough is enough. No one is 'illegal'. We’ve acted today in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are being deported daily. If you stand in solidarity against the underhand entrapment of its workers that Byron has carried out. You should support the actions in defence of migrant workers and refugees.
London Black Revs & Malcolm X Movement
Friday 29 July 2016
Friday, 22 July 2016
'Europe' Formed through A Colonial Genocide Against Africa, Asia and Islam
The Malcolm X Movement will be holding an event (details HERE) for Cedric Robinson and his amazing work - Black Marxism. Below is an extract from that work, this is an extract from Robinson explaining the genesis of modern Europe and European-ness, and how from the feudal times that feudal and the colonial conceptual nature of 'race' and 'racism' was at the heart of the developing concept of what Europe is and has become. This process took place in counter-opposition to the civilisations of Africa and Asia which were inspired and organised by the faith of Islam. This process of genocidal colonialism that developed a racialised white supremacist character, is fundamental in understanding how re-build a Black (non white) but also African and Asian revolutionary analysis and practice towards liberation. These and other connected themes will be explored and discussed at our event.
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Islam and Eurocentrism
Extract from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, p97-100, 1983
The history of Europe for the millennium following the fifth century of the Christian era had not been markedly uni-linear. That immense span of time had contained little if any basis for teleological certainty. Indeed, there had been eras such as the eighth century when the very presence of Western high culture had been faint, preserved in scattered outposts whose own fate was made doubly uncertain by barbarian invasion and the pathetic social and material conditions of the pagan societies that surrounded them.
By the year 700, European learning had fled to the bogs of Ireland or the wild coast of Northumbria. It was in the monasteries of Ireland that fugitive scholars pre- served a knowledge of the Latin and even of the Greek classics. It was in a monastery in Northumbria that the greatest scholar of his time, the greatest historian of the whole Middle Ages, the venerable Bede, lived and wrote. And it was from the monasteries of Ireland and England, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that English and Irish fugitives would return to a devastated Europe.
Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. Feudal Europe, for a time, however, proved to be capable of expansion while rotting from within-but it was only for a time.
By the thirteenth century, that phase of European development was at a close; the system collapsed. The ruling classes of feudal Europe were succeeded by their Mediterranean factors: merchants, traders, and bankers. They in turn spawned or defined the roles for those actors who supplied capital, technical, and scientific expertise, and administrative skills to the states that would lead the emergence of capitalist Europe. By then, however, European culture and consciousness had been profoundly affected. Legend, as we have seen, acquired the authority of history. Moral authority continued to dissipate. The mystifying veil, which the feudal ruling classes had created to hide, or at least soften the crushing oppression that they had put in place, was in tatters. Prester John's [1] first appearance in the European imagination of the twelfth century was consequently understandable.
The legend, if it indeed originated from within the ruling class, accomplished two very disparate ends: for one it presented Europe's intelligentsia with a powerful and splendor, Roman counterpoint, inspired by Christian idealism, biblical imagery and splendor, Roman law, and Greco-Egyptian civil craftsmanship. Here was the ideal Christian society, measure by which the failures secure in its political body and spiritual soul, It was the and insidious corruptions of actual Christendom could be calibrated in detail. A model Christian Empire, which, when compared to Europe, displayed those faults that had contributed to the inability to defeat Islam either spiritually or militarily. This was the legend's internal function.
Its other significance, however, was even more critical. The legend transmuted the world beyond Europe, "the Indies," into Eurocentric terms. Whatever was the reality of those lands and their peoples, came to be less and less important. For the next 300 years, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, the legend of Prester John provided Europe's scholars and their l learned coreligionists with a structured a obfuse prism through which the authenticity of every datum, every traveler's report, every intelligence of its foreign trade, every fable of its poets, and every phatic foible of its soldiery could be screened and strained. Even direct evidence was not immune, for in the next century, G. K. Hunter tells us, this "frame of reference" was sustained:
"The new information which the English voyages of the sixteenth century brought to the national culture had to be fitted, as best it could, into a received image of what was important. This means that the facts were not received in quite the same way as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Historians of the last century were much taken with the idea of the Elizabethan imagination liberated b the voyagers. But there is little evidence of this outside the unhistorical supposition, "that's how I would have reacted." The voyages certainly did expand of physical horizon, but it is not clear that they expanded the cultural horizon at the same time. The image of man in his theological, political and social aspects could not be much affected by the discovery of empty or primitive lands." (G.K. Hunter in Shakespeare in His Own Age, 1964, p40)
The architects of European consciousness had begun the construction of that world-view that presumed the basic structure of other than European societies was at its foundation a European structure, that the moral, ideological, and spiritual scaffold of these societies was the same bottom structure discernible in European culture, that the measure of mankind was indeed the European. The legend of Prester John and his wondrous realm, the formidability of this purely Christian king who waited in patience for his Christian allies at the other end of the world, all this was the form impulse in its appropriate medieval costume. Thus, when the miraculous kingdom could not be located in the deserts and steppes of central Asia or even Cathay, it did not cease its fascination but was transferred to the south beyond the upper Nile The of other people fantasy and its attendant resolve to bend the very existence and being into convenient shapes were important beginnings for the destruction past. While the vitality Islam had seemed to mock the pathetic feebleness of of Christ's chosen, humiliating them in defeat and with the persistent threat of further occupations and invasions, the legend was compelling. And a basic lesson of propaganda learned: Europe's destiny was incompatible with the autochthonous non-European worlds. An increasingly prominent concomitant of the European millennium (roughly from the tenth to the present century) would be the refutation of those terms.
In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.
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[1] 'Prester John' was a myth, whereby European colonialists imagined a perfect Christian utopia ruled by Prester John that existed somewhere in the 'pagan' lands of the 'East'. ie., it was a legend that justified and motivated the colonialists to colonise and conduct genocide - MXM
Sunday, 17 July 2016
Post-Brexit Call to Action
06 July 2016
Now that the results are in, it is easy to see why there is so much mourning across social media; it is a dark day for many reasons and the future is not looking any brighter for the refugees on their way, resident migrants or even those of us lucky enough to be a citizen. However, some would say it is to be expected; all of us who draw family lineage on the wrong side of empire will know that in crisis, like any wounded predator, imperialists often become their most ferocious and unpredictable.
Last week Wednesday: The Malcolm X Movement (MXM), Ealing Momentum, Momentum - Black ConneXions and Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) all got together to organize a “Remain / Leave Debate” to discuss the future beyond the referendum; more specifically, how this future relates to all of us non-white, non-British and non-Christian people living here in England. On the panel there was: Lee Jasper, representing BARAC; Sukant Chandan from MXM; Marlene Ellis from Momentum-Black ConneXions; Nana Asante, representing Africans for Jeremy Corbyn Values; Raj Gill out of West London Unite Community; and Former Cllr Zahida Abbas Noori. Despite the broad range of political backgrounds and views, there were a great number of agreements across the panel, which was what made the event such a success.
There was general agreement across almost the entire panel at the beginning laying the responsibility for the rising tide of fascism, represented by ‘Brexit’ and all its supporters, jointly with: the impotence of current mainstream leaders in dealing with the far right and their campaigns creating disenfranchised masses in the first place. But let’s not forget that “Britain has racism embedded deep in its cultural DNA”1. Moving forward from Friday’s results, there can be no room left for any denial: we now live in a country, in 2016, where a majority, no matter how small, has supported an openly-racist campaign; the culmination of which is going to lead to dire consequences on all fronts.
All is not lost. The event concluded by focusing on the most pressing action points that we need to consider. In the face of one of the most divisive forces on earth, embodied in British fascism and imperialism, unity is one of the most important defenses we have, whether it is: Lee Jasper’s unity through ‘common cause’, which can be used to reach those vulnerable EU migrant’s here who have been spat on by the result; or the age old definition of ‘politically black’, put forward by Nana Asante as well as Lee, which unites all people who fall outside of the well defined category of ‘politically white’. Either way, Sukant brought the event back to the present by making it clear that radicalism is as important a factor: the establishment have not only failed to solve this problem, they have actively contributed to its creation; so it falls on us to make our own solutions. Marlene adds to this perfectly by reminding us that we are not few, we are many; a force to be reckoned with so lets change the way we think to encompass this.
Brothers, Sisters, Aunties, Uncles, Comrades and Partisans: now is the time for action! There are those among us who have experienced first hand the kind of hate that is bubbling over now: they didn’t run; they organized, mobilized and resisted by any means necessary. So we have a duty to do the same.

Wednesday, 6 July 2016
Saif al-Islam is Freed! / Nato War on Libya Based on Same Lies and Deceit as War on Iraq
The Nato war against Libya was based several lies that have since been proven to be so, such as the lie that the Libyan government bombed peaceful protestors and that African mercenaries were being deployed when actually there was a pogrom of lynching of Black people from the outset of the rebellion, including the total eradication of the only Black African town in North Africa, Tawergha which had a population of 40,000 people.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been released by the Zintan tribe in the city of Zintan in the west of Libya after being in detention for nearly five years. Since 2011 similarly to Iraq, Libya and the Libyan and African and Asian people there have been left in a collapsed society where abduction, rape, people smuggling, thousands of militias have proliferated and led directly to the fall out of terrorism in the region including links directly to terrorist attacks in Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.
The 'refugee crisis' is also a direct fall out of the Nato war against Libya that has led and continues to lead to tens of thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Sahel and Sahara areas. Similar to Iraq, Libya was destroyed as it was a strategic unifier and uplifter of its own region in the African continent and had successes in that regard and was about to develop further Pan-African and South-South unity and development. Very similarly to UK and USA's plans for the war on Iraq, the same forces planned the same proxy militias to compliment the Nato's massive airstrikes campaign.
Saif al-Islam is a leading political figure in Libya both in the previous government of the Libyan Jamahirya and since. He is one of the most important national figures in Libya who has the capacity like other leading political prisoners and political figures active in Libya and in the Diaspora who is able to unite Libyans in the current plight they are in.
The Zintanis and most of the tribes and peoples in the Western Mountains are allied to the House of Representatives (HoR) based in Tobruk. The HoR has a legal process for reconciliation and forgiveness for political prisoners that includes Saif al-Islam. Zintan has completed this process in relation to Saif al-Islam and will be releasing him imminently. In stark contrast there was the massacre of over a dozen young men by militias in Tripoli last month, there was no due process, this was a illegal massacre motivated for purely narrow sectarian political interests. There needs to be justice and reconciliation for thousands of other similarly detained people in illegal detention across Libya, especially in Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte and other areas were Daesh or Daesh type forces have a presence.
However, there has been especially in the last year considerable moves by the social movements and patriotic tribes in developing a growing united Libyan process to healing the wounds of division and collapse between the Libyan people and their neighbours, and develop peaceful political processes in uniting the people towards an independence movement that reunifies and uses the God-given natural resources of Libya back to a socialised distribution for the benefit of all people of Libya and Africa. The freeing of Saif al-Islam is another historical development towards the reunification and independence of Libya, and many Libyans have welcomed this development.
Please get in touch with the Malcolm X Movement for Libyan and non-Libyan specialists who can speak to media on this issue.
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