Video:

Bongeziwe Mabandla

“Phupa Lam ft. Zulu Boy”

October 6, 2011 Posted by: killakam

South African folk singer Bongeziwe Mabandla is prepping the release of his debut Umlilo LP. In this clip for lead-single “Phupa Lam” Bongeziwe delivers a Mbaqanga and dub-influenced acoustic serenade from the streets of Johannesburg. It all plays like a neatly sculpted roots pop tune ’til the guitar tracks drop, Zulu Boy pops in, and the underlying beat and synths reveal themselves to be prime spitting material.

While we certainly don't feel literary brilliance is limited to those in a graduate-level creative writing program, this journal only accepts work from students who are currently enrolled at the time of submission.

Our primary focus is to hear your voice. We publish everything from the mainstream to the avant-garde and are looking for a variety of voices and styles. Please, don't hold back, we want to be wowed.

Submission Guidelines:

- The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2011.
- We accept fiction and narrative nonfiction only.
- We only accept previously unpublished work.
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please inform us immediately if your work is picked up elsewhere.
- Word limit is 7000 words.
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Submissions Must Include:

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Submit Here:

 

Any manuscript that does not include the above information will not be considered.

All submissions are handled via our online submissions manager. To submit a story or to view the status of a submission, click:

 

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Submission Guidelines:

-While Apropos accepts rolling submissions, the deadline for our next issue is November 1, 2011.

 
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-Apropos accepts simultaneous submissions. Please immediately notify the editors of Apropos if a submitted piece has been accepted elsewhere.

 
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WCDR Contests – Whispered Words

Write 1000 words. Win $1000 dollars.

Whispered Words, WCDR’s themed prose competition, is now open. Our writing contest welcomes fiction and non-fiction. We accept prose of all kinds: literary, science fiction, children’s, memoir, essay, creative non-fiction. All entries compete head to head, word for word…and whisper for whisper.

Theme: Whispered Words, of course!

PRIZES:

• $1,000 First Place
• $400 Second Place
• $200 Third Place

Selected honourable mentions, plus First, Second and Third Prize winners, will appear in the Whispered Words anthology and receive $25 PLUS a contributor’s copy. Every entry receives written feedback.

• Maximum: 1000 words
• Entry fee: $20 Canadian ($25 for international entries)
• Deadline: November 30, 2011
• Winners announced: March, 2012
• Three-tier blind judging
• Online entry only—email entries as attachments to whisperedwords@wcdr.org
• Please read our complete contest rules

$20.00 Whispered Words Entry – Canadian

$25.00 Whispered Words Entry – International

 

Psst…There’s a Whispered Words cover contest, too!

They say a picture’s worth 1000 words, but what do whispers look like? Show us, and your artwork could appear on the cover of our Whispered Words anthology. The prize is $150, publication on the cover of the Whispered Words anthology, plus a contributor’s copy.

• Entry fee: $5 Canadian
• Deadline: November 30, 2011
• Winner announced: March, 2012
• Blind judging
• Online entry only—email entries as attachments to whisperedwords@wcdr.org
• Please read our complete cover contest rules

$5.00 Whispered Words Cover Contest Entry

TIFF Review:

Akin Omotoso's

Man On Ground

Written & Directed by Akin Omotoso
Starring: Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Fana Mokoena, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Makhaola Ndebele, Bubu Mazibuko
Cinematographer: Paul Michelson
Editor: Aryan Kaganof
Sound: President Kapa
Music: Amu

Country: South Africa
Year: 2011
Language: English, Yoruba, Sotho, Zulu
Runtime: 90 minutes

Still Screening:
Saturday September 17, 2011
Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto
9:30pm

Man On Ground opens to dungeon-like corridors and the sounds of torture - or so you think, but no one is telling the whole truth in this story, including the filmmaker, who keeps his story cards close to the chest, revealing it only in bits and pieces and much of the time in hindsight. It's a skilfully told drama about one brother trying to find out what happened to the other against the backdrop of rising zenophobia in South Africa.

There are recurring images of fire, matches lighting, that you won't understand the significance of until the very end, some scenes that are more symbolic than literal, and others that describe background rather than acting as pieces in the puzzle of the central mystery of what exactly happened to Femi, a Nigerian worker in the construction site at Extension 29, an "informal settlement" in the Eastern Cape region.

 

Ade, the older brother, goes to meet Femi at a cafe, and after a no-show, he's contacted by Femi's fiancée, who's worried sick. Ade agrees to go to Extension 29 to look for Femi, and from here the story begins to unravel. Ade is long estranged from his brother, and has his own dark history with his sibling, but he's only the first character among many to have secrets and hidden agendas, including the construction site foreman where Femi was working, his wife, and assorted locals. It turns out the area's inhabitants live largely in shacks, waiting for government housing that's due to be given to them for free - but then is mysteriously sold to foreigners instead. It's become a hotbed of strife and conflict, with riots and killings and a pervasive hatred of foreigners, and those dancing flames that consume half built houses.

This is the filmmaking of a master storyteller and it works on many different levels. The story unfolds visually in a series of contrasts - the contrast between Ade's urban comfortable life and Femi's scrounging as a street vendor. Femi's voice in a voiced over letter talks about the pretty South African countryside as we see people setting buildings on fire. Talky scenes cut back and forth with the violent action of the protesters.

It's also a very economical form of storytelling. The courtship of Femi and his fiancée takes places over a few quick yet telling scenes. "Are you legal?" she asks. "Legally a refugee," is the answer. In a single line, Ade reveals the deeply felt childhood jealousies at the roots of their estrangement.

 

Recurring images and symbols foreshadow in unexpected ways, and I was particularly impressed with the use of sound in the film. The fires - even a match lighting a smoke - crackle with a malevolent life all their own, the sounds alternating with a great musical soundtrack. Together they serve to both move the story along and underpin the plot. The visual elements also work hard to reinforce the overall tone, especially the cavernous and mostly empty schoolhouse that acts as the construction office. The haunted nature of an abandoned institution works well with the displaced sense of truth, and the hollow nature of public institutions in this violent landscape. The actors turn in entirely convincing portrayals of these conflicted people, without a false note between them.

The story comes to a tragic conclusion, but one that you really won't guess at till the end. It's an absorbing story and a really nicely made film with a highly accomplished and developed sense of style.

 

Posted by Anya Wassenberg

 

__________________________

BEHIND THE CAMERA:

Omotoso reflects on funding,

healing, xenophobia

SHOWCASE: Akin Omotoso takes his new film to Toronto Picture: DANIEL BORN

Women Who Kill

the Men They Love

Oct 15, 2011 

 

AUTHOR

Jessica Bennett

Follow Jessica Bennett on twitter

 

From inside a California prison, a group of women convicted of murder is working to change the way we think about domestic violence. Jessica Bennett looks at a new documentary that tells their story.

When Brenda Clubine killed her husband in 1983, there were 11 restraining orders against him and a warrant for his arrest. He’d put her in the ER more than once—tossing her across the room, fracturing her skull, and puncturing her lungs. But “domestic violence” was scarcely on the public radar back then: local police considered it a problem to be worked out in private; there was no hotline to call and few shelters to escape to. So when Brenda says her husband locked her in a hotel room and told her to hand over her wedding ring—so it would be “harder to identify her body”—Brenda knew she had only one option: she had to kill him first.

Her husband, a retired cop who was twice her size, lay down on the bed, and Brenda saw her chance. “Everything started flashing before my eyes,” Brenda, now 63, remembers. “I started thinking about my son, and I thought, how could I have ended up here?” She grabbed an open wine bottle and swung it toward him, but he grabbed it. She backed up and swung again—connecting with his forehead. “All I remember from that point is grabbing my keys, my ring, my shoes, and running six miles down Colorado Avenue home.”

Brenda would spend 26 years in prison for her husband’s murder—the blow to his head shattered his skull. At her trial, a judge would not permit a psychologist to testify about her mental state, nor friends or doctors who’d witnessed the physical scars of her abuse. Battered women’s syndrome, at the time, was still an untested theory (it remains highly controversial). So Brenda would face a sentence of 17 years to life—trading, as she puts it, “one prison for another.” But Brenda, who was once a licensed vocational nurse, would also change the way lawmakers think about domestic violence in this country—where one in four women is a victim of abuse.

Brenda Clubine was convicted, in 1983, or murdering her husband. At the time of her arrest, there were 11 restraining orders against him for domestic abuse., Courtesy of Quiet Little Place Productions

Clubine is one of half a dozen women featured in a new documentary Sin by Silence, which premieres on Investigation Discovery on Oct. 17—the directorial debut of filmmaker Olivia Klaus. Set on the sprawling brick campus of the high-security California Institution for Women, the state's oldest women’s prison, it tells the story of the prison support group Clubine founded—aimed at women like her, who’ve been imprisoned for killing the men they once loved.

Over the course of the one-hour film, we hear from LaVelma, whose husband was pastor by day and tormentor by night—but who was too ashamed to tell anybody what was going on (she's serving 25 years to life). We meet Joanne, a mother of three, who—like many women stuck in a cycle of abuse—tried endlessly to leave but couldn’t support her children on her own. (Leaving an abuser, say experts, can often be more dangerous than staying.) She is serving a 15 year to life sentence. And we hear the dramatic story of Glenda Crosley, a soft-spoken, gray-haired grandmother who—after 25 years of marriage to her husband, Sam—ran him over in the parking lot of a Bakersfield, Calif., shopping center, as bystanders looked on. “It’s a hard thing, even today,” says the woman, now 65, speaking softly into the camera. “Why did I do it?” Glenda has been in prison for 24 years.

Over the years, Clubine's own story has been criticized, by both lawmakers and the press. But she firmly believes that, in her case, anyway, she had no other option. And so, from her eight- by six-foot prison cell, she began organizing the women around her, shocked by how many of them had similar stories. By 1989, a group of 60 women—calling themselves “Convicted Women Against Abuse—was formally recognized by the state as the first inmate-run support group in the nation. Brenda launched a letter-writing campaign to any politician whose address she could get her hands on. And she started sharing her cellmates’ stories. “Murder is what defines us: section 187 of the penal code,” she tells Newsweek. “But these are normal, everyday people. Inmates, but also victims. We wanted our stories to be heard.”

Clubine’s group would ultimately make headlines—most prominently when the California Legislative Women’s Caucus called on them to testify before a series of legislative hearings. Clubine, along with 10 others from the group, told their stories—explaining how, in court, they were forbidden from presenting evidence of the abuse, and how the support group had helped them. “Battered women’s syndrome” was the term used to describe the mindset of a woman who’d suffered prolonged abuse back then. As a result of the women’s testimonies, in 1992 the California legislature formally deemed it an admissible defense in court. “When most of these women were convicted, there were no laws in place to bring evidence of abuse into a court trial, not even as a self-defense claim,” says Klaus. “So juries saw only the snapshot of the crime.”

In the two decades since that first battle, 10 states have added battered women’s laws to their books, according to the director, and battered women’s syndrome—now called “battering and its effects” in most states—has been used as a defense in hundreds of cases. But the 1992 law was not retroactive—meaning Brenda, and the vast majority of the women in the group, remained behind bars, which is where Klaus comes in. She learned about the group only recently, in 2001, after coming to terms with a friend’s own domestic struggle. By 2003, she was making regular trips to the high-security prison campus, which houses 1,900—the guards leading her down a long, sterile hallway to the conference room where the women would meet weekly.

At first, it was a volunteer mission: Klaus wanted to learn, and to help. But the women had other plans: they wanted her to tell their story. “I realized these women could have been my neighbors or my sister, and I knew I couldn’t turn my back on them,” she says.

Brenda knew she only had one option: she had to kill her husband before he killed her.

Sin by Silence—a reference to an Abraham Lincoln quote—is Klaus’s answer to the problem, its first $1,000 in funding cobbled together from the women’s own 10-cent-an-hour prison wages. It would be the beginning of a years-long filming process, through which Klaus would see appeals denied, paroles overturned—and, ultimately, three inmates, including Brenda, released by the California governor in 2008. In total, more than 30 women from the group have been released from prison.

But for those not so lucky, the support group remains strong: with 72 members and the support of the prison’s officials. They continue to meet monthly. Brenda, meanwhile, has started a new life: she remarried last year and has reunited with her son, now 30, who had been put up for adoption after her conviction. She is a grandmother, living just south of San Diego.

But her heart remains with the women she left behind. Her latest venture is an outside support group to advocate on their behalf called Every 9 Seconds—referring to the frequency with which a woman in this country is abused. Since she launched the group earlier this year, with Klaus’s help (she is a member of the board), she’s spoken at local women’s shelters and met with legislative advocates. Her group offers training to law enforcement and works to educate young women about prevention. But in the back of her mind, always, will be the women who helped her endure. “These women are the forgotten ones,” she says. “Those who didn’t have any choice but to protect their lives.”

+++++++++++++++++++

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Jessica Bennett is a senior writer and editor at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, covering social issues, gender, sex and culture. She has won three Front Page Awards, and has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the New York Press Club and GLAAD, among other organizations. She also edits the Newsweek Tumblr. Follow her on Tumblr.

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A Letter To The

Occupy Together Movement

By Guest Contributor On October 15, 2011 · 4 Comments and 57 Reactions

By Guest Contributor Harsha Walia

I wish I could start with the ritualistic “I love you” for the Occupy Movement. To be honest, it has been a space of turmoil for me. But also one of virulent optimism. What I outline below are not criticisms. I am inspired that the dynamic of the movement thus far has been organic, so that all those who choose to participate are collectively responsible for its evolution. To everyone – I offer my deepest respect.

I am writing today with Grace Lee Boggs in mind:

The coming struggle is a political struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many not only to fight the powerful few but to fight and clash among themselves as well.

This may sound counter-productive, but I find it a poignant reminder that, in our state of elation, we cannot under-estimate the difficult terrain ahead. I look forward to the processes that will further these conversations.

Occupations on Occupied Land

 

One of the broad principles in a working statement of unity (yet to be formally adopted) of Occupy Vancouver thus far includes an acknowledgement of unceded Coast Salish territories. There has been opposition to this as being “divisive” and “focusing on First Nations issues”. I would argue that acknowledging Indigenous lands is a necessary and critical starting point for two primary reasons.

Firstly, the word Occupy has understandably ignited criticism from Indigenous people as having a deeply colonial implication. It erases the brutal history of genocide that settler societies have been built on. This is not simply a rhetorical or fringe point; it is a profound and indisputable matter of fact that this land is already occupied. The province of BC is largely still unceded land, which means that no treaties have been signed and the title holders of Vancouver are the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Tseilwau-tuth, and Musqueam. As my Sḵwx̱wú7mesh friend Dustin Rivers joked “Okay so the Premier and provincial government acknowledge and give thanks to the host territory, but Occupy Vancouver can’t?”

Supporting efforts towards decolonization is not only an Indigenous issue. It is also about us, as non-natives, learning the history of this land and locating ourselves and our responsibilities within the context of colonization. Occupation movements such as those in Boston and Denver and New York have taken similar steps in deepening an anti-colonial analysis.

Secondly, we must understand that the tentacles of corporate control have roots in the processes of colonization and enslavement. As written by the Owe Aku International Justice Project: “Corporate greed is the driving factor for the global oppression and suffering of Indigenous populations. It is the driving factor for the conquest and continued suffering for the Indigenous peoples on this continent. The effects of greed eventually spill over and negatively impact all peoples, everywhere.”

The Hudsons Bay Company in Canada and the East India Trading Company in India, for example, were some of the first corporate entities established on the stock market. Both companies were granted trading monopolies by the British Crown, and were able to extract resources and amass massive profits due to the subjugation of local communities through the use of the Empire’s military and police forces. The attendant processes of corporate expansion and colonization continues today, most evident in this country with the Alberta Tar Sands. In the midst of an economic crisis, corporations’ ability to accumulate wealth is dependent on discovering new frontiers from which to extract resources. This disproportionately impacts Indigenous peoples and destroys the land base required to sustain their communities, while creating an ecological crisis for the planet as a whole.

 

Systemic Oppression Connected to Economic Inequality

In creating a unified space of opposition to the 1% who hold a concentration of power and wealth, we must simultaneously foster critical education to learn about the systemic injustices that many of us in the 99% continue to face. This should not be pejoratively dismissed as “identity politics”, which for many re-enforces the patterns of marginalization. The connection between the nature and structure of the political economy and systemic injustice is clear: the growing economic inequality being experienced in this city and across this country is nothing new for low-income racialized communities, particularly single mothers, all of whom face the double brunt of scape-goating during periods of recession.

The very idea of the multitude forces a contestation of any one lived experience binding the 99%. Embracing this plurality and having an open heart to potentially uncomfortable truths about systemic oppression beyond the ‘evil corporations and greedy banks’ will strengthen this movement. Ignoring the hierarchies of power between us does not make them magically disappear. It actually does the opposite – it entrenches those inequalities. If we learn from social movements past, we observe that the struggle to genuinely address issues of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, age, and nationality actually did more, rather than less, to facilitate broader participation.

In order to this we need to critically examine the idea of “catering to the mainstream”. I do not disagree with reaching out to as broad a base as possible; but we should ask ourselves: who constitutes the “mainstream”? If Indigenous communities, homeless people, immigrants, LGBTQs, seniors and others are all considered “special interest groups” (although we actually constitute an overwhelming demographic majority), then by default that suggests that, as Rinku Sen argues, straight white men are the sole standard of universalism. “Addressing other systems of oppression, and the people those systems affect, isn’t about elevating one group’s suffering over that of white men. It’s about understanding how the mechanisms of control actually operate. When we understand, we can craft solutions that truly help everybody. ” This should not be misunderstood as advocating for a pecking order of issues; it is about understanding that the 99% is not a homogenous group but a web of inter-related communities in struggle.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, Tar Sands Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, wrote to me: “Our own Indigenous Rights movements are gaining momentum which means that we all must continually be educating new folks getting politicized. We can all be working towards a larger convergence that is strongly rooted in an Anti colonial, Anti Racist, Anti Oppressive framework.” In a similar vein, Syed Hussan writes, “Understand that to truly be free, to truly include the entire 99 per cent, you have to say today, and say every day: We will leave no one behind.” Just as we challenge the idea of austerity put forward by governments and corporations, we should challenge the idea of scarcity of space in our movements and instead facilitate a more nuanced discourse about inequality.

 

Learning from History and Building on Successes

While it is clearly too early to comment on the future of the Occupy movement, I offer a few humble preliminary thoughts based on Occupy Wall Street and the nature of the Vancouver organizing. Those who us who have been activists rightfully do not have any particular authority in this movement and as many others have cautioned, more experienced activists should not claim moral righteousness over those who are just joining the struggle. But we also cannot claim ignorance either.

It must be re-stated that Occupy Together is brilliantly transitional. As has been repeatedly noted, it is has been a moral and strategic success to not have a pre-articulated laundry list of demands within which to confine a nascent movement. Peter Marcus writes “Occupy is seen by most of its participants and supporters not as a set of pressures for individual rights, but as a powerful claim for a better world… The whole essence of the movement is to reject the game’s rules as it is being played, to produce change that includes each of these demands but goes much further to question the structures that make those demands necessary.” Similarly Vijay Prashad says that we “must breathe in the many currents of dissatisfaction, and breathe out a new radical imagination.”

The creation of encampments is in itself an act of liberation. Decentralized gatherings with democratic decision-making processes and autonomous space for people to gather and dialogue based on their interests – such as through reading circles or art zones or guerrilla gardening – create a sense of purpose, connectedness, and emancipation in a society that otherwise breeds apathy, disenchantment, and isolation. This type of pre-figurative politics – a living symbol of refusal – is a ways to come together to create and live the alternatives to this system. I am reminded of the modest (Anti) Olympic Tent Village in our own city in the Downtown Eastside last year, which was deemed ‘paradise’ and a place where ‘real freedom lives’ by many.

 

One issue I would stress is building awareness about police violence and police infiltration. In some cities, Occupy organizers have actively collaborated with police. While many do this on the principle of ‘we have nothing to hide‘, the police cannot be trusted. This is not a comment on individual police officers who maybe “ordinary people”, but their job is to protect the 1%. The police have a long history of repression of social movements. Plus, people who are homeless, racialized, non-status, or queer routinely experience arbitrary police abuse. We must take these concerns seriously in order to promote participation from these communities. We must also learn to rely on ourselves to keep ourselves safe and to hold ground when police are ordered to clear us out. This seems insurmountable, but it has been done before and can be done again.

In the heels of the Olympics and G20, a recurring issue is diversity of tactics. Despite a history in community-based movement-building, based on a debate about diversity of tactics with an ally whom I respect, there has been unnecessary and misinformed fear-mongering that those who support a diversity of tactics “fundamentally reject peaceful assemblies”. For me, supporting a diversity of tactics has always implied respect for a range of strategies including non-violent assembly. As G20 defendant Alex Hundert, who has written extensively about diversity of tactics told me, “It is important to recognise that a belief in supporting a diversity of tactics means not ruling out intentionally peaceful means. These gatherings have been explicitly nonviolent from the start and in hundreds of cities across the continent. Obviously this is the right tactic for this moment.”

It is noteworthy that Occupy Wall Street has not actually dogmatically rejected a diversity of tactics. It appears that the movement there has understood what diversity of tactics actually means – which is not imposing one tactic in any and every context. The Occupy Wall Street Direct Action Working Group has adopted the basic tenet of “respect diversity of tactics, but be aware of how your actions will affect others.” In my opinion, this is an encouraging development as people work together to learn how to come keep each other safe within the encampment, while effectively escalating tactics in autonomous actions.

Finally, we may want to stop articulating that this is a leaderless movement; it might be more honest to suggest that We Are All Leaders. Denying that leadership exists deflects accountability, obscures potential hierarchies, and absolves us of actively creating structures within which to build collective leadership. Many of the models being used such as the General Assembly and Consensus are rooted in the practice of anti-authoritarians and community organizers. There are many other skills to share to empower and embolden this movement. As much as we wish we can radically transform unjust economic, political, and social systems overnight, but this is a long-term struggle. And there is always the danger of co-optation. Slavoj Zizek warned Occupy Wall Street that “Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless moral protest.” Which means that we will need to find ways to do the pain-staking work of making this movement sustainable and rooting it within and alongside existing grassroots movements for social and environmental justice.

“We have begun to come out of the shadows; we have begun to break with routines and oppressive customs and to discard taboos; we have commenced to carry with pride the task of thawing hearts and changing consciousness. Women, let’s not let the danger of the journey and the vastness of the territory scare us — let’s look forward and open paths in these woods. Voyager, there are no bridges; one builds them as one walks.”
- Gloria Anzaldua

A version of this article originally appeared in rabble.ca

__________________________

Wall Street’s Opponents

Are Not Moving

Posted on Oct 16, 2011

Bigsteelguy4

This may be the most powerful video yet to come out of the Wall Street occupation, now heading into its fifth week. It strongly and artfully suggests a comparability between the U.S. government’s response to the nationwide protests and those of regimes challenged by the Arab Spring. —ARK

>via: http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/wall_streets_opponents_are_not_moving_20...

__________________________

OP-ED COLUMNIST

America's 'Primal Scream'

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 15, 2011

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

Martin Luther King Jr.:

"Why I Am Opposed

to the War in Vietnam"

By Matthew Bradley

 

Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967:

A Real Audio file hosted here.

The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject, nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I'm using as a subject from which to preach, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam."

Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we're always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It's a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]...have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.

This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is...a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years--especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can't do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There's something wrong with that press!

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission--a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.

Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won't tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around!" It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind. And when I speak of love I'm not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: "Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."

Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more.

Walter Rodney

and the Rodney Riots

Wed, 2008-10-22 

 

PRAGOTI publishes two excerpts from the writings of Walter Rodney on the 40th anniversary of the Rodney Riots in Jamaica in October 1968.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist intellectual and working class activist who inspired a materialist relook at the history of Africa and organised workers and marginalised in the Caribbean into militant action against their own neo-colonial governments and against imperialist depradations in their region. He was active in Guyana, where he was born, Jamaica and Tanzania. In Jamaica, his successful work in poor neighbourhoods of Kingston scared the Government into exiling him which led to some of the largest popular upsurges of anger and rebellion in the history of independent Jamaica. Identified as a threat to the stability of class rule and the imperialist control of the Caribbean, Walter Rodney was killed by a car bomb in Guyana in 1980.

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By the late 1960s, a period of extensive popular movements and radical struggles for transformation was sweeping the world. Rodney had by then finished his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and had started teaching at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica as well as organising working class and marginalised communities. At the young age of 26, he was already a known public figure in the University as well as a recognised organiser of the poor against oppression. So afraid was the Jamaican Government of his work that they refused him entry into the country after he attended the Conference of Black Writers in Montreal, Canada in October 1968. The Jamaican Government's refusal to grant him entry led to spontaneous protests from the University's students and in many of the poor neighbourhoods of Kingston. These protests, demanding Rodney be allowed to return to Jamaica and teach, became the biggest outpouring of popular anger at their Government's policies since independence from Britain. Reacting to these events, Rodney had said that these were only incidentally about him but more intrinsically were a vote of no confidence in the policies of the Jamaican Government which tied up the country's economy and polity to US and British Imperialism.

Walter Rodney was also an important figure in the writing of a radical history of Africa, slavery and capitalism. He relentlessly exposed the false history of Africa's underdevelopment and demonstrated the culpability of capitalism and colonialism in the underdevelopment of Africa and the third world. He was among the pioneers who showed the explanatory and emancipatory power of historical materialism as a methodology for understanding Africa's history and the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Rodney's legacy today remains as important for Marxists and radicals today as it was when he was alive.

Walter Rodney Speaks: the Making of an African Intellectual (a selection)

Wed, 2008-10-22 16:27

Walter Rodney

I have had a rare privilege of traveling around and living and working with black people in a lot of contexts. This has sensitized me to ways in which we need to understand the specificity of different situations. To talk about Pan-Africanism, to talk about international solidarity within the black world, whichever sector of the black world we live in, we have a series of responsibilities. One of the most important of our responsibilities is to define our own situation. A second responsibility is to present that definition to other parts of the black world, indeed to the whole progressive world. A Third responsibility, and I think this is in order of priority, is to help others in a different section of the black world to reflect upon their own specific experience.

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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Wed, 2008-10-22 

Walter Rodney

PRAGOTI reproduces first chapter of Walter Rodney's classic book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1973.

This chapter and the entire book can be found at http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm

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