Sunday, December 21, 2014

More Wisdom


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 The outrage in the Black community is real, not manufactured...except perhaps in your imagination. The outrage is real and a consequence of repressive behavior of the police and the injustices of the judicial system. But fortunately, MOST of us do not respond in the manner of the guy who shot those two cops. But if the misconduct of the police continues despite legal and extralegal nonviolent protests, and if the criminals in badges are continually exonerated by a corrupt judiciary, the numbers turning to armed retaliation or resistance will increase. And it won't be just some random act by a whacked individual, but systematic and organized counterviolence against the police. -Savant __________________

It would be interesting to study the linguistic history of Jewish people. For it seems that after the Babylonian captivity most Jews who returned to Judea spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. Something happened. I recall one rabbi on the history channel who argued that the reason Jews scribes in Alexandria and elsewhere started translating the OT from Hebrew (or Aramaic) to Greek was because many Jews in the Hellenistic period no longer understood Hebrew and were completely Greek speaking. Apparently, at some point Jews began to try to regain Hebrew as their original language. It would be almost like African-Americans choosing one of the ancestral languages--maybe Yoruba or Ashanti--adopting it as the national language of the Black people of America, but still speaking English in a predominantly Anglophone country. There have even been some African Americans who have suggested such a thing. Some AA folk I've even heard pointing to the example of the Jews who survived by claiming or reclaiming their heritage while making whatever accommodation they had to in largely hostile gentile societies. -Savant __________________ T-BOZ shows repeatedly that she is a white racist regardless of her actual skin color. Notice that she speaks of the actions of the killer of NYC cops as in "typical black male fashion." I don't recall her referring to the white Sandyhook killer of about 20 white schoolchildren (after murdering his own mother) followed by suicide as in "typical white male fashion." In fact, I've yet to see her post ANYTHING against white racists--not even when they killed BLACK WOMEN. All this adds up to racist disdain for Black PEOPLE concealed in the idiom of gender. Is it a mere coincidence that she writes pretty much the same thing as do the white racists--sometimes in explicit SOLIDARITY with the racists? All enemies of Black people are not white. Some are folk who, in the current vernacular, "look like us." -Savant

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 In fact, America is divided into the haves and have nots. Which is about 1%-- 5% vs the rest of the population. A few Blacks, male and female, may belong to that elite. The great majority do not. The 1% are still 99% white. Truth be told, the great majority of whites do not belong either. Most whites are serfs of their wealthy white overlords. I believe it was Dr. King who once said that the difference is that Blacks KNOW in general they don't belong, but whites are generally unaware of their unfreedom. But there are some Blacks these days (though not in the same proportion as the whites) who are also unaware.

 -Savant

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 I stated numerous times in this and other threads that I do not think that violence is the best route to take, at least not unless and until it has been shown to be necessary. I've pointed out that the movement against police repression in Black and Brown communities--a movement that has begun to become INTERNATIONAL--has remained 99% NONVIOLENT. Even in Ferguson on the day of the decision, when rioting did break out, if you watch DEMOCRACY NOW or Al Jazeera, you noticed that MOST of the protests by Blacks and non-Black allies, were nonviolent. I wholly COMMEND that movement. I have participated in some of the demonstrations, and have told my students (Black, white, Latin and others) how proud I am of them for not only protesting, but for doing so in a dignified and nonviolent manner. So, the answer to your question should obvious. But I can only wonder whether your sympathies are uncritically pro-police and against even nonviolent protest, or where exactly you stand. But while I do not favor such actions as those which happened recently, I also recognize--and History shows---that where peaceful legal or extralegal measures do not avail, violent alternatives will be used. And eventually it will be random violence of a whacked individual, but systematic and clandestine violence in resistance or retaliation against the police. All of those who oppose, or are at best lukewarm to the nonviolent protests (often with reference to black crime as a pretext) need to check need to check yourselves and notice what time it is.

 -Savant

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I don't favor this kind of response if indeed it was intended as a response to the killings by police. I still favor massive civil disobedience, massive resistance by means other than armed force. But if these measures fail more and more people will resort to armed retaliation against racist cops. But if it comes to THAT, then we'd better do some serious thinking about logistics; and we'd have to be thinking in terms of clandestine armed resistance. Somewhat like in THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR. I hope we don't have to go there.

 -Savant


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 Well, the range of nonviolent resistance are nearly immeasurable. I couldn't name them all. Mass protests on a scale which itself largely disables a city or town. Peaceable occupation of government buildings, or places of business. Strikes, boycotts, maybe even a tax revolt. (Noam Chomsky during the 1960s advocated, I believe, refusal to pay taxes until the Vietnam war ended. Henry David Thoreua refused to pay taxes to a government which enslaved the Black population and invaded Hispanic lands during the Mexican War. Dr. King was planning to virtually shut down the nation's capital if he and his cohorts could not get some positive action along the lines of employment for the poor, and a Economic Bill of Rights amendment). Soldiers can refuse to fight---like some Israeli soldiers who refuse to invade and carry out actions against Palestinian civilians. Young men can refuse to register. Demonstrators who are ordered to move or disperse can refuse to do so. Believe it or not, even police (like the Israeli soldiers) can refuse to obey orders which involve racial profiling or the use of excessive force. Not many of them do so. I know of one Black police officer who is suing his own dept in Philadelphia on account of excessive force and harassment of Black people. I don't know if this will cost him his job. A Latino officer some months ago started reporting the New York police chief explicitly ORDERED his offers to profile and harass Blacks and Hispanics. So, if nonviolent opposition and disobedience is possible to some extent by police and soldiers themselves, it is possible even more for ordinary citizens. The alternatives really are only SUBMISSION (which erodes sense of dignity) or ARMED RESISTANCE, which could mean a blood bath. I'd prefer even armed resistance to submission, but nonviolent resistance to armed resistance if possible. I think it is still possible.....at least for now.

 -Savant

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 Ah yes, now we get to the heart of the matter. The SYSTEM.....The judicial system, the system of e police....I'd go even further and talk about the entire socioeconomic system which breeds poverty, misery, alienation and criminality (which some use as an excuse to defend police terror), and the violence of the police whose job is really to defend this bankrupt, and to do so with force of arms. It's remarkable when you read Dr. King, the original Black Panthers, Stokely, Angela Davis, Du Bois and others they were saying the same thing about the SYSTEM....and if that didn't change very little else would either. So, we're still engaged in wars for essentially the same reasons that Dr. King spoke of in his address against the Vietnam War (April 4, 1967) called "Breaking Silence." We're still having the problems with the police and judiciary for more or less the same reasons explained decades ago by post-Mecca Malcolm X and the original Panthers. Yet, it's remarkable that so many people---including SOME Black people, and maybe MOST white people---still don't get it!!!! It's the SYSTEM, people. And you're going to miss the train if you don't pick up on that reality.

-Savant
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 The struggle against racism and imperialism is one thing Blacks in America and Africa have in common. And having ties with white racists (at least where such can be avoided) is indicative of mental illness. And that's regardless of whether the racist is from your own country or elsewhere. And yes, I'd prefer to marry a woman from Ghana or the Congo before I'd marry an American with racist. Yet, I'm not even opposed to interracial marriage since I think freedom means being able to choose whom you love. Racists are a different matter. -Savant

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 Indeed, domestic terrorists is a good descriptions of the killer cops who murdered Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and others. Perhaps they should be tried in the world court since these terroristic killer cops are so readily let off by the corrupt judiciary of the USA. -Savant ________________

 Meanwhile the killers of Garner, Brown and even little Tamir Rice are neither fired nor subject to criminal charges. And Blacks are 21 times more likely to be killed by cops than are whites. -Savant

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 The usual deflecting talk about black crime is usually a predictable expression of white racism. But that aside, the same system that gives rise to police terror creates the conditions that promote Black crime....and white crime. Therefore, what is needed is a radical social movement to change that system, and to transform the criminal mentality into a revolutionary mentality. When you're ready to consider that option we can talk. In the meantime, maybe you should worry yourself more about white crime since you're more likely to be murdered by another white if you are white than to be murdered by a black....or Latino -Savant

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 What we need is not random acts of violence, but a social movement to combat police violencend judicial injustice. But the Movement must also combat the entire system of class and racial injustice, entire system of concentrated wealth and power. Random acts of violence, even if directed at the specific cops who killed Eric Garner, would not solve the problem because it is the ENTIRE SYSTEM that must be radically transformed. StaggerLee is right about that, and has made perhaps the most perceptive observations on this matter. The police are the armed instruments of the Establishment, of the racist corporate state and the classes that uphold it. Unless that establishment is changed even killing the actual killers of Garner, Brown or Rice will mean little. The system will simply replace them. And yes, such actions will become an excuse for even more police repression. What we need is a movement not only to end police brutality, and the fascistic tendencies illustrated by an increasingly militarized police; we must change the entire social order which makes this kind of police possible (if not necessary) and of which the cops are mainly tools. And for those who are always ranting and raving about "black crime"--usual ly as a deflection from the issue of police brutality--it ought to be known by now that criminal activity is mainly a destructive and self-destructive reaction to an oppressive social system. The Movement which seeks to end social conditions which make police terror possible also seeks to alter the conditins that promote self-destructive behavior among poor blacks, whites, latins and others. MOvemets of the 1960s & 30s show that during times of great liberatory social movements and high social consciousness ordinary criminal activity declines, sometimes disappearing totally. Hence Dr. King noted the drop in crime in Black Montgomery (a 60% drop) during the Bus boycott. Even riots that broke out in Baltimore and other cities after King's assassination led to the radical reductions in crime. If you take a look at Thomas Jackson's FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MARTIN LUTHER KING AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE, it is clear that Movement leaders noticed that. The Black Panthers also tried to steer young people from crime to Struggle. Similar observations have been observed in other counties---in parts of Latin America by Paulo Feirie, in part of Africa by Frantz Fanon. For the aim of the struggle is to build a new community of freedom, with new bonds of solidarity; in that new community there will be no place for police terror, for poverty amidst an ocean of material wealth, and for the kinds of alienation in which one's neighbor is one's enemy. You're right, Stagger Lee. The system must be change----radicall y and fundamentally.

 -Savant

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 I have been involved in mass demonstrations in Baltimore and Washington over issues of police brutality and the corrupt judicial system. As for the "MLK nonviolent" you ought to have noticed (if you really called off from work to be at the demonstrations) that the demonstrations were overwhelmingly NONVIOLENT. Even on the day of the jury's decision in Ferguson when riots did break out, MOST of the Black community and its allies engaged in nonviolent protest. Moreover, the "MLK bullshyt" as you call it was actually quite effective in its time. And it just may be effective now. And yes, some baastard killed Martin Luther King, but people who engage in violent struggle against oppressive authority sometimes suffer casualties as well. More people died in the riots of 1967 than in the previous ten years of nonviolent struggle in the South. I would also submit for consideration that a nonviolent revolution, if it can happen, reduces the dangers of a new tyranny replacing an older one. Without the violence I doubt that a Robespierre or a Stalin can arise. And violence must be a choice, then it ought to be our LAST recourse; what is left when all else has failed. Part of the moral authority of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress derived from the fact that when they decided on armed struggle after the Sharpesville massacre, it was at the end of FORTY YEARS of failed nonviolent strategies in which they were more oppressed than when they started out. Under THOSE kinds of circumstances it is quite understandable that recourse is had to armed struggle. I would have taken up arms myself against the fascistic apartheid regime in South Africa. Even Frantz Fanon and karl Marx both believed that in SOME countries, under SOME conditions, nonviolent transformation is possible. Before I consider taking up arms and risking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people (or more), I want to be damned sure that either no other options exist, or that they have proven to be ineffective in the fight against oppression and injustice. -Savant
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http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/18/when-soldiers-declared-peace-on-earth


http://socialistworker.org/2014/07/28/capitalisms-first-world-war

Unfortunately, you're no better---at least not much--than "lol"; substituting personal insult for argument, and name calling for debate. But anyone besides the racists, or mentally twisted Blacks like T-BOZ or SBT, knows what I've stood for since I accidentally discovered this "forum" about six or seven years ago. Some may be familiar with my thread "NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION: IS IT POSSIBLE?" Some may have seen my thread "PROGRESSIVE WHITE PEOPLE: WHERE ARE YOU?" Or maybe "MARTIN LUTHER KING'S LEGACY AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT". Even those who paid close attention to my thread "BRING BACK THE BLACK PANTHERS?" know that my preference is for NONVIOLENT ACTION even though I do not, as King seems to do, take armed resistance completely off the table. It is a question of reason, sanity and moral sense of justice and human dignity. A sane man--he need not be King, Gandhi or Bishop Tutu---prefers peaceabE means for at least as long as he thinks them possible. Even if I had reached the point, as Mandela did after the Sharpseville Massacre, that nonviolent resistance was no longer an option, I wouldn't advocate random acts of violence. Even then there would have to be discipline and adherence to modern norms and rules of combat. As it stands, I am convinced the NONVIOLENT options, both legal and extralegal, are still options. Perhaps you should explain where YOU stand. In my Panthers thread you told me you posted Mike Brown's mother to essentially tell her off for not properly raising her son. Like the typical white racist you called him a criminal. But you didn't refer to Wilson nor other cops who kill men, women and even children as criminals. And when I asked you what post you sent to Wilson I noticed a deafening silence. You were noticeably cool toward the tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of mainly nonviolent protestors throughout the country (even in foreign countries). But now you come here upset about the killing of police. Could it be that you need to re-examine your own moral compass? (


 -Savant

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