Voice of the International African Revolution! - Uhuru News

April 2003 THE BURNING SPEAR 19
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War" — that turned China into a
nation of junkies — gave rise to capitalism
as a world system. The
French turned Viet Nam into a drug
colony.
The tremendous amounts of loot
and resources coming from places
like this into Europe transformed the
relationship for peoples who used to
be free and independent. We had the
ability to meet our own needs, but
our resources were going to what
had been an impoverished and disease-ridden
Europe.
Europe was not only poverty and
disease-ridden but it was absolutely
un-free. In Europe, there was feudalism.
There was no such thing as
"home ownership" or the things that
Europeans and North Americans like
to brag about today. Those things all
came as a consequence of the pillage
that Europe initiated against the
rest of the world.
The rise of capitalism as a social
system was parasitic. It came at our
expense and that of other peoples
around the world.
Imperialism in crisis
We want to talk about the situation
in the world. We want to struggle
to understand what is going on.
Some things are very glaring to us.
We see a Bush Administration up
against the entire world in its
absolute urgency to deepen the war
that was initiated some 11 or 12
years ago against Iraq.
This is a glaring manifestation.
We see millions of people in the
streets protesting. We saw a few million
here, within the United States.
We’ve seen perhaps up to 18 million
people throughout the world marching,
demonstrating against this genocide
that the United States is intent
on waging against the people of Iraq.
Folks are searching for answers
and we ought to be searching for
some kind of answers in trying to
understand what’s going on as well.
What we concluded some time ago
was that the whole empire, the imperialist
system, is in a state of severe
crisis. It almost sounds like a cliché,
especially for anyone who has been
involved in the struggle for social justice,
as it is often characterized. You
always hear the socialists talk about
the crisis of imperialism.
The imperialists are experiencing
a severe crisis. That’s not to say that
they understand that it’s a crisis,
even though some thinking leaders
of the imperialists have expressed
some recognition of crisis.
The crisis has its origin in a
process that has been going on for a
long time. It clearly began to manifest
itself after the second imperialist
war. That’s the war that the pundits
like to refer to as the last honest war
that America pursued. Of course, in
reality, that’s just a bunch of garbage.
The second imperialist war, like
the first one, like the Korean War and
like virtually every war that’s existed
for the last 400 or 500 years, was a
war to re-divide the world. There
were no good guys in that war. The
heroes of that war – the guys that
were fighting for "democracy" – were
all countries and states that had
colonies. As much as people like to
talk about Hitler, the truth of the matter
is that Churchill presided over
what they like to refer to as "an
How do you
explain the fact
that fundamental
economic crisis can
happen in America,
England and other
places as a
consequence of
what some poor,
starving country is
doing? The oil
workers go on
strike in Nigeria
and the gasoline
prices go up in St.
Petersburg, Florida.
It’s because of this
parasitic
relationship.
empire upon which the sun never
set." That seems to suggest to me
that Hitler was a piker. He was a boy
scout compared to Churchill. In that
war, a group of cutthroats was fighting
to re-divide the world.
Anti-colonial struggles emerge
after second imperialist war
One of the things that was significant
about that war is that it offered
up a certain type of political space for
oppressed peoples around the world.
The empire was at war with itself. I
was taught in school that Africans
went off to Europe as soldiers and,
for the first time, we saw freedom in
places like France. That inspired us
to come back to fight for freedom
here in the United States.
Supposedly, we have to see freedom
in that fashion before we have
an inkling of what it is we should be
struggling for. That’s nonsensical.
The truth is, it was precisely because
of the confrontation that the empire
had within itself that the political
space emerged and other people
began to wage struggle for independence
and freedom from colonialism.
When you talk about imperialism,
you’re talking about white power that
created itself off the colonial domination
of the rest of the world.
Ugandan soldiers leaving the town of Bunia in Congo where hundreds of
Africans have died as a result of imperialist proxy wars.
As a consequence of that war, in
1947 we saw the independence in
India. In 1949, it was China. In the
‘50s, revolutionary struggles
emerged all over Africa. The Mau
Mau were fighting against the British
in Kenya. Ghana achieved independence.
Even Iraq, I think, became
nominally independent from England
in ‘58. Of course, in ’59 there was the
magnificent Cuban revolution that
contributed to revolutionary fervor,
particularly throughout the Americas.
Anybody who’s familiar with Che
Guevara knows that he didn’t stop
just in Latin America. He was also in
Africa.
In the ‘60s, we saw the incredible
and most magnificent struggle of the
people in Viet Nam, who in the ‘50s
had defeated the French before they
saw colonialism propped up by the
United States government. In the
‘50s, we also saw the people of
Korea come close to total independence.
Then the United States intervened
in Korea to prevent the total
liberation of Korea.
In fact, in many ways, the first
humiliating defeat of the United
States was Korea. China came
across the Korean border because it
was clear that part of the objective of
the United States was also to attack
China. The Chinese pushed the U.S.
back across the 38th parallel. They
ended the war by having an
armistice there that resulted in the
Korean people being divided even
today.
We hear discussions about the
North Koreans and the South
Koreans as if they are two separate
people. They’re one people. They
are people who have been divided
just as the people of Viet Nam were
divided and just like various peoples
around the world have been divided
— by imperialism.
You saw the emergence of these
kinds of struggles after the second
imperialist war. They just took off.
These struggles created serious
crises. People talk about the "domino
theory." They talk about how many
troops went to Viet Nam, how many
people were killed by those troops,
and how many of those people coming
from here died in Viet Nam to
stop this domino thing.
The backdrop to all of this of
course was the communist "boogie
man." The communist boogieman
was represented mostly by the
Soviet Union and to a lesser extent
China because China was poor.
Even though China gave significant
political support, and sometimes
more than political support, to struggles
for national liberation, when they
talked about the communist boogieman
it was really the Soviet Union. I
would remind you, however, that
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The International African Revolution is at Hand!
Conference on
July 25 - 27, 2003
London, England
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727.821.6620 or apsp.uhuru@verizon.net
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