(Link to video)
I'll begin with three epigraphs, just in order to set the stage...
Sonny Rollins once told me that he and Coltrane would
get together and speak for hours;
they were always concerned about
what was the relation of
the present picture
with the Larger picture.
That's synecdochic imagination
of relation
of parts and wholes;
the relation
of our present situation
related to the past,
and the way in which
pastness operates in the present, such that
we can be able
to take a stand
to authorize a better,
more visionary
future,
that's focused on poor and working
people.
I want to begin with an epigraph from the great W.E.B DuBois,
the greatest public intellectual in the history of the American Empire.
He was there at the founding of
the United Nations
in San Francisco, and on the way back, on
June 27th, 1945 he wrote in the Chicago Defender, the leading black newspaper of the day,
June 27th, 1945, called "The Winds of Time," he said:
"I envision, ...with tears in my eyes, I envision the emerging of a third world war,
with the American Empire
attempting to suppress Asia and
strangle-hold Russia."
Why? In part, the legacy of the colonies. The truncated character of the United Nations.
He made his way all the way to New York.
He told his very good friend, Paul Robeson, that we have got to launch an
anti-war movement, but that
anti-war movement must be but a moment in
an anti-imperialist project, an
anti-imperialist vision, an
anti-imperialist analysis, an
anti-imperialist praxis, in the name of
Solidarity,
which means it's gonna cut across a whole lot of folk who disagree with each other, but they'll be in
the same streets, and go to
the same jails.
Oh yes, and that's what so deeply, deeply needed: because W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson understood that so much of the history of the species
is the history of organized greed and hatred
and avarice and resentment and envy,
structures of domination, oppression, subjugation
and unbelievable exploitation;
and all we've ever had as a species are
moments of interruption.
Moments of eruption.
And that's when
everyday people straighten their backs up, and any time
everyday people straighten their backs up, they're going somewhere,
cause the ruling class can't ride your back unless it's bent.
That's courage!
All the virtues in the world are empty and shallow and hollow
unless you have courage, which is the enabling virtue, and if we have
any talk about an anti-war movement,
any talk about an anti-imperialist vision, analysis and praxis,
we have to have people who are in
Solidarity,
who get beyond their petty differences, and be able to
hold hands
symbolically, and literally,
and fight
--but straighten your back up!
There's a brother who used to play organ in my church on the chocolate side of Sacramento, Shiloh Baptist Church, named Sylvester, but the world knows him for the genius that it is, his name is Sly Stone;
he wrote a song called:
Stand! You been sitting much too long
There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong.
Stand, there's a cross for you to bear
Things to go through, if you going anywhere.
The second epigraph comes from Martin Luther King, Jr.
That's the same Martin Luther King, Jr. that was
in that paddy wagon for four and a half hours, when he rode
from Atlanta to Reidsville Prison,
and Daddy King told me, he said:
"When Martin my son got out he couldn't walk a straight line,
the German shepherds had disoriented him so he didn't know
when he was going to be bitten, he didn't know
when he was going to be pushed against the wall,
he couldn't walk one line and all he could say was
'Daddy, this is the cross we must bear for the freedom of our people!'"
That's the cross that Sly was talking about.
There is no serious sacrifice or burden that we have to bear
that will not allow us to sustain our Solidarity,
to create moments of interruption, here and around the world,
in light of the war machine coming out of the U.S. empire.
So it's not just a matter of how grand your vision and how splendid it is,
it's not just a matter of how subtle and sophisticated your analysis.
But if you're not willing to throw down,
put your body where your words are...
(brother Jim knows, we been to jail so many times...)
and what Martin said was,
"My own government is the greatest
purveyor of violence
in the world."
When he said it, he'd already signed his death certificate.
But he understood that he'd rather be dead than afraid.
He'd rather be a corpse than a coward.
That's what we're talking about; because the gangsters who run the American empire,
they'll do anything to preserve entrenched interests,
they'll do anything to procure their profits,
they'll do anything in the names of lies and crimes and mendacity and criminality
to trivialize the suffering of
precious brothers and sisters around the world, but
who are disproportionately chocolate. And
each life is equal,
each life
has the same value and significance.
Cause I'm still an old-school revolutionary Christian like Martin King.
I believe that every human being, every baby,
it could be a baby on the West Bank,
it could be a baby in Argentina,
it could be a baby in... Ukraine.
It could be a baby in Moscow.
It could be a baby in Puerto Rico,
it could be a baby in Guatemala.
It could be a baby in... Idaho.
(I say that in the name of Ezra Pound, he's from Idaho. Great poet but fascist. Things are complicated in the world.)
But the important point is that we have to have that kind of
moral consistency and
ethical constancy.
It could be a precious, precious young Iranian sister,
dealing with suppression in Iran.
It could be brothers and sisters in Mississippi,
that's where the third epigraph comes from.
The last speech that Malcom X gave, outside of New York City,
February 16, 1965, in Rochester,
went back to the city of Frederick Douglass.
And oh, you get a chance to, read that powerful speech.
And what did he talk about, he talked about war:
he implicitly invoked Carl von Clausewitz, philosopher of war, and
his text, "On War", published in 1832, the year after he died by his wife.
He said, "Nobody wants to talk about war,"
he said, "I've been in this struggle now for twelve years,
ever since I got out of the prison, and I was
in it before the prison but I didn't know..."
He said, "There's been a war going on against
indigenous people for four hundred years,
there's been a war going on against
black folks in Africa,
black folks in Rochester,
brown folk in Mexico," and he added
--a lot of people don't want to acknowledge this about Malcom, but Malcom said,
"I'm for the truth, anybody who says it,
I'm for justice, anybody who promotes it, and
I'm first and foremost a human being, a Black man and a Muslim."
So that's about as humanistic as you can get, with his own deep religious twist.
And he said we need to talk honestly, candidly, about the levels of war. Because some of us come from a people who have had to have armor
of spiritual and political
and tremendous cultural power,
in the face of multi-layered wars.
I'm a Black man who came from Black people who
for four hundred years dealing with
white supremacist bombardment, every day mediated with
predatory capitalist processes, shot through with
male supremacist and homophobic and transphobic practices
too, and if you don't get yourself together,
you're going to give up real quick,
you're going to cave in real fast,
you're going to sell out
and act as if you're in the vanguard for struggle for something bigger than just your narcissistic ego and agenda.
That's what we're talking about. The war of Cop City.
You can't separate Mexican brothers and sisters
trying to get into California,
from from 1846, when the U.S. empire
stole half of Mexico.
Some of them just coming home, ain't got the memo yet.
That was the illegal war,
it was the immmoral war,
that's still Mexico. Absolutely.
Even Ulysses S. Grant writes about it in the memoir:
it was the phoniest war,
and he was in the war,
as a lieutenant, and hadn't even become
a General in the Civil War
yet.
Interesting how some of these folks begin to tell the truth after,
like the war criminal Henry Kissenger:
"Well, we didn't have anything to do with Chile, you know,
it's just well, accidental that they overthrew Allende..."
Quit lying!
And then in the memoir, "of course the CIA was fundamental, it was fundamental absolutely..."
They're going to say the same thing about Julian Assange, oh yes,
exposing the vicious crimes of the American empire.
Same thing about Snoop!
Same thing about Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Same thing about H. Rap Brown al-Amin!
Same thing about Leonard Peltier!
Same thing about folk who told the truth, and sooner or later,
truth crushed to Earth will rise
again: no lie can live for ever.
That's what we're talking about.
So part of our challenge is to understand the backdrop.
1492, the beginning
of the Europeanization of the world
where those small nations
between the Ural mountains and the Atlantic Ocean
begin to reshape the whole globe
in their interest and in their image
owing to their imperial power;
and the contestation those European empires,
leading toward what? The end of the Age of Europe in
1945, with the most indescribable catastrophic consequences!
And most visibly in so many ways, within Europe,
the inability to come to terms
with the present Jewish brothers and sisters,
given the unbelievable anti-Jewish hatred that was unleashed,
not just by Nazis in Germany, there's a long history of it
throughout Europe.
Throughout Europe,
and Europe ends up
a divided, dependent, deferential continent to two empires,
the Soviet empire on the one hand, and
the U.S. empire on the other.
And with now the Americanization of the world, and
with the American empire in such unbelievable decline and decay,
it's undeniable.
Look on the streets.
Social housing versus real estate development.
Gentrification ain't nothing but
land-grab and power-grab,
just another cycle of what an imperial project is all about;
it's just urban.
Look in the hearts and minds and souls
of our fellow citizens, wrestling with levels of
despair and despondency, with
escalating suicides, and
escalating drug overdoses, making it
difficult even to cultivate the very capacity to love; because
love itself is a magnificent interruption
in the history of the species, given the history
of lust
and manipulation
and domination, tied to
vicious forms of male supremacy,
and other such realities.
One of the reasons why Black people,
one of the reasons why Black folks talk so much about love,
when you've been hated like us,
love is liberation,
love is emancipation,
love is subversive,
love is revolutionary.
You've been bombarded for four hundred years
and told
you have the wrong lips and hips and noses and hair pigmentation,
and told
you're less beautiful and less moral and less intelligent,
and then
you still have to straighten your back, and--
well you can't talk about peace unless you're talking about the presence of justice, and
justice is what love looks like in public.
It is.
Just like cultivating the capacity for intimacy:
tenderness is what love feels like in private.
You can't have a movement if you don't have
tenderness and kindness
in your Solidarity,
even as you have deep disagreements.
And for some of us we just want to make it soulful;
I'm not talking about being on or off the beat; no, no, our
musicians are the vanguard of our movement.
Musicians are the vanguard of the species;
and they understand that soul ain't nothing
but the sharing of a soothing sweetness
against a backdrop of a grim catastrophe.
That's what Strange Fruit is all about.
Meeropol's Jewish brother's lyric, and the genius of
Baltimore City's Billie Holiday, singing
about Catastrophe.
Not a problem:
a Catastrophe.
Looking for what:
Justice.
Tied to:
Peace.
And one of the saddest things,
during the Obama years, one of the reasons why
so many of us who were critical of brother Barack understood it was not just about policy:
there was a time in which the Black community
was the most anti-war community
in the history of the American empire, but here come Barack Obama
dropping seventy-one bombs every day,
twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventeen in one year, in
seven countries,
walking around with the Nobel Peace Prize.
That's a key sweat moment,
something, something just ain't right.
The lies,
the dissonance,
the hypocrisy
of
it
all!
What has that got to do with Ukraine,
Brother West?
Everything.
Because
if we're not talking about an anti-imperial vision and project (as my dear sister and others noticed);
if we're not talking about de-militarization tied to
de-commodification tied to
de-colonization leading to
wholesale democratization,
so that everyday people's voices can be lifted to shape their destiny,
to get the oligarchs
and the plutocrats
off of their backs, then
no matter how strong your anti-war movement is,
we will go somewhere else.
Because
so much of this is precisely about human survival,
(as my dear sister Medea said).
That's what it's about.
The self-destructive tendencies of
the human species.
We are a wretched species!
Oh, that's pessimistic, no, no, no, that's
retail pessimism, that's not
wholesale pessimism. I'm a blues man.
Blues not pessimistic; not optimistic; what is it?
Prisoners of hope: cause you have to do something,
can't just talk about it,
sing your song.
Engage in your practice,
create your Solidarity,
sustain what you're trying to do.
That's what we're talking about here:
how do we de-militarize to
keep track
of the precious suffering of Ukrainian brothers and sisters, but
understand that NATO expansion was
not simply a provocation, but it's part and parcel of
an overall pattern of U.S. imperial activity
that's been going on for decades and decades and--
Panama's been invaded twenty-two times!
Haiti... looks like there's going to be
another occupation coming. How do we
keep track?
Vision, analysis, not be overwhelmed by it, but like Blues folks,
look Catastrophe in the face,
and not allow it to have the last
word.
Oh, that's it. That's it.
BB king said nobody loves me but my mommy, she might be jivin' too.
That's Catastrophic; all the forces of the cosmos and the world against you and
the one person you thought in your corner.
Now that the whole planet has the Blues,
the whole nation has the Blues;
if we don't learn something from the best of the Blues people,
we lose
ev
-er
-y
-thing.
The species;
life on the planet;
the sliver of democracy that's still limping along,
given the ways in which
poverty and
militarism and
materialism, the forms of
racism and
sexism, and
homophobia and
transphobia and so forth are
squeezing out
the best of our democracy.
And sometimes all you can do is do what our magnificent artists to start this program,
is do what?
Sing a song.
Sing a song.
Our precious Hassidic brothers and sisters used to always say,
in the face of the morning of Catastrophe,
you weep,
you're silent, and you...
sing a song.
And I come from a tradition where the
Spirit will not descend
without song.
So when all of our analysis--and you've heard the data,
eight hundred military bases,
eighty-five countries,
special operations,
hundred and sixty-some countries,
three thousand, eight hundred and twenty-nine military units in the United States--
China's got one in Djibouti.
Djibouti! They're supposed to be so imperialist,
ain't attacked nobody for hundreds of years.
Now that doesn't mean China doesn't have its repressive elite;
I'm with my Muslim brothers and sisters when they're mistrated, the Uigur people;
you gotta be morally consistent.
But Chinese imperialism pales in the face of the largest empire in the history of the species.
Sixty-eighth empire--there have been seventy
empires since the
empires emerged out of Africa,
the United States is Number Sixty-eight and has done the most
damage;
and treating human beings as if
they do not matter.
How many precious Iraquis did we
invade,
occupy,
kill,
annihilate, and nobody said
(not nobody: nobody in the powers-that-be)
said a mumbling word!
Reminds me of the unbelievable cowardliness of these same
politicians, when
they can't say a mumbling word when
five hundred and fifty-one
Palestinian babies are killed
in fifty-one days, and all you could talk about is
"Israel has a right to defend itself."
Please!
Where's your morality,
where's your spirituality,
where's your truth-telling,
what happens when it comes to your house?
What happens when the catastrophe comes to your neighborhood,
and all of a sudden you want to be on the cutting edge of morality?
That's, I hope, the raw stuff of this new moment of an anti-war momentum, and possible movement
--it takes a lot to create a movement now, you just can't call for it, you gotta build it--
but it has to be a moment with a larger anti-imperialist vision and analysis,
so that there could be,
possibly,
a new world.
Thank you all so very much.
