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We've Lost the Moral Imperative
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
As the two sides of the ruling oligopoly’s coin of
"democracy" disingenuously haggle, posture and pose over
the budget and the potential for default; we miss the
greater challenge facing us as a people. The challenge
we currently face is the very issue Martin Luther King
Jr. warned us about over forty years ago, spiritual
death. In his sermon on why he opposed the Vietnam War,
King stated, “A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Martin
Luther King Jr. was deeply concerned about the psyche
(soul) of this nation and the damage the warmongers were
doing to us psychologically and spiritually.
King like Malcolm
opposed US imperialistic wars and the absurd
rationalities behind them like “Manifest Destiny,”
“American Exceptionalism,” and “stopping communism”;
euphemisms for white supremacy, genocide, war, rapine
and continued colonialism. Both men were ministers and
religious leaders; King of Christianity, Malcolm of
Islam. Their calling unlike many ministers today, who
focus only on money, imbued them with a higher
consciousness and morality. They preached it and acted
upon it! More importantly they knew first hand our
people were victims of a vicious system of psychological
and socio-economic oppression and brutality. They spoke
out boldly against these conditions; they took action
and offered concrete challenges to the system (Malcolm
taking the US before the
World Court on human rights
violations, King launching a
Poor People’s Campaign
aimed at redirecting domestic policy) which cost both
men their lives. Unlike many religious leaders of their
time and today Malcolm and Martin had integrity and
steadfast courage in the face of unfathomable evil.
The US government
with its counter insurgency and anti-dissidence
campaigns like
COINTELPRO run by the FBI, and
Operation
Chaos run by the CIA (in illegal violation of its
charter) were committed to fascist imperialism and used
these programs to neutralize (kill) Malcolm and King,
and attempt to squash dissent in this country, instill
fear, apathy and an acquiescence to fascist imperialism
in the public. But resistance mounted. The psychopathic
oligarchs saw they were losing and changed their
strategy by ending the war in Southeast Asia (which was
really about drug trafficking not the threat of
communism), doing away with the military draft, creating
an all volunteer imperial military and moving to
inculcate within younger generations a love of killing,
war and imperialism.. These initiatives along with the
continued operation of COINTELPRO,
Operation
Chaos, and
others greatly reduced open resistance to US
imperialism. The economic boom fueled in great part by
this same imperialism raised incomes and living
standards until the banker elite decided to pull the
plug on the US economy.
To keep the
military-industrial hydra going, the ruling elites also
had to reinvent the military to make the people forget
Vietnam since they had no intention stopping their quest
to rob, steal and plunder the earth’s resources and kill
with impunity. So they used the media especially motion
pictures like
Top Gun and
An Officer and A Gentleman to
depict the military in a favorable light. They worked
with Hollywood, the music and video game industries
which they own to encourage immorality, incivility,
warmongering and bloodlust in their programming under a
guise of free speech. So now we are constantly bombarded
with murder, killing, decadence and a general disrespect
for the sanctity of life. We are as King admonished
approaching spiritual death. Over the years, when Blacks
like
C. Delores Tucker and
Rev. Calvin Butts spoke up and
warned us about our moral decline they were attacked and
denounced by the thugs and low lifes in the
entertainment industry on behalf of their owners and
paymasters.
To his credit
Minister Louis Farrakhan is the only national leader who
has consistently called AmeriKKKa out on her immorality
and insanity. Other notables like
Al Sharpton and
Jesse
Jackson have become
shills for the
oligarchies, rarely if
ever speaking out against the ongoing parade of wars or
the egregious domestic policies ravaging this nation and
sending it over the abyss. They are living too
comfortably to challenge the status quo.
Unlike them,
Malcolm and King saw their calling as comforting the
afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Would there
were more like them. In the meantime, AmeriKKK has
accelerated its descent into degradation and immorality.
Quiet as its kept, there is little difference between
present day AmeriKKKa and Nazi Germany in the 1930's.
The reason is the same consciousness and mentality
prevails.
Africans in
AmeriKKKa have always been the moral compass and
conscience of this nation. When the
Great Awakening hit AmeriKKKa, many white church goers still owned slaves,
they were still killing Native Americans and
slavery except for some Quakers and Methodists was
accepted as a way of life. It was Black visionaries and
preachers like
David Walker, Nathaniel Turner,
Denmark Vesey,
Henry Highland Garnet,
Frederick Douglass and a long
line of outspoken men and women who challenged this
country’s legacy of moral turpitude, genocide, war and
oppression often at the risk of bodily harm or death.
Where is that tradition today?
Where are the Black
leaders calling Obama out for his warmongering? Too many
of our people have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid. The ruling
elites purposefully gave him the Nobel Peace Prize to
stunt any criticism once he expanded US/NATO wars on
theirs orders and we fell for it.
Louis Farrakhan,
William Reed,
Cynthia McKinney,
Omali Yeshitela,
Glen
Ford, me and a few others are the only ones
consistently pointing out Obama’s hypocrisy and calling
for our people to resist perpetual war, economic suicide
and the encroaching police state. Sometimes it feels
like I’m talking to rocks.
Our African
ancestors created the first systems of
rectitude, morality and ethics known to man called
Ma’at
that lasted for thousands of years. What happened to
that tradition? Why aren’t we upholding it, why don’t we
know about it? As a people it seems we’ve lost the
moral imperative, we’ve lost our spunk and gumption so
much so we live vicariously through a man like
Barack Obama, which is sad on so many levels. It appears as
though COINTELPRO worked.
The good news is
things are not always as they appear. People are waking
up and throwing off the shroud of mindless conformity.
Despite a dearth of moral leadership in the Black
community, people are waking up. That’s the good news.
The bad news is the psychopathic warmongers are more
determined than ever to embroil this country in a global
conflagration that will make WWII look like child’s
play. Meanwhile the Negro leadership says nothing.
Will we go along to
get along, will we go for the okey-doke, and fall for
the flim-flam like we did after 9-11 and remain silent,
or will we pick up the mantle of Malcolm, King, be about
PEACE, uprightness, do the right thing and derail this
war machine? Time will tell but time is running out.
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Development Arrested
The Blues and Plantation Power
in the Mississippi Delta
By Clyde Woods
Development Arrested has no peer, for Clyde
Woods is a rare scholar who takes the blues seriously as
theory and social critique. Arguing that this folk discourse
emerged in response to economic and political restructuring
in the Delta during the 20th century, he goes on to show how
it constitutes a critique of the plantation South, New South
modernization, and the transformation of capitalist
agriculture during the so-called Green Revolution. To
paraphrase something Marx said a long time ago,
Development Arrested reveals the
connection between the arm of criticism (i.e., the
blues/social science) and the criticism of arms: struggle
for power in the Delta.—Robin
D.G. Kelley
Development Arrested remains the most
sophisticated analysis of the political economy of Black
music that has been published in the last generation, in
part because Woods never lost sight of the fact that the
very economic engines that drove the degradation and
exploitation of Black workers in the Delta, inspired a
resistance to those engines in the music of the region.—Mark
Anthony Neal |
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Obama's America and the New
Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)
/ Michelle_Alexander Part
II Democracy Now
(Video)
Michelle Alexander Speaks At
Riverside Church
/
part
2 of 4 /
part 3 of 4 /
part 4 of 4
There are
more African Americans under
correctional control
today--in prison or jail, on
probation or parole—than
were enslaved in 1850, a
decade before the Civil War
began. If you take into
account prisoners, a large
majority of African American
men in some urban areas,
like Chicago, have been
labeled felons for life.
These men are part of a
growing undercaste, not
class, caste—a group of
people who are permanently
relegated, by law, to an
inferior second-class
status. They can be denied
the right to vote,
automatically excluded from
juries, and legally
discriminated against in
employment, housing, access
to education and public
benefits—much
as their grandparents and
great-grandparents once were
during the Jim Crow era.—Michelle
Alexander,
The New Jim Crow |
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The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer
By Colin Grant
The definitive group biography of the Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston—chronicling their rise to fame and power. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers—one of the most influential groups in popular music. Colin Grant presents a lively history of this remarkable band from their upbringing in the brutal slums of Kingston to their first recordings and then international superstardom. With energetic prose and stunning, original research, Grant argues that these reggae stars offered three models for black men in the second half of the twentieth century: accommodate and succeed (Marley), fight and die (Tosh), or retreat and live (Livingston). Grant meets with Rastafarian elders, Obeah men (witch doctors), and other folk authorities as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of Jamaica's famously impenetrable culture. Much more than a top-flight music biography, The Natural Mystics offers a sophisticated understanding of Jamaican politics, heritage, race, and religion—a portrait of a seminal group during a period of exuberant cultural evolution. 8 pages of four-color and 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations. Colin Grant Interview, The Natural Mystics
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posted 11 July 2011
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