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The Accra Appeal for Worldwide DeNuclearization

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<< “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” the lawyer, Lisa Page, wrote to Strzok. “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded. >>

The DOJ, Department of Justice, through an Inspector General’s report, throws shade today on the operations of the FBI under Comey especially, and in the form of wannabee Deep State officers in the bureau itself. Consider the irony of a Russian-tainted operator in the form of an octarian (octogenarian)–W.E.B. Du Bois the anti-nuclear peace activist being arrested, put in cuffs by police officers, and prosecuted by DOJ attorneys over six decades ago.
The DOJ filed charges against Du Bois, who briefly chaired the Peace Information Center, on February 9, 1951. Together with Elizabeth Moos, Kyrle Elkin, and clerical worker, Sylvia Soloff, Du Bois the radical intellectual faced the case U.S. v. Peace Information Center, et al. wherein the Deep State alleged Du Bois and his comrades had acted as agents of the World Peace Council, and thus for the Soviet Union itself. Du Bois and his partner Shirley Graham give their account  of the episode in the book–

In battle for peace [excerpt], ca. 1952

 Ironic bridges…

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? RFK/JFK/GBShaw

Anti-communism, anti-red, anti-Russia, against the Asians, Walls Up against the Mexicans and LatinX herman@s, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot the black African n-words, no, no, no, negation after negation.

The only response is to act with nia, with the purpose we repurpose as The Accra Appeal: 

“We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to enforce this measure.

“We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal.

“We call on all men and women of good will throughout the world to sign this appeal.”

From where the bones of Du Bois commingle within African earth, we challenge and create the space for peace. The bare existence of nuclear weapons and potential military use is unacceptable to the future of humanity.

“Let all be one and one vast will Cry: Stop, Halt, Hold!” WEBD

IN BATTLE FOR PEACE

 

Fighting the KKK [Satire mode]

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EricinKlanland

EricinKlanland is an editorial I published in The Spectator, the student newspaper of Monsignor Kelly High School in Beaumont, Texas, forty years ago. I was one of the student editor’s of the paper and my reading at the time Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland influenced how I wrote this piece. The image of me holding a pipe and the cartoon of Kluxers preparing to put me on a cross, was drawn by my friend and graphic artist for the paper, Mark Whitney.

The column’s title is a play on my paternal surname and Rhett Butler’s infamous response to Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” I sought to express my views on issues without giving a damn what authorities they might upset. As in Ephesians 6, I put on the full armor of god (Love), “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

One of my first columns landed me on the hot seat in the office of Sister Jane Meyer, the then principal of Kelly H.S., in 1976 when I was 15 years old. It questioned why my Catholic high school was admitting so many white non-Catholics whose only reason to attend Kelly was the fact that racial integration of the city’s public schools was beginning to be enforced. I linked my moral concern with white resistance to racial integration to Pope Paul VI’s Christmas 1975 enactment of the rite of closing the Holy Door. 

The Holy Father closed the two sides of an ancient Vatican door while reciting the words: “Christus heri et hodie, principium et finis; Ipse aperit et nemo claudit; claudit et nemo aperit. Ipsi gloria et imperium per infinita sæcula sæculorum” (Christ the same yesterday, and to day, the beginning and the end; He opens and no one shuts; shuts and no one opens. To him be glory and dominion throughout all the endless ages of the ages). For me this ritual and Il Papa’s words, called upon Catholics to follow the way of the Christ/Cross. It said don’t sell out and associate with Protestants on the grounds of white unity (racial supremacist false consciousness). Instead, live up to the ideas in  POPULORUM PROGRESSIO (The Encyclical of Pope Paul VI “ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PEOPLES” of MARCH 26, 1967).

Pope Paul VI and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I cannot not find the banned article that inspired Sister Jane to ask me if I did not like the high school and wanted to be expelled? Alas, I withdrew it and published “Eric in Klanland.” Overall my journalistic efforts received more positive feedback than negative, and I salute Dr. Mary Gagné who taught me and supported me and did so much to help me be a better writer. She is today is director of The Texas Academy for Leadership in the Humanities on the Lamar University campus, founded in 1994 as a co-educational, residential, public institution for gifted Texas high school juniors and seniors.

Dr. Gagné (and Sister Jane) both signed my Outstanding Achievement in Journalism certificate when I graduated in 1977. She encouraged me to submit my work to the 6th Annual Texas Catholic Interscholastic League Rally for Non-Athletic Events held at the University of Dallas, March 11-12, 1977, for which I received the “Best Editorial” Award in the Newspaper area. Before that I won a medal for my piece “Twilight Zone” at the Interscholastic League Press Conference in competition with over 600 student writers from across the sate of Texas. She also nominated me to be one of ten high school students  from Southeast Texas to attend the 4th annual summer journalism workshop at Lamar University in 1975.

Also, through Dr. Gagné’s recommendation,  I wrote a features column for the daily newspaper The Beaumont Enterprise and worked (for pay!) as an assistant in the paper’s Sports Department to Joe Heiling. I knew very little about sports, but Heiling was a nice man and I later learned, as president of the Baseball Writers of America, he successfully lobbied to induct Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente into the Hall of Fame in 1973, bypassing a mandatory five-year waiting period.

My loving journalism and writing had its foundation not in high school, however, but with my schoolteacher mother, who wrote beautifully and prodigiously. Also, my teachers at my all-black, segregated elementary and junior high schools instilled in me a love of well written stories, poems, letters, essays, and books. In the early 1970s, at John P. Odom Jr. High School, I contributed to our mimeographed paper, “What’s Happening.”

Such was the path that led me in 2009, being named a member of the Texas Institute of Letters for distinctive literary achievement, as well as my book Advancing Democracy, receiving The T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, the History of Education Society Outstanding Book Honorable Mention, and being listed as an Essence Magazine Top-Ten Recommended Book, among other accolades.

The writing life continues despite the call that I received threatening my life four decades ago when I published this “Eric In Klanland.”

# # #

 

Malcolm X, Obama, Powell, Rice and ‘House Negroes’

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By A. Peter Bailey
Published 11/26/2008

The uproar caused by the statements attributed to Al-Qaeda’s deputy
leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he labeled President-elect Barack
Obama and former and current secretaries of states Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice, “house Negroes” is fascinating to those of us who
consider ourselves Malcolmites.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was correct in saying that Brother Malcolm X used that
name to describe “Negroes” whom he considered to be basically allies of
white power. While working with him as editor of the Organization of
Afro-American Unity’s (OAAU) newsletter, I heard him, scornfully, use
the term.

If Brother Malcolm was still with us today, I believe he would use it to
describe those “Negroes” who are constantly called upon by white
television and radio talk show hosts, journalists and academicians who
are looking for a “house Negro” to attack black folks whom they consider
insufficiently grateful for “all the good whites have done for them.”

Such people are willing weapons of mass mis-information ready to be used
by white power whenever called upon. Notable examples of such “house
Negroes” are Ward Connerly, Jesse Lee Peterson, Clarence Thomas and
their cohorts in the political, journalistic and academic arenas.

Though Brother Malcolm, based on his speeches and writings, would
strenuously disagree with many of the positions of Obama, Powell and
Rice on issues of importance to the empowerment of black folks, I don’t
believe he would put them in the same category as Connerly, Peterson and
Thomas.

One doesn’t often see white power propagandists such as Sean Hannity,
for instance, calling on them when they want to launch an attack on a
black person whom they want to put in his or her place.

Some of Brother Malcolm’s beliefs on what black people must do if we are
to ever achieve real power in this group-oriented society can be
ascertained in the following statements from the goals and objectives of
the OAAU and one of his speeches:

“The organization of Afro-American Unity will organize the Afro-American
community block by block to make the community aware of its power and
potential; we will start immediately a voter-registration drive to make
every unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent
voter; we propose to support and/or organize political clubs, to run
independent candidates for office, and to support any Afro-American
already in office who answers to and is responsible to the Afro-American
community….

“And in this manner, the organizations will increase in number and in
quantity and in quality, and by August, it is then our intention to have
a black nationalist convention which will consist of delegates from all
over the country who are interested in the political, economic and
social philosophy of black nationalism. After these delegates convene,
we will listen to everyone. We want to hear new ideas and new solutions
and new answers….

“We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our
children to become scientists and mathematicians. We must realize the
need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will
emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We
intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an
unprecedented level of excellence and self-respect through their own
efforts.

“The political philosophy of black nationalism means the black man
should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no
more. The black man in the black community has to be re-educated into
the science of politics so he will know what politics is supposed to
bring in him in return. Don’t be throwing out any ballots. A ballot is
like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and
if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your
pocket….’’

This doesn’t sound like a Democrat or a Republican to me.

From:

Gates on the attack again

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Gates’s April 23rd op ed piece in the NY Times, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” does little to advance the study of slavery and the European Slave Trade, and fosters an erroneous and very sinister representation of the “advocates of reparations.” Indeed, for such a prominent figure who is identified as an African American Studies scholar at the country’s oldest institution of higher education, the editorial is an embarrassing bit of public intellectual activity. My son, who is a junior in high school, read his opinion piece together with me, and he asked me did the professor really write this? From the mouths of babes, I had to wonder did Dr. Gates actually write this drivel? To be sure he is responsible for it in the same way Sergeant James Crowley found him responsible for mouthing off “ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.”

It was when I was nineteen that I met my first reparations advocates. There names were Queen Mother (Audley E.) Moore and RNA President Dara Abubakari (Virginia Collins). I met them in New Orleans and they both stressed that New Afrikans were owed double reparations. Sister Dara made it plain to me and many others that the U.S. government needed to repair what it did to our ancestors through the slavery and neo-slavery (Jim Crow) regimes, but on the African continent as well the governments there needed to make things right with us by providing citizenship and access to land to those of us who opt to return home. She started my investigation of Gates’s “untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade.” No reparations advocate that I’ve known promoted a “romanticized version” of the slave trade that has tried to hide Africa’s part in the institution of slavery.

As for President Obama, I trust he will not be as quick defend his friend Skip Gates’s latest lapse of judgment as he was to do so last summer. I trust he knows, as Eric Foner has observed, that “virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes” information about how African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. Hopefully, he will heed his counsel “that as bad as history can be, it’s also possible to overcome.” He said that last July (less than a week before Gates found himself behind bars) at Cape Coast Castle after an “extraordinary tour” of the dungeons of that historic place. What I hope he knows is that those of us who advocate reparations, with sincerity, intelligence, and honesty, are people who feel, as he wished for his daughters, a “sense of obligation to fight oppression and cruelty wherever it appears, and that any group of people who are degrading another group of people have to be fought against with whatever tools we have available to us.”* We raise arguments for reparations not to polarize or denigrate any group of people but to oppose oppression with the tools available to us now that were not to preceding generations.

*See http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2009/July/20090711135243abretnuh0.7640955.html for the text of Obama’s Remarks at Cape Coast Castle.

Tell It Bob Herbert!

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Anger Has Its Place
By BOB HERBERT
Cambridge, Mass.

No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.

The charge: angry while black.

The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.

I have nothing but contempt for that message.

Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.

The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.

New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.

But this country is not interested in that.

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.

While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.

Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.