Marvin X, Sunset at the Pacific Ocean
I was born into a world of violence. A few days after my birth, America dropped the atom bomb on Japan. Then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Did you hear any member of the Democratic or Republican parties oppose the annual $700 billion dollar US defense budget? How ironic that the US spends a trillion dollars per year to defend its national security, yet cannot secure her borders, alas, cannot defend the US capitol! Baldwin told us, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe." But we don't get it. In our supreme arrogance and ignorance, we think we can conduct eternal warfare across the planet yet things will be peaches and cream at home. Come out of denial that we are predators who love, i.e., worship, violence. We are psychopaths, men and women, who adore death more than life. Death is the critical ritual in the hood. The Washington Post interviewed black children on their future. As per their future, the black children said their concern was what type of funeral they would have. In another interview, the WP said black women did not think they would ever be married. Black women with BAs, MAs, MBAs and PhDs are marrying brothers in prison doing 25 to life. Violence and other mostly petty crimes is taking its toll on life in the hood, but violence is the critical theme, often the perpetrators are the dual diagnosed, i.e., those suffering mental illness and drug abuse, 80%. Mental illness and drug abuse are in the deep structure violence. Alas, often homicide is often suicide, i.e., the person suffered homicide because he is too cowardly to commit suicide. My son was so brave he walked into a train. But though I suffer as any parent who’s lost a child, after working with mothers who’d lost sons in drive-by shootings, I was overwhelmed emotionally and dropped out of such meetings. My son's mental illness made him encounter a train, though clinical psychologist/sociologist Dr. Nathan Hare says, "Homicide and suicide are two sides of the same coin!"
Noting my son was 39 at his demise, Dr. Hare said Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the same age but took a different route to solving their problem than my son in this age. "Of all the many disorders and distortions that plague the black male each and every day, perhaps the ones that take the heaviest toll on his ravished brain are those that, if not contained by armed resistance, revolve around the painful difficulty of gaining control over his individual and collective destiny, around what is known in mental health circles as 'the locus of control', i.e., the dilemma of resistance to the enemy from without and the enemy from within (including the self, if we consider that there can be no master without those who, for whatever reason, are willing to be the slave.” (See Somethin' Proper, Autobiography of Marvin X, introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland, CA., 1998).
What did H. Rap Brown (Imam Jamil Alamin) say, "Violence is as American as cherry pie."And surely we know Murphy's law: things go from bad to worse.
In their full blown addiction to white supremacy, America is adamant and persistent in the belief that what goes around doesn't come around. We share no guilt of our ancestors. Did you share the wealth from the accumulated capital of your ancestors? Oh, you share the good but not the bad. Did all Germans participate in the genocide of Jews? No, did the German nation pay reparations to the Jews? Yes. Did all Americans participate in the genocide of Native Americans and Africans? Did Americans enjoy the accumulated capital from slavery? Why will it take 240 years for North Americans to acquire the wealth white Americans have today? Must we wait 240 years to achieve equity with you who have benefited from the economics of white supremacy? When we tried to accumulate capital independently of you, e.g., Black Wall Street, you burned our community to the ground and we were massacred in numbers yet untold. And in your dastardly attempt to hide your genocidal behavior, grounded in jealously and envy, you deleted your deeds from your history, denying generations the truth of America's white supremacist history. And even today you persist in your pathologic behavior of denial by attempting to deny the truth of American history. You made us primitive savages and claimed civility for yourselves, yet your behavior in the USA and throughout the Americas is a most critical exposure of your wickedness and debauchery that you seek to hide from your children. What about my children and grandchildren, alas, what about myself who had to sit in civics class to learn I was a cotton picker. I didn't know I was a cotton picker in the Central Valley, as were my great grandparents, grandparents, mother, uncles, myself and siblings. Alas, in 2021, in the state of Washington, you forced black children to participate in a contest to see how fast they could pick cotton. Did you ask the white students to see how fast they could pick cotton? Have you heard the white man's joke: "If I'd known how much trouble these niggas was gonna cause me, I'da picked the cotton myself!" FYI, on a trip back from the Central Valley, my wife and I pulled up to a field of cotton so our daughter could touch and feel a cotton plant. Thank you, we don't need your lesson on how fast we can pick cotton. Take your white ass to the cotton field and pick 100 pounds, then tell me why you deny and object to Critical Race Theory. Tell me why your children shouldn't know they are little devils and shall be beneficiaries of the white supremacist world you are determined to deliver to them for the perpetuation of your species or whatever it is you are seeking in your madness beyond money, love, sex, and whatever floats your boat that only devils can comprehend. Your children are today mass killers because of your mass murders across the planet and soon you shall attempt to do the same in outer space. Lie to your children and promise them you shall be kind and gentle when you stake claim to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Venus. Tell them you won't pollute the heavens as you have done earth with an island of plastic three times the size of Texas. Tell them your Green revolution will not cause the destruction of lithium mines in Bolivia, the cutting of hands beyond the butchery of King Leopold's Congo. Oh, violence, sweet violence!
In the grand denial of our blood thirsty capitalist greed, we cherish eternal war while imagining there should be peace at home. Our children should not be slaughtered at school, workers should be able to go to work and return home to their loved ones in peace. Our politicians should be able to tell their lies for lobbyists in peace. Why can't we party at night clubs without suffering death and injury when the club lets out?
True, guns don't shoot people, people shoot people. Shall we add that crazy people shoot people? Further, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) said mental disease is epidemic in America. So insanity in its various stages, e.g., mild, moderate and severe, is normal rather than abnormal as one would suspect in a normal world, though you who claim a modicum of sanity and a nano-degree of normality must confess this is not the world we used to know. Sun Ra told me, "Marvin this is not the world I used to know. These people are not the people I used to know back in Birmingham, Alabama!"
For sure, neither is this the world my granny told me about in the Fresno projects as the train whistled in the night and mosquitoes tried to bite me. When they did, Granny made me get leaves off the Eucalyptus tree and rubbed me down. No hands more sacred than Granny's. She wasn't religious but told me not to shoot birds on Sunday with my BB gun. It was bad luck. Told my brother Ollie if he didn't stop being so hard-headed he was going to end up in the pen (penitentiary). He spent most of his life from CYA (California Youth Authority) to the California Department of Corrections and beyond. He was violent, so was I but not as violent as he.
My brother and I were in Juvenile Hall for street fighting, stealing, GTA (grand theft auto). Both of us headed to CYA (California Youth Authority). My grades saved me (honor society nigga in Juvenile Hall. Years later I visited Oakland's Alameda County Juvenile Hall to do a reading. FYI, it costs $250,000 per inmate per year to be in Juvenile Hall. I met an eleven year old A student in the hall; there because he was bored with school and played hooky. Imagine, in Oakland 7,000 students played hooky from summer school.) Is it possible students were smarter than their teachers and didn't want to be bothered with white supremacist education?
The judge let me go because he said, "It would cost us as much to send you to college as CYA, so we want you to see you in college." He sent my brother to CYA and released me. When my mother and I were outside Juvenile Hall, I asked her why she wasn't crying? Mama said, "Son, I might not be crying on the outside but I'm crying on the inside!"
Nothing normal in the world these days. America is not the only purveyor of violence in the world, she has allies and sycophants who can be equally or more violent. In 1948, when the British departed the new-found state of Israel, America became the chief backer of the Zionists. Alas, it was a black American, Dr. Ralph Bunch as UN Undersecretary, who put the final nails in the House of Israel. Since 1948, America has supported and supplied Israel with funds, guns, and their undeclared nuclear arsenal. Thus America is equally guilty as the zionists in their displacement of Palestinians. With American support, Israel manifested its long held dream of a Jewish "only" homeland, not a purported democracy as eternally reported in the global fake news propaganda machine. It is an apartheid state that is as fanciful as the now defunct dream of an Apartheid South Africa. Furthermore, remember it took one hundred years before Christian Crusaders were forced out of Jerusalem and the Holy Land by Saladin the Kurd.
Richard the Lionhearted was forced to make peace with Saladin and depart back to Europe. Similarly time is running out for Zionists aided by American and European tricknology of endless peace negotiations for the two-state solution ending with more land grabbing and displacement of Palestinians. Pervasive settler occupation has made the two-state solution an anomaly. Yet the recent Gaza war has united Palestinians as never before: Gazans, Arabs in Israel 48, Jerusalem and the West Bank, plus millions in the diaspora, i.e., refugees from 1948 and since, have suddenly united and a people united cannot be defeated. Al Qur'an says persecution is worse than slaughter, i.e. liberty or death! Imam Jamil Alamin said, "No slave should die a natural death!"
We know when leaders don't deliver they can and will be removed by the masses. Our dearly beloved Ancestor, Dr. Julia Hare, used to say, "There are black leaders and leading blacks. The people choose leaders." The oppressors choose leading blacks and other sycophants around the world, boot lickers and puppets the people ultimately reject. There is no doubt Hamas has inspired the oppressed Palestinians, those in occupied territory and beyond. And to the chagrin of the Zionist and their sycophant Americans and uncle Abdullah Arab collaborators, a new paradigm has appeared, a paradigm of unity among the masses of the oppressed, who clearly sense unity is their only weapon to victory.
Pay no attention to the Jerusalem Post's report of a possible Egyptian takeover of Gaza. If Palestinian unity can solidify, Zionist apartheid shall be ephemeral, not eternal as per the Zionist dream. Alas, after all the Jewish suffering before, during and after the Nazi holocaust, the Zionist dream of a purely Jewish state is pure poppycock, steeped in religiosity but devoid of justice, the critical factor in this Middle East quagmire that may indeed usher in the final battle of Armageddon! My prophecy is that there shall not be a Jewish state in occupied Palestine that does not give freedom, justice and equality to Palestinians. I do not believe the Jews suffered only to make others suffer as they did. No, not in the Holy Land. How can the Mighty God allow injustice to reign in His name? How can a people who endured great suffering inflict the same upon others and pretend ancient myths and rituals preclude them from understanding the God of Justice?
When I arrived in New York, 1968, poet Askia Toure' and I had dinner with Sudanese diplomats since I was trying to get travel documents to the Sudan after being awarded a scholarship to the University of Umderman from the Muslim Students Association of the USA and Canada. As we consumed dinner with our hands in Muslim custom, we discussed Palestine with our Sudanese brothers. One brother said, "Nobody wants more than justice and nobody wants less!"
Dear reader, please tell me when or how often or have you ever heard the term "justice" in the discussion of Palestine? For that matter, when or how often or have you ever heard the term "justice" in reference to the liberation of North American Africans? In the recent Gaza war, you heard of the need for the right to self defense for Israel. If you live in an open air concentration camp of two million hapless people, do they too have the right of self defense? After centuries of free labor, there is no need to discuss reparations for the descendants of African survivors of the American slave system. Again, white Americans have benefited from accumulated capital that will take North American Africans 240 years to equal the wealth whites possess today. Yet white America persists in her full blown denial that North American African must have economic justice. With reparations we may decide to stay or go wherever the Creator guides us, perhaps through the door of no return from which we came. Former President Donald Trump recently demanded China pay reparations in the amount of ten trillion dollars for the Covid19 virus that infected America, not to mention the amount due to other nations. America has suffered 500,000 deaths. As per the 100 million Africans victims of the Triangular Trade or Maafa, what should be the bill due? You do the math.
The world did not stand for Jewish concentration camps, nor will it stand for the Gaza concentration camp and the ethnic cleansing of Israel 48, Jerusalem and the West Bank. If the billion plus Muslims had unity, it would be a simple matter of boycotts, similar to the anti-apartheid movement that dismantled white supremacy in South Africa. But it is becoming clear to the Palestinian masses that their unity shall be the critical factor of their national liberation. Their leaders are effete, corrupt and must be dismissed, along with the uncle Abdullah (Uncle Tom) Arab leaders whose autocratic regimes equal Zionism in repression and religiosity of the most reactionary and archaic kind. The Muslim reactionary regimes have not only sold out the Palestinians but the Uyghur Muslims held in Chinese concentration camps. Egypt and Persian Gulf regimes have deported Uyghurs back to China, no doubt to be "reeducated" into Chinese Communist ideology. The reason, of course, is Arab and Chinese economics. Donald Trump's Abraham deal with the Gulf states is another case of economics at the expense of Palestinian national liberation.
Violence continues throughout the global village, Yemen, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Central African Republic, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Yes, follow the money trail, although often much violence in the world transcends money, alas, the main perpetrators of violence are members of the 1% club of billionaires already in possession of global finance. As we know, most often, those committing acts of violence get high and cannot stop until disarmed and perhaps confined to be "reeducated" in the Chinese manner, God forbid! For sure, those in violent societies will need to enter a long term recovery program for the very reason James Baldwin said, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe."
Although we abhor violence, we believe in armed self defense. If the 200,00 African warriors who fought in the Civil War had refused to disarm, I suspect we would be free today in a nation state of our own, either on a territory carved out of the United States or elsewhere. Under no circumstances should North American Africans disarm today since we see the white supremacists are well armed, and if America descends into a dictatorial regime, we will need arms to defend ourselves. Between police violence and internecine violence, the brother and sister with an iota of common sense do not go around unarmed today. Hamas and Hezbollah shall never disarm in surrender to the Zionists, nor should we disarm as we did in the Civil War that has us in the present quagmire and conundrum. For sure, North American Africans cannot put our national security in the hands of white people of Left or Right persuasion.
--Marvin X
6/8/21
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