Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Human Earthquake hits Central Valley: Marvin X at University of California, Merced, Kim McMillan's Theatre class


Professor Kim McMillan's Theatre and Social Justice students welcome Marvin X to University of California, Merced. They treated him to a reading of his first play Flower for the Trashman, a Black Arts Movement Classic; it appears in the anthology Black Fire and the just released SOS: A Black Arts Movement Reader. It was written in 1964 while he was an undergrad in the English/Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, and produced by the Drama Department at SFSU. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.



Marvin X was invited to have a conversation with UC Merced students in Professor Kim McMillan's Theatre and Social Justice class. Students surprised the poet when they took turns reading his first play Flowers for the Trashman, musical version Take Care of Business, music by Sun Ra. Students have also read the scene Salaam, Huey Salaam about his last meeting with Black Panther co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton in a West Oakland Crack house. Salaam, Huey, Salaam, a scene from One Day in the Life, the docudrama of Marvin's addiction and recovery (It's the most powerful drama I've seen--Ishmael Reed) was co-written by playwright Ed Bullins and produced in New York at Woody King's New Federal Theatre. The full length drama was produced in New York at Sista's Place in Brooklyn and the Brecht Forum in Manhattan; in Newark, NJ, it was performed at Amiri Baraka's house.

He enjoyed hearing the students read Flowers for the Trashman that is included in SOS: the Black Arts Movement Reader, edited by Sonia Sanchez, John Bracey and James Smethurst, UMASS Press.
During the Q and A, Marvin told the students Flowers for the Trashman was not only written at the beginning my writing career, but it was written at the beginning of the 1960s Black Arts and Black Liberation Movement. The language reveals Marvin's leaning toward the Nation of Islam which he joined in 1967. Salaam, Huey, Salaam was written in the fourth quarter of my life and at the end of the Black Liberation Movement. The revolutionaries at Sista's Place in Brooklyn said no excuse was acceptable for radicals like Marvin, Huey and Eldridge getting addicted to Crack, but Marvin says we were exhausted from years of struggle. In the scene, Huey tells Marvin, "We had to experience this, Jackmon. But we can come out of it, we came out of slavery." But Huey and Eldridge never made it back from Crack!


Student reading Marvin's first play Flowers for the Trashman, produced by the Drama Department at San Francisco State University, 1964, while he was an undergrad in the English/Creative Writing Department. the novelist John Gardner was the professor who suggested he write Flowers for the Trashman since he was flunking Gardner's English Lit. class. Gardner took the script to the Drama Department.





Catch Marvin X at the 
Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair, June 5, 6, 7, 2015


View album
This album has 2 photos and will be available on OneDrive until 8/19/2015.


The Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair June 5-7, 2015  is presented in conjunction with the Juneteenth Festival

The historic McClatchy Park known as “The Village,” Saturday, June 6 and June 7, 2015 will be jumping at the Callie Carney Amphitheater featuring gospel, jazz music, bands, poetry, food trucks, vendors and much more!!!

Free and open to the public!!

·         Join Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc. & Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF), Saturday, June 6 from 12 noon-5:00pm at McClatchy Park @ Callie Carney Amphitheater, (35th Street & 5th Ave.) Sacramento, CA 95817. The event will feature the Juneteenth Festival’s auditions, bands, vendors, food trucks, Oak Park Farmer's Market, and much more!!! For more info visit:http://sacramentojuneteenthinc.org/festival/auditons
  • Join the Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF) Sunday, June 7 from 12 noon-5:00pm McClatchy Park at Callie Carney Amphitheater. The program will feature: Stacey Noble, Singer, Norman McDaniel & EarCandy ~ Jazz,, gospel music, vendors, Brother Hypnotic & local poets, food trucks, music, and much more!!!  

 Thank you and join the celebration!!!
Second Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF)
2015 Co-Sponsors/Community Partners:
African Research Institute
Black United Fund of Sacramento Valley
The Black Group
Brickhouse Art Gallery
Blue Nile Press
City of Sacramento – Neighborhood Services Department
Friends of the Sacramento Public Library
JTEnterprises
Roberts Family Development Center
Sacramento Area Black Caucus
Sacramento City Councilmember Allen Warren
The Sacramento City Teachers Association
Sacramento City Councilmember Steve Hansen
Sacramento City Councilmember Rick Jennings, III
Sacramento City Councilmember Jay Schenirer
Teichert Foundation
The Talking Drums News
Colonial Heights Library Affiliated Friends
Kakwasi Somadhi
Underground Books
Sacculturalhub.com
Drexel University Sacramento
Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc.
Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.,Eta Gamma Omega Chapter
Sacramento Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated
Fred and Ruth Foote
ZICA Creative and Literary Guild
Center for African Peace & Conflict Resolution, CSUS
Black Humanists and Non-Believers of Sacramento
Sacramento Section- The National Council of Negro Women
Mary McLeod Bethune Readers are Leaders Club
Tracy & Symia Stigler
Young Scholars –Calvary Christian Center
Sacramento Poetry Center
Sister to Sister Book Group
100 Black Men of Sacramento
Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services
Brenda’s Mane Event
Black Parallel School Board
Literary Ladies Alliance
The Merritt Law Clinic
Sisters Quilting Collective
NIA –Women of Purpose
Leslie & Faye Wilson Kennedy
Sacramento Chapter-Black Child Development Institute
Pam Haynes
Black Images Book Club
The Borden Family
OBBC (Book Club)
Sacramento Black Chamber of Commerce
Allegro Book Club
Sacramento Public Library Foundation
The California Endowment
The Office of Campus Community Relations, University of California, Davis
Los Rios Community College District
Roy Kaufman
Sacramento Observer Newspapers
California Black Chamber of Commerce
University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law
Dr. Tchaka Muhammed
Crystal Bowl
Brenda & Keith Dabney
The Scott Family
Dorothy Benjamin & Family
Sacramento Chapter of The Links Incorporated
Phil Nelson & Family

 Endorsed by:
Mayor Kevin Johnson
Women's Civic Improvement Club
Oak Park United Methodist Church
Guild Theater
Sacramento City Unified School District
Sacramento Public Library
Assembly member Kevin McCarty
California Legislative Black Caucus
916Ink
Crocker Art Museum
Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS)
Sojourner Truth Art Museum





Tuesday, May 26, 2015

EXPULSION OF MALCOLM X: Michael Lange as Malcolm X

Marvin X back in da Bay


Wish somebody could hep me
hep me
back in da bay
made it out Chicago
Chicago gave a nigguh love
Chicago style
smooth love
cool love
love a nigguh love
Chicago style
treated a nigguh first class
nigguh love first class treatment
wow
ouuuuouwwow
baraka style
gave them Dope
baraka style
they loved it
must be the devil
must be the devil
ain't capitalism
ain't Chase
ain't Rockefeller
must be the devil
ain't nigguhs
ain't Africans
we sold ourselves into slavery right
the King didn't sell us
we sold ourselves
put ourselves on the slave ship
marched down to the shore
wavying the red flag
we marched through the door of no return
yes, the door of no return
imagine
door of no return
but then we returned
tears moans
but no white supremacy
except in African face
a little relief from raw colonialism
black face white supremacy
a little less stress
black face white supreamcy
black flag Nkrumah said
National anthem Nkrumah said
colonialism playing possum
who own the banks
who own the land
who own the minerals
must be the devil
must be the devil....
--Marvin X

Black Bird Press News & Review: Photo essay by Afrah: Marvin X ends Chicago tour at South Shore recording studio

Black Bird Press News & Review: Photo essay by Afrah: Marvin X ends Chicago tour at South Shore recording studio



Bro. Marvin X,

Peace. It was truly a pleasure meeting and reading with you at Eliel's place last Saturday (Transition East) in Chicago.

We are looking forward to forging something positive and powerful in the space.

Please take good care. Talk soon.

Peace,

Kazembe


--
Lasana Kazembe, Ph.D.
"A person is a person because there are people."

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971)





In this interview, Sun Ra gives us the full range of his mythology. His music is a demonstration of his mythology or an enactment, i.e., ritual is an enactment of myth. --Marvin X


Sun Ra's reading list at UC Berkeley, 1971


Marvin X and Sun Ra taught at the University of California Berkeley, Black Studies, 1971. In fact, Sun Ra told Marvin X he would be teaching at UCB, though Marvin X didn't believe Sun Ra because in 1969 Gov. Ronald Reagan had  removed Angela Davis from teaching at University of California, Los Angeles  and Marvin X from lecturing at Fresno State University.  He removed Angela because she was a Black Communist and Marvin X because he was a member of the Nation of Islam who'd refused to serve in Viet Nam war against the peace loving people of Viet Nam. Marvin X and Sun Ra collaborated on a musical production of Marvin's first play Flowers for the Trashman, musical version named  Take Care of Business or TCB. They produced a five hour (normal for a Sun Ra conert) at the Harding Theatre on Divisadero Street, San Francisco, including a cast of fifty musicians, actors and dancers, dancers under choreographers Ellendar Barnes and Raymond Sawyer. Concert was without intermission.


SunRa71

A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band. While attending Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, he had a out-of-body experience during which he was transported into outer space. As biographer John Szwed records him saying, “my whole body changed into something else. I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn.” While there, aliens with “little antenna on each ear. A little antenna on each eye” instructed him to drop out of college and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, changing his name from Herman Blount and never looking back.

Whether you believe that story, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire persona is a theatrical put-on should make no difference. Because Sun Ra would be a visionary either way. Combining Afrocentric science fiction, esoteric and occult philosophy, Egyptology, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futurism that has no equal on earth, the man is truly sui generis. In 1971, he served as artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley and offered a spring semester lecture, African-American Studies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Universe,” or “The Black man in the Cosmos.” The course featured readings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philosopher Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, black American writer and poet Henry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cosmic jazz theorist reportedly listed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (otherwise known as the King James Bible).

Now we have the rare opportunity to hear a full lecture from that class at the top of the post. Listen to Sun Ra spin his intricate, bizarrely otherworldly theories, drawn from his personal philosophy, peculiar etymologies, and idiosyncratic readings of religious texts. Hearing him speak is a little like hearing him play, so be prepared for a lot of free association and jarring, unexpected juxtapositions. Szwed describes a “typical lecture” below:
Sun Ra wrote biblical quotes on the board and then ‘permutated’ them—rewrote and transformed their letters and syntax into new equations of meaning, while members of the Arkestra passed through the room, preventing anyone from taping the class. His lecture subjects included Neoplatonic doctrines; the application of ancient history and religious texts to racial problems; pollution and war; and a radical reinterpretation of the Bible in light of Egyptology.
Luckily for us, some sly student captured one of those lectures on tape. For more of Professor Ra’s spaced out presentation, see the Helsinki interview above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own education in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full reading list from his Berkeley course below, courtesy of the blog New Day.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Radix
Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
The Book of Oahspe
Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones
Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968
David Livingston: Missionary Travels
Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro
Rutledge: God’s Children
Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Temple University
John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, United States Information Agency
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972
Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921
The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description; = The King James Bible)
Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956
Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944
Blackie’s Etymology
Countless other free courses from UC Berkeley can be found in our collection, 1100 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
via Dangerous Minds and audio courtesy of Sensitive Skin Magazine
Related Content:
Herbie Hancock Presents the Prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard University: Watch Online
Sonic Youth Guitarist Thurston Moore Teaches a Poetry Workshop at Naropa University: See His Class Notes (2011)
Space Jazz, a Sonic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hubbard, Featuring Chick Corea (1983)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Sun Ra Speaks on Good, Evil, Whiteness and Blackness

SUN RA SPEAKS - HIS POETRY

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 4

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 3

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 2

SUN RA SPEAKS - BERKELEY LECTURE PT 1

ISIS: An American creation

Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad

Tyler Durden's picture




From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which could dethrone Russia as Europe's dominant - and belligerent - source of energy, reaching an interim climax with the unsuccessful Mediterranean Sea military build up of 2013, which nearly resulted in quasi-world war. The narrative and the plotline were so transparent, even Russia saw right through them. Recall from September of last year:
If the West bombs Islamic State militants in Syria without consulting Damascus, LiveLeak reports that the anti-ISIS alliance may use the occasion to launch airstrikes against President Bashar Assad’s forces, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Clearly comprehending that Obama's new strategy against ISIS in Syria is all about pushing the Qatar pipeline through (as was the impetus behind the 2013 intervention push), Russia is pushing back noting that the it is using ISIS as a pretext for bombing Syrian government forces and warning that "such a development would lead to a huge escalation of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa."
But it's one thing to speculate; it's something entirely different to have hard proof.
And while speculation was rife that just like the CIA-funded al Qaeda had been used as a facade by the US to achieve its own geopolitical and national interests over the past two decades, so ISIS was nothing more than al Qaeda 2.0, there was no actual evidence of just this.
That may all have changed now when a declassified secret US government document obtained by the public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
According to investigative reporter Nafeez Ahmed in Medium, the "leaked document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, despite anticipating that doing so could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of the strategy, but described this outcome as a strategic opportunity to “isolate the Syrian regime.” 
And not just that: as we reported last week, now that ISIS is running around the middle east, cutting people's heads of in 1080p quality and Hollywood-quality (perhaps literally) video, the US has a credible justification to sell billions worth of modern, sophisticated weapons in the region in order to "modernize" and "replenish" the weapons of such US allies as Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq.
But that the US military-industrial complex is a winner every time war breaks out anywhere in the world (usually with the assistance of the CIA) is clear to everyone by now. What wasn't clear is just how the US predetermined the current course of events in the middle east.
Now, thanks to the following declassified report, we have a far better understanding of not only how current events in the middle east came to be, but what America's puppermaster role leading up to it all, was. 
From Nafeez Ahmed: Secret Pentagon report reveals West saw ISIS as strategic asset Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion', originally posted in Medium.
Hypocrisy

The revelations contradict the official line of Western government on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.
Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.
The DIA provides military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.
So far, media reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.
Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.
Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:
“Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”

The West’s Islamists

The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.
Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”
The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”
The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.
In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”
The document also recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government.”
In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).

‘Supporting powers want’ ISIS entity

In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:
“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”
The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”
Further on, the document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.
The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.” Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.
Such a quasi-state entity will provide:
“… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”
The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.
In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:
“AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”
The DIA did not respond to request for comment.

Strategic asset for regime-change

Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:
“Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support. Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them.”
According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Battalion Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time provides stunning affirmation that:
“US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report — ?an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct experience of the Middle East?—?points out that the DIA document “matter-of-factly” states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in the region offers a “tool for regime change in Syria.”
The DIA intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian insurgency?—?“there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the contention of innumerable politicians and pundits.” The report demonstrates that:
“The establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”
The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely?—?but nevertheless strategically useful?—?blowback from the West’s commitment to “isolating Syria.”

Complicity

Critics of the US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.
The conventional wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.
However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.
As Shoebridge told me, “The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s rebellion”?—?namely, the emergence of ISIS?—?“but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”
Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:
“This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”
She explained that MI6’s Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, “happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate al-Qaeda.”
This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:
“… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern. And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing.”

Divide and rule

Several US government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.
US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.
But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates?—?that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.
The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corp report.
The report, published four years before the DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”
The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.” Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.
The RAND report confirmed that the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.”
The report observed that the US was forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years in the form of “weapons and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”
The 2012 DIA document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.
The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.
In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.
Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.


Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

Berkeley Juneteenth, Sunday, June 21, 2015


 
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Dear Friends, Supporters, and Programming Editors:
 
Regarding the attached media releases, please consider promoting and covering the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival taking place on Sunday, June 21, 2015, from 11am-7pm, in the city of Berkeley     
 
2015 participants, please note on your social sites your performance at the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival.
 
We are accepting vendor applications up to the day of the event.
 
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
 
Delores Nochi Cooper
Publicity Chair
Berkeley Juneteenth Association, Inc.
 
FYI, Marvin X will autograph books at Berkeley Juneteenth. Look for his booth!
 
 

Monday, May 25, 2015

Sun Ra and Marvin X's Mythology of Pussy and Dick




Sun Ra taught me there are two kinds of music, spiritual music devoted to the Creator of the Universe and P and D Music, i.e., pussy and dick music. Alas, my pamphlet Mythology of Pussy and Dick is reaching young and old people with a healing message. Of my 30 books, this 18 page pamphlet has caught the attention of the world.






Marvin X at Chicago recording session

Nobody wants nobody free

Nobody wants nobody free
we love slaves
we are love slaves
I love you madly
I will kill faya
Kill you faya
I love you madly
you are mine
I am yours
we own each other
your pussy is mine
my dick is yours
this is called marriage
also chattel slavery
personal property slavery
not real estate
no W.E.B. DuBois
personal property
chattel real
ownership is the question and the answer
you do not need to own me
I do not need to own you
I am yours willingly
You are mine Willingly
Alas, I am your love slave
like those artists with Sun Ra
they agreed to be in the Sun Ra jail!
Even I agreed. I am his disciple even now
trying to understand the full glory of his mythology
I have begun the First Poet's Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Rivisionists
Sun Ra taught me this
yes
Latter Day Egyptian Rivisionists
the contradiction is this
artists impose their  creative mythology on lowly humans
who say Wake Up to What?
who say
in an August Wilson play, "I don't have all the answers. I don't even know the questions, sometimes."
Even Sun Ra who denied freedom in the quest for discipline
the most free spirit we know is who? Sun Ra! Ra Ra RA RA!
Artists need to know our thoughts are beyond the beyond
sometimes not for the common people the workers students unemployed uneducated
artists are dreamers of the worst kind
we sit imagining possibilities and impossibilities
Baraka said we artists live a privileged life
so I say be careful about imposing the creative mythology and ritual on the common people.
Be careful as you deliver beauty and truth.
And yet would the people know how beautiful they are except for images of artists
poets
dancers
musicians
painters
architects
To transcend Sun Ra, I say let us be free with discipline
not free to be free
as in a capitalism freedom
free trade
wage slavery
stolen land minerals
for what
minerals for cell phones so we can say Where you at? Where you at? Where you at?
Don't own me
I will not own you
we are together because I can laugh with you
we dialogue in poetry
so beautiful
I can read your mind
you read mine
no lies up in here
be with me because we are we
it is what it is
they say.