Fortress America besieged: war penetrates imperialist sanctuary
Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party
Uhuru News, the online voice of the International African Revolution.
At the time of this writing the U.S. is involved
in an orgy of public grief and displays of self-serving heroism in the wake of the April 15, 2013 twin bombings at the iconic Boston Marathon.
The two bombings, utilizing a pressure cooker and metal container of some sort, resulted in nearly 200 casualties, with three fatalities, up to now. The number of amputations inflicted on the unsuspecting spectators oblivious to the fact they were milling about in a war zone punctuated the horror of the bombings.
Among the casualties was an eight-year-old white boy whose heart-rending plight has captivated the attention of the U.S. media as a symbol of U.S. innocence being flayed by unknown and ill-deserved terror.
Lost in the news on that same April 15 was the decision made by U.S. secretary of defense Charles Hagel that, in response to opposition from veterans’ groups, retreated from a previous decision awarding special medals to U.S. cowards, who from the relative safe environs of Nevada fortresses, direct murderous drone attacks throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other places, leaving hundreds of dead and amputated, including infants and other children, in their wake.
Also, few would have noticed the announcement of 55 killed in Iraq on April 15 by car bombs and other violence that have become common in that country since it came under attack from colonial occupation by the U.S.
In St. Petersburg, Florida, the site of this writing, two Africans, a man and woman were gunned down by police on Monday, April 15, for allegedly refusing to obey commands of the police to open their car doors, a capital offense in any colonially occupied community in the U.S. and the world.
Piercing thru U.S. propaganda
At the time of this writing, U.S. officials claim to be close to identifying those responsible for the bombings. And although U.S. response has been decidedly more measured than after the 9-11 twin towers bombings, there has nevertheless been an undertone of suspicion directed at Muslims. A Saudi student was even detained briefly for questioning.
However, despite the continuous television replay of the bombing scene and incessant, mostly mind-numbing, rating-influenced, patriotism-inducing dribble, other than from official State representatives, there is little real sympathy for the U.S. being shown in many quarters.
No doubt this is because U.S. hypocrisy is wearing thin. The colonized are beginning to understand that the colonizer has a different standard when it comes to the value of human life and that for the colonizer, the life of the colonized is without worth unless in some way it contributes to the wellbeing of the colonizer.
The victims of U.S. and other imperialist white violence are seldom seen in the U.S. and Europe and when we are, it is not as victims, but as errant accomplices of our own downfall.
We should have stopped when the cops said so. Our children wouldn’t get shot by police if they lived in better neighborhoods or didn’t carry toys that look like guns.
Palestinians deserve occupation, Zionist theft of their homeland and Israeli and European murder because they are anti-Semitic ingrates that are unthankful for what the white nationalist Jewish occupiers have done to turn their desert into a bountiful garden of democracy.
White people represent the universal value. Anything that deviates from that value is suspect. We are the “others” whose presence cannot be tolerated, not only by white governments, but also by most of the whites in Europe, North America and other places whites have settled as well as in Africa and places where whites are minority interlopers.
For example, we are told that a recent Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind poll determined that white people in the U.S. are overwhelmingly opposed, 48% to 24%, to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens for drone assassination abroad. However, the same poll has whites agreeable to drone assassinations of others deemed a threat to the U.S. by a margin of six-to-one.
Initially, the U.S. refused to speculate who was responsible for the bombings, though Obama the Drone Meister has declared those responsible will feel the full weight of U.S. justice.
What was notable in his April 16 press conference, however, was his reluctance to declare the bombings a “terrorist” act. Speculation by a former Obama cabinet member suggested Obama’s reluctance to do so is because April 15, the day of the bombing, is “tax day” in the U.S., leaving open the possibility that the bombs were the act of some white anti-tax person or group.
The term “terrorist” has been reserved for special use since the 1981 inauguration of general Alexander Haig as secretary of state in the administration of U.S. president Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Freedom Fighters defined as terrorists by imperialism
Haig declared then that the term “terrorist” would be used to replace the term “freedom fighter” by which revolutionaries were known during another time when the crisis of imperialism was manifest in the growing number of peoples and countries fighting to extricate ourselves from the parasitic grasp of U.S. imperialism.
Generally speaking, a terrorist is not a white person unless it is someone like Lynne Stewart, the lawyer in prison in democratic America for her history of defending Africans, Muslims and others the U.S. has declared to be terrorists because of their association with the just resistance of their oppressed people.
We know the klan are not terrorists and that the police murder and U.S. mass burial of Africans in poorly disguised concentration camps called “prisons” must not be considered terrorism; nor the U.S. drone assassinations and “regime changes” used to destroy the dreams and lives of various peoples seeking independence from U.S. or white imperialist authority
While we are sympathetic with all the struggles of all the peoples of the world fighting to win their liberation from parasitic capitalism, we are opposed to “terrorism” as a method of struggle. This is not due to some moral objection, but to the fact that if the objective is to win liberation through revolution, terrorism does not work.
Notwithstanding the characterization of terrorism by the U.S. and European states, the reality is that terrorism is simply a tactic of war. It has been used throughout history and in all likelihood this will continue for some time to come.
Usually terrorism is used to break the will of a population, to demoralize them in the pursuit of a greater military strategy. It is not now, nor has it ever been considered essentially a “moral” issue until directed at whites by others or at U.S. cities, until recently presumed impregnable.
For nearly a half century Yeshitela has dedicated his life to the unequivocal liberation of Africa and African people everywhere.